also incorrect. Since the conception of foreseeing is contradictory,
and since we cannot know a fact if it be not first a fact, that is, if
it have not happened; if the contradictory hypothesis held, it would
be impossible to act. But the truth is that what is called foreseeing
is nothing but seeing; it is to know the given facts and to reason
upon them with the universals. That is to say, it is the invariable
theoretical base of action, already illustrated. When we will and act,
what we will and do is _our own action_ itself, not that of others or
of all the others, and so is the resulting event. _Voluntas fertur in
incognitum,_ but the all intent upon itself does not take count of the
unknown, which is in this case relatively unknowable and, therefore,
relatively non-existent. The individual is aware that when he acts, he
does not aim at anything but the placing of new elements in universal
reality. He takes care that they shall be energetic and vital, without
nourishing the foolish illusion that they must be the only ones, or
that they alone produce reality. A popular little tale tells how
God, who had at first granted to men to know their future lives and
the day of their death, afterwards withdrew this knowledge from them
altogether, because He perceived from experience that such knowledge
made them lazy and inert. The new ignorance, on the other hand, revived
and impelled them to vie with one another in activity, as though it
had been granted them to obtain and to enjoy everything.[1] How can we
doubt that our good and energetic work can ever be rendered nugatory
in the event? That is unthinkable, and the saying _fiat justitia et
pereat mundus_ is rectified by that other saying: _fiat justitia ne
pereat mundus._ Bad is not born from good, nor inaction from action.
Every volitional man, every man active in goodness, is a contradiction
to that one-sided attitude in which the will is suppressed to give
place to happening, a world unmade is believed to be already made,
arms are crossed or the field deserted. But it also contradicts the
fatuous security that the future world will conform to the ends of our
individual actions taken in isolation; saying with the good sense of
the Florentine statesman, that we ourselves control one half of our
actions, or little less, Fortune the other half. Hence our trust in our
own strength; hence, too, our apprehension of the pitfalls of Fortune,
continually arising and continually to be conquered. This constitutes
the interior drama of true men of action, of the political geniuses
who have guided the destinies of man. While the unfit is all anxiety,
or bewilderment and depression, the fatuous is all over-confidence or
expectation of the impossible, also losing himself in bewilderment when
he finally discovers that the reality is not what he imagined. Hence
also the serenity of the sage, who knows that whatever happen there
will always be opportunity for good conduct. _Si fractus illabatur
orbis,_ there will always be a better world to construct. Hope and fear
are related to action itself in its becoming, not to its result and
succession.
[Sidenote: _Confirmation of the inderivability of the value of action
from its success._]
We can illustrate the fact that no one seriously thinks of valuing
an action according to its success, but that all value it at its
intrinsic value as action, from the circumstance that no one recognizes
any merit to the action of a marks-man who hits the bull's-eye, when
shooting at the target with closed eyes; whereas no little merit is
recognized to him who, after having taken careful aim, does not hit
the mark but goes very near it. We are certainly often deceived in our
practical judgments, and fortunate men are continually praised to the
skies as men of great practical capacity, while the unfortunate are
hurled into the mire as incompetent; for we do not distinguish exactly
between action and success. This is not only so as to judgments of the
present life: it is also true of the life of the past, of the pages of
history, where imbeciles are made heroes and heroes calumniated; to
the worst of leaders is attributed the honour of victories, ridiculous
statesmen credited with ability. On the other hand, the sins of madmen
are attributed to the wise, or they are accused of faults that are
nobody's fault, but the result of circumstances. In vain will the
Pericleses of all time ask, as did the ancient Pericles of the people
of Athens, that the unforeseen misfortunes of the Peloponnesian war
should be attributed to him, provided that by way of compensation he
might have praise for all the fortunate things that should also happen
παρὰ λόγον.[2] All this depends upon an imperfect knowledge of facts
more than upon anything else: hence the necessity of criticism. Just as
the work of the poet and of the painter is not materially to be laid
hold of in the poem or in the picture, but requires a re-evocation that
is often very difficult, so the work of the man of action, which is in
part fused in events and partly contained in them, as a bud that will
open in the future, asks a keen eye and the greatest care in valuation.
