_Quid est veritas?_--Platonism, or transcendental idealism--Naturalism,
or transcendental realism--The idea of progress--Progress and truth:
evolutionism--Pragmatism--Croce's new pragmatism--The immanence of
value--The actuality of Truth--Truth as history: the function of error
and of evil--The foundations of Croce's thought.
There is one problem in the history of human thought, which, however
conscious we might be of the multiplicity and historical contingency
of philosophical problems, yet can appear to us as the ultimate or
central one, if only because it is an abstract interrogation describing
the attitude of the philosopher, and to which every concrete logical
research, every act of thought, can be reduced. It is Pilate's
question: _Quid est veritas?_ What is truth?
The question itself has no definite meaning, until it receives from the
individual thinker a definite content, which is history or experience,
and the infinite variety of the answers it has received is due to the
infinite variability of that content. But at all times man has been
urged by a passionate desire to lift his own individual answer from the
flux of life, to put it as it were over and against that experience
from which it had emerged, not as the truth of his particular problem,
but as an abstractly universal truth. It is by violently breaking the
process of thought, and hypostatizing in essence the subject of his
thought, abstracted from its object, or the object from its subject,
and both from the creative activity which produces truth, that man has
created, both in philosophy proper and in the minds of the multitude,
a double transcendence, of pure ideas, on one side, of brute matter on
the other, from which the two most common meanings of the word truth
are derived.
The Platonic idealist, for whom the actual processes of life and
thought are but shadows and remembrances of the Eternal Ideas in
the hyper-uranian space, can be assumed here as the symbol of the
transcendental idealist, for whom truth is adequation to an ideal model
existing outside the mind. The most disparate types of philosophers
belong to this herd, and among them many that commonly go under the
name of realists, since the idealist who has fixed and objectified
his ideas cannot help considering them as real essences, and dealing
with them accordingly. The Aristotelian realist, the theologian,
Hegel himself when postulating an original Logos, of which Spirit and
Nature are the temporal explication, all can be gathered together
in the goodly company of Platonists; and Platonists are to-day both
the literal followers of German idealism, and the less barbarous
among contemporary realists, who are in the habit of attributing
an independent, absolute existence to logical or mathematical
abstractions. But neither the ones nor the others seem to be in very
close contact with the spirit of the age: what they mean by truth is
not what is generally meant by truth to-day, except among those who
still cling to the myths in which that form of transcendence expressed
itself in past ages. The sturdiest, though hardly recognizable,
survivals of Platonism are relics of formalistic logic, still very
frequent in contemporary culture, and a belief in what might be called
average truth, mechanically extracted from an external and material
consensus of opinions. But with this conception of truth, we touch the
border line between idealistic and naturalistic transcendentalism.
The most common attitude of contemporary thought (and the one that is
therefore usually designated as common sense, and as such opposed to
philosophy) is a naively naturalistic one. But it would be a mistake
to regard it as a simple and spontaneous attitude, and to identify it,
for instance, with the naïve intuition of the artist, with a first
grade of knowledge as yet untroubled by logical problems. The artist's
vision is more distant from naturalism than the philosopher's concept,
since common sense, however unreflected and illogical, is in itself
a philosophy, and, though it may sound paradoxical, a transcendental
one. The artist constantly identifies himself with his object; in his
consciousness, the distinction between subject and object has not
yet arisen. But the naïve naturalism of which we are now speaking
is posterior to the logical judgment, in which that distinction
first appears; and is obtained by keeping separate the two terms of
the judgment, each of which exists only in relation to the other,
and by transforming that relation into a quality of the object. The
unity thus disrupted is artificially reconstituted by abolishing the
subject, that is, by treating the subject itself as merely an object
among many objects, or as a mere abstract intersection of objects. It
is with this form of naturalism that realism generally coincides, and
its abstracting process is the one that has been recently systematized
by the New Realists. The justification of the naturalistic conception
of truth, as truth of description, and the motive of its present
popularity, is that it rests on a method of knowledge which is
indispensable to the natural and mathematical sciences, and that the
sciences have come to usurp, in modern times, for reasons which are
obvious to every one, the place of science. It is not the less true,
however, that wherever that method is applied, it reduces the living
reality of life and thought to a heap of dead, immovable abstractions.
There is no real danger in this as long as the abstractions are taken
for what they are, and used as instruments for the purposes of our
doing and understanding; but when they are considered as a complete
equivalent of the living reality, then we become their prisoners, and
are shut out by them from all possibility of true understanding.
