concept of development, and his thought as and progress. synthesis of opposites, which essentially belongs to the Hegelian philosophy and has been super ficially 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 philo sophies 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 292 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL 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.1 Finally, the conception of cosmic progress was extraneous to the oriental world, to the Graeco- 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 " disappear ance 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 See the study of Hegel mentioned.
THIRD SECTION UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL THE study of the practical activity in its relations Double result.• precedence of that we made in the first section has removed the theoretical over the pracall doubt as to the thesis that the practical tical and °f 'the practical over activity presupposes the theoretical, or that know- the theoretical. ledge is the necessary precedent of volition and action} 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?1 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 Spirit3 (for this will is 294 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
subsidiary and not constitutive; but if it become constitutive it produces, as has been seen, wilfulness and the theoretical error1), but precisely in the sense of a constitutive will, without which no knowledge would be thinkable. Knowledge, indeed, is knowledge of some thing: 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 re presentations, Philosophy, which is the search for the universal, is not conceivable, nor History, the understanding of the individual. Error of those ( The indubitability of this affirmation, which no •who maintain %.
the exclusive force of sophistry can destroy, renders fallacious either. ^ 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 1 Section I. c. 4.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 295 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 -&n& 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, Schopen hauer) completely tallies with this Thought that does not think because it has not previously 296 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
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 libera tion 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 uncon scious, 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 conscious ness does not reveal. Problem of This however does not mean that the demand the unity of this duality, 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.
Not the duality This connection cannot be the relation or of opposite s..
synthesis ot opposites. 1 he theoretical is not ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 297 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.
Nor can the connection be thought as are Not duality of finite and thought the subdivisions of the theoretic and infinite. 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 298 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
we shall see further on that the forms of the practical are also two), the aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 subdivi sion, 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.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 299 The two forms, theoretical and practical, both Perfect analogy of the two positive, both a connection of finite and infinite, forms, theoretic and practical.
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 (aesthetic 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 corre spondence between art and economic, logical thought and ethicity, historical discrimination and ethical discrimination, empirical concepts and laws of action, and so on.
I f this analogy exclude the possibility of the two Not a parallelism, forms being unequal, it must not, on the other tut a circle. 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 ;oo PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and object.
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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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.
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 know- ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 301 ledge, 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 302 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
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 uncon vertible 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 circu larity that is not vicious; thought and being are not a succession of two finites, but an absolute relation, that is, the Absolute itself. To ex press 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.
critique of the It is well to state again that in consequence the primacy of of the relation and correlation established, all the theoretical or of practical questions as to the primacy of thought or will, reason.
of the contemplative or active life, and speaking ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 303 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 cor relation. 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 hie manebimus optime? Can he arrest life which is raging and demanding to be continued? And if he succeed in suspend ing 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: know ledge 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 New prag matism: life conditioning Philosophy.
304 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
life is now means and instrument. Knowledge serves life and life serves knowledge; the con templative 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.
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 prag- matists 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, ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 305 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.
Finally, with the establishment of the duality- Deductive confirmation of unity of the theoretical and the practical, we have the two forms and deductive demonstrated that which at the beginning Q{ exclusion of the third (feeling}.
the exposition had only been asserted and pre supposed: namely, why a practical form of the spirit must be placed beside the theoretical,1 and why there is no third form beyond these, whether it be called feeling or by any other name.2 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.
X SECOND PART THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS FIRST SECTION THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC DISTINCTION OF THE TWO FORMS IN THE PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS ALL that has been developed in the preceding...or economc book concerns the practical activity in general: form, and the moral or therefore no account has been taken of the ethical form. 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, 3io PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
of which the first may be called utilitarian or economic, the second moral or ethical. insufficiency of In affirming this sub -distinction, we are the descriptive 111 and psyckoiogi- obliged to renounce (as we have already done cal distinction.
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, ex changes, 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 ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 311 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 institu tions 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 undertak ings are subject to moral laws, so that in drawing up accounts there is no knowing where is thaf 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 under stand also the mode of formation of empirical classes. For this reason the psychological method revolves in a circle that is effectively vicious.
