A retrospective view of the system--Germs of development--The return to
history--Croce's attitude during the war--Essays on the great poets.
To the reader of the three volumes of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_,
which were published before 1910, the whole of Croce's thought appeared
as a solidly constructed system, in which the four grades or forms
of spiritual activity were studied in their intrinsic essence, and
presented in their relations as completing the cycle of living reality,
in contrast with that reality which the mind postulates outside its
living self, and which the system reduces to a complex practical
product of the mind, a collection of material helps subservient to the
essential forms of its activity. Knowledge and action, reciprocally
implicated, are the substance of reality; and both knowledge and
action, rising, the first, from the intuition to the concept, the
second, from the economic to the ethical will, attain the universal,
all-including values which we express by the words Beautiful, True,
Useful and Good, but only and in so far as they realize themselves
in the concrete and individual. A universal more universal than that
which is present in the individual act is inexistent, or exists only
as an impotent abstraction renouncing the concreteness and reality of
the individual, and therefore also that true universality which has
no being outside this action, this thought, this life. The soul of
the system, slowly extricating itself from the traces of naturalism
or intellectualism, which are still visible in the _Estetica_, is the
logic of the pure concept, which resolves in the concrete universal the
dualisms of nature and spirit, of fact and value, of life and thought,
and, finally, of history and philosophy. But while this logic can be
seen at work in all the parts of the system, and is, in fact, the form
towards which all Croce's thoughts seem to have constantly tended from
the time of his earliest philosophical essays, yet, to an attentive
eye, it is possible to discover the successive stages by which it
actually incorporated itself in the system. In particular, we have been
able to point to the effects of the later meditations on the philosophy
of will, on one side, on a more intimate understanding of the pure
intuition as the lyrical intuition, on the other, on the identification
of the definition with the individual judgment, and thereby on the
relations between history and philosophy. On the whole it can be said
that two apparently contrasting directions were at work within the
system itself: one reflecting Croce's mental need for clear and fine
distinctions, the other, that deep consciousness of the unity of the
real, without which all distinctions tend to solidify themselves into
dead abstractions.
If we imagine two students of Croce's philosophy, endowed with
antagonistic philosophical temperaments, the one a dialectician,
the other a mystic, we can easily conceive them as the founders of
two diametrically opposed schools of thought. The first would have
emphasized the rigorous distinctions, the formal character, the
intellectual precision of the system; he might have retained the
identification of philosophy and history, but to him these words would
have stood only for the names of two formal disciplines, and not for
the concrete life of the human spirit which is present in them. The
second would have passed lightly over the distinctions, and probably
considered them as partaking of the same unreality which belongs to
scientific or legal abstractions; and by obliterating the logical
processes without which the mind of man is unable to grasp and to
express itself, he would have taken refuge in an ineffable, though
not necessarily silent, contemplation of the underlying unity. This
hypothesis is not a criticism of Croce's philosophy; it is merely the
indication of the fact that, when the system appeared as completed,
new problems, and therefore new errors or new truths, were bound to
grow out of the elements of the system itself. And nobody was more
conscious of this fact than Croce himself, who concluded his volume on
the _Filosofia della Pratica_ by expressly warning his readers of the
inexhaustibility of thought, which is one with the infinity of reality
and of life. No philosophical system is final, because life itself
has no end. Every system of philosophy, being conditioned by life,
can do no more than solve a group of problems historically given, and
prepare the conditions for new problems and new systems. Of his own
work in relation to his readers, he conceived as of nothing more than
an instrument of work.
In these last few chapters we shall see Croce himself at work on
the new problems generated by his own system, trying "more rigidly
to eliminate the last remnants of naturalism, and to put a stronger
accent on the spiritual unity,"[1] yet constantly defending his
conception of the spirit as the unity of distinctions, especially
against the mystical tendencies of the new actual idealism. While
never, in the course of his whole life, has he limited his activity to
mere systematic thinking, during the last eleven years he has shown
a more marked tendency to return from a philosophy, which is all a
meditation of the formal problems of history, to those concrete works
of history, by which he was started on his philosophical career; to
return to them, however, with a mind in which the original uncertainty
and obscurity has given place to a definite consciousness of the nature
and purpose of history. The passage from the more philosophical to the
more historical stage is marked by the publication of a fourth volume
of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_, in which, under the title of _Teoria
e Storia della Storiografia_, he collected a number of essays written
between 1912 and 1913, containing an elaboration of the theory of
history already expounded in the _Logica_. This volume does not form
a new part of the system, but rather the natural conclusion of the
whole work, since the problem which it discusses is the one towards
which tended all his former inquiries into the forms of the spirit,
into their concrete life which is development and history, and the
consciousness of which is historical thought. But before proceeding to
analyze this final form of Croce's theory of history, we shall give a
rapid account of the rest of his intellectual activity from 1910 onward.
As during the preceding eight years, the _Critica_ continues to this
day to be the main organ of Croce's work and influence, and in the
Critica the greatest part of his writings are still published for
the first time. The general features of the Critica have remained
practically unchanged, except that his series of essays on the Italian
literature of the last fifty years (which he collected in 1914-15 in
the four volumes of _La Letteratura della Nuova Italia_) has been
followed by studies on Italian historiography from the beginning of the
nineteenth century to our day (since 1914), by essays on some of the
greatest European poets (since 1917), by notes on modern Italian and
foreign literature (since 1917), and by the Frammenti di Etica (since
1913), containing discussions of particular problems of contemporary
morality. But practically all the reviews and essays published in
the Critica and elsewhere are now being collected in the edition of
his complete works, of which a full list will be found at the end of
this volume. In 1912, for the inauguration of the Rice Institute in
Houston, Texas, he wrote his _Breviario di Estetica_, which we have
partly utilized in our exposition of his æsthetic doctrine, and which
he reprinted in 1920 in his _Nuovi Saggi di Estetica_, which also
contains his most significant philosophical essays of the last four or
five years. His _Contributo alla critica di me stesso_ ("Contribution
to the Criticism of Myself") was written in April, 1915, on the eve of
Italy's entrance into the war, and is the best essay in existence on
the development of his thought.
