THE ATTRIBUTES OF CULTURE
From the concept of the spirituality of culture, we derive all the
fundamental propositions of pedagogy. But in as much as this conception
of culture coincides with that of personality, or of the spirit, it is
evident that all the fundamental propositions of the philosophy of the
spirit are also derived from it. In fact, we separate pedagogy from the
philosophy of the spirit only because of didactic convenience. To
determine, then, the attributes of culture, by which education becomes
actual, we have but to consider the nature of the spirit and endeavour
to define its attributes. This way we must follow if we are ever to
acquire a thorough comprehension of the principles of the several
theories of education, principles which are but the laws immanent to the
life of education itself in its effective development.
The assertion that "culture is the human spirit" means nothing unless we
first define this spirit and understand its attributes. We cannot
possess a concept which is not determined; and the determinations of a
concept are the constituent attributes of the reality which we strive to
conceive, and which is not thinkable if deprived of any of these
attributes. The following example, appropriate even though trite, will
make my meaning clearer. Physical bodies cannot be conceived without
also conceiving gravity. Gravity is then an attribute of the physical
body, and as such it determines the concept of it. In the same way, to
conceive the spirit is to embrace with thought the concepts which are
absolutely inseparable from the concept of the spirit.
This inquiry into the nature of the attributes of culture, though it
constantly progresses towards a satisfactory solution, yet seems at
times to be losing ground on account of the ever-increasing difficulties
that beset its advance. It is true, no doubt, that human thought, driven
by the irresistible desire to know itself, has made some headway towards
mastering the concept of itself. Philosophy has indeed progressed, and
the modern world can proudly point to truths unsuspected by the thinkers
of antiquity. But the assiduous and prolonged toil of thought engaged in
this task has at all moments disclosed new difficulties; it has ever
been busy sketching new concepts which subsequently prove immature and
in need of further elaboration, and has been pushing its investigations
to such depths as to make it difficult to follow its lead without
sometimes going astray, without frequently stopping in utter weariness
at the roadside.
Men talk learnedly nowadays of the human spirit, but with a doctrine
which is often insufficient or, as we say, not up to date. They have
stopped at one of those wayside concepts where thought no doubt passed
and temporarily halted, but from which it moved on towards a more
distant goal. For while this long history of the endeavours by which man
struggles onward towards the understanding of his own nature is the
basis on which modern philosophy builds its firm concept of the spirit,
yet for those who have not attained the vantage ground of this modern
philosophy, this history is unfortunately a very intricate maze; it is
the bewildering
"selva selvaggia ed aspra e forte"[3]
from which it is difficult ever to issue. And therefore it is much
easier, as Dante once remarked, to teach those who are completely
ignorant than those who have a smattering of philosophy. But to-day
culture is so intimately connected with philosophical speculation that
the greater part of educated men profess this or that system without
being aware of it. And when such men do take up the study of philosophy
_per se_, they no longer possess the mental ingenuousness, the
speculative candour, which would enable them to grasp the obvious,
evident, incontrovertible truth of the most profound philosophical
proposition.
This inquiry then is difficult. It demands either a long, methodic,
laborious study of the history of philosophy conducted with critical
vigour, or that unyielding tenacity of the mind which is the surest sign
of sound spiritual character; that steadfast firmness by which man, once
in possession of a clearly irrefutable, truly fundamental truth,
rigorously excludes from his soul all the allurements of prejudice, all
convictions formerly entertained, even though extremely plausible, if
they contradict his Truth. For he trusts that these perplexities, these
difficulties which he is not now in condition to explain, will be
removed in virtue of that very thought to which he has confidently
committed himself.
This unflinching resolve is the courage of the philosopher, who has
never feared to brave common sense, and single-handed to marshal against
the multitude the array of his seemingly absurd assertions, which
however, in the progress of their reciprocal integrations, have
subsequently contributed to redeem this very multitude from error,--from
that error which is intellectual misery, social wretchedness, economic,
political, and moral destitution. Because of this inflexible firmness
the philosopher has never dreaded that boundless solitude, that thin
atmosphere to which he is uplifted by thought, and where at first he has
the sensation of fainting away into the rarefied air.
