2;o PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL rr.
An obvious confirmation of this theory is also the empirical observation often made, that the men who lose themselves in desires are rather poets than men of action, dreamers rather than actors; and in respect to this, that poets who seem to have the soul overflowing with energetic plans, magnanimous loves, and fierce hatreds are the most incapable in the field of action, and the worst of captains in practical struggles; because those plans, those loves and hates, are not will, but desires, and desires already weakened as such, because they are no longer in process of volitional synthetization, but have become the objects of contemplation and of dream. He who reads the biographies of artists, or has dealings with artists in daily life, almost always has the impression that their gusts of passion are nothing but poetry about to break forth, as a green bud that opens and breaks the brown sheath. And if this process be painful, that is because every travail of birth is painful. One sees, indeed, how everything generally ends par des chansons. A fine poem and the sufferer is calm again.
This also explains why individual actions and practical collective movements are accompanied with hopes, beliefs, and myths. These have no ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 271 logical or historical truth, but it is on the other hand impossible to criticize them, because they are not error, but fantastic projection of the state of soul of individuals and groups of indi viduals in action, and testify to the existence of desires ready to transform themselves into will and action. Utopias are poetry, they are not practical acts; but beneath that poetry there is always the reality of a desire that is a factor of future history. Hence it also happens that poets are thought of as seers, when the Utopia of to-day becomes the reality of the morrow. The Utopian and semipoetic Address of the Italian patriots to the Directory of June 18, I799,1 the not less Utopian Proclamation of Rimini of 1815, the song of Manzoni, in which rang out the fateful verse, We shall not be free if we are not one, will become, for the Italians of 1860, effective action and historical event.
Pure intuition, ingenuous representation Q{ Art as the pure representation reality, representation of feeling, lyricism and of becoming personal intonation, are then all equivalent artistic form of thought.
formulae, all of them definitions of the aesthetic activity and of art. And it would be superfluous to repeat that art thus characterized remains 1 B. Croce, Relazioni dei patrioti napoletani col Direttorio e col Consolato e F idea delF unita italiana, Napoli, 1902, pp. 69-73.
272 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL the concrete form of the superior theoretical grades of the spirit. In fact, logical thought or concept is also volition, owing to the unity of the spirit, and the representation of such voli tion is the logos made flesh, the concept that incorporates itself in language, palpitating with the drama of its becoming. What word of man is there that is not personally and lyrically coloured, whether he communicate the truth of science or narrate the incidents of life? And how could we deny a place among the dramas that agitate human life and art portrays, to that drama of dramas, which is the drama of thought and of the historical comprehension of the real?
VII HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS I. FOR the reasons stated in their place, a history The problem of freedom.
of the concept of freedom would end by becom ing almost a general history of philosophy. Denied in different ways in the mechanistic and deterministic conceptions (from the Stoics to Spinoza), and in the theological and arbitraristic (from Epicurus to St. Augustine and the mystics), that concept afterwards continually assumed a more and more conciliatory form; an indica tion that the question must be put in an alto gether different way. This movement culminated in the Kantian theory, in which freedom, de fended against the psychologists, is withdrawn from natural causality and affirmed a priori, as causality by means of freedom; but, at the same time, Kant did not succeed in fully justifying it, owing to his failure in the solution of the antitheses, the defect of the Kantian philosophy, which never really became a system. The 274 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
embarrassments and absurdities to which the unsolved antithesis between liberty and causality gives rise, are sufficiently exemplified in a pro position to be found in the Critique of Practical Reason: " It would be possible to foresee what man will do in the future, if we possessed all the facts; yet he would be perfectly free."1 But notwithstanding these contradictions and em barrassments, the energetic affirmation of the principle of freedom by Kant (which had an altogether special certitude in Kant, in respect to the other two postulates of the practical reason, God and immortality, from which in this respect it was distinguished) helped to make prevalent the conviction of the impossibility of eliminating that concept or of escaping from it, and made of it the field of battle, where the fortunes of philosophy were decided. The problem of the* freedom of willing is really solved or near to a solution, in those philosophies which do not fatigue them selves with it as a particular problem, but treat of it as something to be understood of itself, provided there be a non- mechanistic conception of reality, such as would not need special defence. This happens, not only with senti mentalists and mystics such as Jacobi and ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 275 Schleiermacher, but also and above all in the Hegelian philosophy. Perhaps no philosopher has been less occupied with the problem of liberty than Hegel, just because he was always occupied with it. The will is free (he contents himself with saying); freedom is the fundamental de termination of the will, as gravity is of matter; thus as gravity is matter itself, so is freedom the will. Hegel consequently saw true in the contest between arbitrarism and determinism, recognizing in determinism the merit of having given its value to the content, the datum, in opposition to the certainty of abstract auto- determination, so that freedom understood as free will is considered to be illusion. Free will is both determined and indetermined.1 But how Hegel could conciliate this theory of freedom with the mechanistic concept of nature that per sists in him is another question. His failure to attain to this conciliation was perhaps among the reasons that made his profound solution of the antithesis between determinism and indeter- minism seem a vain playing with words.