Of Croce's attitude during the war we shall say but a few words. He
was one of the very few European philosophers or scholars who did not
transform themselves into improvised statesmen, or into passionate
defenders of national prejudices and proclaimers of national hatreds.
Differing from the Germanized philologist, who was the type prevailing
in most universities before the war, in that he had not waited for
the war to become aware of the many weaknesses and imperfections
of modern German culture, while on the other hand he had lived for
years in true and intimate contact with the great spirits of German
Romanticism, he resisted with all his power the universal tendency of
the time to make of the contingent issues of the war a criterion of
intellectual truth and of scientific conduct. At the same time, his
temper and education reacted violently against the false ideologies of
the war, the superstructure of verbal ideals with which on all sides
cunning statesmen and naïve philosophers attempted to veil the true
nature of the conflict. Against these, he reasserted his conception
of the political life and struggles of states as manifestations of
the economic, amoral or pre-moral, activity, and of life itself as a
perpetual struggle, finding its reason and its rest in the struggle
itself. The theory of the state as justice appeared to him merely as
a theoretical error, the fortune of which lay in the opportunity it
afforded to give a convenient mask of morality to particular interests,
either of individuals or of states. The intrinsic morality of the
war he conceived as resting on its tragic reality, as reflected in
a severely historical thought, to which it appears as a moment of
that historical fate which crushes and destroys states as well as
individuals, to create from their ruins always new forms of life.
It is needless to say that for a time at least Croce shared with
Bertrand Russell and with Romain Rolland, two thinkers in many respects
very distant from him, and yet as impervious as he was to the rhetoric
of the war, the privilege of a vast unpopularity. Looking back now on
his writings which were later collected in the volume _Pagine sulla
guerra_, it is possible to discover among them many attitudes which
were justified and useful only as a reaction against the current
fallacies of the time; and also to realize that the man who speaks to
us through them is not always and only a pure philosopher, but a man
with a given complex of moral and political tastes and passions. But
this is, in a way, as it should be; in the same way, between Croce the
philosopher of æsthetics and Croce the critic of poetry, there is a
difference which is inherent in the nature of the two different forms
of intellectual activity; the philosopher is a man of understanding,
the critic a man of tastes and passions. In both cases, his ideal
has always been to make the critic or the moralist worthy of the
philosopher, his particular comprehension of history adequate to his
concept of the universal. To say that the equation is never perfect,
is only another way of saying that every particular historical problem
continually raises new problems of thought, and that Croce's thought
finds therefore in itself the motives of its own development, the
springs of its own life. Where passion and reason ultimately coincide,
the roots of the development are taken away, and death takes the place
of life.
Yet, notwithstanding these limitations, I know of no man whose thought
on the war is on the whole more acceptable to those among us who lived
through the war not as spectators, looking on it as on a vast moral
abstraction, but as humble actors, in the midst of its human reality. A
sense of collaboration between one side and the other, of being, here
as there, employed in a common task, whose meaning was much deeper
than any that had been offered to us by the national rhetoricians,--a
collaboration which happened to take the aspect of a struggle, and
imposed duties antagonistic, but of the same nature--was probably the
most usual frame of mind among the soldiers who could think; and it
existed, subconsciously, even among the unthinking ones, provided that
their duties were of a definite, concrete kind, touched them in the
deepest chords of their beings, involved the fundamental issues of life
and death. To the man who consciously faces death, there is no comfort
in wilful error; only this realization of an end that transcends all
particular ideals, because it is the end of life itself, can be worthy
of that price. You cannot willingly die for fourteen points any more
than for one point, but death which is loathsome in the drama of mere
circumstance, however adorned with brilliant rhetoric, is no longer
death but an act of life in the tragedy in which the hero is conscious
of his fate. There was no war, probably, that was ever more full than
the last one of what might be called the material of tragedy; but what
have the official celebrators done with it, they who have not feared
to desecrate, in all our countries, one at least of the concrete,
individual tragedies, in order to make of it an empty symbol, to
transform an unknown hero into abstract heroism? In some of Croce's
pages, there is a more concrete realization of the ideal tragedy of
the war than in any poem or oration that I have seen to this day.
The last years of the war found Croce at work on some of the greatest
poetical spirits of modern Europe, Ariosto, Goethe, Corneille,
Shakespeare, bringing to the understanding of their work, to this task
of concrete history, the deep consciousness of the nature of poetry,
and of the relations of poetry with life, acquired in twenty years of
philosophical meditations. Even his functions as Minister of Public
Education during the last two years did not distract him entirely from
his studies, and this year of the sixth centenary of Dante's death
was celebrated by him with the publication of _La Poesia di Dante_,
which will certainly remain as the most lasting monument raised to the
memory of the poet on this occasion. This troubled peace cannot make
him deviate from the path of his appointed labour any more than the war
could; in peace as in war, his duty is his daily task, here and to-day,
and his confidence in the morality and usefulness of that work which is
his work is as little shaken by the prophets of despair in peace, as
it was by the messiahs of the promised land who were so loud above the
turmoil of war. He is probably now noting with a smile that the same
men who talked of the war to end all wars, are now very busy preventing
our civilization from dying away; that is, building a peace in the
abstract, with programs and words, as they fought a war which was not
the war, but a phantasm of their imagination.
[Footnote 1: _Contributo_, p. 74.]