We must then muster up courage and relinquish all the ideas which we
once accepted, even though they still tempt us with superficial
glitterings of truth, when once they have proved themselves to be in
contradiction with experience. For I too hold experience to be the
touchstone of all our thoughts, philosophy not excluded. But I insist
that we be careful lest we confound the mockery of the first puppet that
dupes our imagination with genuine experience; that in as much as every
man speaks of experience in exclusive accordance with whatever concept
he has been able to form of it, we too determine beforehand what our
conception of it is. Now I say that no concept of experience can be
validly entertained which does not take into account that truth which
presents itself to us as truly fundamental and therefore to be used as
an indispensable basis for all subsequent conceptual constructions.
Such fundamental truth we have previously attained when we established
that "We" are not what we seem to be in the dim empirical representation
of our personality, a thing among things. Our "Self" is the deeper one
by means of which we see all things in whose midst our other self too is
discernible. The reality of this, our deeper "self" which cannot be
conceived as a thing, without which nothing can be conceived, in the
same way that the trunk, the branches, and the boughs are not possible
without the root from which the tree issues, is a truth which we may
never grasp, but if we do, we shall forever be compelled to see in it
the source of all other possible truths, including the concept of
experience. For once we have securely mastered it, we will be convinced
that it is impossible to conceive whatever is considered and thought of
as constituting this world otherwise than as this world which _we_ see,
which _we_ touch, and which, in short, we look upon as the contents of
_our_ experience: and that it is also impossible to conceive this
experience without referring it to _us_ who have it not as an object of
possession but as an activity which we exercise. So that nothing,
absolutely nothing, can be thought when the relationship between things
and experience, and again the rapport between experience and ourselves
is obtained, without thinking the deep reality of this our "self." We
may again close our eyes to this reality or hold it in abeyance, but we
can do so only after we have effaced every notion of the two
relationships just mentioned, and when we again have immersed ourselves
in the mystery of things, in the gloom of their apparent independent
existence, of their ever self-defeating multiplicity.
Against this reality of the profound "us" which is the genuine spiritual
reality, there are innumerable and awe-inspiring difficulties. They are
difficulties that so violently oppress our minds and our hearts as to
dismay us, and almost force us to give up this concept of a reality on
which all other realities depend, and which cannot but be one alone, and
infinite, and really universal.[4] Alone, because in it all opposites
must coincide: the good and the evil, what is true and what is false,
life and death, peace and war, pleasure and pain, yours and mine,--all
things, in short, that we have been obliged to sunder and distinguish in
order to take our bearings and meet the exigencies of life. Formidable
difficulties indeed! And they are the problems of philosophy. It would
be childish and senseless to dispose of them by ignoring that concept
from which they derive. It is the philosopher's task, it is the strict
duty of human thought to face the problems as they rise out of the
positions which it has captured in its onward march. For to yield
ground, to turn the back to a truth which has been demonstrated to be
indispensable, that is impossible.
Those who wish to orient themselves in the world to-day must, before
all, cling to this: that the basis of every thinkable reality is our
spiritual reality, one, infinite, universal,--the reality which unites
us all in one sole spiritual life; the reality in which teacher and
pupils meet when by their reciprocal comprehensions they constitute a
real school.
What then is this one, infinite, universal reality? Is this question
truly unanswerable as it seems to be, as it has often in the past
been declared to be? For, it has been argued, in order to give an
answer, whether here or elsewhere, we must somehow think the reality
to which the answer is referred. We must think it and therefore
distinguish it from all the others, and so presuppose it as one
existing among many and as forming with them a multiplicity; and this is
the very opposite of that reality which we are striving to think.
