its logic. In order to avoid repetition, we must refer to the analysis of the single or historical judgment already given and assume its result, namely, that it is the only judgment in which there is a true and proper distinction between subject and predicate, and that it is composed of an intuitive element (subject) and of an intellectual element (predicate). In like manner the practical judgment is not possible without a clear repre sentation of the act to be judged and a con ception not less clear of what the practical act is in its universality and in its particular forms, and so on, specifying in its various subforms and possibilities of individuation. The judgment is the compenetration of the two elements, the historical synthesis which establishes: Peter has accomplished a useful act in tilling a piece of land of such and such dimensions; Paul has accomplished an action that is not useful in opening a new manufactory of boots, more costly and not better than those already on the market; —Pope Leo III. acted wisely, as custodian of the universal character of the Church of Rome, in consecrating Charles the Frank emperor, thus restoring the empire of the West; — Louis XVI. acted foolishly in not deciding upon a prompt and profound change of the French ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 91 political constitution, and in allowing himself to be afterwards dragged unwilling whither he had not known how to go of his own will. And so on. There are therefore two ways of sinning against the exactitude of the practical judgment: either by not having exact information as to the content of the volitional act to be judged and understood, or by not having an exact criterion of judgment. The first of these errors can be exemplified by those judgments that are so frequently pronounced, without knowledge as to the true sequence of events or without placing oneself in the precise conditions in which the person to be judged found himself. Hence it happens not less often, that when the facts are really known, the precise conditions understood, and the defence of the accused has been heard, the judgment must be altered. A cause of the second error is the substitution (likewise a very common occurrence) of one category of judgment for the other, as when a moral act is praised and admired for its cleverness, or the gestures and the felicitous utterance of a practical man are praised, as though it were a question of judging an actor or reciter. As in art, so in life, differences of judgment arise, not so much from difference of understanding, as 92 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
from these oscillations and undue transpositions of judgments and concepts.
It is likewise superfluous to enter into disputes as to the absoluteness or relativity of the practical judgment, because these have been superseded by the concept of the historical judgment, which is both absolute and relative: absolute for the categories that it applies, relative for the matter, always new, to which it applies them. importance of The importance of the practical judgment for judgment. practical lite is of the greatest, and when we are warned: nolite judicare or noli nimium judicare, what are meant are not true acts of judgment, but certain psychical conditions, which reveal slight spiritual seriousness. /And the importance is of the greatest, precisely because the nature of the judgment is historical, and as we know already, historical knowledge, knowledge, that is, of actual situations, is the basis of future actions^ For this reason every man who is strongly voli tional is continually submitting himself and others to judgment; for this reason we feel the need of talking to others about our own actions, in order to be upheld by the spirit of others in forming a just judgment. This is the origin of such social institutions as the confessional, or of poems such as the Divina Commedia. The only ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 93 judgment without meaning is that final judgment made in the valley Jehoshaphat, because what object can there be in giving oneself the trouble of judging a world looked upon as ended? We judge in order to continue to act, that is, to live, and when universal life is at an end, judgment is vain (vain praise or paradise, vain cruelty or hell).
The value of the volitional act is therefore, Difference between the as has been demonstrated, in the act itself, and practical judgment and we must not expect and derive it from succession the judgment of the event.
