it is truly real, that is, in so far as it is unity of thought and
willing; it is Life, in so far as realized in its profundity as this
unity itself; it is Freedom, if a reality so conceived be perpetual
development, creation, progress. Outside the Spirit nothing is
thinkable in a truly universal form. Æsthetic, Logic, Historic, this
very Philosophy of the practical, have demonstrated and confirmed
this truth in every way. Every other concept brought forward reveals
itself (and has revealed itself beneath our analysis), either as a
feigned universal, or as something contingent that has been abstracted
and generalized, or as the hypostasis of certain of our particular
spiritual products, such as mathematical formulæ, or as the negation of
the Spirit, on which is conferred positive value (first with metaphor
and then with metaphysic).
And the moral individual who wills the universal, or that which
transcends him as an individual, turns precisely to the Spirit, to
real Reality, to true Life, to Liberty. The universal is in concrete
the universal individualized, and the individual is real in so far as
he is also universal. He is not able to assert one part of himself
without asserting the other (under the penalty of stopping half-way,
_dimidiatus vir,_ and so of again becoming nothing). But in order to
assert them both, he must first posit the one as explicit and the other
as implicit, and then make the other also explicit. Man as economic
individual, at the first moment (so to speak) of his revealing himself
to life and to existence, cannot will, save individually: will his
own individual existence. There is no man, however moral he be, who
does not begin in this way. How could he ever surpass and finally
deny his own individual life, if he had not first affirmed it and
did not reaffirm it at every instant? But he who should stop at that
affirmation of the individual, regarding the first stage of development
as the resting-place, would enter into profound contradiction with
himself. He should will, not only his own self individualized, but also
that self, which, being in all selves, is their common Father. Thus he
promotes the realization of the Real, lives a full life and makes his
heart beat in harmony with the universe: _cor cordium._
The moral individual has this consciousness of working for the Whole.
Every action, however diverse, which conforms to ethical duty, conforms
to Life; and if, instead of promoting Life, it should depress and
mortify it, for that very reason it would be immoral. Where facts seem
to demonstrate the contrary, the interpretation of facts is erroneous,
since it affirms as a criterion of judgment a life which is not that
true life, which, as we know, we serve even by dying--dying as an
individual, as a collectivity, as a social class, or as a people. The
most humble moral act can be resolved into this volition of the Spirit
in universal. Thus it happens that the soul of a simple and ignorant
man, altogether devoted to his rude duty, vibrates in unison with that
of the philosopher, whose mind receives into it the universal Spirit:
what the one thinks at that moment, the other does, thus attaining
by his own path to that full satisfaction, that act of life, that
fruitful conjunction with the Real, which the other has attained to by
a different path. It may be said that the moral man is a _practical
philosopher_ and the philosopher a _theoretic actor._
[Sidenote: _Moral acts as volitions of the Spirit._]
This criterion of the Spirit, of Progress, of Reality, is the intimate
measure of our acts in the moral conscience, as it is the foundation,
more or less clearly expressed, of our moral judgments. Why do we exalt
Giordano Bruno, who allowed himself to be condemned to the stake for
asserting his philosophy? Perhaps for the calmness with which he faced
the torture? But many fanatics, even malefactors, are capable of this,
and it may sometimes even be a simple sensual desire, of which we
have seen examples in history and of which a modern Italian poet has
lately sung, exalting the beauty of the flame and the voluptuousness of
the pyre. By facing death and refusing to deny his philosophy, Bruno
contributed to the creation of a larger form of civilization, and
for this reason he is not only a victim, but also a _martyr,_ in the
etymological sense of the word: witness and realizer of a demand of
the Spirit in universal.--Why do we praise the charitable man? Perhaps
because he yields to the emotion caused by the spectacle of suffering.
But emotion in itself is neither moral nor immoral, and thus to yield
to it materially is weakness, that is, immorality. The charitable man,
when he removes or mitigates suffering, relights a life and reconquers
a force for the common work, which both he and the person whom he has
benefited, must serve.
[Sidenote: _Critique of antimoralism._]
There is indeed nothing more foolish than antimoralism, so much the
fashion in our day; it is an ugly echo of unhealthy social conditions,
of one-sided theories ill understood (Marxism, Nietzscheianism).
