Two meanings of the word history--History as contemporary history--
History and chronicle--The spirit as history--Philology, and
philological history--Poetical and rhetorical history--Universal
history--The universality of history: history and philosophy--The
unity of thought--Philosophy as methodology--The positivity of
history--The humanity of history--Distinctions and divisions--The
history of nature.
There are two meanings to the word history, in English as well as in
other European languages; on one hand it denotes the actual doing, the
immediacy of life, on the other, the thinking that seems to follow
the doing, the consciousness of life. In a rough, approximate way, we
speak of men who make history, and of other men who think or write
history--though we are all perfectly aware of the fact that we cannot
make history without first thinking history, that the action, in other
words, follows a judgment of the situation, which is an elementary form
of historical thought, and is accompanied by its own consciousness,
which is its immediate history. In this sense, the action cannot be
materially severed from its history: the distinction between the two
is a purely formal and ideal one. And again, the thinking of history,
in the second meaning of the word, consists in making present to our
spirit, in re-living, an action or group of actions, which thus
become as actual an experience as any practical doing, a fragment
of our own life, and, ultimately, the consciousness of our own
individual experience. Thus the two meanings which stand out as sharply
contrasting when we objectify and solidify them, as an external,
chronological series of happenings, and as a formal discipline
attempting to give, in innumerable books, a description and as it were
a verbal duplicate of that series, once we examine them in the light
of our consciousness, reveal themselves merely as different aspects or
moments of the same spiritual process.
Croce's latest writings on history may be puzzling to the average
reader because this ambiguity cannot be overcome by him unless he is
willing to penetrate to the heart of Croce's doctrine, in which the
word history acquires a more pregnant and fundamental meaning. In
many of us there is a tendency to balk at any attempt at filling old
words with deeper and more precise connotations; but philosophy is
not a matter of words. A new thought will in any case alter the whole
physiognomy of our vocabulary, and to stand up for the old meanings
is as much as to refuse to think, or rather, to refuse to live. For
history as a formal discipline, for the actual writing of history,
Croce uses the word Historiography; but in his _Teoria e Storia
della Storiografia_ (Theory and History of the writing of History),
history still means both the doing and the thinking, life and the
consciousness of life, though not in the abstract distinction in which
these meanings are generally apprehended. In Croce the distinction is
also unity, and there is no doing which is not also a thinking, no life
which is not also the consciousness of life, no consciousness which is
not also the consciousness of itself. The ambiguity, some traces of
which could still be seen in the _Logica_, entirely disappears in this
fourth volume of the system, at least for the reader who has followed
the whole development of Croce's thought.
We call contemporary history the history that is being made, rather
loosely including in it a more or less extended stretch of time up
to the actual present. But contemporary history rigorously ought
to be only history in the actual making, the immediate present and
the consciousness of the immediate present. All history, however,
is contemporary history in this rigorous and precise sense; it is a
condition of all history that it should live, be present in the mind
of the historian; all history springs directly from present life,
since only an interest of our present life can induce us to inquire
into the past, which, by being made history, is no longer a past but
a present. If, Croce says, "contemporaneity is not the characteristic
of one class of histories (as it is held to be, and with good reasons,
in an empirical classification), but the intrinsic character of all
history, the relation between history and life must be conceived of
as a relation of unity: not certainly in the sense of an abstract
identity, but in that of a synthetic unity, which implies both the
unity and the distinction of the terms. To speak of a history, of
which we do not possess the documents, will then seem as absurd as
to speak of the existence of a certain thing, of which we should at
the same time affirm that one of the essential conditions for its
existence is lacking. A history without relation with the document
would be an inverifiable history; and since the reality of history
lies in this verifiability, and the historical narrative in which it
realizes itself is an historical narrative only in so far as it is the
critical exposition of the document, a history of that kind, without
meaning and without truth, would be inexistent as history. How could
