to PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
the poor sickly Jew; they sought that Plato and that Spinoza, who are not Plato or Spinoza, but man, the spirit, universal being. The remedy proposed will therefore seem not only useless, but actually harmful; for in an inquiry whose very object is to surpass the empirical ifcself, is offered the aid of a multiplicity of selves, thus increasing the tumult and the confusion, where there should be peace and silence; offering, in exchange for the universal that was sought, something worse than the individual, namely, the general, which is an arbitrary complex of mutilated individualities.
It may seem, however, that the result of such and deduction.,.,.
an inquiry as to the form and the universality of consciousness would merely possess the value of a statement of fact, not different from any other statement, as when we say, for instance, that the weather is rainy, or that Tizio has married. If these two last facts be indubit able, because well observed, in like manner indubitable, because likewise well observed, will be an affirmation concerning the universal con sciousness. And since both affirmations are true, there is certainly no difference between them, or between truth and truth, considered as such. But since single and contingent facts, like the i ACTIVITY IN GENERAL n two adduced in the example, are single and contingent, precisely because they have not their own reason in themselves, and because the universal is the universal, precisely because it is a sufficient reason to itself, it clearly results that we cannot assume that truth has been definitely established from the universal standpoint of con sciousness, save when the reason for this also has been seen, that is to say until that aspect has been simply enunciated and asserted, as in the case of a single fact. To affirm the existence of the practical form of activity, side by side with the theoretical, means to deduce the one from the other, and both from the unity of the spirit and of the real. We do not intend to withdraw ourselves from this duty and exigency; and if we limit ourselves here at the beginning to the assertion of its existence and to the demonstra tion that the arguments brought against it are unfounded, we do so for didascalic reasons, certain that in due course we shall be able to free this assertion from what it may contain of provisional, that is to say, from the character itself of assertion.
The doctrines which deny the practical form Theories -which oi the spirit are and cannot but be of two ticaifon* of fundamental kinds, according to the double 12 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
possibility offered by the proposition itself which they propose to refute. The first doctrine affirms that the practical form is not spiritual activity; the second that although it be spiritual activity, yet it is not in any way distinguishable from the already recognized theoretic form of the spirit. The second, so to speak, denies to it specific, the first generic character. The practical Those who maintain the first of these theses as a fact of.
unconsciousness, say i — We are unconscious of the will at the moment of willing and during its real develop ment. This consciousness is only attained after one has willed, that is to say, after the volitional act has been developed. Even then, we are not conscious of the will itself, but of our repre sentation of the will. Therefore the will, that is to say the practical activity, is not an activity of the spirit. Since it is unconscious, it is nature and not spirit. The theoretic activity which follows it is alone spiritual.
critique. Were we, however, to allow this argument to pass, the result would be that none of the activities of the spirit would belong to the spirit, that they would all be unconscious and all, there fore, nature. Indeed, the activity of the artist, at the moment when he is really so, that is to say in what is called the moment of artistic ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 13 creation, is not conscious of itself: it becomes conscious only afterwards, either in the mind of the critic or of the artist who becomes critic of himself. And it has also often been said of the activity of the artist, that it is unconscious; that it is a natural force, or madness, fury, divine inspiration. Est Deus in nobis; and we only become conscious of the divinity that burns and agitates us when the agitation is ceasing and cooling begun. But what of the activity of the philosopher? It may seem strange, but it is precisely the same with the philosopher. At the moment in which he is philosophizing, he is unconscious of his work; in him is God, or nature; he does not reflect upon his thought, but thinks; or rather the thing thinks itself in him, as a microbe living in us nourishes itself, reproduces itself and dies: so that sometimes the philosopher has also seemed to be seized with madness. The consciousness of his philo sophy is not in him at that moment; but it is in the critic and in the historian, or indeed in him self a moment after, in so far as he is critic and historian of himself. And will the critic or the historian at least be conscious? No, he will not be so either, because he who will afterwards criticize the historico-critical work is conscious 14 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
of it, or he himself, in so far as he criticizes him self, and by objectifying himself occupies a place in the history of criticism and of historiography. In short, we should never be conscious in any form of the spiritual activity.
But this negation is founded on a false idea of consciousness: spontaneous is confused with reflex consciousness, or that which is intrinsic to one activity with that which is intrinsic to another, which surpasses the first and makes of it its object. In such a sense we can certainly not be conscious of the will, save in the repre sentation which follows it, as we are not conscious of a poem, save at the moment of criticizing it. But there is also consciousness in the act itself of him who reads or composes a poem, and he " is conscious " (there is no other expression) of its beauty and of its ugliness, of how the poem should and of how it should not be. This consciousness is not critical, but is not therefore less real and efficacious, and without it internal control would be wanting to the formative act of the poet. Thus also there is conscious ness in the volitional and practical act as such: we are not aware of this act in a reflex manner, but wre feel, or, if you will, we possess it Without it there would be no result. It is i ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 15 therefore developed in moments or alternatives of happiness and of unhappiness, of well-being and of malaise, of satisfaction and of remorse, of pleasure and of pain. If this be uncon sciousness, we must say that unconsciousness is consciousness itself.
