his thought as synthesis of opposites, which essentially belongs to
the Hegelian philosophy and has been superficially treated and adopted
by other philosophical schools, and this is not the place either to
retrace their history or to demonstrate into what errors Hegel fell
through abusing the truth that he had discovered. Among the errors of
that philosophy (as for that matter of all contemporary philosophies
and of those that have followed one another down to our own day), is
to be noted the persistence of the concept of Nature as a mode of
reality opposed to the mode of the Spirit, whence came a dualism that
was not effectually surpassed, save in appearance. The doctrine of
development by opposites is to be understood as accepted and maintained
here, with the correction of the concept of nature, and also the
doctrine of the synthesis of opposites, free from the use or abuse
of it by Hegel for distinct concepts (and worse still, for empirical
concepts). As for the concept of Providence, which is neither Fate
nor Fortune, nor the work of a transcendent God, this, in its modern
form, goes back to the _Scienza nuova_ of Vico and is not to be
confounded with the personal religious beliefs that Vico held and kept
distinct from his philosophical concept as to immanent Providence.
The same concept reappears in the Hegelian philosophy under the form
of the Idea, or of the _astuteness of Reason,_ which avails itself
of men as its instruments and managers of business.[25] Finally, the
conception of cosmic progress was extraneous to the oriental world,
to the Græco-Roman, and to the Christian worlds, prevailing in turn
in the latter that of decadence from an original state of perfection
and of circles or returns. In its modern form it takes its origin from
thinkers free of these religious views, who merge in the philosophies
of becoming and of evolution. But the concept of progress destroyed
itself in many of these rationalistic philosophies, the "disappearance
of evil" being posited as possible (Spencer), and a definite state
of perfection conceived (though transferred from the past into the
future), that is to say a Reality that should be Reality, indeed,
perfect Reality having ceased to be development, that is to say, itself.
[1] _Kr. d. prakt. Vern._ p. 119.
[2] _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ §§ 4, 15.
[3] Lotze, _Grundzüge der Ethik_ (Leipzig, 1884), pp. 26, 30-31; Wundt,
_Ethik_² (Stuttgart, 1892), pp. 463-464.
[4] _Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_ (Paris, 1898).
[5] _Tract, theol.-pol._ vi. c. 6; _Ethica,_ p. iv. intr.; _Epist._36
(_Opera,_ pp. 208, 378, 597).
[6] _Kr. d. pr. Vernf._ p. 79.
[7] _System der Sittenlehre,_ in _Werke,_ iv. pp. 198-205.
[8] See my study: _Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di
Hegel_ (Bari, 1907).
[9] _Médit._ iv.
[10] For example, _Compendio di Etica_ (Roma, 1907), p. 56.
[11] _Mentor,_ iv. c. 2, § 19 _sqq._
[12] _Hippias minor,_ 375.
[13] Pascal, _Provine,_ i, iv.; Hegel, _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ § 40.
[14] _Enc._§ 248.
[15] _Allg. prakt. Phil._ pp. 121-122; _Einl. i. d. Phil._ (trad,
ital.), pp. 118, 171, 224.
[16] _Ethic,_ iv. prop. 54, p. 480.
[17] _Gesch. d. Phil._ ii. 240-241; _Vorles. üb. Aesth._ ii. 162-163.
[18] _Eth. Nicom._ Bk. iii. cc. 2-3, 1111-1113.
[19] _Scienza nuova seconda,_ degn. 5.
[20] _Phän. d. Geistes,_ pp. 484-486; _Encycl._ § 474; _Phil. d.
Rechtes,_ § 124; _Phil. d. Gesch._ pp. 39-41.
[21] _Traité des passions,_ iii. § 211.
[22] _Maximes,_ n. 182 (Ed. Garnier, p. 43).
[23] _Woldemar,_ pp. 112-113.
[24] _Monologen,_ in _Werke,_ i. 366-368, 372.
[25] See the study of Hegel mentioned.
