TO BENEDETTO CROCE More than twenty years ago I dedicated to you a book which bore witness to a concordia discors, a friendship formed by discussions and intellectual collaboration. I have seen with joy a younger generation look up to our friendship as an example to follow.
In all these years our collaboration has become ever more inward, our friendship ever more living. But my old book is no longer alive in my soul, and this is why I feel the need to inscribe your much-loved name in this.
G.
THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE...so I print this small volume (as I hope to print others in years to come) in order not to part company with my students when their examination is over, and in order that I may be ready, if my work be not lost, to repeat in these pages mv reply, or my encouragement to make them seek their own reply, when they feel the need arise — and that I hope will not be seldom — to meet the serious problems, so old yet ever new, which I have discussed in the class-room.
The first edition of this book had its origin in^a course of lectures given at the University of Pisa, in the Academic year 1915-16. It was exhausted in a few months. The continued demand, seeming to prove that the interest in the work is not diminishing, has induced me to reprint the book as it first appeared, without waiting for the time and leisure necessary for the complete revision I wished to make. I should like to have given another form to the whole treatment and more particularly to expound several subjects hardly noticed.
I 'have, however, devoted as much care to the revision as the shortness of the time at my disposal made possible. I have replaced the original lecture form of the book with chapters, revising as far as possible the exposition, making it as clear as I was able to, introducing here and there notes and comments XXV xxvi THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE which I hope will be of use to students, and I have added at the end two chapters, originally the sub ject of a communication to the Biblioteca filosofica of Palermo in 1914. In these two chapters the doctrine is summed up, its character and direction defined and a reply given to a charge which originated in a specious but inexact interpretation of it.
The book can be no more than a sketch, fitted rather to raise difficulties and act as a spur to thought than to furnish clear solutions and proofs. Yet had I developed it in every part with minute analysis, without taking from it every spark of suggestion, it would still have needed well-disposed readers willing to find in a book no more than a book can contain. For, whatever other kinds of truths there may be, the truths I ask my readers to devote attention to here are such as no one can possibly receive complacently from others or acquire easily, pursuing as it were a smooth and easy path in pleasant company. They are only to be conquered on the lonely mountain top, and they call for heavy toil. In this task one toiler can do no more for another than awaken in his soul the taste for the enterprise, casting out the torment of doubt and anxious longing, by pointing to the light which shines on high afar off.
This General Theory is only designed to be a simple introduction to the full concept of the spiritual act in which, as I hold, the living nucleus of philosophy consists. And this concept, if my years and forces permit, I intend to expound in special treatises. I have this year published the first volume of my System of Logic, which is in fulfilment of this design. The reader of this Theory of Mind, who finds himself dissatisfied with it, may know then beforehand that the author is himself dissatisfied, and wants him to read the sequel, that is, if it seem to him worth while.
PISA, October 1917.
THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE xxvii In this third edition the only modifications I have introduced are formal, designed to remove the obscurity which some have found in my book, due to want of clearness in expression.
As for myself, in re-reading my work after three years I have found nothing I desire to alter in the doctrine, although here and there I find in it several buds which I perceive have since opened out in my thoughts and become new branches, putting forth new leaves and new buds in which I now feel the life is pulsating. But what of this? I have never led my readers or my pupils to expect from me a fully defined thought, a dry trunk as it were encased in a rigid bark. A book is the journey not the destina tion; it would be alive not dead. And so long as we live we must continue to think. In the collec tion of my philosophical writings which my friend Laterza has proposed to publish, beginning with this Theory of Mind there will follow forthwith the com plete System of Lo%ic.
ROME, April 1920.
" Par Pespace, 1'univcrs me comprend et m'engloutit comme un point; par la pensee, je le comprends."
PASCAL.
CHAPTER I THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL BERKELEY in the beginning of the eighteenth century expressed very clearly the following concept. Reality is § i. Berkeley's conceivable only in so far as the reality con- idealism, ceived is in relation to the activity which conceives it, and in that relation it is not only a possible object of knowledge, it is a present and actual one. To conceive a reality is to conceive, at the same time and as one with it, the mind in which that reality is represented; and therefore the concept of a material reality is absurd. To Berkeley it was evident that the concept of a corporeal, external, material substance, that is, the concept of bodies existing generally outside the mind, is a self-contradictory concept, since we can only speak of things which are perceived, and in being perceived things are objects of consciousness, ideas.