or event. The practical judgment always con cerns the volitional act, the intention, the action (which are all one), and never the result or happening. With this distinction we annul one of the most disputed, intricate, and difficult questions: if it be possible to judge, or as they say, to try history. Since we know well that judgment and historical narrative coincide, we must reply in general, as we have replied, in the affirmative. We must in consequence deny all the absurd claims of an objectivity, which is the irrealizable aspiration to the abstention from thought and from history itself. We must also deny to the historian that frivolous privilege by which he is allowed to judge, almost tolerating in him an original sin or an incorrigible vice, provided 94 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
he clearly distinguish between the serious and the facetious, between the narrative and the judgment, as though the distinction were ever possible. But the prejudice against those who make out a case against history on the ground that it should have happened in a manner different from what actually took place, and describe how this should have been, is well justified. Whoever possesses historical sense, or even simple good sense, cannot but agree to this. The question should in reality be asked differently, and in this manner: Is it correct to apply to history the categories of judgment that we apply to volitions and single acts? Is it correct to judge in a utilitarian or moral manner historical events and the whole course of history? Rectified in these terms, the question becomes clear, and requires a negative answer. When we narrate artistic or philosophical, economic or ethical history, we place ourselves at the point of view of the individual activity. As we expose aesthetic or philosophical products, useful or moral actions, we judge them at the same time aesthetically, philosophically, economically, morally, and we know in every case if the action has been such as it ought. Who would hesitate to affirm that (at least as an affirmative method) the Africa ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 95 of Petrarch was not what he wished it to be, a poetic work; or that Emmanuel Kant did not succeed in establishing from his practical postulates, according to his intention, the exist ence of a personal God and the immortality of the soul; or that Themistocles behaved in an undecided manner as regards Xerxes, not know ing how to resolve to sacrifice his ambitions to the safety of Greece, nor to inflict a grave loss upon his country, in order to satisfy his desire for vengeance; or that Napoleon ignored the rights of man, and behaved as one without scruples, when he ordered the arrest and shooting of the Due d'Enghien? But what can be the ad vantage of asking if the arrest of the Persian expansion in Europe were a bad thing or a good? if the creation of the Roman Empire deserve blame? if the Catholic Church were wrong in concentrating Western religion in her self? if the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the French of the eighteenth, or the Italian of the nineteenth, could have been avoided? if Dante could have been born in our day and have sung the Kantian rather than the Thomist philosophy? if Michael Angelo might have painted the victories of the modern in dustrial world, which Manzotti has made into a 96 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
ballet in his Excelsior, instead of the visions of the Last Judgment? Here we have before us, not individual spirits, whose work we examine in given circumstances, but facts that have happened, and these are the work, not of the individual, but of the Whole. They are (as has already been said) the work of God, and God is not to be judged, or rather He is to be judged, but not from the visual angle at which individual works and actions are to be judged. He is not to be judged as a poet or as a philosopher, as a statesman or a hero, as a finite being working in the infinite. The contemplation of His work is at the same time judgment. Die Weltgeschichte das Weltgericht: the history itself of the world is the judgment of the world, and in recounting the course of history, while not applying the judg ment of the categories above indicated, which are inapplicable, we do, however, apply a judgment, which is that of necessity and reality. That which has been had to be; and that which is truly real is truly rational.
But we cannot give the justification of this supreme judgment, of this world-embracing judg ment (we repeat the refrain), until further on. Let it suffice for the present that in discussing the practical judgment we have limited it to all ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 97 that part of history which contemplates actions, that is, to individual activity, to biography and to the biographical element, which is the material of all history. In it, the practical judgment is active and energetic, but is silent before the event, and every history is like an impetuous river of individual works, which flows into a sea, where it is immediately restored to calm serene. The rush of actions and of their vicissitudes, of victory and of defeat, of wisdom and of folly, of life and of death, are set at rest in the solemn peace of the " historical event."
As we have distinguished the practical judg- Progress of action and ment from the judgment of the event, the progress of Reality.
historical-individual from the historical- cosmic, so we must distinguish the concept of progress, as the progress which belongs to the volitional act and that which belongs to the event. The concept of progress (according to the explana tions given elsewhere) coincides with the con cept of activity. There is progress whenever an activity declares itself, whenever (not to leave the circle of the practical) we pass from irresolu tion to resolution, from conflict to the volitional synthesis, from suspense to action. But the event, which is no longer action but result, that is to say, is action, not of the individual but of H 98 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
the Whole, is not to be judged with that concept of progress, and in it progress coincides with the fact. That which follows chronologically, if it be truly real, represents a progress upon what pre cedes. Even illness is progress, if there were a latent crisis of health, and getting over it gives rise to more vigorous health. Even apparent regression (invasion of barbarians) is progress, if it lead to the ripening of a wider civilization. What is death for the individual is life for the Whole. — Hence the insipidity of the question, often proposed and still discussed by writers of treatises, whether there be practical progress, or as is said when limiting the question, moral progress.
From the individual point of view, at every new volitional act, practicality and the relative impulse of progress are once more born, and they are extinguished with that act, to be born again in a new one, and so on in a circle of infinite changes. As to cosmic reality, we must declare, as in the previous example of the course of history, that it is itself progress (which is also confirmed by the positivist philosophy, when it declares that reality is evolved), but this is progress of reality and therefore progress without adjective, or at least without practical or moral adjective.
i ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 99 The intellectual element, which is constitutive Precedence of the philosophy in the practical judgment as in every other of the practical J over the historical judgment, can also be called the philo- p™ticai , judgment.