THIRD SECTION
UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL
[Sidenote: _Double result; precedence of the theoretical over the
practical and of the practical over the theoretical._]
The study of the practical activity in its relations that we made in
the first section has removed all doubt as to the thesis that the
practical activity presupposes the theoretical, or that _knowledge is
the necessary precedent of volition and action._[1] But the succeeding
study of the practical activity in its dialectic having led to the
result that the practical activity is reality itself in its immediacy,
and that no other reality (or we may say _other nature_) is conceivable
outside will-action, compels us also to affirm the opposite thesis,
that the theoretic activity presupposes the practical, and that
_the will is the necessary precedent of knowledge_.[2] And it is a
precedent, not indeed in the sense admitted from the beginning, of
the necessary implication of the will in every theoretical act, as
will to know, by means of the unity of the Spirit[3] (for this will
is subsidiary and not constitutive; but if it become constitutive it
produces, as has been seen, wilfulness and the theoretical error[4]),
but precisely in the sense of a constitutive will, without which no
knowledge would be thinkable.
Knowledge, indeed, is knowledge of something: it is the remaking of
a fact, an ideal recreation of a real creation. If there have not
previously been a desire, an aspiration, a nostalgia, there cannot be
poetry; if there have not been an impulse or a heroic deed, the epic
cannot arise; if the sun do not illumine a landscape, or a soul invoke
a ray of sunlight upon the countryside, the picture of a luminous
landscape cannot exist. And if there be not a world of reality that
generates a world of representations, Philosophy, which is the search
for the universal, is not conceivable, nor History, the understanding
of the individual.
[Sidenote: _Error of those who maintain the exclusive precedence of
either._]
The indubitability of this affirmation, which no force of sophistry
can destroy, renders fallacious both the opposite theses, which have
several times been variously proposed and maintained: the exclusive
priority of the theoretic, and the exclusive priority of the practical.
Those who maintain them enter into so desperate a contest with
reality, that in order to issue from it without too much dishonour,
they are finally compelled to call in the aid of a third term, which is
in turn either thought that is not thought, or will that is not will,
or something grey that contains in itself thought and will, without
being either the one or the other, nor the unity of that duality. On
the one hand is postulated a Logos, a thought _in se_ (one does not
understand how this can ever think and be thought), and it is made to
adopt the resolution (which one does not understand how it can ever
adopt) of coming forth _from itself_ and creating a nature, in order
to be able to return finally to itself, by means of this alienation,
and to be henceforth _per se,_ that is to say, able to think and to
will. The defect of this artificial construction, its mythological and
religious origin, can be said to have been already revealed, in the
comparison employed with reference to it by the author who maintained
it (Hegel), to the effect that the Logos is God _before_ the creation
of the world: a God, that is to say, altogether unreal and absurd.
On the other hand, the excogitation of a _blind Will_ (Schelling,
Schopenhauer) completely tallies with this Thought that does not think
because it has not previously willed, and that does not truly will
because it has not previously thought, and all of a sudden fashions
for itself the instrument of knowledge, to succeed in surpassing
itself in this alienation from itself, by means of liberation from
willing obtained in the contemplation of the ideas and in asceticism.
Here, too, we must repeat that the one error passes over and converts
itself into the other, and this inevitable conversion causes the other
secondary and hybrid forms of theory to have but slight interest, those
in which the priority has been conceived as that of fancy, or feeling,
or the unconscious, or the indifferentiated, and the like, all of which
represent vain efforts to suppress one of the two fundamental forms of
the spirit, or to derive them from a third, which consciousness does
not reveal.
[Sidenote: _Problem of the unity of this duality._]
This however does not mean that the demand to conceive the link of that
duality, or the unity of the theoretical and the practical, manifested
in all these erroneous attempts, is not legitimate. But in order to
conceive this, it is necessary to insist above all upon the reality of
this duality, of which is sought the connection and the unity.
