The conclusion is obvious. The proposal to re- 1 Leibniz, following an original concept of Augustine, according to which evil is justified as an instrument of good, makes Pallas conclude, " The crime of Sextus subserves great things. Of it will be born a mighty empire which will produce splendid examples, but this is nothing in regard to the value of the complexity of this world " (Theod. sec. 416).
1 92 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
nounce Rome which Jupiter makes to Sextus at Dodona § ii. Vanity is a cheat, because from eternity there has of the attempt, been assigned to Sextus his own destiny in this possible world to which Jupiter has given existence. And the conclusion, so far as it concerns our argument, is, that the knowledge of the empirically real supposed to pre-exist the mind (whether really or ideally pre-existing is the same thing) is knowledge only of facts; and when we attain to foreknowledge we know nothing except fates which are facts: systems of reality wholly realized in their knowability. The future of the prophets, and of Apollo who can inspire them, is exactly like the future of the astronomer, an apparent future which in the concrete thought in which it is represented is a true and proper past.
One other remark we may make in confirmation of what we have said. It is that when Jupiter chooses § 12. The the best of the possible worlds, that which antithesis stands at the apex of the pyramid, he not between Qnj cannot leave Sextus free to choose his and freedom own lot, but neither is he tree nimselr to in God. choose it for him. The world which he realizes is in reality already realized, and precisely because it is realized he can know it, and choose it. That world is in itself before Jupiter wills it; and it is the best of all possible worlds. The willing it adds nothing to its goodness. It is in its very absoluteness incapable of development and growth. It is like the Platonic ideas, which are in them selves, and bound dialectically by a law which is their very being, when they can be known or, it may be, willed.
In short, the divine foreknowledge not only renders impossible the freedom of the human mind, xii NATURALISTIC CONCEPT OF GOD 193 but even the freedom of the divine mind; just as every naturalistic presupposition not only binds the object of the mind in the iron chain of nature, but also the subject, the mind itself. The mind can no longer conceive itself except as bound up with its object, and therefore naturalistically. The concept, then, of the divine foreknowledge is a mark of the naturalistic conception of God.
Reality, we can now say, cannot be distinguished into condition and conditionate except on the clear understanding;: that the two realities are the condition conceived as in every way one reality only; and the con- a reality which, in its turn, being the negation of the freedom of the mind, is unintelligible save in relation to it.
Reality is not duplicated but is maintained in its unity even when distinguished into condition and con- § 14. The tend- ditionate; because neither metaphysics nor ency to unity, empiricism can present the condition in its immanent relation with the conditionate, nor the con ditionate in its immanent relation with the condition, except as a unity of the two terms.
Metaphysics with its efficient causality, empiricism with its empirical causality, one as much as the other, both tend to the identification rather than to the distinction which is essential to the concept of condition ally. So that, taken strictly, the concept of meta physical causality aims at considering the cause, from which the effect is not really differentiated, as alone absolutely real; while, on the contrary, empiricism represents the absolute as the simple effect (fact) into which the cause itself is resolved. And the philosophy of contingency is a manifestation of the empirical tendency to free the effect from its relation 194 FREEDOM AND PREVISION to the cause without making it thereby acquire any other right to freedom. But neither can metaphysics stop at the cause without an effect, nor empiricism at the effect without a cause; not only because the cause is not a cause unless it is cause of an effect, and an effect without a cause is a mystery which the mind cannot admit, but for a deeper reason, which we have already indicated more than once. It is that undifferentiated reality is inconceivable, even as self-identical, for identity implies a relation of self with self and therefore a moment of opposition and duality, which the pure undifFerentiated excludes.