ever a history of painting be composed by a man who should not see and
enjoy the works of which he intends to describe critically the origin
and development? How, a history of philosophy, without the works, or
at least the fragments of the works of the philosophers? How, the
history of a feeling or a custom, for instance, of Christian humility
or of chivalresque honour, without the capacity to re-live, or rather,
without actually re-living those particular states of mind? On the
other hand, having established the indissoluble connection of life
and thought in history, the doubts that have been advanced about the
certainty and utility of history suddenly and totally disappear, and
it becomes almost impossible to understand them. How could that ever
be uncertain, which is a present product of our spirit? How could a
knowledge be useless, which solves a problem rising from the womb of
life?"[1]
If history is thus regarded not as an object but as an activity, not as
the irrevocable past but as the living present, the difference between
history and chronicle, which is one of the puzzles of historical
thought, becomes an important and significant distinction. We are used
to think that the original form of historical writing is the chronicle,
and history a later and maturer development. Now if history is the
consciousness of a present, it follows that history is contemporary
with the event; that, therefore, the most meagre chronicle, in the mind
of its writer, moved by the actuality of the facts which he records,
is already a history in the full sense of the word. And the records of
the past, whether appearing to us, from a literary point of view, as
mere chronicles or as true histories, become history again whenever
they are apprehended by a new mind as an answer to a present problem,
partaking of the activity of the mind that thinks them anew. The same
records, on the other hand, are a mere chronicle, an empty narrative,
a truly irrevocable past, whenever they are not re-lived by a living
mind, either because they do not correspond to any interest of present
life, or because the essential conditions for the recreation of that
past, the documents which enable us to revive within ourselves the
original experience, are irrevocably lost. The true distinction between
history and chronicle is not, therefore, a literary or material one,
but a distinction between forms of spiritual activity: history is the
living consciousness, and, therefore, an act of thought or knowledge;
chronicle is the dead record, which we preserve by a mere act of will,
because we know that some day the dead record itself may come back to
life, transform itself again, under an impulse rooted not in the past
but in the present, into a living thought.
"These revivals have purely inward motives; and no amount of narratives
or documents can produce them; on the contrary, it is the inner motive
that gathers and brings before itself documents and narratives,
which, without it, would remain dispersed and inert. And it will be
for ever impossible to understand the effectual process of historical
thought, unless one starts from the principle that the spirit itself
is history, and, in every one of its moments, the maker of history
and at the same time the result of all foregoing history; so that the
spirit carries within itself the whole of its history, which in fact
coincides with the spirit itself. To forget one aspect of history
and to remember another is nothing but the rhythm of the life of the
spirit, which works by determining and individualizing itself, and by
in-determining and dis-individualizing the preceding determinations
and individualizations, in order to create new and richer ones. The
spirit would live over again, so to speak, its history, even without
those external objects which we call narratives and documents; but
those external objects are instruments that it fashions for itself, and
preparatory acts that it accomplishes, in order to effect that vital
interior evocation, in whose process they resolve themselves. And for
this purpose the spirit asserts and jealously preserves the 'memories
of the past.'"[2]
This practical function of the preservation of the dead documents
and records is the work of the pure scholar, of the erudite, the
archivist, the archæologist, or what might be termed philology in the
strict sense of the word. And it is a legitimate and useful function,
provided that it does not pretend to be other than it actually is, and
to substitute itself for the true process of history, by attempting to
make history with the external objects that have been confided to its
care. Philological histories are never anything but mere compilations,
learned chronicles, useful repertories; and as such, blameless; but
as histories they lack the living spirit, the creative impulse, which
alone can transform the document into history. We have only to turn our
attention to the greatest part of our modern histories of literature,
whether written by a single philologist or by a learned society, to