[Sidenote: _Not the duality of opposites._]
This connection cannot be the relation or synthesis of opposites. The
theoretical is not the opposite of the practical, nor the practical
the opposite of the theoretical: the opposite of the theoretical is
error or the false, as the opposite of the practical is the volitional
contradiction or evil. The theoretical, far from being negative, is
positive, not less than the practical, and inversely. Neither form can
therefore be in any way debased to a simple opposite. Opposition is
intrinsic to the spirit and is to be found in each one of its forms:
hence the general value of the spirit (activity against passivity,
rationality and reality against irrationality and unreality, being
against not-being) and that of its special forms (beautiful against
ugly, true against false, useful against useless, good against evil).
But precisely for this reason, it cannot constitute the character of
one form in respect to the other: neither that of the true against the
good, nor that of the beautiful against the useful, and so on.
[Sidenote: _Not duality of finite and infinite._]
Nor can the connection be thought as are thought the subdivisions of
the theoretic and the practical forms, or according to the relations
of individual to universal, of finite to infinite, the first of
which terms conditions the second, but is conditioned by it only in
an implicit manner. Of the two theoretical forms (and we shall see
further on that the forms of the practical are also two), the æsthetic
precedes the logical and is autonomous: a song, a story, a statue, do
not express any concept; but the philosophy that gives the concept, is
at the same time fancy, expression, word: the prose of the philosopher
is his song. The æsthetic form is the knowledge of the individual;
the logical that of the universal, which is also individual. But this
relation that arises within the theoretic, as within the practical
form, cannot be transported to the relation of the two forms without
logical incoherence: the subdivision, so to speak, is not the
division. Thought is not the finite in respect of willing, which is
the infinite; nor is the will the finite in respect of thought, which
is the infinite. Thought and will are both of them at once finite
and infinite, individual and universal. He who passes from action to
thought, does not limit his own being by becoming finite; nor does he
limit it by passing from thought to action; or better, in both cases he
makes himself finite to attain to the infinite; poet to open to himself
the way to the thought of the eternally true; man of action, that he
may dedicate his work to the eternal good.
[Sidenote: _Perfect analogy of the two forms, theoretic and practical._]
The two forms, theoretical and practical, both positive, both a
connection of finite and infinite, correspond in everything, as has
already appeared from our exposition, in which the appeal to the one
from the problems of the other has always aided a better penetration
of the nature of such problems and the finding of their solution.
Thus in both there is genius and creation (geniuses of art and of
thought, and geniuses of action); in both, reproduction and judgment
take place in the same way (æsthetic taste, practical taste; history
of art and history of philosophy, history of actions); in both arise
representative concepts and empirical rules. The analogy will be
better illustrated by what is to follow, when will be demonstrated the
correspondence between art and economic, logical thought and ethicity,
historical discrimination and ethical discrimination, empirical
concepts and laws of action, and so on.
[Sidenote: _Not a parallelism, but a circle._]
If this analogy exclude the possibility of the two forms being
_unequal,_ it must not, on the other hand, be perverted with the
object of conceiving them _parallel,_ as would perhaps be pleasing
to the parallelists of spirit and nature, soul and body; this is an
expedient that is certainly easy, but certainly not satisfying. They
are not parallel, but are on the contrary bound, the one to the
other, in such a way that the one proceeds from the other. From the
æsthetic apprehension of reality, from philosophical reflection upon
it, from historical reconstruction, which is its result, is obtained
that knowledge of the actual situation, on which alone is formed and
can be formed the volitional and practical synthesis, the new action.