Or, in other words, when we try to say what the subject is, we must,
somehow, set it as the object, and thus convert it into what is the
opposite of the subject. Or again: the subject cannot think itself,
because if it did, it would split into the duality of itself as
thinking and itself as thought, and what is thinking is not what is
thought. But all these objections together with many others of the
same force that are ordinarily raised against radical idealism have but
one single defect; which is such, however, as to make it hopeless for
the idealist ever to succeed in being understood by those that resort
to this kind of argument. These opponents, strangely enough, miss the
most elementary meaning of the terms with which they claim to be
familiar. They fail to see that when the idealist says "subject," he
cannot possibly mean by it one abstract term of the relationship
_subject-object_, which, because of this very abstractness, is
devoid of all consistency. The _ego_ is called "subject," because it
contains within itself an object which is not diverse but identical
with it. As a pure subject it is already a relationship; it is
self-affirmation and therefore affirmation of an object, but of an
object, be it remembered, in which the subject is not alienated from
itself; by which, rather, it truly returns to itself, embraces itself,
and thus originatively realises itself. In order to be _I_, I must
know myself, I must set my own self in front of myself. Only thus I am
I, a personality, and "subject," the centre of my world or of my
thought. For if I should not objectify myself to myself, if in the
endeavour to free myself completely from all objectivity, I were to
retreat into the first term,--a purely abstract one,--of this
relationship by which I posit myself, I should remain on the hither side
of this relationship, that is of that very reality in which I am to
realise myself. So then by this inner objectification the subject
does not at all depart from itself. It rather enters into its own
subjectivity, and constitutes it. Surely man may, Narcissus-like,
make an idol of his own self: he may worship himself in a fixed
semblance already determined and crystallised. But in so doing, he
materialises himself, makes his person into a thing, looks away from
his true spiritual life, misses self-consciousness, averts his thought
from his own intimate being. This self-conversion from person into
thing takes place, not when we think of ourselves, but rather when we
fail to do so.
Philosophy then, as the thinking of the Spirit in its absolute
subjectivity, is the Spirit's own life. For the spirit lives by
constituting itself as the ego, and it does this by thinking itself, by
acquiring consciousness of itself. And while philosophising then, we
cannot but ask what is this one infinite universal reality which is our
_Self_ and is called the spirit. We cannot dispense with this inquiry
into the attributes of the spirit, which is at the same time the inquiry
into the attributes of culture.
The examination of the possibility of this investigation has carried us,
without our being aware of it, into the very midst of the inquiry
itself. For what we considered as an elementary meaning of the word
"spirit," the _ego_, which is not something in unrelated immediacy, but
which constitutes itself, posits itself, realises itself in that it
thinks itself and becomes self-consciousness,--this is also the ultimate
characteristic which can be assigned to the spirit, or to man himself,
that is, to what in man is essentially human. If we examine all the
other differences that have been assigned or could be found by which the
spirit is distinguishable from things, we shall find, after due
reflection, that they all cease to have a real meaning as soon as we
neglect the most profound characteristic of spiritual reality, viz.,
that this reality is generated by virtue of consciousness. Every form of
reality other than spiritual, not only is presented to thought as not
conditioned by consciousness, but seems to afford no possibility of
being thought (in relation to consciousness) otherwise than as
conditioning this very consciousness. And when we say of the spiritual
being that it does not know what it is, that it is not acquainted with
itself, that it therefore remains concealed from itself, we conceive
then its spiritual being in a manner analogous to that by which we
conceive material or bodily being,--externally visible, but internally
unknown. And we say that the individual fails to grasp his own moral
nature, because in fact we make this moral being into something natural,
similar to that which is attributed to each one of the things that the
spirit sets in opposition to itself.
But the spirit has no nature of its own, no destiny to direct its
course, no predetermined inevitable lot. It has no fixed qualities, no
set mode of being, such as constitute, from the birth to the death of an
individual, the species to which it belongs, to whose law it is
compelled by nature to submit, whose tyrannical limits and bounds he can
never trespass. The spirit, we have seen, cannot but be conceived as
free, and its freedom is this privileged attitude to be what it wants
to,--angel or beast, as the ancients said; good or evil, true or false,
or, generally speaking, to be or not to be. To be or not to be
man,--the spirit, that which he is, and which he would not be if he did
not _become_.
Man is not man by virtue of natural laws. He _becomes_ man. By man I do
not mean an animal among animals, held to no accounting of his deeds,
who comes into the world, grows, lives, and dies, unaware. Man from the
time he considers himself such, and in so far as he considers himself
such, _becomes_ through his own efforts. He makes himself what he is the
first time he opens his eyes on his inner consciousness and says
"_I_,"--the "I" which never would have been uttered, had he not been
aroused from the sluggish torpor of natural beings (such as our phantasy
represents them) and had not started thinking under his own power and
through his own determination.