After Hegel, a return was made to the Kantian doctrine, variously modified, in which is posited, now a double causality, now a com- 276 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
position of diverging forces, now a double point of view, now two worlds, the one in cluded in the other and dominated, the one by the principle of the conservation of energy, the other by that of increase. Such contradictory doctrines are to be found for example in Lotze and Wundt, to the latter of whom belongs the formula that the causal explanation is certainly to be applied to spiritual facts, but a parte post, not a part e ante ^ The philosophy of Bergson repre sents in a certain way a return to the sound idealistic view, which declares that the dilemma of determinism and indeterminism is surpassed.2 The doctrine II. The conception of the relation between bad and good, as reality opposed to reality, is mythological and religious (Parseeism, Manich- aeism, Jewish-Christian doctrine of the devil, etc.). But evil had already begun to reveal itself to the philosophical reflection of the ancients as the unreal, the not being; and this is explicitly affirmed in Neoplatonism. It was not, however, possible to understand this function of unreality, real in its way, without a general dialectical conception, which became very slowly mature. Without a dialectic conception, evil, conceived 1 Lotze, Grundzuge der Ethik (Leipzig, 1884), pp. 26, 30-31; Wundt, Ethik^ (Stuttgart, 1892), pp. 463-464.
2 Essai sur les donntes immtdiates de la conscience (Paris, 1898).
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 277 as unreality, becomes mere illusion, not so much a moment of the real as an equivocation of man philosophizing. This is clearly to be seen in Spinoza, who opposes the full laws of reality to the narrow laws of human nature, saying: Quidquid nobis in natura ridiculum, absurdum aut mahim videtur, id inde venit quod res tan- turn ex parte novimus, totiusque natiirae ordinem et cohaerentium maxima ex parte ignoramus, et quod omnia ex usu nostrae rationis dirigi volumus, cum tamen id, quod malum esse dictat, non malum sit respectu ordinis et legum universae naturae; sed tantum solius nostrae naturae legum respectu. For indeed, if evil, error and wicked ness were something that had essence, God, who is the cause of all that has essence (continues Spinoza), would also be the cause of evil, of error, and of wickedness. But this is not so, because evil is nothing real. Neronis matricidium (he observes) quatenus aliquid positivum compre- hendebat, scelus non erat: nam f acinus externum fecit, simulque intentionem ad trucidendam matrem Orestes habuit, et tamen, saltern ita uti Nero, non accusatnr. Quodnam ergo Neronis scelus? Non ahud q^lam quod hoc facinore ostendit se ingratum, immisericordem ac inobedientem esse. Certum autem est, mhil horum aliquid essentiae exprimere, 278 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
et idcirco Deum eoruni non fuisse causam, licet causa actus et intentionis Neronis fuerit} But Spinoza was not able to determine in what sense Nero was really ungrateful, implacable, and dis obedient, nor in what way such a judgment could be justified, owing to his idea of Substance, not as subject, spirit, activity, but as cause.
Kant did not succeed in understanding the nature of evil; for him good and evil were "the categories of freedom," 2 and the view of Fichte who makes the radical evil to be vis inertiae, laziness (Tragkeit), which is in nature and in man as nature,3 represents progress in respect to the Kantian position. But only with the Hegelian dialectical view of evil, understood as negation, is evil at the same time given its right place; and its unreality, contradiction, which is no longer the product of illusion of thought, but of things themselves, in intimate contradiction with one another, if it be a blemish, is shown to be the blemish, not of human thought, but of reality.4 Decision and III. Free will, too, is not considered as a freedom.