And this new action is in its turn the material of the new æsthetic
figuration, of the new philosophical reflection, of the new historical
reconstruction. In short, knowledge and will, theory and practice,
are not two parallels, but two lines, such that the head of the one
is joined to the tail of the other; or, if a geometric symbol also be
desired, such that they constitute, not a parallelism, but a _circle._
[Sidenote: _The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and
object._]
They constitute therefore the circle of reality and of life, which is
duality-unity of thought and being, of subject and object, in such
a way that to think the subject is the same as to think the subject
of an object, and to think an object is the same as to think the
object of a subject. In truth, it sometimes seems strange and almost
impossible that such hard and difficult questions should have arisen
as to the objectivity of knowledge, and as to whether thought attains
to being, or whether there be a being beyond thought. Thought is such,
precisely because it affirms being, and being is such, precisely
because it is generated by a thought. It is only when we remember
that in those questions were included others of a very difficult and
intricate nature, concerning divine transcendency and the content of
the concept of nature (gnoseological questions, which it is the glory
of modern philosophy to have asked and solved);--it is only then that
we understand how the relation of thought and being, of knowing and of
willing, has also become obscure. Kant was forced to come to a stop
before the mystery of reality, because he had not altogether conquered
transcendency, nor altogether surpassed the false conception of nature
as _ens,_ given by the naturalists. It revealed itself to him, not
as a circle, but as an assemblage of lines diverging or joining to
infinity. Hegel made two of will and nature, owing to the insufficiency
of his gnoseological theory relating to the natural sciences, and was
led to posit a Philosophy of nature in opposition to a Philosophy of
the spirit, thus permitting to exist a form of non-mediate dualism,
after he had destroyed so many, or making it mediate in the artificial
manner to which we have referred. The shadows of that gnoseology having
been dispersed, the relation between theory and practice, subject and
object, appears in full light; and the answer becomes very simple to
the question as to how, when everything is unconvertible relation of
condition and conditioned, thought and being are reciprocally condition
and conditioned, and as to how the vicious circle is avoided. The
criticism of vicious circles includes in itself and affirms the idea
of a circularity that is not vicious; thought and being are not a
succession of two finites, but an absolute relation, that is, the
Absolute itself. To express ourselves mythologically, if the creation
of the world be the passage from chaos to cosmos, from not-being to
being, this passage does not begin either with the theoretic or with
the practical, with the subject, or with the object, but with the
Absolute, which is the absolute relation of the two terms. _In the
beginning was neither the Word nor the Act; but the Word of the Act and
the Act of the Word._
[Sidenote: _Critique of the theories as to the primacy of theoretical
or of practical reason._]
It is well to state again that in consequence of the relation and
correlation established, all the questions as to the primacy of
thought or will, of the contemplative or active life, and speaking
more empirically, of the thinker or the man of action, disappear.
To pose such problems is as though one were to ask which of the two
semicircles of a circle has precedence. Similar questions, always
insoluble or badly solved, have their origin in internal obscurity as
to the fundamental correlation. When man has attained to the summit of
knowledge (a summit that is certainly not Art; nor, strictly speaking,
Philosophy, but History, the knowledge of the concrete real, that
is, the actuality of philosophy), when he has completely penetrated
the actual situation, can he perhaps stop at this point and say _hic
manebimus optime?_ Can he arrest life which is raging and demanding
to be continued? And if he succeed in suspending it for an instant in
thought, why has he suspended, if not to continue it? Knowledge is
not an end, but an instrument of life: knowledge that did not serve
life would be superfluous and harmful.--On the other hand, when a man
has willed and has thrown himself into action, when he has produced
another piece of life, can he blindly continue to produce life for
ever? Would not blindness impede the production itself? Therefore he
must rise from life to knowing, if he wish to look in the face the
product that he has lived, and surpass it with thought, for which life
is now means and instrument. Knowledge serves life and life serves
knowledge; the contemplative life, if it do not wish to become insipid
ease, must lead to activity, and that activity, if it do not wish to
become an irrational and sterile tumult, must lead to contemplation.
Reality, in specifying aptitudes, has formed men of thought and men
of action, or of prevailing thought or prevailing action, these not
superior to those, for they are collaborators.--Thus the discussions
as to whether human progress be moral or intellectual, or whether the
propelling force be the practical and economic activity, or philosophy,
or religion (Buckle, Kidd, etc.), are shown to be vain.
[Sidenote: _New pragmatism: life conditioning Philosophy._]
It is rather to be considered that from this bond between theory
and practice is obtained a pragmatism of a new sort, of which the
pragmatists have never thought, or at least have not been able to
distinguish from the others and to give it value. If Life condition
Thought, we have in this the apodictic demonstration of the always
historically conditioned form of every thought; not only of Art, which
is always the art of a time, of a soul, of a moment; but also of
Philosophy which can solve only those problems presented by Life. Every
philosophy reflects and cannot but reflect the preoccupations, as
they are called, of a definite historical moment; and this, not in the
quality of its _solutions_ (in which case it would be and is indeed bad
philosophy), but in the quality of its _problems._ Thus it is at once
contingent and eternal, mortal and immortal, extratemporal and living
only in time and history.