It is especially from the misuses of this method in the historical
and moral sciences, from the degenerations of sociology, psychology,
and philology, that we must be constantly on guard; lest in the very
sciences of the human spirit we should miss that which is their true
object, the human activity which creates the world of history and the
values of life.
Modern thought, at the end of the Renaissance, begins with an attempt
at eliminating that static conception of truth, in which both Platonism
and naturalism find the roots of their transcendence. This is the
origin of the idea of Progress, first established by Bruno, by Bacon,
by Pascal, by Vico, in the form of a correlation between truth and
time. Mediæval thought had been shackled for centuries by the authority
of the ancients; the new thinkers invoked the authority of antiquity,
of old age, and, therefore, of wisdom, not for the distant ages, in
which the world could be said to be still young and inexperienced, but
for their own times, in which it was possible to add a perpetually
new experience and thought to that which had been bequeathed by the
thinkers of Greece and Rome. The consequence of this attitude was the
discovery of the immanence of truth in life, the liberation from the
principle of authority (which had been the characteristic mediæval
form of transcendence), and a vigorous impulse towards the recognition
of the dynamic nature of reality, of what an American philosopher
called the continuity of the ideal with the real. The thought that
was contained in germ in those early polemics, vaguely and mythically
in Bruno, and much more consciously in Vico, is substantially that of
Croce's identification of philosophy with history.
We do not expect of a new philosophy that it should suddenly, as a
revelation or illumination, give us a key to all the problems of
reality, and resolve, once and forever, the so-called mystery of the
universe. If such a thing should ever happen, it would mean the end of
life, which cannot be conceived, in its ultimate essence, otherwise
than as a perpetual positing and solution of problems. It must not be
forgotten that a philosophy is the work of one man, and, therefore,
contains only the answers to the problems that are real to him.
But if we stop to consider the whole course of thought in the last
two centuries, we shall realize that the idea of Progress, in many
different and even in contrasting forms, is the one around which all
our life, theoretical and practical, has centred in modern times. And
of that idea, Croce's philosophy is the most powerful and coherent
expression that has ever appeared. It is only by considering the
whole of reality as activity, and the values of reality as coinciding
with the forms of that activity, that Progress acquires a definite
meaning: a progress which should be a constant approximation towards
a preëxistent ideal, or a material process external to ourselves,
would be a purely illusory one. In one case, our whole life would tend
towards making a duplicate of that which already is--a work, therefore,
without intrinsic worth, and without a real end; in the other, there
would be no work at all, no activity, no life.
But nothing seems more difficult to our mind than to keep together
the two ideas of progress and of truth. The natural sciences have
made a gallant attempt at assimilating the idea of progress, and at
transforming themselves, ultimately, into history. But the static
concepts of naturalism resist that assimilation, and scientific
evolutionism offers but the mechanical outline, the external processes
of progress, the evolved and not the evolving reality; that is, it
keeps its truth at the expense of its progress. This same evolutionism,
when applied to the human sciences, is obviously unable to grasp the
actuality of spiritual growth and life, and it only reproduces, in
aggravated form, the evils inherent in all naturalistic interpretations
of the spirit. Bergson's philosophy is a new evolutionism, which
succeeds much better than the old one in retaining the idea of
progress, and is, therefore, a further step towards the transformation
of science into history; but what it gains in this respect, it loses
in relation to its principle of truth, which is mythically represented
as the lowest form of consciousness, or rather as that which is below
consciousness itself.
What is vital in Bergson is his criticism of the scientific, or
naturalistic, intellect; but the intellect of man has other functions
besides those of dissecting and classifying. From a similar beginning,
that is, from the economic theory of science, derives another attempt
at conciliating progress and truth, pragmatism. In pragmatism also, the
critical element is more or less sound, but the constructive one is
weak and arbitrary. Pragmatism does not reject the truth of science,
because of its practical character; on the contrary, having recognized
that the foundation of scientific truth is economic, it proceeds
to deduce all truth from the will, and to verify it in action. The
result of this deduction is a closer connection between truth and life
than has been ever reached by any system of philosophy; but a merely
apparent one, since truth itself is thus submerged and annulled in the
immediacy of practical and passional life. The solution of the problem
of truth is obtained only by putting truth out of the question at the
beginning of the inquiry; as it is dear that for a rigid pragmatist,
there is but one truth left, and that is the truth of his theory,
which, however, cannot be verified by the theory itself, since its
usefulness is, to say the least, very doubtful.