sophical element. C Hence the consequence that a philosophy of the practical activity is a necessary condition of every practical judgment.) This is another thesis of paradoxical appearance, which, however, it is not difficult to make plausible with suitable reflections, plausible at least to those who do not refuse to reflect. For what is philosophy but the thinking of the concept, and in this case the concept of the practical? The conclusion, then, that a philosophy is necessary for a judgment is irrefutable. The difficulty in admitting it comes from the false association of ideas, for which the sound of the word " philo sophy " suggests the disputes of the schools, the treatise, the manual, or the academic lecture, whereas we should think of philosophy in all its extension and profundity, inborn in the human spirit (we have elsewhere called this ingenuous philosophy] before its more complicated forms. Every man has his own philosophy, more or less developed or rudimentary, more or less defective; no one is without any philosophy. The first judgment on the practical activity is already guided by the light of a philosophical concept, ioo PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
which, if it does not give a light, gives at least a glimmer, if not straight and certain, at the least undulating and tremulous, producing therefore tremulous and undulating judgments. Ingenuous philosophy and philosophy in the specific sense are not, therefore, separable from one another with a clear-cut distinction, and if there exist a disability in pronouncing a judgment as to many people and to many actions, that arises from difficulties consequent upon the philosophy of the time, which must first of all be solved, before passing to the effective judgment. Hence long researches into doctrine are sometimes necessary. Thus it is difficult to do justice to the work of a rebel or of a revolutionary, with out first clearing away prejudices and understand ing what a revolution is, and the relative value of what is called obedience to the existing order of things. Thus it would be naive to condemn as faithless the Saxon regiments which deserted Napoleon on the field of Leipzig, or Marshal Ney, who returned to the service of Napoleon from that of Louis XVIII., unless we previously make clear the meaning and the limits of the political treaty and of the military oath, which cannot be the only unconditioned things in a world where nothing is unconditioned save the world itself.
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 101 From the recognized precedence of philosophy confirmation over the practical judgment arises the confirma- sophicai incapacity tion of the impossibility of the psychological °fthe psychological method as the foundation of a Philosophy of the method- practical. Descriptive psychology is based upon practical facts historically ascertained, or upon practical judgments. Hence, by proceeding from particular to particular, it is not only incapable of exhausting the infinite and of attaining to the real universal, but by the very choice of particular examples, which should be the founda tion of philosophical research relating to the practical, it is under the necessity of first possess ing a concept of the practical. Hence it stands between Scylla and Charybdis, between a vicious progressus ad infinitum and a not less vicious circle.
In this way is eliminated the problem, mon strous from whatever point of view it may arise, as to the historical origin of the practical activity (economy or morality). If these activities be categories, which constitute fact and judge it reflected in the spirit, they cannot have arisen historically, as contingent facts. When we prove the historical origin of anything, with that very proof we destroy its universal value. The fears of certain moralists lest, with the indication of 102 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.I the historical origin of morality, its value should come to be denied, have therefore been wrongly mocked. Certainly, if morality had a historical origin, it would also have an end, like all historical formations, even the most grandiose, the Empire of the East or the Empire of the West, the Hunnish Empire of Attila or the Mongolian Empire of Gengiskhan. The fear manifested by the moralists in question was then an instinctive horror of the incorrect method of philosophical psychology, which now presupposes, now destroys the categories that it would wish to establish.
VII THE PRACTICAL METHOD, RULES AND CASUISTRY IN repeatedly rejecting the psychological method, Justification as at the end of the last chapter, we have been logical method and of very careful to make use of a cautious phrasedescriptive ology. Thus we have employed such expressions dtsciPhnes- as " psycho-philosophical method," "speculative- descriptive method," and the like, in order to make it quite clear that our hostility is directed against that mixture, or rather against its intro duction into Philosophy, but is not directed against Psychology itself, that is, descriptive psychology. This psychology has always been practised, since the world was world, and we all practise it at every instant, and could not propose to banish it from the spirit, save at the risk of going mad.
If indeed we know that the true and proper knowledge of theoretical philosophy is resolved into the cycle of art, philosophy, and history, and that we possess no other means of knowing 104 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
the individual, both ingenuous and reflective, outside the knowledge of the universal given by philosophy, then we also know that the spirit needs to arrange and to classify the infinite intuitions and perceptions given to it by art and history, and to reduce them to classes, the better to possess and to manipulate them. We also know that the method called naturalistic or positive performs this function, and that hence arise natural disciplines or sciences. These do not, as is the popular belief, deal only with so-called inferior reality (minerals, vegetables, and animals), but with all manifestations of reality, including those most strictly termed spiritual.