3i2 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL „.
Deduction and Neither is it possible to proceed with the the necessity of integrating it method that we shall call deductive solely; that •with induction.
is, we see the necessity of the two sub-forms of the practical activity, which, being the object of the subject and therefore in every way analogous to the activity of the subject, that is, to the theoretical, must have a duplication of forms answering to the duplication of the theoretical activity into aesthetic and logical, and cannot posit the universal practical without positing the individual that shall be its vehicle. This deduc tion, although in every way correct and rigorous, cannot be convincing, save when it is also demonstrated that it responds to fact as revealed by observation, that is, when deduction is also induction, as the speculative method demands. The two forms Leaving, therefore, on this occasion also, the as a fact of as a fact of consciousness, deductive proof to the complete development of the theory, we shall begin by appealing to observation of self, in order that every one may verify in himself the existence of the two different forms of volitional acts, termed by us economic and ethic. £The economic activity is that which wills and effects only what corresponds to the conditions of fact in which a man finds him self; the ethical activity is that which, although it correspond to these conditions, also refers to ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 313 something that transcends them. To the first correspond what are called individual ends, to the second universal ends; the one gives rise to the judgment concerning the greater or less coherence of the action taken in itself, the other to that concerning its greater or less coherence in respect to the universal end, which transcends the individual. ) If we wish to recognize only the moral form of The economic activity, we soon perceive that it draws with it the other, from which it is distinct; for our action, although universal in its meaning, cannot but be something concrete and individually determined. What is put in practice is not morality in universal, but always a determinate moral volition: as Hegel remarked in a different connection, we do not eat fruit in general, but cherries, pears, plums, or, these cherries, these pears, these plums; we hasten to comfort in this or that way an individual, made in this or that way, who finds himself in this or that state of misfortune; we do justice at this or that point of time and space to individual beings on a definite matter. If a good action be not solely our individual pleasure, it must become so: otherwise, how could we carry it out? Thus, by closer examination, we realize that our action 3i4 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
always obeys a rational law, even when its moral law is suppressed, so that, when every inclination that transcends the individual has been set aside, we do not on that account remain the prey of caprice. We shall desire only our own will, we shall follow only our own individual inclination; but, even so, it is necessary to will this will and this inclination coherently, not to undulate between two or more volitions at the same time. And if we succeed in really obtaining our desire, if, while the moral conscience is for a moment suspended within us, we abandon ourselves to the execution of a project of vengeance and attain to it in spite of many obstacles, thus executing a masterpiece of ability, a practical masterpiece; even when, in this case, populus non plaudit, we for our part certainly nos nobis plaudimus, and feel most satisfied, at least so long as lasts the suspension of the moral consciousness; for we have done what we willed to do, we have tasted, though but for a little while, the pleasure of the gods. Whereas if, although we follow our desire, we do something different from it, or mingle several mutually exclusive desires with one, and having decided not to drink wine, for example, in order to obey the advice of the doctor and to remain in good health, we yet yield to ii ACTIVITY IN SPECIAL FORMS 315 the wish to drink it, that pleasure is, so to say, poisoned by preoccupation, the taste is at the same time distaste, unless we succeed in forgetting for some moments the advice of the doctor, or think that very possibly he does not know what he is saying. We continually apply the same criterion to the incidents of life; actions and individuals, of whom we cannot morally approve, drag from us sometimes cries of admiration for the ability with which they have conducted them selves, for the firmness that they display, worthy (as is said) of a better cause. The Epicurean Farinata, who raised himself erect on his red-hot bed, or the impious Capaneus who cursed Jove beneath the rain of punishing fire, obtain from us that esteem which we refuse to those sad souls who lived without infamy and without praise. Art has celebrated in tragedies and poems the strong characters of great criminals, but it has turned to ridicule in comedies little criminals, the violent who show themselves timid, the astute who let themselves be cheated.
As we cannot fail to recognize this form of The ethical form.