Berkeley with his clear insight remarked that "there is surely nothing easier than to imagine trees in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody being by to perceive them; but in such case all that we do is to frame in our mind certain ideas, which we call books and trees, and at the same time omit to frame the idea of any one who may perceive them." x It is not therefore really the case that no mind perceives them, the perceiver is the mind which imagines them. The 1 Principles of Human Knowledge, sect. 23.
I B 2 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH.
object, even when thought of as outside every mind, is always mental. This is the point on which I desire to concentrate attention. The concept of the ideality of the real is a very difficult one to define exactly, and it did not in fact prevent Berkeley himself from con ceiving a reality effectively independent of mind.
For Berkeley, notwithstanding that happy remark, came himself to deny the ideality of the real. In § 2. Berkeley's declaring that reality is not properly an self-contra- object of the human mind and contained diction. therein, nor, strictly speaking, a thought of that mind, but the totality of the ideas of an objective, absolute Mind, whose existence the human mind pre supposes, he contradicted the fundamental principle of his whole thought. Berkeley, indeed, even while saying esse est percipi, even while making reality coincide with perception, distinguished between the thought which actually thinks the world, and the absolute, eternal Thought, which transcends single minds, and makes the development of single minds possible. From the empirical point of view, at which, as a pre-Kantian idealist, Berkeley remained, it is obvious, and appears incontrovertible, that our mind does not think all the thinkable, since our mind is a human mind and therefore finite and the minds of finite beings exist only within certain limits of time and space. And then, too, we are able to think there is something which exists, even though actually it may never yet have been thought. It seems undeni able, then, that our mind has not as the present object of its thought everything which can possibly be its object. And since whatever is not an object of human thinking at one definite, historical, empirical, moment, seems as though it may be such an object at another EMPIRICAL IDEALISM 3 such moment, we come to imagine another thinking outside human thinking, a thinking which is always thinking all the thinkable, a Thought which transcends human thought, and is free from all the limits within which it is or can be circumscribed. This eternal, infinite, thinking is not a thinking like ours which feels its limits at every moment. It is God's thinking. God, therefore, is the condition which makes it possible to think man's thought as itself reality, and reality as itself thought.
Now it is evident that if we conceive human thinking O as conditioned by the divine thinking (even though the § 3. Berkeley's divine thinking does not present itself to naturalism. us as an immediate reality), then we repro duce in the case of human thinking the same situation as that in which mind is confronted with matter, that is with nature, regarded as ancient philosophy regarded it, a presupposition of thought, a reality to which nothing is added by the development of thought. If we conceive reality in this way we make it impossible to conceive human thought, because a reality which is already complete and which when presented to thought, does not grow and continue to be realized, is a reality which in its very conception excludes the possibility of conceiving that presumed or apparent new reality which thought would then be.
It was so with Berkeley. He had given expression to a clear, sound, suggestive theory, strikingly analogous § 4 The to m°dern idealistic doctrine, declaring annulling of that when we believe we are conceiving a thought. reality outside the mind, we are actually ourselves falsifying our belief by our simple presence in the act of perceiving; and when we presume our selves absent, even then we are intervening and 4 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH.
powerless to abstain from intervening, in the very act by which we affirm our absence. When he had given expression to this doctrine he himself returned to the standpoint of the ancient philosophy, with the result that he failed to conceive the thinking which truly creates reality, the thought which is itself reality. This was precisely the defect of the ancient thought. For it, thinking, strictly conceived, was nothing. Modern philosophy, after full consideration, puts forward simply, with all discretion, the very modest requirement that thinking shall be something. No sooner, however, does modern philosophy acknowledge this modest requirement than it feels the necessity of going on to affirm thinking, as not simply something, as not only an element of reality or an appurtenance of reality, but as indeed the whole or the absolute reality.
