of duties in the third part of his Philosophy of Law, which is entitled Of Ethicity (Sittlickkeit). The Ethic of Herbart is intrinsically descriptive, for the author himself professed to wish simply "to describe the ideal of virtue,"1 and the five practical ideas that he takes as principles were at bottom nothing but classes of virtue refined into ideas. Treatises of to-day are overflowing with empirical elements, as can be seen from those in English by Ladd and Seth, and by those in German of Paulsen, Wundt, and Cathrein. Sometimes a more concrete historical element is coupled in those treatises with the empirical classification of practical examples'and institutions: as, for instance, in Cathrein, a modernized Jesuit, who exposes at length the moral views, not only of civilized people, ancient and modern, but also of the savages of Oceania, of Asia, of Cochin China, of the Hottentots and Boschimans, of the Botocudis, and so on. Questions of casuistry also survive in these treatises, such as whether and on what occasions it is permissible to tell a lie; this question is notably represented in the history of ideas, from the Socrates of the Memorabilia to Kant and Schopenhauer.2 Kant added 1 Allg. prakt. Phil., ed. Hartenstein, p. 107.
2 Memor. iv., c. 2, §§ 14-16. Schopenhauer also exhaustively, Grundl. d. Moral, in Werke, ed. Grisebach, iii. pp. 603-607.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 155 questions of casuistry to the various sections of the Mctaphysic of Customs, as scholia to the system and examples of the way in which the truth of particular questions should be sought.1 But the efforts of ancient and modern philo- vain attempts at definitions sophers rigorously to define empirical concepts of empirical afford more interest than the external form of treatment, as do their efforts to modify or to simplify, or indeed finally to deduce them rationally. The Platonic dialogues, such as the Charmides, the Lachetes, the Protagoras, are most instructive in this respect. Here it is sought to define sophrosune, andreia and the other virtues, without arriving at any precise result, or rather arriving at the contradictory one, that each of these virtues is the whole of virtue, whereas it should only be a part of it. In the Republic is sought the relation of the four virtues, or rather of three of them, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, with justice, which forms as it were the foundation and unity of the whole. From such discussions arose the affirma tion, to be found also in Cicero, that the virtues are inseparable from one another: virtutes ita copulatae connexaeque sitnt, ut omnes 1 Metaphys. d. Sitten, ed. Kirchmann, p. 248.
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participes sint, nee alia ab alia possit separari.1 The difficulty of the Platonic inquiry is renewed with all those who have given definitions of the virtues and of the other empirical concepts, because, when they have achieved with much labour a definition which appears satisfactory, it is afterwards always found to be too narrow or too wide. Thus the definition given by Kant and by others (Fichte, Schopenhauer) of egoism, consisting in their view, of con sidering other individuals as means and not ends, is the definition, not of egoism, but of any form of immorality which debases the Spirit that should be the end, by means of its own caprices. The same is to be said of the defini tions given by Fichte as to the duties inherent to this or that condition and state: the duties, for instance, of the learned, who should love truth, communicate it to others, rectify errors, promote culture,2 and so on. These are all things that form part of the duty, not only of the learned, but of every man. The simplifiers are not more fortunate in their attempts to reduce the number of empirical concepts, for the concepts excluded by them have neither more nor less right to 2 System der Sittenkhre, § 29, in Werke, iv. 346-347.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 157 recognition than the others that they have accepted. Schopenhauer, for instance, when he rejects the class of duties toward oneself,1 should also reject that of duties toward others. For others and ourselves are correlative terms, and we cannot be benevolent to others and malevolent to ourselves, just to others and unjust to our selves. If this be met with the objection that the empirical self is not the object of duties, we must reply that neither are the empirical " others," but only that Spirit which is in all and constitutes all. In reacting against these unifiers and simplifiers, other philosophers (as for example Herbart) have maintained the indeducibility of the virtues or duties from a single principle, which means that they have received those con cepts into their philosophy atomistically, and left them there as something not digested and not digestible, an extraneous element. If they had openly admitted this and drawn from it the legitimate consequence, and for that reason excluded those concepts from philosophy, they would really have contributed toward simplifying and unifying, by making it homogeneous. But Herbart, if he have no other merit, has at any rate declared that the Philosophy of the practical is not 1 Grundl. d. Moral, ed., cit., iii. pp. 506-508.