The history of men of action and of their deeds is easily changed
into _legend,_ and legends are never altogether eliminable, because
misunderstanding or error is never altogether eliminable.
[Sidenote: _Explanation of apparently conflicting facts._]
On the other hand, certain commonplaces seem to be in opposition to
the criterion itself: for example, that men are judged by success and
that it matters little what we have willed and done, when the result
is not satisfactory. There are also certain popular customs that make
individuals responsible for what happens outside their own spheres
of action, not to mention the well-known historical examples of
unfortunate leaders crucified at Carthage and guillotined at Paris, for
no other cause in reality than that of not having won the victory. And
there is also the insistence of certain thinkers upon the necessity of
never distinguishing the judgment of the act from that of the fact. But
such insistence is nothing but a new aspect of the implacable struggle
that it has been necessary to conduct against the morality of the mere
intention and against the sophisms and the subterfuges that arise from
it; an insistence that has expressed itself in paradoxical formulæ,
as are also paradoxical the trivial remarks of ordinary life that
have been mentioned. As to the customs and condemnations narrated by
history, these were without doubt extraordinary expedients in desperate
cases, in which people had placed themselves in such a position that it
was impossible or most difficult to verify intentions and actions, and
to distinguish misfortunes from betrayals; and as all expedients born
of like situations sometimes hit the mark, that is to say, punish bad
faith, so will others increase with irrationality the evil that they
would have wished to diminish, since in those cases there has not been
any bad faith to punish and to correct.
[1] _Arch. p. lo st. d. trad, pop.,_ of Pitré (1882), pp. 70-72.
[2] Thuc. ii. 64.
VI
THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, THE HISTORY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL
With these last considerations, we are conducted to the theory of
practical judgments, that is, to those judgments of which we have
demonstrated the impossibility, when their precedence to the volitional
act was asserted; but their conceivability as following it, indeed
their necessity, is clear, by the intrinsic law of the Spirit; which
consists in always preserving or in continually attaining to full
possession of itself.
[Sidenote: _Practical taste and judgment._]
But we must not confound the practical judgment with what has been
called _practical taste, or the immediate consciousness of value, or
the feeling_ of the value of the volitional act. None can doubt that
such a taste, consciousness, or feeling is a real fact. The practical
act brings with it approbation and disapprobation, joy and sorrow,
and like facts of consciousness that are altogether unreflective. By
these we explain the immediate sympathy that certain actions afford
us, and the enthusiasms that are often spread through wide circles of
society, and the force of example, which is most successful in arousing
imitative efforts. Thus at certain moments the soul of all seems to
vibrate in unison with the soul of one, and the actions of many to be
prepared and carried out, as though with one accord, without its being
possible to say at those moments what is willed, what abhorred and what
admired. That taste, or consciousness, or feeling is not, however,
distinct from the volitional act, and is, indeed, the volitional act
itself. It is that internal control of which we have already spoken,
that immediate feeling of oneself, that immediate consciousness, which
makes of it a spiritual act. Abstract it from the volitional act and
the volitional act itself disappears from before you.
If it can take place, not only in the individual who is acting, but
also in him who contemplates the action, that is because the individual
who contemplates becomes unified in that moment with the individual
who acts, he wills imitatively with him, with him suffers and enjoys,
as the disc-thrower watches with his eye and with his whole person
the disc that has been thrown, follows its rapid and direct course
and the dangers in the form of obstacles that it seems to be about to
strike, its turns and deviations, and seems to become himself a running
turning disc. The denomination "practical taste" is very well chosen,
because the analogy with the theoretic activity and with æsthetic taste
is here most full. But since æsthetic taste is not æsthetic judgment,
as the mere reproduction of the æsthetic act is not the criticism of
it, as the listener to a poem who sings within himself with the poet,
must not be confused with the critic, who analyses and understands
it, any more than the contemplator of a picture, of a statue, or of a
piece of architecture, who paints with the painter, sculptures with
the sculptor, or ideally raises airy masses with the architect; so we
must distinguish practical taste and sympathy (or antipathy) from the
practical judgment. Without taste (æsthetic or practical), judgment
(æsthetic or practical) is not possible; but taste is not judgment,
which demands a further act of the spirit.