The practical activity may appear to be nature Nature and in respect of the theoretical, but not as some- activity.
thing without the spirit and opposed to it, but as • a form of the spirit opposed to another form. ^Esthetic contemplation has in like manner, as has already been mentioned, appeared to be a natural force creating the world of intuition, which the philosophical activity of man afterwards understands and recreates logically. Hence art can be called nature (and has indeed been so called), and conversely philosophy has been called spirituality. This gives rise to the further problem: whether it be correct to con sider nature (it is convenient so to call it) that which has afterwards been recognized in sub stance as spiritual activity; or whether the concept and the name of spirit should not be reserved for that which is truly altogether outside the spirit, and whether this something placed, altogether outside the spirit truly exists. This point does not concern us here, although we 16 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
Reduction of the practical form to the theoretical.
are much disposed to admit that one of the mainstays of that absurd conception of nature as of the extra-spiritual is precisely the practical or volitional form of the spirit, so conspicuously different from the theoretical form and from the subforms of the same. We do not therefore hold those philosophers to have been so completely in the wrong, who have identified nature and will, for they have thus at any rate discovered one aspect of the truth.
Passing to the second thesis, which does not place the will outside the spirit, but denies to it the distinction between practical and the theoretical forms and affirms that the will is thought, there is nothing to be objected to it, provided that, as is often the case, " thought " be taken as synonymous with " spirit." In this case, as in that where it is affirmed that art is thought, we need only inquire, what form of thought is the will, as in the other what form of thought is art. It is not, for instance, logical or historical thought, and the will is neither imaginative, logical nor historical thought: if anything, it must be volitional thought.
But we have the genuine form of this thesis in the affirmation that the will is the intelligence itself, that to will is to know, and that action ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 17 practically well conducted is truth. This thesis would not have arisen, had it not found support in the real situation of things (and what this support is will be seen when studying the relation of the practical with the theoretic activity, and the complicated process of deliberation). But, when tested here independently, it proves to be unsustainable.
We must not oppose to it the usual observa- critique. tions as to the lack of connection between great intellectual and great volitional development, or the cases of those theoreticians who are practically quite ineffectual, of philosophers who are bad governors of States, of the "very learned" who are not "men" and the like; for the reason already given, that an observation is not a philo sophical argument, but a fact which itself has need of an explanation, and when this has been done, it may serve as proof of the philosophical theory, but can never be substituted for it. But it is well to recall to memory the quite peculiar character of the will and the practical activity in respect of knowledge. Intellectual light is cold, the will is hot. When we pass from theoretic contemplation to action and to the practical, we have almost the feeling of generating, and sons are not made with thoughts and words. With i8 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
the greatest intellectual clearness, we yet remain inert, if something does not intervene that rouses to action, something analogous to the inspiration that makes run a shiver of joy and of voluptuous ness through the veins of the artist. If the will be not engaged, every argument, however plausible it may seem, every situation, however clear, remains mere theory.
The education of the will is not effected with theories or definitions, aesthetic or historical culture, but with the exercise of the will itself. We teach how to will as we teach how to think, by fortifying and intensifying natural disposi tions, by example, which suggests imitation, by difficulties to be solved (practical problems), by rousing energetic initiative and by disciplining it to persist. When an act of will has taken place, no argument will extinguish it. As an illness is not to be cured with reasons, so an affective and volitional state cannot be altered by these means. Reasoning and knowledge may and certainly do assist, but they do not constitute the ultimate and determining moment. The will alone acts upon the will, not in the sense that the will of one individual can act upon that of another (which is merely a fact among the facts perceived by him), but in the sense that ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 19 the will of the individual himself, causing the previous volition to enter upon a crisis, dissolves it and substitutes for it a new practical synthesis, with a new volition.