realize that that which is philology in them is not history, but
repertory; and the rest, which is history, is not philology, but a
vivid reaction, an act of present life, by which some at least of the
documents of the past (since some philologists are men) have suddenly
become part of the actual experience of the writer, answered his
spiritual need, stirred that which is still human in his soul. And if
a further confirmation of the philological error is needed, and of the
further errors in which it involves the philological historian, it is
sufficient to open those same literary histories at the pages in which
they attempt to explain the origins of the Renaissance. Because as
those writers make history from the sources, so they imagine that life
itself springs from material sources; and the Renaissance finds its
_causes_ in the discovery of monuments and documents of the classical
world, in the lives and travels of humanists, in the munificence of
popes and princes. It does not seem to occur to them that monuments
and manuscripts, which materially had existed in Europe during all the
so-called Dark and Middle Ages, could not have been discovered unless,
at a certain moment in the development of European civilization, the
spirit of the Western nations had not craved those particular helps
to its own life, because of motives and impulses generated by its own
actual experience; and that the mediæval clericus was not less of a
traveller than the humanist, and that the economic aspect of life can
never be intelligibly conceived as a cause of that life of which it is
but a moment. For the philological historian, the Renaissance begins
between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth
century; but the historian _tout court_ knows that the fundamental
impulses and motives by which we empirically ally characterize that
period in the history of the human spirit were already present in the
Italy of the thirteenth century, and slowly maturing in the other
European countries long before any of the Italian humanists had come to
them as the apostles of a new creed.
If philological history is not history but pseudo-history, so are also
two other forms of so-called historical thought, poetical history and
rhetorical history. The first substitutes for the value of history,
which is thought, a purely immediate and sentimental, or æsthetic
value; it presents itself very often as a reaction to philological
history, but it falls into the opposite error, which is that of putting
the imagination in the place of the document. Rhetorical history is
that which is animated by practical ends (moralistic, nationalistic,
or other), and it really consists of two distinct elements, history
itself, and the particular end towards which the recitation of history
is directed, converging into a single practical act. Both partake of
life much more intensely than philological history; but the life of
the one is poetry, that of the other is economic or moral action. They
are, therefore, legitimate as poetry and as action, and become errors
only in so far as they are presented as history. It is important to
make this distinction as clear as possible: the actual interest which
makes history is not for Croce a sentimental or practical interest,
but an interest of thought. In the distinction of the various forms of
spiritual activity, history is not the sentimental or practical moment,
but the moment of ultimate consciousness, the reflection and not either
the intuition or the action, the thought which is consciousness of
life and not life immediate; neither art nor morality, in a word, but
philosophy, if by philosophy, we mean not a formal discipline, but
all knowledge _sub specie universalis_. The defenders of rhetorical
history have become more frequent during and after the war than they
were before it, it being only too natural that in times of exceptional
stress truth should be made subservient to practical ends, and the man
of knowledge should be unwittingly transmogrified into a man of action;
and they insist more than ever on the moral efficacy of history as its
proper educational value. But "if by history we mean both that history
which is thought, and those that are poetry, philology or moral will,
it is clear that 'history' will enter into the educational process not
under one only, but under all these forms; though as history proper,
under one only, which is not that of moral education, exclusively
and abstractly considered, but of the education or development of
thought."[3]
The conception of history as contemporary history, or present thought,
helps us to discard that form of historical scepticism, or agnosticism,
which affirms that all we can know of history is but one part, and
a very small part, of the whole. If we should imagine that infinite
whole, in its infinite detail, as present for one moment to our mind,
all we could do, would be instantly to proceed to forget it, in order
to concentrate our attention on that detail only which answers to
a problem and, therefore, constitutes a living and active history.