This freedom which is man's prerogative offers merely an external view,
has a very hazy consistency, and appears as something illusory, only
because we do not define it exclusively as autonomous becoming or
self-making. For in fact "becoming" is ordinarily understood in a way
which does not admit of being considered as man's prerogative. Does not
every living being _become_? The plant vegetates only because it too has
an inborn potency by which it is forced from one stage of development to
the next, from which in this process it acquires the mode of being which
is peculiarly its own, which it did not have before, which no other
being could from the outside have conferred upon it. And yet the plant
is not a person but a thing: it is not spirit, but a simple object, and
as such it is endowed with a definite nature and moved by a definite
law, which is the very antithesis of the freedom which is peculiar to
the spirit.
I might without further thought say that this conception of becoming,
referred to the plant as a plant, is improper, that in reality the plant
does not _become_ for the very reason that we deny it its freedom. But I
shall begin by stating that the becoming which we attribute to the
spiritual reality must be specified and determined with greater
accuracy, if we are to consider it as the characteristic of this
reality. When so specified and determined, it will be found to coincide
with the conception of freedom. Becoming, then, can be taken in two
ways, which for brevity's sake we shall call the _autonomous_ and the
_heteronomous_. That is, the being which becomes may have the law of its
becoming either in itself or outside of itself. Becoming covers such
cases as, for example, the filling of a vessel into which a liquid is
poured. But this becoming takes place in a manner which has its law in
the person that fills the vessel; and the filling therefore may be
considered not so much a becoming as the effect of a becoming, that is,
as the result of that act which is being performed by man. An
heteronomous becoming is to be traced back to the becoming of the cause
which produces it. The plant vegetates, and its vegetation is a
development, a becoming. But could it grow without the rays of the sun,
the moisture of the soil? The plant vegetates in consequence of its
nature, that nature which in accord with our ordinary way of considering
plant life it possessed from the time it was a green blade just
sprouting; nay, from the time it was a seed in the ground, or rather
when it was as yet in the plant that produced the seed, or better still
when it was in its infinitely remote origin. It is evident therefore
that we cannot think of the law of becoming as residing, so to speak,
within a given plant. Whether we call it nature or name it God, this law
transcends the becoming of the plant, its heteronomous becoming as we
called it, and is properly the becoming of something else. But the
becoming of man is autonomous. If he _becomes_ intelligent, that is, if
he understands, he does so through a principle which is intrinsically
his own; for no man can be made to comprehend what he himself will not
grasp. If he becomes good, his perfected will can in no manner
whatsoever be considered as determined by an outside cause, without at
the same time being thereby deprived of all that is characteristic of
goodness.
But in stating that man's becoming is autonomous (or true) we have
simply formulated a problem without giving it a solution. What does this
autonomous becoming consist in? Simply to notice its existence would
never help us to understand it. Every fact is intelligible only as an
effect of a cause. And a cause is a cause on condition that it be a
thing other than the effect. In order to understand the autonomous
becoming or freedom of the spirit, we must not consider it as a fact,
that is, as something done. A thing made presupposes the making; and
from the deed we must rise to the doing, but to a doing which shall not
itself be a thing done, a fact, and similar therefore to the doings
which we witness as mere spectators. The doing in which our autonomous
becoming is detected is that one of which _We_ are not spectators but
actors, we the spectators of every other doing, we as the thinking
Activity.
This then is the becoming which rigorously may be called autonomous: the
one which we know not as spectators but as actors, which comes forth as
that reality which is produced by the act of knowing, and therefore is
not known because it exists, but exists because it is known,--our
existence. It is the existence of us who know, for example, that a==b,
and who are such only in so far as we know and are conscious of knowing
that a==b,--of us who suffer or rejoice, and who cannot be in this or
that state except by knowing it, so that no cause could reduce us to
such a state, unless we were conscious of such a cause and felt its
valid application to us,--of us, above all, who are not ourselves unless
we apperceive ourselves, by reflecting upon ourselves, and thus
acquiring existence as a personality, as human self-consciousness, as
thought. Thought in opposition to nature, with which it is constantly
contrasted, is nothing but this self-reflection which establishes the
personality, and that reality which, absolutely, is not, but becomes.