The evident paradox of the thesis which The practical as thought identifies without any distinction thought and which realizes itself. Recogwill, theory and practice, has caused it to be «*'«>» */** autonomy.
modified and to be produced in another form, expressed in the definition; [that the will is thought in so far as it is translated into act, ±_ thought in so far as it is imprinted upon nature, thought when held so firmly before the mind as to become action, and so on.) Now it remains to determine what may be the relation between thought and will, and when this has been done, we shall see what is exact and what inexact in the above formulae, of translating, imprinting, and holding fast. These formulae are all logically vague, however imaginative they may be. But what is important to note here is that with the new turn given to the thesis that denies the peculiarity of the practical activity, this same peculiarity is unconsciously affirmed, because that transforming, that imprinting, that holding fast, which did not exist in the simple theory, conceal precisely the will. Thus the ultimate form of the negation comes to join hands with that of the 20 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL affirmation, and we can consider undisputed the existence of a particular form of the spirit, which is the practical activity. We must now examine the relation of this form with the other from which it has been distinguished.
II NEGATION OF THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FEELING IN affirming the existence of the practical form The practical activity and of activity, we have had in view only the theoretical *fa so-caiied third spiritual form and have demonstrated that the one cannot form: feeling, be absorbed and confused in the other, and we have referred only to the theoretic form, when announcing our intention of determining the relations of the practical with the other forms of the spirit. This seems but little correct, and in any case not exhaustive, because there are or may be other non-theoretical forms of the spirit, into which the practical form could be resolved.
Of these it would be necessary to take account.
And not to beat too long about the bush, that of which in this case it is question, is the form vi feeling^ the last or intermediary of the three forms into which it is customary to divide the spiritual activity: representation, feeling, tendency; thought, feeling, will. Attempts have not been wanting to reduce tendency or will to 21 22 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
feeling, or, as is said, to a sentimental reaction from perceptions and thoughts. In fact there is hardly a treatise of philosophy of the practical without a preliminary study of the relations between the will and feeling. We cannot, then, escape from the dilemma; either we must recognize the omission into which we have fallen and hasten to correct it, or else make explicit the supposition that may be contained in that omission (which would thus be intentional and conscious), that a third general form of the spirit, or a form of feeling, does not exist. We have adopted precisely this last position, and it there fore becomes incumbent upon us briefly to expose the reasons for which we hold that the concept of feeling must disappear from the system of the spiritual forms or activities. Various mean- Feeling may and has been understood in ings of the..
•word feeling, as various ways, some of which do not at all concern a psychological class. our thesis. In the first place, the word " feeling " has been used to designate a class of psychical facts constructed according to the psychological and naturalistic method. Thus it has happened that, with various times and authors, all the most rudimentary, tenuous, and evanescent manifestations of the spirit have been called " feelings," slight intuitions (or sensations as ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 23 they are called), not yet transformed into percep tions, slight perceptions, slight tendencies and appetites, in fact all that forms, as it were, the base of the life of the spirit. The name has thus, on the other hand, also been given to psychical processes and conditions, in which various forms follow one another or alternate in relation to a material empirically limited. Such are what are called feelings of " fatherland," " love," "nature," "the divine." Nothing forbids the formation of such classes and the use of that denomination, but as has already been declared in relation to the psychological method, they are of no use to philosophy, which not only does not receive them within its limits, but does not occupy itself with them at all, save to reject them when they pre sent themselves, as philosophical psychology or psychological philosophy. To classify is not to think philosophically, and philosophy on the one hand does not recognize criteria of small and great, of weak and strong, of more and of less, and a small or smallest thought, a small or smallest tendency, is for it thought and tendency and not feeling at all; on the other, it does not admit complicated processes without resolving these into their simple components. Thus the feeling of love or of patriotism, and the others 24 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
made use of in the example, are revealed to philosophy as series of acts of thought and of will, variously interlaced. Let the psychologists, then, keep their classes and sub-classes of feeling. We, for our part, not only do not dream of dis possessing them of such a treasure, but shall continue to draw from it, when necessary, the small change of ordinary conversation. Feeling as a There also exists another meaning of the state of the spirit. word "feeling," of which, at present at any rate, we do not take account. This appears when the word is used to designate the state of the spirit or of one of the special forms of the spirit; we should indeed term these more correctly the states, since the spirit in this case, as is known, is polarized in two opposite terms, usually denominated pleasure and pain. Indubitably these two terms can also be taken as psychological (and are thus included in the preceding case). Hence it results that pleasure and pain are represented by psycho logists as the two extremes of a continuous series, in which there is a passage from the one to the other term by insensible increases and gradations. But we must also recognize that this psycho logical representation is not the only one possible, and indeed is not truly the real one, and that the two terms have their place and their proper ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 25 meaning in the philosophy of the spirit. They are, as has been said, opposites; and are differentiated, not only by a more and a less, by a greatest and a least, but also by the special character of distinction that opposites possess. The doctrine of opposites and of opposites in the practical activity of the spirit does not, however, appertain to this part of our exposition. In denying feeling, we do not here deny the doctrine of opposites, and that psychology of the states of the spirit which is founded upon it, but the doctrine of feeling considered as a particular form of activity.