From Berkeley's standpoint thinking, strictly, is not anything. Because in so far as the thinking thinks, what it thinks is already thought; for human thought is only a ray of the divine thought, and therefore not something itself new, something other than the divine thought. And even in the case of error, which is indeed ours and not God's, our thinking, as thinking, is not anything; not only is it not objective reality, but it is not even subjective reality. Were it something new, divine thought would not be the whole.
The Kantian philosophy places us at a new stand point, though Kant himself was not fully conscious of its significance. With Kant's concept pirical and the of the Transcendental Ego it is no longer transcendental possible to ask Berkeley's question: How is our finite thinking thinkable? Our thinking and what we think are correlative terms; TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 5 for when we think and make our own thinking an object of reflexion, determining it as an object by thinking, then what we think, that is, our very thinking itself, is nothing else than our own idea. Such thinking is finite thinking; how is it possible for it to arise? It is our present actual thinking. It is, that is to say, the actualization of a power. A power which is actual must have been possible. How is it possible? Berkeley, in perceiving that this thinking is actual, feels the need of transcending it: and he is right. It is the question which sprang up in the inmost centre of the Kantian philosophy, and to answer it Kant had recourse to the concept of the noumenon. But this concept has really no ground, once we have mastered the concept of thinking as transcendental thinking, the concept of mind as self-consciousness, as original apperception, as the condition of all experience. Be cause, if we conceive our whole mind as something finite, by thinking of it as a present reality, a present with a before and an after from which its reality is absent, then what we are thinking of is not the transcendental activity of experience but what Kant called the empirical ego, radically different from the tran scendental ego. For in every act of our thinking, and in our thinking in general, we ought to distinguish two things: on the one hand what we are thinking; on the other the we who think and who are therefore not the object but the subject in the thinking act. Berkeley indeed drew attention to the subject which always stands over against the object. But then the subject which Berkeley meant was not the subject truly con ceived as subject, but rather a subject which itself was objectified and so reduced to one of the many finite objects contained in experience. It was the object 6 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH.
which we reach empirically whenever we analyse our mental act and distinguish therein, on the one hand, the content of our consciousness, and on the other the f consciousness as the form of that same content. Just as in vision we have two objects of the one experience, the scene or the term which we may call the object and the eye or the term which we may call the subject, so also in our actual living experience not only is the object of that experience an object, but even the subject by the fact that it is made a term of the experience is an object. And yet the eye cannot see itself except as it is reflected in a mirror!
If then we would know the essence of the mind's transcendental activity we must not present it as § 6. Thinking spectator and spectacle, the mind as an in act- object of experience, the subject an outside onlooker. In so far as consciousness is an object of consciousness, it is no longer consciousness. In so far as the original apperception is an apperceived object, it is no longer apperception. Strictly speaking, it is no longer a subject, but an object; no longer an ego, but a non-ego. It was precisely here that Berkeley went wrong and failed and for this reason he could not solve the problem. His idealism was empirical.
The transcendental point of view is that which we attain when in the reality of thinking we see our thought not as act done, but as act in the doing. \ This act we can never absolutely transcend since I it is our very subjectivity, that is, our own self: an act therefore which we can never in any possible manner objectify. The new point of view which we then gain is that of the actuality of the I, a point of view from which the I can never be conceived as its own object. Every attempt which we make — we may try i SUBJECT WHICH IS NEVER OBJECT 7 it at this moment — to objectify the I, the actual thinking, the inner activity in which our spiritual nature consists, is bound to fail; we shall always find we have left outside the object just what we want to get in it. For in defining our thinking activity as a definite object of our thinking, we have always to remember that the definition is rendered possible by the very fact that our thinking activity remains the subject for which it is defined as an object, in what soever manner this concept of our thinking activity is conceived. The true thinking activity is not what is being defined but what is defining.