Every reality other than thought _becomes_ relatively; and its becoming
is intelligible simply as the effect of another becoming. Only thought,
only the Spirit, is absolute becoming, and its becoming is its liberty.
But whether it be called "freedom" or "becoming," the important thing is
to avoid the mistake, which was general in the past and is still very
common to-day, of separating this attribute of the spirit from the
spirit itself, thus failing to understand exactly what is properly
called the attribute. For example, we say that the triangle is a
three-sided plane figure, and we seem to be able to distinguish and
therefore to separate logically the idea of _triangle_ from the idea of
_three-sided plane figure_. But a little reflection will make it evident
that in thinking the idea of triangle, we think nothing unless we at
least think the plane trilateral figure. So that we do not really have
two ideas, which however closely connected may yet be separated to be
conjoined again: what we have is one single idea. And such is the
agreement of the becoming and of the spirit, and in general of every
attribute and of the reality to which it belongs. When we begin
inquiring whether the spirit is free or not, we set out on an erroneous
track which will take us into a blind alley with no possibility of exit.
All the unsurmountable difficulties encountered at all times by the
advocates of the doctrine of freedom arise in fact from the error of
first thinking the spirit (or whatsoever that reality may be for which
freedom is claimed) and of subsequently propounding the question of its
properties. For the spirit is _free_ in as much as it is nothing else
than _freedom_; and the spirit "becomes" in as much as it is nothing
else than "becoming," and this becoming cannot therefore be considered
as the husk enveloping the kernel--the spirit. There is no kernel to the
spirit: it is in no manner comparable to a moving body in which the body
itself could be distinguished from motion, and would admit therefore of
being thought as in a state of rest even though rest is considered
impossible. The spirit, continuing our simile and correcting it, is
motion without a mass,--a motion surely that cannot be represented to
our imagination, for the very reason that motion is peculiar to the body
and does not belong to the spirit; and imagination is the thought of
bodies, and not of the thought which thinks the bodies. This idea of
motion without a mass, baffling as it is to our imagination, is perhaps
the most effective warning that can be given to those who wish to fix in
their minds the exact concept of the nature of the spirit. In order to
avoid new terminology not sufficiently intelligible and therefore
unpractical, we may resort to material expressions, and speak of the
nature of the spirit as of a "thing" which becomes, and use such words
as "kernel" and "husk." But we must never lose sight of the fact that
this manner of speaking, which is appropriate for things, is not
suitable for the spirit, and can be resorted to only with the
understanding that the spirit is not a thing, and that therefore its
whole being consists solely in its becoming.
We are now in a position to understand the meaning of the spirituality
of culture, that is, of the reduction of culture to the human
personality obtained in the preceding chapter, as well as the
pedagogical interest of this reduction. Culture, as the entire content
of education, because it must be sought within the personality, and
because it resolves itself into the life of the spirit, is not a thing,
and does not admit of being conceived statically either in books or in
the mind: not before nor after it is apprehended. It does not exist in
libraries or in schools, or in us before we go to school, or while we
still remain within its walls, or after our nourished minds have taken
leave of it. It is in no place, at no time, in no person. Culture _is
not_, because if it _were_, it would have to be some "thing," whereas by
definition it is the negation of that which is capable of being anything
whatever. It is culture in so far as it _becomes_. Culture exists as it
develops, and in no other manner. It is always in the course of being
formed, it _lives_.
But to understand this _life_, and in order to grasp more firmly this
"idea" of culture which is a spiritual banner to rally educators, I
must again bring up a certain distinction. Culture, I said, lives
(that is, it is culture) when it is endowed with a life that is
entirely different from the life which biologically animates all
living beings, ourselves included. The difference can be stated as
follows: in the case of every other life, we can assert its existence
in so far as we have knowledge of it either directly or indirectly. It
is always, however, different from us and from our knowing it; so
much so that the possibilities of going astray are very great. But
for the life of culture, which is the life of our spirit, we have no
need of being informed by the experience of others, or even of
ourselves. We live it. It is our very thought,--this thought which
may indeed err in respect to what is different from itself, as not
tallying with it; but which cannot possibly deceive us in regard to
itself, since it is unable not to be itself. The life of culture is
not a spectacle but an activity. Nor is it activity for some and a
spectacle for others. Culture is never a show for any one. No person can
ever know for his fellow being. What, for me, Aristotle knows, is
what I know of Aristotle.