1 Tract, theol. -pol. vi. c. 6; Ethica, p. iv. intr.; Epist. 36 ( Opera, 8 System der Sittenlehre, in Werke, iv. pp. 198-205. 4 See my study: do che e vivo e cib che e morto della filosofia di Hegel ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 279 quality and character of complete liberty, but as its negation, will as contradiction, in the Hegelian philosophy. It was preceded in this respect, not only by Kant, but also by Descartes. Descartes wrote of the decision of indifference: Cette in- difference que je sens lorsque je ne suis point porte1 vers un cote plutot que vers un aiitre par le poids daucune raison est le plus bas degrd de ma liberty et fait plutot paraitre un dtfaut dans la connaissance quune perfection dans la volontd: car si je connaissais toujours clairement ce qui est vrai et ce qui est bon, je ne serais jamais en peine de de'libe'rer quel jugement et quel choix je devrais faire; et ainsi je serais entierement libre, sans jamais etre indifferent?
Among the false formulae of the freedom of choice can be mentioned that of Rosmini, who calls it bilateral freedom, or that of performing or not performing a given action.2 But since the spirit cannot be reduced to complete passivity, not to perform a given action is equivalent to performing a different one; and if this other action that presents itself before us be also not willed by us, then it will be another, and so on. Thus it is not a question of bilaterality, but 1 Medit. iv. 2 For example, Compendia di Etica (Roma, 1907), p. 56.
28o PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
of multiplicity of tendencies: not of the choice between two volitions, but of the synthesis of many appetites in one, which is the will or freedom. conscience and We may mention the disputes that have responsibility been preserved in the Memorabilia as to the greater responsibility of him who knows more (or wills more), as compared with him who knows less (or wills less), as to whether he that acts voluntarily be more unjust than he who acts in voluntarily (o e*:a>i> ^7 o aicwv). In this connection it is to be observed that he who voluntarily does not write or read well is certainly more gram matical than he who reads and writes ill through ignorance; and therefore that he who commits injustice while knowing what is just, is more just than he who commits it because he does not know what is just; and that he is better, who says what is false when he knows what is true, than he who says what is false, not knowing what is true. The dispute leads to the celebration of know ledge of self, or, as we should say, of knowing and possessing oneself.1 These thoughts are discussed anew in the Hippias minor, where the multiple difficulties are placed in relief and a conclusion reached that ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 281 does not even satisfy those who propose it.1 It is henceforward clear that the question must be solved in the sense that he who is conscious of sinning is certainly a sinner, whereas he who is not conscious of so doing, does not sin at all; but this being even incapable of sinning is in itself a sin, and places the man who is in such a condition yet a degree lower. In the polemic of Pascal with the Jesuits — who maintained that in order to sin it was necessary to be conscious of one's own infirmity and of the suitable remedy, the wish to be healed and to ask it of God — the Jesuits were theoretically on the side of reason. Croira-t-on, sur votre parole (wrote Pascal), que ceux qui sont ploughs dans I avarice, dans limpu- dicitd, dans les blasphemes, dans le duel, dans la vengeance, dans les vols, dans les sacrileges, aient ve'mtablement le de"sir dembrasser la chastete1, t humilit^ et les autres vertus chrdtiennes? Nevertheless, it is inevitably so, if those acts of theirs are to be judged to be vices (and if they really are so). Hegel places himself on the side of Pascal, who accepts and refers to the follow ing argument and reduction to the absurd: Us seront tous damne's ces demi-pe'cheurs qui ont quel- que amour pour la vertu. Mais pour ces francs- 1 Hifpias minor, 375.
282 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
ptcheurs, sans melange, pleins et acheve's, lenfer ne les tient pas: Us out trompd le diable a force de sy abandonner.1 A reduction to the absurd which is not such: because the formula given as absurd expresses at bottom a very simple truth, which Hegel too stated in his own way, when he said that it was necessary to prefer self-will, evil, the erring Spirit, to the innocence of plants and animals, or of Nature.2 The concept IV. A classical example of the disputes as to of duly.
the principle of the Philosophy of the practical, arising from the consideration of this principle in its empirical formulations, can be furnished from the polemic of Herbart against Kant on the subject of duty. Herbart demonstrated that duty is not an original but a derived concept, and that it appears only when there is disagree ment between the practical ideas and the will? But it would be possible to demonstrate with the same method that the practical ideas are derived concepts, because they do indeed pre suppose the moral will, from the manifestations of which they are constituted by means of abstrac- 1 Pascal, Provinc. I, iv.; Hegel, PhiLd. Rechtes, § 40.