Antimoralism is justified, in so far as it combats moral hypocrisy
in favour of effective morality instead of that of mere words, but
it loses all meaning when it inflates empty phrases or combines
contradictory propositions and preaches against morality itself. By so
doing, it thinks to celebrate strength, health and freedom, but on the
contrary exalts servitude to unbridled passions, the apparent health of
the invalid and the apparent strength of the maniac. Morality (begging
pardon of literary immoralists), far from being a pedantic fiction or
the consolation of the impotent, is _good blood against bad blood._
[Sidenote: _Confused tendencies of tautological, material, religious
formulæ, etc., toward the Ethic of the Spirit._]
We must also declare that this truth concerning the ethical principle
understood as will that has for its end the universal or the Spirit,
is to some extent confirmed by several of the formulæ that we have
criticized, which have erred only in defining it, either confusing
altogether the universal and the contingent, or have fallen into
tautologism. Those who posit Life, or the interest of the Species,
Society or the State, as the end of morality, have in view that Life,
that Species, that Society, or that ideal State, which is the Spirit
in universal, although they are not able to define it clearly. The
same may be said of other formulæ, which often have a better intention
at starting than that realized in the development of the relative
doctrines, or, on the contrary, a development superior to their bad
initial intention.
[Sidenote: _The Ethic of the Spirit and religious Ethic._]
This function of symbol possessed by idealist Ethic, this
affirmation that the moral act is love and volition of the Spirit
in universal, is to be found above all in religious and Christian
Ethic, in the Ethic of love and of the anxious search for the divine
presence. This is the fundamental characteristic of religious Ethic,
which remains unknown to vulgar rationalists and intellectualists, to
so-called free-thinkers, and to frequenters of masonic lodges, owing to
their narrow party passion or lack of mental subtlety. There is hardly
an ethical truth (and we have already had occasion to refer to this
matter) that cannot be expressed with the words that we have learned
as children from traditional religion, and which rise spontaneously
to the lips, as the most elevated, the most appropriate and the most
beautiful; words which are certainly impregnated with mythology, but
are also weighty with profound philosophical content. There is without
doubt an exceedingly strong antithesis between the idealist philosopher
and the religious individual, but it is not greater than that within
ourselves, when, in the imminence of a crisis, we are divided in
soul and yet very near to unity and to interior conciliation. If the
religious man cannot but see in the philosopher his adversary, his
mortal foe, the philosopher, on the other hand, sees in him his younger
brother, his very self of a moment past. Hence he will feel himself
more nearly allied to an austere, emotional, religious Ethic, troubled
with phantoms, than to an Ethic that is superficially rationalistic:
for this latter is only in appearance more philosophical than the
other, since if it possess the merit of recognizing (verbally only, or
with _psittacism,_ as Leibnitz would have said) the supreme rights of
reason, yet in plucking thought from the soil in which it has grown and
depriving it of vital sap, it exercises them very ill.
III
HISTORICAL NOTES
[Sidenote: _Merit of the Kantian Ethic._]
I. It is the singular merit of Kant to have put an end, once for all,
to every material Ethic, by proving its utilitarian character: a
merit that is not cancelled by the lacunæ that exist in other parts
of his thought, entangling him unawares in the materialism and in the
utilitarianism that he had surpassed. It would be anti-historical to
desire to judge a thinker by the contradictions into which he falls
and so to declare his work to be a failure and of no importance, when
it is only imperfect. There are errors in all the works of man, and
error is always contradiction; but he who has the eye of the historian
discovers where lies the true strength of a thought and does not deny
the light, because of necessity accompanied with shadow. Before Kant,
ethic was either openly utilitarian or such that although presenting
itself in the deceitful form of Ethic of sympathy, or religious Ethic,
was yet reducible to utilitarianism. Kant conducted an implacable and
destructive war, not only against admitted utilitarian forms, but also
against those that were masked and spurious, called by him material
Ethic.