By some of his adversaries Croce himself has been classed as a
pragmatist. It is no wonder that certain distinctions should escape
the attention of men who live to-day as exiles from distant centuries,
and whose critical sight is, therefore, not clearer then that of an
owl fluttering in the noonday sun. But the only relation that I
can think of between Croce and the pragmatists is that he advocates
an economic theory not of truth, but of error; that he finds in the
passions and practical interests of men the root of intellectual
error. The problem of the positive relations between life and thought
has been treated by him, as we know, in a very different spirit from
that of the pragmatists; and in the circle of the human spirit, the
ideal precedence is given by him, not to the practical but to the
theoretical. On the other hand, in the actual process of time, all
forms of human activity are reciprocally conditioned, and under
this respect Croce's thought can be called, and has been called by
himself, a new pragmatism, but "of a kind of which pragmatists have
never thought, or at least which they have never been able to discern
from the others, and to bring out in full relief. If life conditions
thought, we have in this fact the clearly established demonstration of
the always historically conditioned form of every thought: and not of
art only, which is always the art of a time, of a soul, of a moment,
but of philosophy also, which can solve but the problems that life
proposes. Every philosophy reflects, and cannot help reflecting, the
preoccupations, as they are called, of a determined historical moment;
not, however, in the quality of its solutions (because in this case it
would be a bad philosophy, a partisan or passional philosophy), but in
the quality of its problems. And because the problem is historical,
and the solution eternal, philosophy is at the same time contingent and
eternal, mortal and immortal, temporary and extratemporary."[1] Croce's
conception of truth is his philosophy, and it is not my intention to
summarize here what this book presents in what is already so rapid a
survey. I wish only to point again at those doctrines of his, through
which progress and truth are reconciled, without any sacrifice of the
one to the other. Truth is for Croce a universal value or category of
consciousness: its absoluteness rests on its character of universality,
but, as a universal has no real being outside its concrete actuality,
truth is nowhere if not in the individual judgment, that is, in the
mind that creates it. It is strange that this mode of its manifestation
should be considered to impair the quality of truth, while a similar
objection would hardly be raised to-day in regard to other forms of
spiritual activity. That the Beautiful is the value of the concrete,
historical productions of the æsthetic spirit, or the Good that of the
concrete, historically determined moral activity, these are concepts
common to all contemporary thought, though no one, perhaps, has as
yet expressed them as clearly as Croce. To the artist or to the
saint, reality appears at a given moment as an æsthetic or an ethical
problem; the terms of the problem are always particular, contingent,
historical; yet when the artist or the saint impresses on that reality
the seal of his own deepest personality, when he creatively reacts to
it, then the Beautiful and the Good realize themselves, as universal
values, in the individual work of art or of mercy. Our belief in the
absoluteness of the æsthetic or of the moral value is not weakened
but strengthened by our inability to fix them in formulas or codes or
standards; we see them perpetually transcending the reality in which
they express themselves, by the same process by which that reality,
which is all growth and life, transcends itself in the infinite
course of its realization. We cannot think of any number of works
of art or of mercy as exhausting the categories of the Beautiful or
of the Good. The identification of these values with the infinite
series of their individual expressions fills the soul with a sense of
reverence and responsibility towards life, that cannot be equalled
by any faith in static, immovable ideals, by which a term, however
high and remote, is set to the living spirit, no longer recognised
as the creator of its own æsthetic and moral world. To the mind that
has grasped this relation of the universal to the individual, of the
eternal to the present (and the artist or the saint grasps it in his
own unphilosophical way, to which his work or his action is witness),
the whole of reality, human and natural, appears as linked by a bond of
spiritual solidarity, moving towards the same end, engaged in the same
sacred task.
Truth is the value of the logical activity, and therefore it coincides
with the positive history of human thought. Its actuality is an
infinite progress or development, but not in the sense that the value
itself may be subject to increase or change from century to century.
At no particular point in that history is it possible to point to a
conversion from error to truth, to a total illumination or revelation.