That whole is not something of which we can affirm the existence at
any given moment, but the eternal phantasm of the thing in itself,
the limiting concept of the infinity of our doing and knowing: a
naturalistic construction similar to the external and material reality
of physical science. It is this naturalistic process that gives birth
to agnosticism, in history as in science; that is, to the affirmation
of the impossibility of knowing that which has no reality outside our
own thought, which has created, or rather posited it, for its own
purposes. A further consequence is that we must renounce the knowledge
of universal history, not as a fact, because as such it has never
existed, but as a pretence under which, in fact, we are given something
quite different. The pretence consists (and it will be well to recall
Croce's own words, written long before some recent attempts, which in
those words find their precise valuation) in "reducing within a single
frame all the facts of mankind, from its origins on earth to the
present day; or rather, since in this way history would not be truly
universal, from the origins of things or from the Creation to the end
of the world; hence a tendency to fill the abysm of prehistory or of
the origins with theological or naturalistic novels, and somehow to
outline the future, either with revelations or with prophecies, as in
the Christian universal history (which extended to the Anti-Christ and
to the universal judgment), or with forecasts, as in the universal
histories of positivism, democraticism, and socialism. Such is the
pretence; but the fact turns out to be different from the intention,
and what we get is either a more or less heterogeneous chronicle, or
a poetical history expressing some aspiration of the heart, or even a
true history, which is not universal but particular, though embracing
the life of many nations and of many epochs; and, more often, in the
same literary body we discern these divers elements, one by the side of
the other."[4]
Universal history is a utopian ideal similar to those of a universal
language, or of universal art, or of a law that should be valid for
all times; the only useful meaning of the word universal when applied
to history is that of a recommendation to enlarge the sphere of our
historical interests, and to turn from the knowledge of one time and
one people to that of the great facts and currents of history. But a
denial of the validity of universal history must not be understood as
withdrawing from history the knowledge of the universal. The reader who
has followed us through the preceding chapters, and especially through
our analysis of the historical judgment, knows how the concreteness
and individuality of history is determined by thought, and therefore
known as a universal. History is thought, and, as such, the thought
of the universal in its concrete and particular determinations. The
object of history is never this or that poet, but poetry; not this or
that nation or epoch, but culture, civilization, progress, freedom, or
a similar word which denotes the development of the human spirit as a
whole, and is therefore a universal. It is of history, thus conceived,
of contemporary history, as opposed to the naturalistic moment
(chronicle, or philological history), that Croce asserts the identity
with philosophy: history as, the knowledge of the eternal present being
one with the thought of the eternal present, which is philosophy.
History renounces the pretence of an objective universality in the same
way as philosophy, immanent in and identical with history, abolishes
the idea of a universal philosophy: the two negations are but one,
since the closed system, the final truth, is as much a cosmological
novel as universal history is. "This tendency was implicit in Hegel's
philosophy, but contrasted within it by old prejudices, and wholly
betrayed in the execution, so that even that philosophy converted
itself into a cosmological novel; we can therefore say that that which
at the beginning of the nineteenth century was a mere presentiment,
only at the beginning of the twentieth is transforming itself into a
firm consciousness, which defies the fears of the timid, that in this
way we endanger the knowledge of the universal; maintaining that, on
the contrary, in this way only this knowledge is obtained truly and
for ever, because in a dynamic mode. History becoming actual history,
and philosophy becoming historical philosophy, have freed themselves,
one from the dread of not being able to know that which is not known
only because either it was or it will be known, and the other, from the
despair of never attaining the final truth: that is, both have freed
themselves from the phantasm of the 'thing in itself.'"[5]
This final affirmation of the unity of human thought, this
qualification of all thought as at the same time historical and
philosophical, is the last answer given by Croce to the problem
which had occupied him for the last twenty years, ever since his
first speculations on history as art. From the consideration of the
individual moment which is essential to history, he had slowly raised
himself to the contemplation of the pure universal, only to return
finally to the individual moment in which only the universal realizes
itself. And while this answer can be regarded, on the whole, as the
natural conclusion of the idealistic movement in philosophy, yet it
differs from Kant in its ultimate repudiation of the _noumenon_, from
Hegel, in that it makes it impossible to build, side by side with a
dynamic logic, a mythology of the Idea, a philosophy of history and of
nature, in which the transcendental element, eliminated already from
the logic, should find its ultimate refuge. It is to be hoped that
Croce's critics will not level against him those same criticisms that
are generally employed against Kant or Hegel, because they would be for
the most part ineffectual against a Kantian and Hegelian philosopher
who has discarded the whole of Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics.
