criticized, save by starting from the distinction between the theoretic
and the practical, and from the theoretic character of the æsthetic
activity. Man is not simply knowledge and contemplation: he is will,
which contains the cognitive moment in itself. Hence the saying is
either altogether void, as when it is taken to mean that the style is
the man _qua_ style--is the man, that is, but only so far as he is
expressive activity; or it is erroneous, as when the attempt is made
to deduce what a man has done and willed from what he has seen and
expressed, thereby asserting that there is a logical connexion between
knowing and willing. Many legends in the biographies of artists have
sprung from this erroneous identification, since it seemed impossible
that a man who gives expression to generous feelings should not be a
noble and generous man in practical life; or that the dramatist whose
plays are full of stabbing, should not himself have done a little
stabbing in real life. Artists protest vainly: "_Lasciva est nobis
pagina, vita proba._" They are merely taxed in addition with lying
and hypocrisy. How far more prudent you were, poor women of Verona,
when you founded your belief that Dante had really descended to hell
upon his blackened countenance! Yours was at any rate a historical
conjecture.
[Sidenote: _Criticism of the concept of sincerity in art._]
Finally, _sincerity_ imposed as a duty upon the artist (a law of ethics
also said to be a law of æsthetic) rests upon another double meaning.
For by sincerity may be meant, in the first place, the moral duty not
to deceive one's neighbour; and in that case it is foreign to the
artist. For indeed he deceives no one, since he gives form to what
is already in his soul. He would only deceive if he were to betray
his duty as an artist by failing to execute his task in its essential
nature. If lies and deceit are in his soul, then the form which he
gives to these things cannot be deceit or lies, precisely because it
is æsthetic. If the artist be a charlatan, a liar, or a miscreant,
he purifies his other self by reflecting it in art. If by sincerity
be meant, in the second place, fulness and truth of expression, it is
clear that this second sense has no relation to the ethical concept.
The law, called both ethical and æsthetic, reveals itself here as
nothing but a word used both by Ethics and Æsthetic.
VII
ANALOGY BETWEEN THE THEORETIC AND THE PRACTICAL
[Sidenote: _The two forms of the practical activity._]
The double degree of the theoretical activity, æsthetic and logical,
has an important parallel in the practical activity, which has not yet
been placed in due relief. The practical activity is also divided into
a first and second degree, the second implying the first. The first
practical degree is the simply _useful_ or _economical_ activity; the
second the _moral_ activity.
Economy is, as it were, the Æsthetic of practical life; Morality its
Logic.
[Sidenote: _The economically useful._]
If this has not been clearly seen by philosophers; if the correct
place in the system of the spirit has not been given to the economic
activity, if it has been left to wander about in the prolegomena to
treatises on political economy, often vague and but little developed,
this is due, among other reasons, to the fact that the useful or
economic has been confused, sometimes with the concept of the
_technical,_ sometimes with that of the _egoistical._
[Sidenote: _Distinction between the useful and the technical._]
_Technique_ is certainly not a special activity of the spirit.
Technique is knowledge; or rather, it is knowledge itself in general
which takes this name when it serves as basis, as we have seen it does,
for practical action. Knowledge which is not followed, or is supposed
not to be easily followed by practical action, is called "pure": the
same knowledge, if effectively followed by action, is called "applied";
if it is supposed that it can be easily followed by a particular
action, it is called "applicable" or "technical." This word, then,
indicates a _situation_ in which knowledge is, or may easily be, not a
special form of knowledge. So true is this, that it would be altogether
impossible to establish whether a given order of knowledge were,
intrinsically, pure or applied. All knowledge, however abstract and
philosophical it may be believed to be, may be a guide to practical
acts; a theoretical error in the ultimate principles of morality may be
reflected and always in some way is reflected in practical life. One
can only speak roughly and unscientifically of certain truths as pure
and of others as applied.
The same knowledge that is called technical may also be called
_useful._ But the word "_useful_" in conformity with the criticism of
judgements of value made above, is to be understood as used here in
a verbal or metaphorical sense. When we say that water is useful for
putting out fire, the word "useful" is used in a non-scientific sense.