[Sidenote: _The practical judgment as historical judgment._]
The practical judgment is, as has already been observed, a _historical_
judgment; so that to judge practical acts and to give their history
is really the same thing. What occurs here is analogous to what was
demonstrated of the theoretic and æsthetic act, when we illustrated
the coincidence of literary and artistic criticism with literary and
artistic history. Criticism, be it practical or theoretic, cannot
consist of anything but determining whether a spiritual act has taken
place and what it has been. The differences between the one and the
other criticism arise only from the diversity of content present
in each case, asking different categories of judgment, but not of
logical procedure, which is in both cases the same. Every other
conception of the judgment, which should make it consist, not of a
historical judgment, but of heaven knows what sort of measurement upon
transcendental models, separated from the real world by a measurement
of which the measure is extraneous to the measured, indeed (as though
it were something of the other world) extraneous to the real itself,
runs against insuperable contradictions, and makes judgment arbitrary
and history grotesque; history would thus have value, not in itself,
but outside itself, enjoying it as a loan from others, a gracious
concession. But even these contradictions cannot appear in all their
crudity, nor the opposite theory in all its unshakable truth, save from
what will be seen further on, and we must here be satisfied with the
enunciation.
[Sidenote: _Its logic._]
In order to avoid repetition, we must refer to the analysis of the
single or historical judgment already given and assume its result,
namely, that it is the only judgment in which there is a true and
proper distinction between subject and predicate, and that it is
composed of an intuitive element (subject) and of an intellectual
element (predicate). In like manner the practical judgment is not
possible without a clear representation of the act to be judged and
a conception not less clear of what the practical act is in its
universality and in its particular forms, and so on, specifying in its
various sub-forms and possibilities of individuation. The judgment is
the compenetration of the two elements, the historical synthesis which
establishes: Peter has accomplished a useful act in tilling a piece
of land of such and such dimensions; Paul has accomplished an action
that is not useful in opening a new manufactory of boots, more costly
and not better than those already on the market; -Pope Leo III. acted
wisely, as custodian of the universal character of the Church of Rome,
in consecrating Charles the Frank emperor, thus restoring the empire of
the West;--Louis XVI. acted foolishly in not deciding upon a prompt and
profound change of the French political constitution, and in allowing
himself to be afterwards dragged unwilling whither he had not known
how to go of his own will. And so on. There are therefore two ways of
sinning against the exactitude of the practical judgment: either by not
having exact information as to the content of the volitional act to be
judged and understood, or by not having an exact criterion of judgment.
The first of these errors can be exemplified by those judgments that
are so frequently pronounced, without knowledge as to the true sequence
of events or without placing oneself in the precise conditions in
which the person to be judged found himself. Hence it happens not less
often, that when the facts are really known, the precise conditions
understood, and the defence of the accused has been heard, the judgment
must be altered. A cause of the second error is the substitution
(likewise a very common occurrence) of one category of judgment for the
other, as when a moral act is praised and admired for its cleverness,
or the gestures and the felicitous utterance of a practical man are
praised, as though it were a question of judging an actor or reciter.
As in art, so in life, differences of judgment arise, not so much from
difference of understanding, as from these oscillations and undue
transpositions of judgments and concepts.
It is likewise superfluous to enter into disputes as to the
absoluteness or relativity of the practical judgment, because these
have been superseded by the concept of the historical judgment, which
is _both absolute and relative:_ absolute for the categories that it
applies, relative for the matter, always new, to which it applies them.
[Sidenote: _Importance of the practical judgment._]
The importance of the practical judgment for practical life is of the
greatest, and when we are warned: _nolite judicare_ or _noli nimium
judicare,_ what are meant are not true acts of judgment, but certain
psychical conditions, which reveal slight spiritual seriousness.
And the importance is of the greatest, precisely because the nature
of the judgment is historical, and as we know already, historical
knowledge, knowledge, that is, of actual situations, is the basis of
future actions. For this reason every man who is strongly volitional is
continually submitting himself and others to judgment; for this reason
we feel the need of talking to others about our own actions, in order
to be upheld by the spirit of others in forming a just judgment. This
is the origin of such social institutions as the confessional, or of
poems such as the _Divina Commedia._ The only judgment without meaning
is that _final judgment_ made in the valley Jehoshaphat, because what
object can there be in giving oneself the trouble of judging a world
looked upon as ended? We judge in order to continue to act, that is,
to live, and when universal life is at an end, judgment is vain (vain
praise or paradise, vain cruelty or hell).