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capable of solving all the problems that occur in life, and that we must always rely upon the answer of the heart, upon the delicacy of in dividual tact. And, therefore, while Kant still preserved casuistic questions in Ethic and pro fessed to solve them rationally, Herbart showed that they lack the determinations that are of true importance in real cases, and that such questions are therefore as a rule either without meaning or insoluble (entweder gar keiner Fragen, oder im Allgemein unaufloslichY Attempts at As concerns the attempt to connect and to deduction.
deduction.
deduct the empirical part of treatises from the philosophical, the first example is the Aristotelian division of the virtues into the dianoetic and ethic, with their consequent determination by means of the concept of mediacy (/-teo-or???) be tween two extremes. But this Aristotelian method, which was continued by the Scholastics, seemed to others (as for example Schleiermacher) nothing but "a heap of virtues," without any rule and without any certainty; hence he made constant attempts at new classifications and new deductions. Kant recognized that the ethical obligation, that is, respect for the law, is some thing unique and indivisible, and that to attain 1 Allg. prakt. Philos., ed. Hartenstein, pp. 29-30.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 159 from that to duties or ethica officia, which are many, it is necessary to introduce the considera tion of objects.1 Here he should have stopped, because objects have infinite determinations, are infinite. Hence the enumeration, division and deduction of duties, should be simply pronounced impossible. Instead of doing this, he passed at a bound, how far logical we know not, from the general ethical obligation, to the division of duties into two great classes: of man toward man, and of man toward beings that are not human. He divided the first into duties toward oneself and duties toward other men, the second into that of the duties toward beings beneath man (animals) and those toward beings above him (God).2 The strangeness of these divisions, which sometimes verge on the comic, can already be seen, though abridged, in the first class of the duties toward oneself, subdivided in its turn into duties toward oneself as an animal or physical being, and duties toward oneself as a moral being; as though human duties are not always to be referred to spirituality and can ever concern physicality or animality. In their first aspect they receive a tripartite division, into the duty of self-preserva- 1 Metaphys. d. Sitten, pp. 247-248.
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tion, which is violated by suicide, by allowing oneself to be castrated (in order to sing soprano, as used to be done at that time at the San Carlo of Naples and at the Opera of Berlin), by allowing a healthy tooth to be pulled out in order to sell it (as does poor Fantine in the story of the Mistrables); into the duty of pre serving the species (violation: unnatural use of the sexual impulse); — into the duty of preserving the use of one's own strength (violation: gluttony). The duty of preserving the dignity of man is contained beneath the second heading (violation, lying, covetousness, abjection, etc.1). The fact is that the duty of preserving the dignity of man comprises in itself, not only the class that stands first, of duties toward oneself, but also all the other duties toward men, animals, or gods. Fichte feels the difficulty, because he sees that conscience is that which determines our duty on each occasion; but he adds: " This is not enough for science: either we must be able to determine a priori that which our conscience will affirm in universal, or we must admit that an Ethic, as a pure applied science, is impossible."2 The second horn of the dilemma was precisely that ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 161 of the truth, but Fichte, like Kant, bowed to the supreme power of tradition and clung to the first. He divides duties into mediate and conditioned (toward oneself) and immediate and unconditioned (toward others), and into general and special (those of various states and conditions), deducing from this the fourfold division, resulting from the meeting of general conditioned duties, particular conditioned, general unconditioned, and particular unconditioned. Hegel, who in his youthful writ ings had denied absolute value to the virtues, and consequently the possibility of collisions between the virtues (for example, in the Life of Jesus, recently published), well defines the altogether empirical character of that treatise, calling it, by reason of its natural element and of the quantitive considerations upon which it is founded, " a natural history of the spiritual world " (eine geistige Naturgeschichte]; but since he did not perceive the identity of the concept of duty with that of virtue, he believes in the possibility of a philosophical theory of duties.1 This is developed by him, as has been said, in the section of Ethicity, applying to it the dialectical rhythm proper to the philosophical universal, and distinguishing in it three moments: of the M M i62 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