[Sidenote: _The predecessors of Kant._]
In this too, his predecessors are to be found in traditional philosophy
of Christian origin, or, if it be preferred, Platonic (opposition
of material to formal Ethic can already be observed in the attitude
of Aristotle to Plato). If the fathers and the scholastics had been
divided as to the question of the relation between moral laws and the
divine will, and many of them, especially the mystics, had made that
law to depend upon the divine will and upon nothing else, yet views
had not been wanting, according to which the power of changing at
will the moral laws, that is to say, of changing his own essence, was
denied to God, since he could not be _supra se._ Religious Ethic was
cleansed of every admixture of arbitrarism and utilitarianism by this
solution, accepted by nearly all religious thinkers of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries (by Cudworth, by Malebranche, and finally by
Leibnitz). On the other hand, we cannot but recognize that many other
material formulæ used to be understood in an ideal, or, as we have
said, in a symbolical manner; and certainly that very eudæmonism
of Aristotle, toward which Kant showed himself too severe, was not
the pleasure and happiness of the hedonists and utilitarians, and the
mediety (μεσότης) proposed as the distinctive character of virtue,
although without doubt empty and often incoherent, was already almost
a formal principle. The same is to be said of the Stoic principle of
_following nature_; and coming to the immediate predecessors of Kant,
of that _perfectio_ already mentioned, which Kant, after wavering a
little, reduced to happiness, not, however, without stating that it is
a more indeterminate concept than any other. With Kant, however, the
point was admitted, that the moral law is not to be expressed in any
formula, which contains representative and contingent elements.
[Sidenote: _Defect of that Ethic: agnosticism._]
The defect of the Kantian Ethic is the defect of his whole philosophy:
agnosticism, which prevents his truly surpassing either the phenomenon
or the thing in itself, leading him, on the one hand, toward
empiricism, on the other toward that transcendental metaphysic, which
no one had done more to discredit than himself. He combated the concept
of the good or supreme good as the principle of Ethic, and he was right
in so far as he understood it as object of any sort, of "a good," as of
a "thing." But this did not exempt him from the duty of defining the
supreme good as that which is not exhausted in any particular object,
or of determining the universal. Now his philosophy was incapable of
attaining to the universal.
[Sidenote: _Critique of Hegel and of others._]
Hence the involuntary return to utilitarianism, clearly stated by Hegel
in his youthful essay upon natural Right. The practical principle of
Kant (remarked Hegel) is not a true but a negative absolute; hence
with him the principle of morality becomes converted into immorality:
since every fact can be thought in the form of universality, it is
never known what fact should be received into the law. In the famous
example of the deposit, Kant had said that it is necessary to keep
faith as regards the deposit, otherwise there would no longer be
deposits.[1] But if there were no more deposits, how would this
constitute a contradiction to the form of the law? There would perhaps
be contradiction and absurdity for material reasons, but it is already
agreed that this is not to be brought up in the argument. Kant wishes
to justify property, but he does not attain to more than the tautology,
that property, if it be property, must be property, opening the way
to the free choice of conceiving at will as duties these or those
contingent definitions of property. The moral maxims of Kant, owing to
the empirical determinations that they assume, are contradictory, not
only of one another, but of themselves. This inevitable degeneration
of the Kantian Ethic was called by Hegel _tautology and formalism_.[2]
Other thinkers were also affected by the utilitarianism of the
Kantian Ethic: Schopenhauer even declared that his doctrine has no
other foundation than egoism, since it can be reduced to the concept
of reciprocity, and he protested against the Kantian theory that we
should be compassionate to animals, in order to exercize ourselves
in the virtue of compassion, judging it to be the effect of the
Judæo-Christian views of Kant.[3] Schopenhauer was in some respect
right in these observations, although as regards animals we must note
that the same attitude is found in Spinoza and in other thinkers and
that it derives from material and utilitarian Ethic; and for the rest
that it would be very unjust to see nothing but egoism in the categoric
imperative of Kant, for this, we repeat, though it constitute its
danger, does not constitute its essential character.
[Sidenote: _Kant and the concept of freedom._]
Nevertheless, in Kant himself, in this thinker, so rich in
contradictions and suggestions, was indicated the concept which, when
elaborated, was to constitute the principle, not merely of tautological
and formalistic, but of concrete and formal Ethic, the concept of
_freedom._ By means of this concept Kant enters into the heart of the
real and reaches that region of which mysticism and religion had from
time to time caught a glimpse and had here and there attained. As the
origin of the rigid Kantian ethical conception and of his abhorrence
for the material and mundane is to be found in Christianity (and in
Paganism), so the origin of the concrete moral idea is to be sought in
St. Augustine, and also in St. Paul, in the mystics and in the great
French Christians of the seventeenth century; in that virtue of which
Pascal wrote as _plus haute que celle des pharisiens et des plus sages
du paganisme,_ and it operates with omnipotent hand, by means of which
alone is it possible _dégager l'âme de l'amour du monde, la retirer
de ce quelle a de plus cher, la faire mourir à soi-même, la porter et
l'attacher uniquement et invariablement à Dieu._[4] The successors
of Kant, especially Fichte and Hegel, closed the circle which he had
left open, and altogether excluding transcendency, they made of God
freedom and of freedom reality. Fichte, who expelled the phantom of the
thing in itself from theoretical philosophy, removed from the categoric
imperative the appearance of _qualitas occulta,_ which it had borne in
the Philosophy of the practical, illuminating that tenebrous region,
ready to receive any sort of phantasm or superstition, such as belief
in a moral law arbitrarily imposed by the divinity.[5] Hegel does not
recognize duty and the categoric imperative, but freedom only, and as
he says, the free spirit is that in which subject and object coincide
and freedom is freely willed.