Culture,--this untiring activity which never for a moment turns into a
spectacle for any of us, which ever therefore demands effort and
toil,--could not avoid becoming a show and being made up into a
"thing," could not escape the danger of dying as culture by degenerating
into something anti-spiritual, fruitless, and material, if, while yet
being activity, it were not at the same time in some way a spectacle to
itself. This point demands careful consideration. It is not sufficient
to say that culture, that thought is life, and not the thought of life.
We will not attain the conception of culture by merely contrasting, as
we have done, our life, the life we lead as actors, with the life of
others which we behold as spectators, or by opposing the life of
ourselves as thinking beings to the life we possess as organic beings,
to the life of our senses by which we are on a par with the other
animals. The life of thought, in its peculiar inwardness and
subjectivity, is still conceived to-day by powerful thinkers, by analogy
with life in a biological sense, as irreflective and instinctive, or, as
they say, as simple intuition. But thought which though living is
irreflective becomes indeed an active performance, a drama without
spectators, but it also remains as a drama represented for spectators
who are absent, and who should be informed of those things which direct
experience had not placed before their eyes. And it is difficult to
surmise who would impart to them this information if the house were
empty.
In other words, I mean to say that this would-be intuitive life of
thought, fading away into the subconscious, melting into the naturality
of the unconscious, is, like every form of natural life effectually a
stranger to thought (that is _conceived_ as a stranger to thought), an
object and nothing more than an object of thought, and therefore
incapable of ever being a subject, of ever having value as subject, that
is, as thought itself. For that reason we can never effectively think
it; for never can we truly think any thing which is natural and thought
of as natural. Who can say what the life of the plant is? To posit
nature by thought is to posit something irreducible to thought and
therefore unthinkable. This perhaps would not necessarily be a serious
drawback for the life itself of thought if we lived it. For would it not
be sufficient to live it? Why insist on _thinking_ its life? Why demand
a head, so to speak, as a hood for the head? But there is a drawback,
and a serious one, as a result of the fact that this life itself of
thought does not now, never will in the future, come before us as that
irreflective life which it is claimed to be: it comes to us as a
philosophy which recommends it and advocates it as the only possible
life of thought. In fact, in order to be able to speak of this life, we
must first think it. But how could we think it, if the only possible
life was that one which we intend to think, and not the one with which
we think this irreflective life?
So then, in order that this life of ours (truly, intimately, spiritually
ours) may not be confounded with the life of natural things, with that
pseudo-life which is only an apparent becoming, an effect of another
becoming by which it is transcended, it is not sufficient, as I started
out to say, to call it a drama and not a spectacle. As a result of more
careful determinations we may now say that it is not another man's
spectacle, but our drama which is at the same time our spectacle too. In
it the actors play to themselves. It is self-conscious activity. It is
activity perpetually watching over itself.
And again: Just as the becoming of the spirit would cease to be that one
sole becoming which it actually is, were we to distinguish the spirit
from its becoming, so the consciousness of spiritual activity would also
become unintelligible if we were to distinguish, as philosophers
insistently do, between activity and awareness, between the performance
and the show. The distinction here too arises from referring to the
spirit, the mode of thinking which is suited for the thinking of things.