The conception of feeling as a spiritual activity Function of the . concept of fee lhas answered to a want of research, which may be ing in the History of described as provisional excogitation. Whenever philosophy.- the in de term inate.
thought has found itself face to face with a form or subform of spiritual activity, which it was not possible either to eliminate or to absorb in forms already recognized, the problem to be solved has been endorsed with that word " feeling." With many this has passed for a solution. Feeling, in fact, has been the indeterminate in the history of philosophy, or rather the, not yet fully deter mined, the half-determined.
Hence its great importance as an expedient for the indication of new territories to conquer, 26 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
and as a stimulus against remaining obstinately shut up in old and insufficient formulae. But hence also its fate: the problem must not be exchanged for its solution, the indeterminate or semi -determinate must be determined. When ever the determination of the forms and subforms of the spirit has not been given in a complete manner, the category of feeling will reappear (and it will be beneficial); but at the same time will reappear the duty of exploring it and of understanding what is concealed beneath it, or at least what unsolved difficulty has caused it to reappear afresh.
Now we have already met with the concept of feeling on more than one occasion, when investi gating the philosophy of the theoretic spirit, as something supplying a theoretical need outside the theoretic forms generally admitted, or as a special form of theoretic activity. Every time that we have done this, an attentive examination has caused it to disappear before our eyes, and has generally helped us, either to discover some thing previously unknown, or to confirm the necessity of contested categories. Feeling as Thus it happened that when a special (Esthetic herald of the herald of the function was not recognized and it was attempted to explain it, either intellectualistically, as nothing orm ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 27 but an inferior form of philosophy, or historically, as a reproduction of the historical and natural datum, or almost as the satisfaction of certain volitional wants (hedonistic theory), the view of art as neither a form of the intellect nor of perception nor of will, but of feeling, was an advance, as also was the appeal to men dl feeling to recognize and to judge it. As a result of this insistence, it was eventually discovered that art possessed an absolutely simple and ingenuous theoretic form, without either intellectual or historical contents, the form of the pure intuition which is that of the aesthetic and artistic activity. Whoever returns to treat of art as a product of feeling, after this discovery of the pure intuition, falls back from the determinate to the semi- determinate, and is at the mercy of all the dangers which arise from it.
The theory of historiography owes its progress AS herald of the intuitive in like manner to the demonstration that it is element in Historicimpossible to deduce the historical statement from concepts, but that we must deduce it in final analysis from an immediate feeling of the real, that is to say, from the intuitive element, which inevitably exists in every historical recon struction, as in every perception. On the other hand, and in altogether another sense, reacting 28 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
against the false idea of an extra - subjective historical objectivity, to be found in the mere reproduction of the datum, it was made evident that no historical narration is possible without the reaction of feeling in respect to the datum. Thus was discovered the indispensability of the intellective element in the historical affirmation. Whoever has recourse to feeling as a factor in historiography, after this complete constitution of the historical judgment, returns from the clear to the confused, from light, if not to darkness, then to twilight. Feeling as The concept of feeling has also been of capital herald of the pure concept in importance in the progress of the Logic of philosophical Logic. philosophy. For how could we begin to ex plain that philosophy is constructed with a method altogether different from that of the exact disciplines (natural sciences and mathe matics), without denying to those sciences the capacity of conquering the supreme truth, the true truth, full reality, and recognizing such capacity on the other hand to a special function called feeling or immediate knowledge? That function was void, that is to say, undetermined, because defined in a negative and not in a positive manner: feeling was something different from the abstract and arbitrary procedure of the i ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 29 exact sciences, from the abstract intellect, but its true nature was unknown. When this was at last known it was discovered that it was not a question of " feeling " or of " immediate knowledge," but of the intellect itself, in its genuine and uncontaminated nature, its pure and free activity, of intellect as reason, of thought as speculative thought, of that " immediate know ledge," which is true, intrinsic, perpetual media tion. Whoever henceforth returns to feeling, after the discovery of the pure or speculative concept, and believes it to be the creator of philosophy and of religion, fighting with it against the natural and mathematical sciences, behaves as he who should wish to return to-day to the flint-lock, for the excellent reason that it was an advance upon the bow and the catapult. Thus those who invoke feeling in philosophy are henceforth a little ridiculous. This does not imply that they were not at one time to be taken seriously, for this concept has been of great pro visional assistance and has been as it were the compass of the new idea of philosophy.
The same will be the case in the investigation Analogous function in that we have begun of the practical form of the the Philosophy of the practical.
spirit and of the problems to which it gives rise. This concept of feeling has been mingled with 30 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.