Water thrown on the fire is the cause of its going out: this is the
knowledge that serves for basis to the action, let us say, of firemen.
There is a link, not of nature, but of simple succession, between the
useful action of the person who extinguishes the conflagration and that
knowledge. The technique of the effects of the water is the theoretical
activity which precedes; the only useful thing is the _action_ of the
man who extinguishes the fire.
[Sidenote: _Distinction of the useful from the egoistic._]
Some economists identify utility, that is to say, merely economic
action or will, with the _egoistic,_ that is to say, with what is
profitable to the individual, in so far as individual, without regard
to and indeed in complete opposition to the moral law. The egoistic is
the immoral. In this case Economics would be a very strange science,
standing not beside but opposite Ethics, like the devil facing God, or
at least like the _advocatus diaboli_ in the processes of canonization.
Such a conception is altogether inadmissible: the science of immorality
is implied in that of morality, as the science of the false is implied
in Logic, science of the true, and a science of unsuccessful expression
in Æsthetic, science of successful expression. If, then, Economics were
the scientific treatment of egoism, it would be a chapter of Ethics,
or Ethics itself; because every moral determination implies, at the
same time, a negation of its contrary.
Further, conscience tells us that to conduct oneself economically
is not to conduct oneself egoistically; that even the most morally
scrupulous man must conduct himself usefully (economically), if he
does not wish to act at hazard and consequently in a manner quite the
reverse of moral. If utility were egoism, how could it be the duty of
the altruist to behave like an egoist?
[Sidenote: _Economic will and moral will._]
If we are not mistaken, the difficulty is solved in a manner perfectly
analogous to that in which is solved the problem of the relations
between expression and concept, Æsthetic and Logic.
To will economically is to _will an end;_ to will morally is to _will
the rational end._ But whoever wills and acts morally, cannot but will
and act usefully (economically). How could he will the _rational_ end,
unless he also willed it _as his particular end_?
[Sidenote: _Pure economicity._]
The converse is not true; as it is not true in æsthetic science that
the expressive fact must of necessity be linked with the logical fact.
It is possible to will economically without willing morally; and it
is possible to conduct oneself with perfect economic coherence, while
pursuing an end which is objectively irrational (immoral), or, rather,
an end which would be held to be so at a higher grade of consciousness.
Examples of the economic, without the moral character, are
Machiavelli's hero Cæsar Borgia, or the Iago of Shakespeare. Who can
help admiring their strength of will, although their activity is only
economic, and is developed in opposition to what we hold moral? Who
can help admiring the Ser Ciappelletto of Boccaccio, who pursues and
realizes his ideal of the perfect rascal even on his death-bed, making
the petty and timid little thieves who are present at his burlesque
confession exclaim: "What manner of man is this, whose perversity
neither age, nor infirmity, nor the fear of death which he sees at
hand, nor the fear of God before whose judgement-seat he must stand in
a little while, have been able to remove, nor to make him wish to die
otherwise than as he has lived?"
[Sidenote: _The economic side of morality._]
The moral man unites with the pertinacity and fearlessness of a Cæsar
Borgia, of an Iago, or of a Ser Ciappelletto, the good will of the
saint or of the hero. Or, rather, good will would not be will, and
consequently not good, if it did not possess, in addition to the side
which makes it _good,_ also that which makes it _will._ So a logical
thought which does not succeed in expressing itself is not thought, but
at the most a confused presentiment of a thought beyond yet to come.