3 Allg. prakt. Phil. pp. 121-122; Einl. i. d. Phil. (trad, ital.), pp.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 283 tion. Herbart was in the right against Kant, but he afterwards let the axe fall on his own feet. The hard formula of the imperative preferred by Kant had already been combated by Frederick Schiller, who accentuated the moment of pleasure, sympathy and enthusiasm in the good action.
As to the other concepts and to the disputes Repentance and remorse.
to which they gave rise, it will be opportune to mention repentance and remorse. Spinoza does not see that it has value as a necessary negative moment, for he declared: Poenitentia virtus non est, sive ex ratione non oritur; sed is qui facti poenitet bis miser, seu impotens est. Nam primo prava cupiditate, dein tristitia vinci se patitur\ and he concludes by assigning to it value for altogether empirical motives. Men rarely live (he says) ex dictamine rationis; and yet re pentance and other similar affections do more good than harm, and if it be necessary to sin in istam partem potius peccandum. Terret vulgus, nisi metuat} But it was Hegel who instituted a regular persecution of the concept of repent ance and remorse. There are certain passages in his works that should be read in connection with this question, in order that we may clearly see how he had an eye to contingent and histori- 284 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
cal events in his criticism. " In the Christian world in general (he writes) there is in force an ideal of the perfect man, who cannot exist as multitude in a people; and if this ideal is found realized in monks, quakers, and such-like pious folk, it must be remarked that a mass of these sad creatures does not constitute a people, just as lice and parasitic plants cannot exist by them selves, but only on an organic body. In order to constitute a people, it would be above all desirable to destroy that lamblike gentleness of theirs, that vanity which is occupied solely with their own persons, the caring for them and holding them dear, and has always before it the image and consciousness of its own excellence. For life in the universal and for the universal demands, not such vile and listless gentleness, but an energetic gentleness, not a thinking of oneself and one's own sins, but of the uni versal and of what should be done for it. To him who nourishes so false an ideal, men must always appear to be affected with weakness and corrup tion, and that ideal to be so constituted that it can never be translated into reality. They attribute importance to trifles, to which no reasonable person pays special attention, and believe that such weaknesses and defects exist, i ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 285 even when they are not remarked. Nor should we admire their greatness of soul, but note rather that their corruption lies precisely in standing still and looking at that which they call weak nesses and errors, and in making out of nothing something that exists. A man with such weak nesses and defects is immediately quit of them, if he do not attach to them importance." The observations that Hegel makes in his ^Esthetic, regarding the type of the Magdalen in Italian art, are in this respect especially curious. " In Italian painting the Magdalen appears, both within and without, as the beautiful sinner; sin in her is as seductive as conversion. But here neither sin nor sanctity are to be taken too seriously. She was pardoned, because she had loved much; she sinned through love and beauty; and the affecting element lies in this, that she has scruples about her love, and beautiful and sen sible as she is, sheds torrents of tears. But her error is not that she has ' loved so much; her beautiful and moving error is precisely that she believes herself to be a sinner, whereas her sensitive beauty gives the impression that she could not have been otherwise than noble and of lofty senses in her love." * 1 Gesch. d. Phil. ii. 240-241; Varies, iib. Aesth. ii. 162-163.
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The doctrine V. The relation between the passions or of the passions.
of the passions.