This concept may appear abstruse. Yet it is the concept of our ordinary life so long as we enjoy a certain feeling of life as spiritual reality.
actuality of It is common observation that whenever every spiritual we want to understand something which has a spiritual »value, something which we can speak of as a spiritual fact^ we have to regard it not as an object, a thing which we set before us for investigation, but as something immediately identical with our own spiritual activity. And it makes no difference that such spiritual values may be souls, with whom our own soul may not be in accord. The apprehension of spiritual value may be realized both through agreement and disagreement, for these are not two parallel possibilities either of which may be realized indifferently; they are rather two co-ordinate and successive possibilities, one of which is necessarily a step to the other. It is clear that the first step in spiritual apprehension is the assent, the approbation, for we say that before judging we must understand. When we say that we understand without exercising judgment, it does not mean that we exercise no 8 THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THE REAL CH.
judgment; we do not indeed judge approval or dis approval, but we do judge provisionally for appre hension. A fundamental condition, therefore, of under standing others is that our mind should penetrate their mind. The beginning of apprehension is con fidence. Without it there is no spiritual penetration, no understanding of mental and moral reality.
Without the agreement and unification of our mind with the other mind with which it would enter into relation, it is impossible to have any kind of under standing, impossible even to begin to notice or perceive anything which may come into another mind. And we are driven by our thinking activity itself into this apprehension of others. Every spiritual relation, every communication between our own inner reality and another's, is essentially unity.
This deep unity we feel every time we are able to say that we understand our fellow - being. In those moments we want more than intellectual unity, we feel the need of loving. The abstract activity we call mind no longer contents us, we want the good spiritual disposition, what we call heart, — good will, charity, sympathy, open-mindedness, warmth of affection.
Now what is the meaning of this unity? What is this fellow-feeling which is the essential condition of all spiritual communication, of all knowledge of mind? It is quite different from the kind of unity which we experience when, for example, we touch a stone, altogether different in kind from the knowledge of simple nature, of what we call material nature. We find a need to be unified with the soul we would know, because the reality of that soul consists in being one with our own soul: and that other soul likewise cannot meet in our soul what is not essentially its own subjectivity. Life of our life, it lives within our soul, where distinction is not opposition. For, be it noted, within our own soul we may find ourselves in pre cisely the same spiritual situation as that in which we are when face to face with another soul which we fain would but do not yet understand. This means that the disproportion and incongruence which we find between our soul and other souls, when they appear to us as mute and impenetrable as the rocks and blind forces of nature, is no other than the dis proportion and incongruence within our own soul between its own states, between what it is and what we would have it be, between what we can think but yet fail to realize; between what, as we shall see, is our state and what is our act.
CHAPTER II SPIRITUAL REALITY To understand, much more to know, spiritual reality, is to assimilate it with ourselves who know it. We may even say that a law of the knowledge jectivity of the or spiritual reality is that the object be object in so far resolved into the subject. Nothing has for us spiritual value save in so far as it comes to be resolved into ourselves who know it.
We usually distinguish the spiritual objects of our knowledge into two classes: either they are subjects of experience, men, intelligent beings; or they are not themselves subjects of experience but the spiritual fact or mental work which such subjects presuppose. This is an empirical distinction which vanishes the moment we reflect on it; not indeed if we only bring to bear on it the reflexion proper to empiricism, but if we reflect with the reflexion proper to philosophy, that which begins with sceptical doubt of the firm beliefs of common sense. The moment we examine the nature of the spiritual facts which we distinguish from true and proper subjects of experience, we see that the distinction is inadmissible. Thus there is no science which is not particular in the sense that it is what particular, historically-determined individuals possessed in thinking it, yet we distinguish the science of men from science in itself. So, too, with language: although LANGUAGE 1 1 LANGUAGE 1 1 it is an historical product we begin by detaching it from every particular person who uses it, who is himself unique, and for whom the language he uses is, moment by moment, a unique language; we extend it to a whole people. And mentally we even detach it from all and every people, and no longer speak of a definite language, but of language in general, the means, as we say, of expressing states of mind, a form of thought. Language, so conceived and fixed by our mind, is then freed from all contingency or particular limitation, and hovers in the world of concepts, which is not only the world of the actual, but also the world of the simply possible. Language has now become an ideal fact. And lo! On the one hand there is the language sounding from a man's lips, the speech of one particular man, a language whose reality consists in the personality of the speaker, and, on the' other hand, language in itself, which can be spoken, but which is what it is even though no one should speak it.