immediate natural spirit, which is the family, of the dissension from which arises civil society, and of conciliation, whence arises the State. But notwithstanding the external dialectical form, there is to be found in all this section of the Ethicity at every point, not so much the philosopher properly so-called, as the historian who describes and narrates, the acute and well- balanced politician and moralist. The merit of such a treatise resides precisely, therefore, in the abhorrence of a sham philosophy; with but slight modifications of literary form, it could be developed into a series of excellent historico- political essays. Certain of the propositions of the writing on Natural Law (i 802-3) T would tend to show that Hegel inclined to look upon the treatment of duties and institutions as nothing more than a provisional classification of historical and changeable material, a thought that is in any case suggested by his whole system. Schleier- macher was among the philosophers of that time who laboured, perhaps, with the greatest tenacity upon the empirical classes, with a view to re ducing them to philosophical form; but the results were unhappy, only revealing, by their contradictions persisting after such efforts, the ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 163 impossibility of the task. In fact, Schleier- macher sees and does not see the unity of the three spheres of things good, of duties, and of virtues; hence they appeared to him to be three aspects of the same object, and he strangely placed them in analogical connection with three spheres of the natural world, the mechanical, the chemical, and the organic. He, too, starting from a double division and a double antithesis, ideal and temporal, of knowledge and exposition (Darstellen), arrived at a quadruple division of the virtues, into wisdom and love, discretion and perseverance, which seemed to him to coincide with the four Platonic virtues, of ^>p6vrjcr^, Si/caioavvrj, aw^poavvij, and dvbpeia, or with the four cardinal virtues derived from them, to which would correspond the four duties: of right, of vocation, of love, and of conscience.1 After this, it would be superfluous to proceed to enumerate the ethical systems of contemporary philosophy, noteworthy neither for the ingenuity of their artificial deductions nor for the grandeur of their paradoxes.2 IV. The very copious empirical element that /r.
questions.
fills the books on the Philosophy of the practical 1 In the Entwurf e. Systems d. Sittenlehrc (in Werke, sec. iii. vol. v.), and cf. the collected writings in Werke, iii. I.
3 For example, F. Paulsen, System der Ethik, Leipzig, 1906.
1 64 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT. and the attempt to treat it philosophically have also had the injurious effect of distracting their authors from entering deeply into the problems of true and proper philosophy, to which the practical activity gives rise. Thus a history of the aforesaid aberrations would be as rich as a history of the speculation as to the will would be poor. The problem of the theoretic element in the volitional act, or of the theoretic phase of deliberation, has not been developed as it deserved, and as the important pages of the third and seventh books of the Ethica Nico- machea seemed to augur. The question, too, of the priority of the will over the concepts of the useful and of the good and of the practical judgments, is hardly touched by a philosopher here and there, and the Herbartian theory of practical judgments failed to excite any fervour of examination, criticism, or opposition. The concept of good will and of good intention, to which Kant gave a prominent place, is not discussed profoundly, save by Hegel, who goes deeply into the difficult problems of abstract and concrete intention in the introduction and in the second section of the Philosophy of Law. The other problem, as to the possibility or impossi bility of willing without full knowledge, was ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 165 not adequately treated after Descartes and Spinoza.
In Descartes are also to be found the most The practical nature of error m acute observations as to the practical nature of error. After having stated that it is impossible that God should have given to man any faculty that was not perfect of its kind, he asks himself: " D'ou est-ce done que naissent mes erreurs? Cest a savoir, de cela seul que la volonte', ttant beaucoup plus ample et plus e'tendue que lentende- ment, je ne la contiens pas dans les memes limites, mais que je Intends aussi aux choses que je nentends pas; auxquelles ttant de soi indifferent e, elle sdgare fort aisdment, et choisit le faux pour le vrai et le mal pour le bien: ce qui fait que je me trompe et je peche" Errors arise from the concourse of two causes, the faculty of knowing. and the faculty of choice: " car pour Pentendc- ment seul je n assure ni ne nie aucune chose, mais je concois seulement les idtes des choses que je puis assurer ou nier" 1 For Descartes the affirmation was an act of the will, and here perhaps lies his mistake and the mistake of those who have followed him in this theory (Rosmini for example); that is to say, they have mistaken the affirmation, which is theoretical, 1 Mtdit. iv.; and Rlponses aux 3™" et aux 5™' object.