In the sphere of things, doing is one thing, watching the thing as it is
done is another. But to us the spirit's becoming has shown itself to be
the very negation of this distinction between actor and spectacle, so
that in saying that the actor is his own spectator we cannot introduce,
within the unity in which we had taken refuge, the dualism which is
excluded from the concept of the spirit. I have spoken of "motion
without mass," turning a deaf ear to the claims of our imagination. Now
I shall add something that clashes even more violently against the laws
which govern our image-making; and I shall do so in order to make it
very clear that the spirit does not live in the world of things which is
swept over by our imagination. I shall now call the spirit a gazing
motion. The spirit's acting--its eternal process, its immanent
becoming--is not an escort to thinking, but the very thinking itself,
which is neither cause nor effect: neither the antecedent nor the
consequent, nor yet the concomitant of the action by which the spirit
goes on constantly impersonating itself. _It is this very acting._
In accordance with the popular point of view which, as I have said, is
shared by great philosophers, a distinction is made between the spirit
considered as will and the spirit regarded as intellect, or as
consciousness, or as thought, or whatever term may be used to indicate
the becoming aware of this spiritual activity. But if the spirit in that
it wills did not also think, we should be thrust back to the position
which we have shown above to be untenable, and be forced to admit that
the irreflective life of the spirit cannot be fused with the reflective
life, and is therefore unaccountable and unthinkable. The will which
_qua_ will is not also thought, is in respect to thought which knows it
a simple object, a spectacle and not a drama. It is nature and not
spirit. And a thought which _qua_ thought is not will, is, in respect
to the will which integrates it, a spectator without a spectacle. If
there is to be a drama, and a drama which is the spirit, it is
inevitable that the will be the thought, and that the thought be the
will, over and beyond that distinction which serves if anything to
characterise the opposition between nature and spirit.
Should we, returning to our comparison, demand of that motion which is
spirit a moving mass; should we, grounded on the naive and primitive
conception which identifies knowing with the seeing of external things,
demand within the sphere of the spiritual activity itself a doing in
which knowing should find its object all ready made, we should continue
to wander helplessly in the maze of things, and to grope in the mystery
of the multiplicity of things, which are many and yet are not many. We
would be turning our eyes away from the lode star which is the supreme
concept of the spirit, and thereby show ourselves incapable of rising to
that point of view which is the peculiar one of culture.
Culture, as the spirit's life, which is a drama and self-awareness, is
not simply effort and uneasy toil, it is not a tormenting restlessness
which we may sometimes shake off, from which we would gladly be rescued.
Nor is it a feverish excitement that consumes our life-blood and tosses
us restlessly on a sick-bed. The spirit's life is not vexation but
liberation from care. For the greatest of sorrows, Leopardi tells us,
is _ennui_, the inert tedious weariness of those who find nothing to do,
and pine away in a wasting repose which is the very antithesis of the
life of the spirit. The negation of this life,--the obstacles, the
hindrances, the halts it encounters,--that is the source of woe. But
life with its energy is joy; it is joy because it is activity, our
activity. Another man's activity as the negation of our own is
troublesome and exasperating. The music which we enjoy (and we are able
to enjoy it by being active) is our enjoyment. But the musical
entertainment in which we have no part disturbs us, interferes with our
work, irritates us. Our neighbour's joys in which for some reason we are
unable to participate awaken envy in us, gall us, bring some manner of
displeasure to our hearts.
Culture, then, as life of the spirit, is effort, and work, but never a
drudgery. It would be toilsome labour if the spirit had lived its life
before we began to work; if this life had blossomed forth, and had
realised itself without our efforts. But our effort, our work is this
very life of the spirit, its nature, in which culture develops. Work is
not a burdensome yoke on our will and on our personality. It is
liberation, freedom, the act by which liberty asserts its being. Work
may sometimes appear irksome because the freedom of its movement is
checked by certain resistances which have to be overcome and removed.
But in such cases it is not work which vexes us, but rather its
opposite, sloth, against which it must combat. It follows then that the
more intensely we occupy ourselves, the less heavily we are burdened by
pain. For as our efforts redouble and the resistance is proportionately
reduced, the spirit, which perishes in enthralment, is enabled to live a
richer life.
Culture then is the extolment of our being, the formation of our spirit,
or better, its liberation and its beatification. As the realisation of
the spirit's own nature, it is opposed to all suffering and is the
source of blissfulness. But it must not be regarded as the fated,
inevitable working out of an instinctive principle, or a natural law.