But the truth is that if we would know language in the concrete, it must present itself to us as develop ment. Then it is the language which mind's con- sounds forth from the mouths of the men creteness. wfro use fa \\Te no longer detach it from the subject, and it is not a spiritual fact which we can distinguish from the mind in which it exists. The spiritual act which we call language, is precisely the mind itself in its concreteness. So when we speak of a language and believe that we mean not an historical language but a language conceived as a psychical or ideal fact apart from history, a fact as it were inherent in the very nature of mind and ideally reconstructed whenever its principle is meant; and 12 SPIRITUAL REALITY CH.
when we believe that in this case we have completely detached it from the particular individual who from time to time speaks a particular language; what we are then really doing is forming a concept of language by reconstructing a moment of our own consciousness, a moment of our own spiritual experience. Detach from language the philosopher who reconstructs it and language as a moment of mind disappears; since language, hovering loose, transcendent and freed from time and space, is language as it is conceive^ by the man, the individual, who can only effectively represent it by speaking it, and who speaks it just to the extent that he represents it. Yet do we not distinguish the Divine Comedy from Dante its author and from our selves its readers? We do; but then even in making the distinction we know that this Divine Comedy is with us and in us, within our mind thought of as distinct from us. It is in us despite the distinction; in us in so far as we think it. So that it, the poem, is precisely we who think it.
To detach then the facts of the mind from the real life of the mind is to miss their true inward nature by looking at them as they are when realized.
When we speak of spiritual fact we speak of mind, and to speak of mind is always to speak of con- § 3. The sub- crete, historical individuality; of a subject jectasact. which is not thought as such, but which is actualized as such. The spiritual reality, then, which is the object of our knowing, is not mind and spiritual fact, it is purely and simply mind as subject. As subject, it can, as we have said, be known on one condition only — it can be known only in so far as its objectivity is resolved in the real activity of the subject who knows it.
THE IDEALITY OF OTHERS 13 In no other way is a spiritual world conceivable. Whoever conceives it, if he has truly conceived it as §4. Self and spiritual, cannot set it up in opposition to others. his own activity in conceiving it. Speak ing strictly, there can be no others outside us, for in knowing them and speaking of them they are within us. To know is to identify, to overcome otherness as such. Other is a kind of stage of our mind through which we must pass in obedience to our im manent nature, but we must pass through without stopping. When we find ourselves confronted with the spiritual existence of others as with something different from ourselves, something from which we must distinguish ourselves, something which we pre suppose as having been in existence before our birth and which even when we are no longer there to think will always remain the possession, or at least, the possible possession, of other men, it is a clear sign that we are not yet truly in their presence as spiritual existence, or rather that we do not see the spirituality of their existence.
This doctrine that the spiritual world is only con ceivable as the reality of my own spiritual activity, would be clearly absurd were we to seek empirical ego to interpret it in any other light than that and the moral of the distinction, explained in the last chapter, between the transcendental ego and the empirical ego. It is only rational when we clearly and firmly apprehend the concept of the reality of the transcendental ego as the fundamental reality, without which the reality of the empirical ego is not thinkable. Applied to the empirical ego the doctrine is meaningless. Empirically I am an individual and as such in opposition not only to all material things, i4 SPIRITUAL REALITY but equally to all the individuals to whom I assign a spiritual value, since all objects of experience, whatever their value, are not only distinct but separate from one another in such a manner that each of them absolutely excludes from itself, by its own particularity, all the others. In the empirical domain moral problems arise entirely and precisely in this absolute opposition in which the ego empirically conceived stands distinct from other persons. The supreme moral aspiration of our being as empirical individuals is to acquire a harmony, a unity, with all the others and with all that is other. This means that moral problems arise in so far as we become aware of the unreality of our being as an empirical ego opposed to other persons and surrounding things and come to see that our own life is actualized in the things opposed to it. Though on such ground the moral problems arise, they are only solved when man comes to feel another's needs his own, and thereby finds that his own life means that he is not closed within the narrow circle of his empirical personality but ever expanding in the efficacity of a mind above all particular interests and yet immanent in the very centre of his deeper personality.