desires and the will has rather been studied at the moment of strife between the will and the passions, than for itself and within its two terms, although Aristotle had already begun an analysis as to the diversity of appetites or ySouX^o-t? in re spect to the intention or Trpoalpeo-is, observing that the intention relates only to what can be done, whereas the appetition relates also to things that are impossible.1 The opposed schools of the Cynics and Cyrenaics, Stoics and Epicureans, and others such, were chiefly concerned with the antithesis of the passions and the rational will; but the formulae of all these schools, if they have some empirical value as precepts of life more or less suitable for definite individuals, classes and times, possess none or very little for philosophy. Cynics and Cyrenaics, Stoics and Epicureans, they seem rather to be monks following this or that rule than philosophers. The question as to the mode of freeing oneself from the passions and of dominating them, which lingered till the treatises of Descartes and Spinoza, has also a chiefly empirical character. G. B. Vico took up a position opposed to the two opposed degenerations arising from those practical tendencies, that of 1 Eth. Nicom. Bk. iii. cc. 2-3, 1111-1113.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 287 " quenching the senses," and of " making a rule of them." He despised both Stoics and Epi cureans as "monastic or solitary philosophers," and maintained as " a philosopher politician," that it is needful " not to tear away his own nature from man, nor to abandon him in his corruption," but " to moderate the human passions and to make of them human virtues." Rarely has the defence of the passions enjoyed an equally limpid philosophical enunciation; as a rule, and even in Hegel, it has been directed chiefly against certain social tendencies, rather than against philosophical doctrines.2 The absolute abandon ment to the passions or their absolute destruction, are theories that have not had true and proper representatives. — The confusion between the various meanings of the word " passion," under stood now as appetition, or concrete and actual passion, now as a state of the soul (joy and sorrow), now as volitional habit, is to be found in the various treatises that we have already had occasion to record. It is natural that their character of indifference when understood as habits should have often been observed. Thus for Descartes, elles sont toutes bonnes de leur 1 Scienza nuova seconda, degn. 5.
288 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
nature et nous riavons rien a dviter que leurs mauvais usages ou leur exces.1 On the other hand, the erroneous form of the defence of the passions, consisting of making them the preparation or cause of the virtues, is already to be found in the English philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (More, Shaftesbury, etc.); and in the celebrated Fable of the Bees 6"f Mandeville, it assumes the aspect of a paradoxical theory, in which the vices are looked upon as promoters and factors of progress, morality as inefficacious and harmful for this purpose. And La Rochefoucauld had written: " Les vices entrent dans la composition des vertus comme les poisons dans la composition des The doctrine remedes" All these are false or crude forms, in of individuwhich is involved the doctrine of the right to individuality, and they have always constituted and still constitute its danger. This doctrine received its most energetic expression in the romantic and preromantic period, thanks above all to Schleiermacher, after it had been referred to in a rather vague way by Jacobi.3 "For some time" (writes Schleiermacher in the Monologues] " I too was satisfied that I had ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 289 discovered Reason; and venerating equality with the Unique Being as that which is most lofty, I believed that there was one single measure for every case, that action should be in all of them the same, and that each one is distinguished from the other only in so far as it occupies a place of its own in space. I believed that humanity manifested itself differently only in the variety of external facts; but that the internal man, the individual, was not a being peculiarly (eigenthiimlicK) con structed, and that each was everywhere equal to the other." " But afterwards was revealed to me that which instantly raised me to a high state of exaltation: it became clear that every man must represent humanity in his own way, in an alto gether individual combination of its elements, in order that it may manifest itself in every mode, and that everything most different may issue from its bosom and become effectual in the fulness of time and space...Owing to this thought, I felt myself to be a work individually willed and therefore elected by the Divinity and such that it must enjoy a particular form and culture; and the free act to which this thought belongs has collected and intimately joined together the elements of human nature in a peculiar existence."
" While I now do whatever I do according to my 29o PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
spirit and sense, my fancy places before me as very clear proof of the internal determination, a thousand other modes, in which it would be possible to act otherwise without offending the laws of humanity: I rethink myself in a thousand different forms, in order to discover with the greater certainty that which is especially mine."1 Romantic and But this peculiarity (Eigenthumlichkeit\ oppor- •very modern theories. tunely placed in relief by Schleiermacher, and a thought much loved by the Romantics (Herder, Jacobi, G. Humboldt, the Schlegels, etc.), is often seen to degenerate into individual caprice, even in those times, as may be ob served in the sort of caricature which Frederick Schlegel made of the Fichtian I, become the individual I, and in the notorious Lucinde, to which the same Schleiermacher inconsider ately devoted a series of letters of comment and defence. The last offshoots of the Romantics were Max Stirner and Frederick Nietzsche: in the former the value of individuality becomes changed into an affirmation of spasmodic egotism; in the second there is a continuous mixture of true and false, of good and of bad individuality, as is natural in a writer whose ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 291 Eigenthilmlichkeit was rather that of a poet than of a thinker.
VI. We have discussed elsewhere Hegel's The concept of development