[Sidenote: _Difference between the practical judgment and the judgment
of the event._]
The value of the volitional act is therefore, as has been demonstrated,
in the act itself, and we must not expect and derive it from succession
or event. The practical judgment always concerns the volitional act,
the intention, the action (which are all one), and never the result or
happening. With this distinction we annul one of the most disputed,
intricate, and difficult questions: if it be possible to judge, or
as they say, to try history. Since we know well that judgment and
historical narrative coincide, we must reply in general, as we have
replied, in the affirmative. We must in consequence deny all the absurd
claims of an objectivity, which is the irrealizable aspiration to the
abstention from thought and from history itself. We must also deny to
the historian that frivolous privilege by which he is allowed to judge,
almost tolerating in him an original sin or an incorrigible vice,
provided he clearly distinguish between the serious and the facetious,
between the narrative and the judgment, as though the distinction were
ever possible. But the prejudice against those who make out a case
against history on the ground that it should have happened in a manner
different from what actually took place, and describe how this should
have been, is well justified. Whoever possesses historical sense,
or even simple good sense, cannot but agree to this. The question
should in reality be asked differently, and in this manner: Is it
correct to apply to history the categories of judgment that we apply
to volitions and single acts? Is it correct to judge in a utilitarian
or moral manner historical events and the whole course of history?
Rectified in these terms, the question becomes clear, and requires a
negative answer. When we narrate artistic or philosophical, economic
or ethical history, we place ourselves at the point of view of the
individual activity. As we expose æsthetic or philosophical products,
useful or moral actions, we judge them at the same time æsthetically,
philosophically, economically, morally, and we know in every case if
the action has been such as it ought. Who would hesitate to affirm that
(at least, as an affirmative method) the _Africa_ of Petrarch was not
what he wished it to be, a poetic work; or that Emmanuel Kant did not
succeed in establishing from his practical postulates, according to his
intention, the existence of a personal God and the immortality of the
soul; or that Themistocles behaved in an undecided manner as regards
Xerxes, not knowing how to resolve to sacrifice his ambitions to the
safety of Greece, nor to inflict a grave loss upon his country, in
order to satisfy his desire for vengeance; or that Napoleon ignored the
rights of man, and behaved as one without scruples, when he ordered the
arrest and shooting of the Duc d'Enghien? But what can be the advantage
of asking if the arrest of the Persian expansion in Europe were a bad
thing or a good? if the creation of the Roman Empire deserve blame?
if the Catholic Church were wrong in concentrating Western religion
in herself? if the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the
French of the eighteenth, or the Italian of the nineteenth, could have
been avoided? if Dante could have been born in our day and have sung
the Kantian rather than the Thomist philosophy? if Michael Angelo
might have painted the victories of the modern industrial world, which
Manzotti has made into a ballet in his _Excelsior,_ instead of the
visions of the Last Judgment? Here we have before us, not individual
spirits, whose work we examine in given circumstances, but facts that
have happened, and these are the work, not of the individual, but of
the Whole. They are (as has already been said) the work of God, and God
is not to be judged, or rather He is to be judged, but not from the
visual angle at which individual works and actions are to be judged. He
is not to be judged as a poet or as a philosopher, as a statesman or
a hero, as a finite being working in the infinite. The contemplation
of His work is at the same time judgment. _Die Weltgeschichte das
Weltgericht_: the history itself of the world is the judgment of the
world, and in recounting the course of history, while not applying the
judgment of the categories above indicated, which are inapplicable, we
do, however, apply a judgment, which is that of necessity and reality.
That which has been had to be; and that which is truly real is truly
rational.