It is not correct, then, to conceive of the amoral man as also
anti-economical, or to make of morality an element of coherence in
the acts of life, and therefore of economicity. Nothing prevents us
from conceiving (an hypothesis which is verified at least during
certain periods and moments, if not during whole lifetimes) a man
altogether without moral conscience. In a man thus organized, what
for us is immorality is not so for him, because it is not felt as
such. The consciousness of the contradiction between what is desired
as a rational end and what is pursued egoistically cannot arise
in him. This contradiction is anti-economicity. Immoral conduct
becomes also anti-economical only in the man who possesses moral
conscience. The moral remorse which is the indication of this, is
also economical remorse; that is to say, sorrow at not having known
how to will completely and to attain that moral ideal which was
willed at first, instead of allowing himself to be led astray by the
passions. _Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor._ The _video_
and the _probo_ are here an initial _volo_ immediately contradicted
and overthrown. In the man without moral sense, we must admit a
remorse that is _merely economic_; like that of a thief or of an
assassin who, when on the point of robbing or of assassinating should
abstain from doing so, not owing to a conversion of his being, but
to nervousness and bewilderment, or even to a momentary awakening of
moral consciousness. When he has come back to himself, such a thief
or assassin will regret and be ashamed of his incoherence; his remorse
will not be due to having done wrong, but to _not_ having done wrong;
it is therefore economic, not moral, since the latter is excluded by
hypothesis. But since a lively moral consciousness is generally found
among the majority of men and its total absence is a rare and perhaps
non-existent monstrosity, it may be admitted that morality, in general,
coincides with economicity in the conduct of life.
[Sidenote: _The merely economic and the error of the morally
indifferent._]
There need be no fear lest the parallelism that we support should
introduce afresh into science the category of the _morally
indifferent,_ of that which is in truth action and volition, but is
neither moral nor immoral; the category in short of the _licit_ and
of the _permissible,_ which has always been the cause or reflexion of
ethical corruption, as was the case with Jesuitical morality, which it
dominated. It remains quite certain that indifferent moral actions do
not exist, because moral activity pervades and must pervade every least
volitional movement of man. But far from upsetting the established
parallelism, this confirms it. Are there by any chance intuitions which
science and the intellect do not pervade and analyse, resolving them
into universal concepts, or changing them into historical affirmations?
We have already seen that true science, philosophy, knows no external
limits which bar its way, as happens with the so-called natural
sciences. Science and morality entirely dominate, the one the æsthetic
intuitions, the other the economic volitions of man, although neither
of them can appear in the concrete, save the one in the intuitive, the
other in the economic form.
[Sidenote: _Criticism of utilitarianism and the reform of Ethics and of
Economics._]
This combined identity and difference of the useful and the moral, of
the economic and the ethical, explains the success at the present time
and formerly of the utilitarian theory of Ethics. Indeed it is easy to
discover and to illustrate a utilitarian side in every moral action; as
it is easy to reveal the æsthetic side in every logical proposition.
The criticism of ethical utilitarianism cannot begin by denying this
truth and seeking out absurd and non-existent examples of _useless_
moral actions. It must admit the utilitarian side and explain it as
the concrete form of morality, which consists in this, that it is
_inside_ this form. Utilitarians do not see this inside. This is not
the place for the fuller development that such ideas deserve. Ethics
and Economics cannot however fail to be gainers (as we have said of
Logic and Æsthetic) by a more exact determination of the relations that
exist between them. Economic science is now rising to the activistical
concept of the useful, as it attempts to surpass the mathematical
phase in which it is still entangled; a phase which was in its turn
a progress when it superseded historicism, or the confusion of the
theoretical with the historical, and destroyed a number of capricious
distinctions and false economic theories. With this conception, it will
be easy on the one hand to absorb and to verify the semi-philosophical
theories of so-called pure economics, and on the other, by the
introduction of successive complications and additions, to effect a
transition from the philosophical to the empirical or naturalistic
method and thus to embrace the particular theories expounded in the
so-called political or national economy of the schools.
[Sidenote: _Phenomenon and noumenon in practical activity._]
As æsthetic intuition knows the phenomenon or nature, and the
philosophic concept the noumenon or spirit; so the economic activity
wills the phenomenon or nature, and the moral activity the noumenon or
spirit. _The spirit which wills itself,_ its true self, the universal
which is in the empirical and finite spirit: that is the formula which
perhaps defines the essence of morality with the least impropriety.