[Sidenote: _Deductive confirmation of the two forms and deductive
exclusion of the third feeling._]
Finally, with the establishment of the duality-unity of the theoretical
and the practical, we have demonstrated that which at the beginning
of the exposition had only been asserted and presupposed: namely,
why a _practical_ form of the spirit must be placed beside the
theoretical,[5] and why there is no _third_ form beyond these, whether
it be called _feeling_ or by any other name.[6] The theoretical form
postulates the practical, because the subject postulates the object;
but the spirit does not postulate a third form intermediate between the
two, or unity of the two, because it is itself precisely mediator and
unity of itself, _subject-object._
[1] Section I.
[2] Section II.
[3] Section I. c. 3.
[4] Section I. c. 4.
[5] Section I. c. 1.
[6] Section I. c. 2.
SECOND PART
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS
FIRST SECTION
THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC
I
DISTINCTION OF THE TWO FORMS IN THE PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
[Sidenote: _The utilitarian or economic form, and the moral or ethical
form._]
All that has been developed in the preceding book concerns the
practical activity _in general:_ therefore no account has been taken of
the special distinctions of the practical forms, as though there were
none, or they have only been alluded to as something problematical;
and when exemplifications have been given, recourse has been had
indifferently to one or to the other of the forms commonly admitted,
whether or no they are to be held philosophically distinguishable.
Now, on the contrary, we affirm in an explicit manner that the spirit,
which we have seen distinguished as theoretical and practical, is
sub-distinguished as practical spirit, into two forms, of which the
first may be called utilitarian or _economic,_ the second moral or
_ethical._
[Sidenote: _Insufficiency of the descriptive and psychological
distinction._]
In affirming this sub-distinction, we are obliged to renounce (as we
have already done for the practical in respect to the theoretical) a
demonstration by the psychological method, which has already shown
itself to be vicious. If indeed it were applicable in this field, we
should doubtless be able to strike the intellect and persuade the soul
for a moment, by pointing to the spectacle of life as a demonstration
of the two forms, economic and ethic, showing on the one hand, farmers,
commercial men, speculators, conquerors of men and of territories,
wielders of the word or of the sword as instrument of dominion;
and, on the other hand, educators, benefactors, disinterested and
self-sacrificing men, martyrs and heroes; on the one hand, economic
institutions (manufactories, mines, exchanges, exploration companies),
and on the other moral institutions (educators and schools, charitable
societies, orders of Sisters of Charity, or red, white, or blue Cross
Companies, and so on). What can be better proof of the reality of the
bipartition enunciated? Cannot we touch it, as with the hand? However
(as already in the case of the distinction between the theoretical
and the practical), what is touched with the hand is not on that
account seized by the intellect, and indeed in a little while it also
escapes the hand which had thought to be its master. For when we better
observe the individuals who seemed to be merely economic, they seem to
be also moral, and inversely;--moral institutions are also economic,
and economic moral The benefactor calculates and wishes to attain his
object with the same _cupiditas_ as the peasant, all intent upon gain;
and the peasant in his turn is ennobled in his chase after lucre by
the dignity of labour and by the moral impulses that sustain it;--all
charitable institutions are economic undertakings, and economic
undertakings are subject to moral laws, so that in drawing up accounts
there is no knowing where is that material distinction between the
economic and the ethical activities. The truth is that here too it is
not possible to start from contingent facts and from their classes
with empirical limitations, to attain to philosophical distinctions,
but that it is necessary to start from these, in order to interpret
contingent facts, and finally to understand also the mode of formation
of empirical classes. For this reason the psychological method revolves
in a circle that is effectively vicious.
[Sidenote: _Deduction and the necessity of integrating it with
induction._]