But we cannot give the justification of this supreme judgment, of this
world-embracing judgment (we repeat the refrain), until further on. Let
it suffice for the present that in discussing the practical judgment
we have limited it to all that part of history which contemplates
actions, that is, to individual activity, to biography and to the
biographical element, which is the material of all history. In it,
the practical judgment is active and energetic, but is silent before
the event, and every history is like an impetuous river of individual
works, which flows into a sea, where it is immediately restored to calm
serene. The rush of actions and of their vicissitudes, of victory and
of defeat, of wisdom and of folly, of life and of death, are set at
rest in the solemn peace of the "historical event."
[Sidenote: _Progress of action and progress of Reality._]
As we have distinguished the practical judgment from the judgment of
the event, the historical-individual from the historical-cosmic, so we
must distinguish the concept of progress, as the progress which belongs
to the volitional act and that which belongs to the event. The concept
of progress (according to the explanations given elsewhere) coincides
with the concept of activity. There is progress whenever an activity
declares itself, whenever (not to leave the circle of the practical) we
pass from irresolution to resolution, from conflict to the volitional
synthesis, from suspense to action. But the event, which is no longer
action but result, that is to say, is action, not of the individual
but of the Whole, is not to be judged with that concept of progress,
and in it progress coincides with the fact. That which follows
chronologically, if it be truly real, represents a progress upon what
precedes. Even illness is progress, if there were a latent crisis of
health, and getting over it gives rise to more vigorous health. Even
apparent regression (invasion of barbarians) is progress, if it lead to
the ripening of a wider civilization. What is death for the individual
is life for the Whole.--Hence the insipidity of the question, often
proposed and still discussed by writers of treatises, whether there be
practical progress, or as is said when limiting the question, moral
progress.
From the individual point of view, at every new volitional act,
practicality and the relative impulse of progress are once more born,
and they are extinguished with that act, to be born again in a new
one, and so on in a circle of infinite changes. As to cosmic reality,
we must declare, as in the previous example of the course of history,
that it is itself progress (which is also confirmed by the positivist
philosophy, when it declares that reality is evolved), but this is
progress of reality and therefore progress without adjective, or at
least without practical or moral adjective.
[Sidenote: _Precedence of the philosophy of the practical over the
practical judgment._]
The intellectual element, which is constitutive in the practical
judgment as in every other historical judgment, can also be called
the philosophical element. Hence the consequence that a philosophy of
the practical activity is a necessary condition of every practical
judgment. This is another thesis of paradoxical appearance, which,
however, it is not difficult to make plausible with suitable
reflections, plausible at least to those who do not refuse to reflect.
For what is philosophy but the thinking of the concept, and in this
case the concept of the practical? The conclusion, then, that a
philosophy is necessary for a judgment is irrefutable. The difficulty
in admitting it comes from the false association of ideas, for which
the sound of the word "philosophy" suggests the disputes of the
schools, the treatise, the manual, or the academic lecture whereas
we should think of philosophy in all its extension and profundity,
inborn in the human spirit (we have elsewhere called this _ingenuous
philosophy_) before its more complicated forms Every man has his
own philosophy, more or less developed or rudimentary, more or less
defective no one is without any philosophy. The first judgment on the
practical activity is already guided by the light of a philosophical
concept which, if it does not give a light, gives at least a glimmer,
if not straight and certain, at the least undulating and tremulous,
producing therefore tremulous and undulating judgments. Ingenuous
philosophy and philosophy in the specific sense are not, therefore,
separable from one another, with a clear-cut distinction, and if there
exist a disability in pronouncing a judgment as to many people and
to many actions, that arises from difficulties consequent upon the
philosophy of the time, which must first of all be solved, before
passing to the effective judgment. Hence long researches into doctrine
are sometimes necessary. Thus it is difficult to do justice to the
work of a rebel or of a revolutionary, without first clearing away
prejudices and understanding what a revolution is, and the relative
value of what is called obedience to the existing order of things.
Thus it would be naive to condemn as faithless the Saxon regiments
which deserted Napoleon on the field of Leipzig, or Marshal Ney, who
returned to the service of Napoleon from that of Louis XVIII., unless
we previously make clear the meaning and the limits of the political
treaty and of the military oath, which cannot be the only unconditioned
things in a world where nothing is unconditioned save the world itself.
[Sidenote: _Confirmation of the philosophical incapacity of the
psychological method._]