This will for the true self is _absolute freedom._
VIII
EXCLUSION OF OTHER SPIRITUAL FORMS
In this summary sketch that we have given of the entire philosophy of
the spirit in its fundamental moments, the spirit is thus conceived
as consisting of four moments or degrees, disposed in such a way that
the theoretical activity is to the practical as the first theoretical
degree is to the second theoretical, and the first practical degree to
the second practical. The four moments imply one another regressively
by their concreteness. The concept cannot exist without expression, the
useful without both and morality without the three preceding degrees.
If the æsthetic fact is in a certain sense alone independent while
the others are more or less dependent, then the logical is the least
dependent and the moral will the most. Moral intention acts on given
theoretic bases, with which it cannot dispense, unless we are willing
to accept that absurd procedure known to the Jesuits as _direction of
intention,_ in which people pretend to themselves not to know what they
know only too well.
[Sidenote: _The forms of genius._]
[Sidenote: _The system of the spirit._]
If the forms of human activity are four, four also are the forms of
_genius._ Men endowed with genius in art, in science, and in moral
will or heroes, have always been recognized. But the genius of pure
economicity has met with repugnance. It is not altogether without
reason that a category of bad geniuses or of _geniuses of evil_ has
been created. The practical, merely economic genius, which is not
directed to a rational end, cannot but excite an admiration mingled
with alarm. To dispute as to whether the word "genius" should be
applied only to creators of æsthetic expression or also to men of
scientific research and of action would be a mere question of words. To
observe, on the other hand, that "genius," of whatever kind it be, is
always a quantitative conception and an empirical distinction, would be
to repeat what has already been explained as regards artistic genius.
[Sidenote: _Non-existence of a fifth form of activity. Law;
sociability._]
A fifth form of spiritual activity does not exist. It would be easy to
show how all the other forms either do not possess the character of
activity, or are verbal variants of the activities already examined, or
are complex and derivative facts, in which the various activities are
mingled, and are filled with particular and contingent contents.
The _juridical_ fact, for example, considered as what is called
objective law, is derived both from the economic and from the logical
activities. Law is a rule, a formula (whether oral or written matters
little here) in which is fixed an economic relation willed by an
individual or by a community, and this economic side at once unites it
with and distinguishes it from moral activity. Take another example.
Sociology (among the many meanings the word bears in our times) is
sometimes conceived as the study of an original element, which is
called _sociability._ Now what is it that distinguishes sociability,
or the relations which are developed in a meeting of men, and not in a
meeting of sub-human beings, if it be not just the various spiritual
activities which exist among the former and which are supposed not to
exist, or to exist only in a rudimentary degree, among the latter?
Sociability, then, far from being an original, simple, irreducible
conception, is very complex and complicated. A proof of this would
be the impossibility, generally recognized, of enunciating a single
law which could be described as purely sociological. Those that are
improperly so called are shown to be either empirical historical
observations, or spiritual laws, that is to say judgements into which
the conceptions of the spiritual activities are translated, when
they are not simply empty and indeterminate generalities, like the
so-called law of evolution. Sometimes, too, nothing more is understood
by "sociability" than "social rule," and so law; thus confounding
sociology with the science or theory of law itself. Law, sociability,
and similar concepts, are to be dealt with in a mode analogous to that
employed by us in the consideration and analysis of historicity and
technique.
[Sidenote: _Religion._]
It may seem that _religious_ activity should be judged otherwise.
But religion is nothing but knowledge, and does not differ from its
other forms and sub-forms. For it is in turn either the expression of
practical aspirations and ideals (religious ideals), or historical
narrative (legend), or conceptual science (dogma).
It can therefore be maintained with equal truth either that religion
is destroyed by the progress of human knowledge, or that it is always
present there. Their religion was the whole intellectual patrimony of
primitive peoples: our intellectual patrimony is our religion. The
content has been changed, bettered, refined, and it will change and
become better and more refined in the future also; but its form is
always the same. We do not know what use could be made of religion by
those who wish to preserve it side by side with the theoretic activity
of man, with his art, with his criticism and with his philosophy. It
is impossible to preserve an imperfect and inferior kind of knowledge,
such as religion, side by side with what has surpassed and disproved
it. Catholicism, which is always consistent, will not tolerate a
Science, a History, an Ethics, in contradiction to its views and
doctrines. The rationalists are less coherent: they are disposed to
allow a little space in their souls for a religion in contradiction
with their whole theoretic world.