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for the communication, which is practical, or they have taken as being of the same degree the general will that is in affirmation through the unity of the spirit, and the particular will that is in error. Spinoza opposes Descartes' theory of error, but in conformity with the deter ministic nature of his philosophy, his criticism relates only to the point as to whether the will can be the cause of error when it is not more than a mere abstraction or ens rationis; hence errors or the p articular es volitiones can be deter mined, not indeed by the will and by liberty, but a causis externis.1 The consciousness of the introduction of the will into the theoretical spirit as production of error has been affirmed by Schleiermacher as well as by Rosmini: 2 "It is the will (he writes) that conceals men from themselves: the judgment cannot err if it turn its gaze really upon itself."3 Baader frankly reduced incredulity to ill-will and moral cor ruption.4 Practical taste. As to the concept of an immediate form of practical discrimination, independent of the 1 Epist. in Opera> ed. Gfrorer, p. 523.
2 Cf., among other places, Logica, §§ p, 278 sq.; FiL d. diritto 3 Afonologen, in Werke, i. 363.
4 Cf. Jodl, Gesch. d. Eth. ii. pp. 131-132.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 167 intellectual judgment, it is to be remarked that the faculty of taste in Gracian and in other thinkers of the seventeenth century l has a prac tical rather than a theoretical origin, and that the sentimentalists of Ethic (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and others) were led to posit a moral tact or sense. Before Herbart talked of a moral taste (sittlicher Geschmack*) Jacobi, who saw better than others the analogy between practical and aesthetic facts, had written: " The science of the good, like the science of the beautiful, is subject to the condition of taste, without which nothing can be decided, and beyond which nothing can be carried. The taste for the good, like that for the beautiful, is formed by means of models of excellence, and original acts are always the work of genius. By means of genius, nature gives laws to art, both as regards the good and the beautiful. Both are liberal arts; they do not allow themselves to be lowered to the level of mechanical arts and placed at the service of industry." 3 V. With the mention of a few facts and v. The names, it can be proved that the function of the feeling. term " feeling " in the history of philosophy 2 Allg. pract. Phil. pp. 9-22.
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has been as shown above. We have already said that the peculiarity of the practical form has been asserted by the use of the word " feel ing " or similar denominations ("moral sense," " conscience," and the like), especially by the Scottish School, in opposition to intellectualist re ductions. Jacobi appealed to the feeling of duty (Gefuhl der Pflichf) or conscience in his ethical discussions. In our day, too, it has been affirmed (by Simmel * and others), in opposition to abstract and imperative Ethics, that the practical decision is the product of feeling and is not definable by theoreticians. But the principal cause of the importance attached to feeling in the eighteenth century was the aesthetic problem. This is seen in Dubos's book, in the English sentimentalists (who approach the ideas of virtue and of beauty, treating of the moral sense and of the beautiful), and, finally, in the doctrines of Leibnitz himself and of his school, as to confused cognition, which led to the Aesthetica of Baumgarten. We owe The the word and the concept of feeling (Gefuhl and sometimes also Empfindung) principally to the Leibnitzian - Wolfians and to the German thinkers under the influence of Wolff (Mendels sohn, Tetens, Sulzer, Riedel). By means of the 1 Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, Berlin, 1892-93.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 169 speculation of Jacobi, on the other hand, feeling Schlcierwas called upon to fulfil the functions of a true mocker. and proper metaphysical organ. He had demon strated in a rigorous and irrefutable manner that the form of the empirical sciences and of the abstract intellect, since it proceeds by nexus of cause and effect, is incapable of attaining to the infinite, and had assigned the affirmation of God to the " sense of the supersensible," to " immediate knowledge," and to " feeling." After Jacobi, the same position was assumed by Schleiermacher, who maintained that it was im possible to know God by means of the intellect and to treat Him as an object, since He is in difference of thought and being. He can be known only by feeling, which is indifference of all determinate functions of ideal and real, of thought and being. The neocriticists and agnostics of to-day, with their appeal to feeling in all truly philosophical questions, are followers, often unconscious and certainly less coherent, of Jacobi and Schleiermacher.
The concept of feeling in the Kantian philo- Kant. sophy can be said to derive its importance from the meeting of two unsatisfied wants, namely, that which sought a concept for the aesthetic activity and that which sought a 1 7o PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PI.
forma mentis proper to philosophy. Indeed, the Critique of Judgment corresponds to feeling, the first part of which consists of an inquiry into the nature of the beautiful and of art. The second part (critique of the theological judgment) is an anticipation of the concrete concept, or of that organ of speculative thought which the Critique of Pure Reason had not dis covered.