Thus we can at this point reduce to a more correct meaning a claim that has been usually maintained by those who have treated of the Practical and of the Ethical in our day. They demand that a science of the practical and of morality should be preceded by a wide historical inquiry and have a great mass of facts as its foundation. If such science be understood as a Philosophy of the practical and as an Ethic, such a demand is an irrational pretension, because the true relation is exactly the opposite: from philosophy to history, not from history to philosophy. But if, on the other hand, this ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 105 science be understood as a naturalistic and empirical discipline, the claim is rational, because it is not possible to construct a discipline of that sort, save with material that has been historically verified.
The practical discipline that arranges in groups Practical and classifies the spiritual facts concerning man, and its literature.
is Psychology. But the writer or the professor is not the only psychologist. Man himself is a psychologist; even the savage constructs in some sort of way his psychology of types and classes. And to remain within the circle of volitional acts, their psychology or description by types has always existed. A conspicuous example of this was the Comedy of Menander or the New Comedy in Greece. This partly received and gave artistic form to the results of the observations of the moralists and partly served as material for the elaboration of treatises, to such an extent that the Characters of Theo- phrastus have been looked upon as a repertory or summary of theatrical types. In the Rhetoric of Aristotle, a whole book is devoted to a description of affections, passions, and habits. In modern times, Descartes lamented the in sufficiency of ancient treatises on the subject, and presented as quite a new thing his Trait^ io6 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
des passions. In this treatise, six primitive passions being distinguished (admiration, love, hate, desire, joy, and sadness), he maintained that all the others were derived from them: esteem, contempt, generosity, pride, humility, baseness, veneration, disdain, hope, fear, jealousy, certainty, desperation, irresolution, courage, hardi hood, emulation, cowardice, terror, remorse, mockery, piety, satisfaction, repentance, favour, gratitude, indignation, anger, glory, shame, and so on. Spinoza, following the example of Descartes and correcting his theories, devoted the third part of his Ethic to the affections or passions, considering them perinde ac si quaestio de lineis planis aut de corporibus esset. Let it suffice to mention the Anthropologia of Kant among the other most celebrated treatises upon the argu ment. Extension But although we have recorded as examples of practical description, these general treatises on the passions, it would be impossible to continue the enumeration, because descriptive psychology is carried out, so to speak, with the widest divergences and is infinitely subdivided. An ample bibliography would not suffice to catalogue all the books deal ing with this discipline. These are sometimes arranged in chronological divisions (Psychology ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 107 of the Renaissance, of the eighteenth century, of the Middle Ages, even including prehistoric man!). Sometimes they contain geographical divisions (Psychology of the Englishman, of the French man, of the Russian, of the Japanese, and so on), with subdivisions according to regions. Some times they combine the two methods (Psychology of the ancient Greek, of the Roman of the Decadence), and sometimes according to their psychical content (Psychology of the priest, of the soldier, of the politician, of the poet, of the man of science), and so on. And when the treatises that bear a title of the kind above mentioned had been catalogued, it would be also necessary to trace a great mass of descriptive psychology (and of the best sort) in the books of historians, novelists, dramatists, in memoirs and confessions, in maxims and advice for the conduct of life, in the sketches of satirists and caricaturists. And when all these had been catalogued (a very difficult task), it would be necessary to take account of all the other psychology, which, formed in the spirit of in dividuals who are not writers, is poured forth in speech. This is found, but in small part, in collections of proverbs. It would also be necessary not to neglect (an altogether desperate io8 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL PT.
Normative knowledge or rules: their nature.
enterprize) everything that each one of us does and forgets and substitutes continually in life, according to his own needs and experiences. Tantae molis would be a complete account, pre cisely because psychological construction, having for its object actions and individuals in action, is of such common use.
There is another class of mental forms in timately connected with Psychology, and of this also we have denied the justification in the foregoing chapters, but only in the philosophical field, and not at all outside it. These are the norms, or normative knowledge and science, maxims, rules, and precepts. In truth, if philosophy, which commands and wills and judges, when its task is on the contrary to understand willing and commanding, and to make possible correct judgment — if such a philosophy be a contradiction in terms, there is yet nothing to prevent our taking the psychological classes, of which we have indicated the formation, and separating them from one another, according as they do or do not lead to certain other classes, which are called ends and are abstract ends. This is done when those classes are selected which are more efficacious for practical action. Psychological classes and rules ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 109 are therefore the same, save that in the second the character possessed by knowledge as prior to action is placed in relief, that is to say, its technical character. This is proved by the easy convertibility of rules into psychological observa tions, and of the latter into the former. It suffices to add the imperative to the first and to remove it from the second. " Do everything so as to seem good, for that helps in many things; but since false opinions do not last, you will have difficulty in seeming good for a long period, if you are not so in reality." That is a rule of Francesco Guicciardini * (or rather of the father of Guicciardini, quoted by him). Now if we transfer this proposition from the imperative to the indicative mood and remove the predicate of exhortation, we have a mere psychological observation: "To seem good helps in an infinite number of things; but since false opinions do not last, it is difficult to seem good for long, unless one really be so." Here is a psychological observation of Vico upon seeming and being: " It happens naturally that man speaks of nothing but what he affects to be and is not." This can be turned into a maxim: " Watch yourselves, in 1 (l) Ricordi politici e civili, n. xliv. (in Opere. inedite (2), Firenze, 2 Scritti ineditii ed. Del Giudice, Napoli, 1862, p. 12.
no PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
order that by talking too much of a given advantage, you may not let it be seen clearly that you do not possess it." Or in relation to moral classes it can be turned thus: " Try to be that which you would like to appear to others,'' and so on. usefulness of Of rules it can be said that they do not rules.
rules.
possess absolute value. This is to be found written at the beginning of one of the best books of rules: Peu de maximes sont vraies a tons dgards (Vauvenargues), and he might have said, " no maxim "; for if it were ever possible to produce one that was absolutely true, by that alone would it be demonstrated not to be a true maxim. But criticism prevails against the distortion of empirical rules into philosophical principles, or against the confusion between the psycho logical and the speculative methods, to which attention has already been drawn. If this distortion be not committed, then rules are altogether innocuous. Not only are they innoc uous, they are indispensable. Each of us is constantly making them for use in his own life. To live without rules would be impossible. Certainly, the man of action makes no practical rule, nor does he indicate how we should will and act in definite circumstances, nor does the ACTIVITY IN GENERAL in poet make any rule of Poetic. Guicciardini himself, whom we have just quoted, and who formulated stupendous maxims, warns us: " These memories are rules that can be written down in books; but special cases, which, since they have a different cause, ask a different treatment, can ill be written down elsewhere than in the book of discretion." Action depends upon the quickness of the eye, upon the per ception of the situation historically given, which has never occurred before, and never will occur again, precisely identical. But it is useful to possess these types of actions to encourage and of actions to avoid, in order to sharpen the attention and to find one's way in the world of action, to facilitate and to discipline the examina tion of the concrete fact. If, therefore, individual rules are more or less transitory, the formation of rules is immortal.
The condition of literature in recent times The literature would seem to be in disagreement with this a* apparent decadence.
affirmation, since as a fact there is a great falling off in the appearance of books of rules, compared with the enormous mass that remains in our libraries as an inheritance of the past. At one time rules of conduct were compiled for everything, not only for the moral life, in ii2 PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL FT.
the multiplication of treatises relating to vice and virtue, to merits and to sins, to things good and evil, to duties and to rights, dividing these and entering into minutiae, and again, summaries, catechisms, and various " decalogues," relating to every part of life. The literature of the Cinquecento gives rules even for the procuress and the courtesan, in most elegant little books, which bear the names of Piccolomini and of Aretino. In this same century, too, Ignatius of Loyola formulated rules for ''tying up" the will, and for the reduction of the docile individual perinde ac cadaver, for the ends of " sanctity." We must further remark that all rules, including those on poetry and the arts, have at bottom a practical character. That is to say, they are directed to the will, if only as intermediary. Thus it is necessary to add to the great mass of practical rules the un numbered and innumerable treatises of Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry of the figurative arts, of music, of dancing, and so on. But it is a fact that there are now hardly any treatises containing rules, either for morality, politics, or for the arts. Has the world by chance become learned on the subject, through inherited aptitude, or rather has the inutility of rules been discovered?
ACTIVITY IN GENERAL 113 Neither the one nor the other. The rules still live in books and treatises; they have only changed their literary form. In literature they have reabsorbed that imperative which they used at first to display and to boast of, not only mentally but literally. That has been made possible by the already established con vertibility of rules into psychological classes. Hence in modern times the literary form of the psychological observation is preferred to that of rules. This was indeed redundant, pedantic, and at the same time ingenuous, as for instance in the Italian Seicento. It is difficult to restrain a smile when reading the many books on what was called the reason of State, elaborated by the Italians of that day and imitated by foreigners, especially Spaniards and Germans. Those arcana imperil, those " secret strokes," those impostures, mysteriously inculcated on the printed page, are a true and real aesthetic contradiction. The eighteenth century therefore began to give up this form of treatise, and as it happens that men are accustomed to attribute to moral virtue that which is necessity or virtue of another kind, the writers of that century boasted of the moral pro gress which had set them free from the pernicious