From this standpoint, Croce is not only the heir of the idealistic,
but also of the positivistic or realistic tradition, which he has
constantly opposed, not because of its anti-metaphysical character,
but because in the external reality of the realist, in the natural or
historical philosophy of the positivist, he is unable to see anything
but naturalistic disguises of the old metaphysical entities. A realist
who should not in principle refuse to become acquainted with Croce's
thought, but honestly attempt to understand it, would probably find his
own realism purified and made more truly realistic by the experience.
A material distinction, as of formal disciplines, between history and
philosophy still survives in Croce's theory, philosophy proper being
considered as the categoric or methodological moment of history--a
distinction roughly corresponding to the one he made in his logic
between the individual judgment and the definition. But philosophy
itself is profoundly modified once we fully realize that its historical
character implies the abandonment of certain features which are
constantly associated in our minds with the idea of philosophy, because
of its early associations with mythology and the positive religions
ions. To these belong the belief in the existence of a fundamental
problem of philosophy, which remains the same throughout the history of
human thought, and of which the various philosophies are but successive
approximations to an answer; the consequent stress laid on the unity
of the system rather than on the fine and clear distinctions; the
research of an ultimate truth; and finally, the prejudice by which
the philosopher is regarded as a Buddha or priest, freed from human
passions and human illusions, resting in the pure contemplation of
a truth, which, by being tom from the soil of active life that has
borne it, cannot but wither away and become as empty and unreal as the
Buddha's own Nirvana frankly professes to be. Metaphysics to Croce is
the last incarnation of theology; and the professor of philosophy in
our universities, with a culture formed exclusively on the books of the
great philosophers of the past, unmoved by the passions and problems
of life, is but the heir of the mediæval master of theology. "A strong
advancement of philosophical culture ought to tend towards this result:
that all the students of human things, jurists, economists, moralists,
men of letters, that is, all the students of historical matters,
should become conscious and well-disciplined philosophers; and the
philosopher in general, the _purus philosophus_, should no longer find
place among the professional specifications of knowledge."[6]
We shall not follow our author in all his developments of the theory
of history. It suffices to say that these developments are obviously
but new presentations, made here and there more precise and more
coherent, of the various problems already discussed in the preceding
volumes of the _Filosofia dello Spirito_. We shall thus recognise in
Croce's criticism of the philosophy of history as a special discipline,
distinct both from history as such and from a so-called general
philosophy, his polemic against transcendence, either metaphysical
or naturalistic; and in his claim for the positivity of history, his
theory of value, by which the only real values are the positive ones,
coinciding with the fact, while negative values are but expressions
of feelings and desires. In the light of this theory, since history
is obviously concerned with that which is, and not with that which is
not, the limits of historical judgment are clearly established, in the
way in which we saw them established for literary criticism. As the
literary critic is never concerned with anything but with expression,
or art, or beauty, non-expression, non-art, non-beauty being as such
inexistent, and truly existent only as manifestations of the logical
or practical activity of man; so the historian at large will never
meet negative values, but positive facts only, which assume the aspect
of ugliness, or error, or immorality, only in the dialectic process of
reality, in the creation of a higher form of life. His affirmation of
the positive fact is sufficient judgment, and it becomes an implicit
moral judgment whenever the consciousness of the historian is a moral
consciousness, without any need for him to usurp the function of the
moralist or of the judge in apportioning praise or blame on the objects
of his history.
Against the humanistic or pragmatic conception of history, which finds
the reasons and motives of history in the abstract individual, as
against the opposite view, for which the true history is only that
of the collectivity, of the institutions, of the human values, Croce
reasserts his concept of the actuality of the spirit, in regard to
which the individual is as much of an abstraction as the society or
the value which does not entirely realize itself in the fact. The
object of history is neither Pericles nor Politics, neither Sophocles
nor Tragedy, neither Plato nor Philosophy; but the universal in the
individual, that is, Politics, Tragedy, Philosophy, as Pericles,
Sophocles, and Plato, or Pericles, Sophocles, and Plato as particular
moments of Politics, of Tragedy, and of Philosophy.