Feeling, therefore, cannot but lose importance in the Hegelian philosophy, which makes of art a form of knowledge, and of the teleological judgment the logic of the idea or philosophical logic, resolving also in it the demand of Jacobi, whose feeling or immediate knowledge is shown to be logical knowledge and supreme mediation. In Hegel feeling is nothing but a class of spiritual facts, the lowest of all, that in which theory and practice are still indistinct. But this class has a merely psychological value in his system, not philosophical and real (which is not clearly recognised by him). Indeed, feel ing, which was absolute knowledge for Jacobi and for Schleiermacher, is placed, not in the sphere of the absolute spirit, nor in that of the objective or practical spirit, but in the subjective spirit, or Psychology. The " doctrine ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 171 of the three faculties " (Dreivermogenslekre], as was called that elaborated from Mendelssohn to Kant and promulgated in the Kantian philo sophy, did not, however, remain without oppo nents in the nineteenth century; from Krug (1823) to the youthful Fichte, and in more opponents of the doctrine recent times Brentano (1874). Krug's confuta- of the three faculties.
tion is wrongly combated by Hamilton and Krus- discredited by Brentano, for it proceeds with perfect correctness, and is founded on the correct philosophical principle that there are no other activities of the spirit conceivable, save those directed either inwardly or outwardly (immanent or theoretical and transcendent or practical), and that therefore there is no place for feeling, which would be a mixture of the two activities, and consequently a failure of direction or inactivity, nothing, therefore, but a poor, rudimentary knowing or willing, that is, a psychological class, not a philosophical category.
Brentano, returning in a measure to Descartes, constructs « the doctrine of the three faculties in a different way, determining them as represen tation (to which he makes art and the aesthetic activity correspond), judgment (to which corre sponds science), and love and hate (to which i;2 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL corresponds the practical). Feeling, therefore, does not find a place of its own in the psyche, and that which is wont to be called feeling is either representation, or love and hate. Brentano shows himself inferior to Krug in the philosophical demonstration of the incon ceivability of this form of the spirit, but he has the merit of having substituted certain positive elements for the indeterminate word " feeling," although the function exercised by feeling in the development of philosophical thought is more important than Brentano succeeds in perceiving, for among other things he ignores and fails to recognize the relation of the concept of feeling to the demands of speculative thought.1 1 For the doctrine of feeling see, chiefly, Volkmann, Lehrb. d. Psychol. (Cothen, 1885), ii. pp. 301-311; F. Brentano, Psychol. (Leipzig, 1874), i., ii. c. 5; cf. Ursprzmg sitt. Erkennt. (Leipzig, 1889) pp. 51-55; A. Palme, Sulzer's Psychol. ^i. d. Anjange d. Dreivermogenslehre (Berlin, 1905). Cf. also Croce, Estetica, pp. 226-228, 4th ed.
SECOND SECTION THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS DIALECTIC I NECESSITY AND LIBERTY OF THE VOLITIONAL ACT THE relations of the practical form with the The problem freedom.
other forms of the spirit having been examined, it is now necessary to re-enter, so to speak, the interior of the volitional activity, and enclose our selves within it, that we may study its mode of development, its rhythm, its dialectic. We shall no longer ask, therefore, whether the practical activity precede or follow knowledge, or exactly what knowledge it follows and what it precedes, what the volition is in relation to events, what the practical concept or judgment, and the like. But we shall ask what are good and evil, the passions and the forces that dominate them, desires and aspirations; and in the first place (this being the problem that opens the series and gives the key for the solution of the others) what are the freedom and necessity of the volitional act.
Freedom of willing and freedom of action: criti cism of such distinction.
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This problem of freedom and necessity (that is to say, whether the will be free or determined) has seemed to be and is, from a certain point of view, most weighty and complicated, and we shall soon see why this is so. But at this point, owing to the premises that we have already laid down in our preceding treatises, and also in the part of the present treatise that has already been developed, it will be convenient to solve it with relative expedition.
First of all, we have been able to eliminate the distinction that is wont to be made between freedom of willing and freedom of action, with the duplicity of the problem thus entailed. I ndeed we know that volition and action coincide, and that it is impossible to conceive either a volition which is not at the same time action, or an action which is not at the same time volition, and that in consequence there cannot be freedom of willing on the one hand and freedom of action on the other. All the instances of the one that are brought forward can be reduced to the other, provided that the word " freedom " be not used in an improper and metaphorical manner. For example, a paralytic (they say) wills to get up and run; his spirit is free, but his action is restrained; he has freedom of willing, but not of action. But ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 175