The building of a bird's nest, which is the necessary antecedent to
generation and reproduction, cannot be looked upon as work; and it is
fruitless to try to guess whether this act is a cause of pleasure to the
bird or a source of suffering. Instinct leads the individual to
self-sacrifice on behalf of the species. But not even this fact, vouched
for solely by external inferences, authorises us to conclude that the
fulfilment of an instinctive impulse is actually accompanied by pain. So
that it seems wiser to keep off this slippery surface of conjecture. It
will be sufficient to note here that an action prompted by instinct,
conceived as merely instinctive and thoroughly unconscious of the end to
which it is subservient, is in no way to be compared with man's work.
Human occupation is personality, will, consciousness. The animal does
not work. But culture we have said is work. For it is liberty,
self-formation, with no existence previous to the process; whereas the
laws which govern the development of natural being pre-exist before the
development itself. Culture exists only in so far as it is formed, and
it is constituted solely by being developed. And what is more, as we
shall see in the next chapter, culture does not even count on a
pre-existing external matter ready to receive its informing imprint.
To conclude then: culture _is_ (in its becoming) only to the extent that
the cultivated man feels its worth, desires it, and realises it. It is a
value, but not in the sense that man first appreciates it and
subsequently looks for it and strives to actualise it. The value which
man assigns to culture is that which he gradually goes on ascribing to
_his_ own culture, and whose development coincides with the development
of his own personality. What we ought to want is exactly what we do
want; but we want just that which we ought to. The ideal, not the
abstract, inadequate, and false one, but the true ideal of our
personality, is that one toward whose realisation we are actually
working. And the ideal of our culture is that self-same one towards
which our busy person remains turned in the actuality of its becoming.
But work implies a programme, and spirit means "ideal;" and when we
speak of culture we signify thereby the value of culture, of a culture
which as yet is not but which must be. Life is the life of the spirit as
a duty,--as a life which we live, feeling all along that it is our duty
to live it, and that it depends on us whether it exists or not. And
culture could not re-enter as it does in the life of the spirit, if it
too were not a duty, that is, if it were not this culture to whose
development our personality is pledged. So interpreted, culture, far
from being a destiny to which we are bound, is the progressive triumph
of our very freedom. On these terms only, culture is a growth, and the
spirit a becoming.
This attribute, which is an ethical one, is not added to the attribute
of Becoming any more than "becoming" was superadded to "freedom." For
just as Becoming develops the concept of freedom, so does the ethical
develop and accomplish the concept of becoming. Freedom is never true
liberty unless it is a process, an absolute Becoming; but Becoming can
only be absolute by being moral. And it is therefore impossible to speak
of learning which is not ethical.
It has often been repeated for thousands and thousands of years that
knowledge is neither good nor bad; that it is either true or false. But
is the True a different category from the Good? Are they not rather one
sole identical category? Truth could be maintained in a place quite
distinct from the grounds of morality, only so long as the world clung
to that conception of truth which was the agreement of the subject with
an assumed external object. But now by truth we understand the value of
thought in which the subject becomes an object to itself and thus
realises itself; and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we
discover that morality is identical with it. For knowing is acting, but
an acting which being untrammelled conforms with an ideal--Duty. And in
this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired
voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to worship Truth
with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that
identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral
mission. The cult of truth is in fact what we otherwise call and
understand to be morality, namely, the formation of our personality,
which can be ours only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or
not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, but rather one
which is intent on self-realisation, on that sacred and eternal task
which is the Good.
If we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, and an ethical one
at that, we have succeeded in grasping its spirituality, and we are in a
position therefore to proceed with security on that way which opens
before the educator's eyes, as he intently goes about his work of
creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his task as a promoter of
culture.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] "Forest savage, rough, and stern."--Dante, _Inferno_, i. 5.
[4] Many speak of the universal and say that they conceive this
universal as concrete and immanent. Few, however, effectively fix
their thought on that universality which alone is such, which
alone can be such, which has nothing outside of itself, not even
the particular, and which is ideal on condition that the idea to
which it belongs be reality itself in all its determinateness. And
so in speaking of "universal" and of "individual" we must remember
that the latter cannot be anything without being the former, since
indeed the universal is not a merely abstract idea, but reality,
the reality of thought. Therefore I have here used the expression
"really universal".--G. G.