[Sidenote: _Ethic in the nineteenth century._]
II. After the classical epoch of modern philosophy, in the general
regression of Ethic, the concept of the concreteness and universality
of the practical principle was also lost. Omitting the utilitarians,
who no longer have a place here, it must suffice to record how there
was a return either to the formalistic principles, which Hegel
criticized in Kant (for instance the principle of the Ethic of Rosmini,
the _respect for being,_ afterwards combated by Gioberti), or directly
to those material principles which Kant had already excluded. Such
are the _compassion_ of Schopenhauer, the _five practical ideas_ of
Herbart, the love of Feuerbach, _benevolence_ as the supreme ethical
idea of Lotze, the _theological_ morality of Baader, the _life_ of
Nietzsche, and the like.
The principles of the first were completed with a religious conception
(here too Rosmini may afford an example), and those of the second, when
they did not reveal themselves as utilitarian or tautological, showed
an obscure tendency toward the Ethic of Freedom. This must not be
overlooked in the Ethic of Nietzsche, which despite the rocks and mud
that the thought of Nietzsche drags with it, is yet anti-hedonistic and
anti-utilitarian and quite full of the sense of Life as activity and
power. Positivistic evolutionism is also often unconscious idealism;
and the moral actions, united to evolution, can be interpreted as
those which correspond to the Spirit in universal. The concepts of the
pessimists alone are altogether incapable of idealistic interpretation
(for example, Schopenhauer), and those of the semi-pessimist and
semi-idealist Hartmann are strangely contradictory. He makes morality
to consist of the promotion of civilization, whence so lofty a
condition of the spirit can be attained that it will be possible to
decree universal suicide by means of the vote of all the world.
The question asked after Kant, whether Ethic should be formal
or material, is one that we have made more precise in the other
form, whether Ethic should be abstract or concrete, full or empty,
tautological or expressive--that is (with even greater precision),
whether Ethic can be established before and without a philosophical
system and even be reconciled with agnosticism, has no longer been
understood, even by its pretended followers, the Neocriticists or
Neokantians. These have either believed they had solved it by means of
moderate utilitarianism, or by going outside it and denying the most
secure result of the Kantian critique of Ethic; or they have discussed
it tiresomely, without making a step in advance. Progress indeed was
possible on one condition alone: that a philosophical system should
be constructed not inferior to that of the postkantian idealists. But
this would have been tantamount to demanding the death of neokantianism
or neocriticism, which has not only not attempted to surpass the
idealistic systems, but has even maintained that we should philosophize
without a system, declaring that a system is altogether inconceivable.
The Neokantians can thus be recognized as the descendants of Kant; but
in the same way as the last descendant of the Hapsburgs in Spain,
who was neither emperor, king, soldier, nor man, could be recognized
as the descendant of Charles the Fifth, who was man, soldier, king,
and emperor: because, like his great predecessor, he possessed the
deformed, hanging lip of the Hapsburgs.
[1] _Krit. d. prakt. Vern._ pp. 30-31.
[2] _Ueb. d. wissensch. Behandlungsarten d. Naturrechts,_ in _Werke,_
i. 353; cf. _Gesch. d. Phil._ iii. 533 sqq.
[3] _Gründl, d. Moral,_ in _Werke,_ ed. cit., iii. 538, 542-543.
[4] _Lettres prov._ 1. 5.
[5] _System d. Sittenlehre,_ pp. 49-51.
THIRD PART
LAWS
I
LAWS AS PRODUCTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL
[Sidenote: _Definition of law._]
_Law_ is a volitional act, which has for content a _series_ or _class_
of actions.
[Sidenote: _Philosophical and empirical concepts of society._]