Every single affirmation of truth, from the simplest and humblest
to the most elaborate and complex, takes possession of the whole of
reality, in the fulness of its relations; since it is manifestly
impossible to affirm the truth of one individual subject, without
implicitly determining its position in the universe. Truth, as all
other values, has no extension; it is incommensurable either with space
or with time, it is not augmented by accumulation. Degrees in truth,
and a more and a less, are inconceivable; but each act that affirms
it contains its whole, since truth itself does not live except in the
spirit that perpetually creates and recreates it. Truth belongs to the
thinking mind, that is, to reality as a logical consciousness, as life
belongs to the living body. It belongs to us, individually, in relation
to that universal consciousness, in the mode and measure of our
partaking of it: which means that however much of it we may conquer,
however constant, laborious, honest, intense our efforts towards
truth may be, yet our duty towards it will always remain infinite,
inexhaustible. The conquered truth is dead in the mind that rests in
it, that ceases its effort, as life gives place to death in the body
that no longer functions.
In a wider sense, truth belongs to every form of spiritual activity.
Beauty, utility, goodness are the truths of the artistic, the
practical, the moral mind. And in the actual life of the spirit, each
of these values represents all the others in the particular act in
which it realizes itself. This is what Croce means by his circular
conception of the spirit. And this is why what is said of one value
seems to apply without any change to the others; why, as we said
elsewhere, all universals are but one universal. Whether we call this
one Progress or Development, Spirit or Reality, Mind or Nature, we
know that our thought is grasping Life itself, not in its abstract
identity, but in its infinite actuality, that is, each time, this
life, this beauty, this action, this truth. What we aim at is not an
ecstatic absorption into the undifferentiated unity, but the finding
within ourselves of a centre of consciousness, capable of introducing
order and reason into the variegated spectacle of the natural and human
world, not from outside and from above, but from its very heart. The
truth that we seek is therefore never external to ourselves, but our
own activity, our own life, our own history.
This concept of truth as activity and as history, this activistic and
energetic philosophy, truly positive in that the course of history
appears to it as a succession of only positive acts and positive
values, is not however a blind and fatuous optimism. If it is true
that nowhere positive error or positive evil can interrupt the process
of life, that death itself does not end but fulfil it, yet from the
relations and implications of the various forms of activity arises
a real dialectic of good and evil, of truth and error, which is the
spring and motive of life. What to the purely utilitarian conscience
is the good of now and of to-day, the same conscience, awakened to a
greater light, repudiates as evil. The imaginative vision of the poet,
in which truth expresses itself, sensuous and finite, and yet pregnant
of its infinity, dissolves like mist in the sun in the clearness
of the logical concept, and is then restored in its right by the
historical and critical consciousness to which that truth is poetry.
The myths and superstitions of the old religions, dead in the letter,
are revived in the thought itself that seems to destroy them. History
is but this perpetual cycle of death and resurrection, in which what
is concrete distinction in the act transforms itself into opposition
in the process, producing the terms of a new problem and becoming the
source of the new creation. Thus the whole method of Croce's philosophy
reveals itself as directed towards a realistic conception of life, and
the distinctions within the concept are not abstract forms, but the
very structure of reality.
The professional philosopher moves always and only in the rarefied
atmosphere of the pure concept. Croce came to philosophy from art and
from economics, and he never lost contact with the elementary forms
of knowledge and of action. What might be termed as his fundamental
discoveries are his definitions of the æsthetic and of the economic
principle. On this basis the whole of his thought rests. Without a
conception of a truth which is sufficient unto itself, and yet is not
logical truth, and of a good which has its own justification, and yet
is not moral good, he would have been compelled to maintain by the side
of the concepts of truth and of goodness, error and evil as positive
realities, or to include the whole of reality within what would have
been truth and goodness in a purely verbal sense. In both cases, he
would have been unable to make his philosophy immediately adherent to
all grades of active consciousness, from the lowest to the highest,
and thereby to history. Of these discoveries the one that until now
has attracted the greatest attention is that of the pure intuition,
and of art and language as expression. But the establishment of the
economic principle, that is of the world of nature, of feeling, of
passion, as a positive grade of the spiritual process, will probably
be counted as Croce's greatest achievement, by those who shall be able
to look back on his work with an ampler perspective. It is through
it that his philosophy of the spirit, and in this philosophy, the
consciousness of our day, has taken possession of that other world, of
that persistent transcendance, which we call nature. In this direction
lies, undoubtedly, the future course of the thought of an age, to
which, in this afterglow of a great conflagration, all problems seem to
gather into the one of the subjection to its better and higher self,
the utilization for its purer purposes, of its own cumbersome economic
body, of its nature and of its passions.
[Footnote 1: Filosofia della Pratica, p. 208.]