As there are no special philosophical sciences, and then a general
philosophy, which should be outside or above them, but whenever we
think of reality under one of its aspects or distinctions, we think
of the whole of reality in one of its determinations, so there are no
special histories, the limits of which can be definitely stated, and
above them a general history, which would in a new form revive the myth
of universal history. We have seen how literary history, for instance,
tends inevitably to become the whole spiritual history of a nation;
and the same applies to all special histories, whether political or
moral, or philosophical. There are divisions of history, according
to the quality of the objects, to time and space, but such divisions
are mere empirical classifications, practical instruments or literary
expedients; and we can use as the foundation of such divisions even the
ideal distinctions of the fundamental forms of spiritual activity. But
when these distinctions are understood as actual distinctions of the
aspects of the spiritual life, of which we make history, then all the
other aspects will inevitably be present in the particular distinction,
once we truly apprehend it in the fulness of its relations. In this
sense, history is always special or particular, because it is only in
the special and particular that we can grasp the effectual and concrete
universality, the effectual and concrete unity.
Finally, the difference between the history of man and the history of
nature is not a difference in the object but in the method of history.
The whole of reality is spiritual reality, and nature apprehended
in its concreteness and actuality, if we are able to recreate it
within ourselves, becomes actual, concrete, contemporary history as
much as any part of human history. On the other hand, the application
of empirical and abstract concepts, the practical manipulation of
the data of human history, transforms the history of man into mere
natural history. This difference in method we have already analyzed in
studying Croce's logic, and we shall only add here that the reader of
Croce may often be tempted to regard Croce's conception of reality as
limited to the human spirit only, and therefore to give a metaphysical
interpretation to his exclusion of "nature." The correct interpretation
is a purely epistemological one, and again and again Croce insists that
in the whole of reality, which is development or life, man and nature
are but empirical and abstract distinctions. On the other hand, Croce's
interests are certainly more human than natural, and not only in the
sense in which this is true of every man; in the more precise sense
also that the effort to recreate within himself the consciousness of a
blade of grass, which he advises the historian of nature to perform,
clearly appeals to him so little, that he may even seem doubtful of its
success. The accent is continually laid, in Croce's thought, on the
history of man, and on the thought of man; to many of us, our dealings
with nature (not the dead nature of Linnæus, but the living nature of
Virgil and Shelley) would probably suggest a shifting of the accent
by which the spirituality of nature, the continuity of the dynamic
process from nature to man would become more emphatically affirmed
than it is in any of Croce's writings. We are probably touching here
on one of the possible, and probable, lines of development of Croce's
philosophy; which, however, will not become actual until the historical
problems of the living nature shall not urge Croce himself, or one of
his successors, as powerfully as the problems of human history have
moved him. At present, with very rare exceptions, the students of
the history of nature are occupied in transforming their historical
experience into classes and types and laws; but a time may come when
from the naturalistic constructions we shall be able more frequently
to recreate the life of which these are but the dead spoils, the
accumulated vestiges, by the same process by which history re-kindles
the old chronicles into new, contemporary life. That such a development
is implied in Croce's own theory of history can hardly be questioned,
though, when realized, it will undoubtedly react on more than one point
of Croce's logic.
[Footnote 1: _Teoria e Storia_, pp. 5-6.]
[Footnote 2: _Teoria e Storia_, pp. 15-16.]
[Footnote 3: _Teoria e Storia_, pp. 35-6.]
[Footnote 4: _Teoria e Storia_, p. 46.]
[Footnote 5: _Teoria e Storia_, pp. 51-2.]
[Footnote 6: _Teoria e Storia_, p. 145.]