The religious affectations and weaknesses prevalent among the
rationalists of our time have their origin in the superstitious worship
so recklessly lavished upon the natural sciences. We know ourselves
and their chief representatives admit that these sciences are all
surrounded by _limits._ Science having been wrongly identified with
the so-called natural sciences, it could be foreseen that the remainder
would be sought in religion; that remainder with which the human
spirit cannot dispense. We are therefore indebted to materialism, to
positivism, to naturalism for this unhealthy and often disingenuous
recrudescence of religious exaltation, which belongs to the hospital,
when it does not belong to the politician.
[Sidenote: _Metaphysic._]
Philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing, because it
substitutes itself for religion. As the science of the spirit, it
looks upon religion as a phenomenon, a transitory historical fact, a
psychic condition that can be surpassed. Philosophy shares the domain
of knowledge with the natural sciences, with history and with art.
To the first it leaves enumeration, measurement and classification;
to the second, the chronicling of what has individually happened; to
the third, the individually possible. There is nothing left to allot
to religion. For the same reason, philosophy, as the science of the
spirit, cannot be philosophy of the intuitive datum; nor, as has
been seen, _philosophy of history,_ nor _philosophy of nature_; and
therefore there cannot be a philosophical science of what is not form
and universal, but material and particular. This amounts to affirming
the impossibility of _Metaphysic._
The methodology or logic of history has supplanted the philosophy
of history; an epistemology of the concepts employed in the natural
sciences succeeded the Philosophy of Nature. What philosophy can
study of history is its mode of construction (intuition, perception,
document, probability, etc.); of the natural sciences the forms of the
concepts which constitute them (space, time, motion, number, types,
classes, etc.). Philosophy as metaphysic in the sense above described
would, on the other hand, claim to compete with history and with the
natural sciences, which alone are legitimate and effective in their
field. Such a challenge could do nothing but reveal the incompetence
of those who made it. In this sense we are _anti-metaphysicans,_
while declaring ourselves to be _ultra-metaphysicians,_ when the
word is used to claim and to affirm the office of philosophy as
self-consciousness of the spirit, distinguished from the merely
empirical and classificatory office of the natural sciences.
[Sidenote: _Mental imagination and the intuitive intellect._]
Metaphysic has been obliged to assert the existence of a specific
spiritual activity producing it, in order to maintain itself side
by side with the sciences of the spirit. This activity, called in
antiquity _mental or superior imagination,_ and more often in modern
times _intuitive intellect or intellectual intuition,_ was held to
unite the characters of imagination and intellect in an altogether
special form. It was supposed to provide the means of passing by
deduction or dialectic from the infinite to the finite, from form to
matter, from the concept to the intuition, from science to history,
acting by a method which was held to penetrate both the universal and
the particular, the abstract and the concrete, intuition and intellect.
A faculty marvellous indeed and most valuable to possess; but we, who
do not possess it, have no means of establishing its existence.
[Sidenote: _Mystical Æsthetic._]
Intellectual intuition has sometimes been considered to be the true
æsthetic activity. At others a no less marvellous æsthetic activity
has been placed beside, below, or above it, a faculty altogether
different from simple intuition. The glories of this faculty have been
celebrated, and the production of art attributed to it, or at least
of certain groups of artistic production, arbitrarily chosen. Art,
religion and philosophy have seemed in turn to be one only, or three
distinct faculties of the spirit, sometimes one, sometimes another of
them being supreme in the dignity shared by all.
It is impossible to enumerate all the various attitudes assumed or
capable of being assumed by this conception of Æsthetic, which we will
call _mystical._ We are here in the kingdom, not of the science of
imagination, but of imagination itself, which creates its world out
of varying elements drawn from impressions and feelings. Suffice it
to mention that this mysterious faculty has been conceived, sometimes
as practical, sometimes as a mean between the theoretic and the
practical, at others again as a theoretic form side by side with
philosophy and religion.