The abstract unity, with which metaphysics as well as empiricism ends, in absorbing the conditionate § 15 The 'in tne condition, or the condition in the abstract un- conditionate, is what is called the uncon- condmoned. ditioned, not in the meaning of freedom but in that of necessity: the necessity which the doctrine of contingency dreads, and into which it falls headlong. Now this unconditioned cannot be affirmed without being denied, in accordance with our usual appeal from the abstract to the concrete thought. Because in so far as we think it, the un conditioned comes to be thought, not as the purely thinkable, but precisely as the thing thought, or rather as that which we posit in thought. Unconditioned it is, then, but, so far as it is such, thought, or in thought, which is therefore the condition of it. In other words, it is unconditioned for the thought which abstracts from itself, and thinks its object without thinking itself, in which its object inheres. It is conditioned in so far as the object thus unconditioned is thought in its immanence in the subject, and as this subject is conscious of positive activity which belongs to that xii ARISTOTLE'S IMMOBILE MOVER 195 unconditioned. In short, the object is conditioned by the subject even when the object, as pure abstract object, is unconditioned.
The relation, then, of the subject with the object is that of conditionality. It can only be effectively § 16. The conceived by bringing together the unity true uncon- and the duality, and therefore by requir ing thought neither to shut itself within unity, which is absurd, nor yet to end in abstract duality, which is equally absurd, because it reproduces in each of the elements the same position of unity. Evidently it is the relation of the a -priori synthesis belonging to the act of thinking, which is realized in the opposition of subject and object, of self and other than self.
The ignorance of such a relation is the explanation of the origin of all the difficulties of metaphysics and Th d'ffi °^ empiricism with which we have been culties of meta- dealing. The conditionate of metaphysics physics and of must in fact, when accurately thought out, be merged in its condition, since the con dition is not a true and proper condition, it being itself the conditionate. Aristotle, in the well-known argu ment based on the absurdity of the process to infinity, believed indeed he could make God an immobile mover, an unconditioned condition or first cause; but his God cannot explain the world as other than Himself; and from Aristotle, therefore, we must necessarily pass to Plotinus. God as the mover is no other than the movement which it is required to explain. He is the very form, whose reality philosophy studies in nature and so finds already realized before nature. He is indeed nature itself, thought and hypostasized beyond immediate nature; that is, the opposite of 196 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
thought. This opposite is always pure fact in so far as it is never apprehended in the making through the process of thought. In empiricism, on the contrary, the condition must be resolved into the conditionate, because a condition which is not thought itself but the presupposition of thought (and this is what it must be for the empiricist) is nothing else but an object of thought, a conditionate of the activity of thought.
The condition of metaphysics cannot explain its own efficiency and productivity, since it is not productive, being rather itself a simple product of thinking: a thought which supposes the activity of the think ing which realizes it. And the empiricist Hume was right in his opposition to metaphysics because he saw the full consequence of the metaphysical point of view. Metaphysics contraposes the cause (the only true cause is God, alike for the Scholastics and the Cartesians) and the thought which thinks it as cause; and, granted the opposition, it is impossible that thought should penetrate into the working of the cause, as it must in order to understand it, and perceive thereby the necessity of the relation by which the cause is connected with the effect. To that extent it is true that the empiricist criticism of the principle of causality is the profound consciousness of the implicit scepticism in the transcendent metaphysical intuition. As we have already pointed out, we find the con sciousness of this, even before Hume, in Vico, a metaphysicist who denied the certainty of knowledge concerning the working of the natural cause, precisely because that cause is an object of thought and not thought itself.
The empiricist, on the other hand, if he would endow his empirical causality with a minimum of xii SELF-ENGENDERING PRINCIPLE 197 logical value, must maintain some connexion between condition and conditionate. Having no other way he thinks it permissible even for empiricism to main tain the chronological chain of succession, which indicates a kind of synthesis, and therefore a principle of unification, chargeable to the work of the subject. Even then he does not realize his concept of pure de facto conditionality; and it is impossible for him to do so because, just as the metaphysicist posits the condition, so he posits the conditionate as confronting the thinking. Therefore for the empiricist the unity of the manifold is inconceivable, it presents itself to him as mere temporal connexion, as to the meta physicist it presents itself as efficiency.
The a -priori synthesis of condition and conditionate is dialectic, and it is obvious from our standpoint that a dialectic outside thought is incondialectic of the ceivable. When, instead, we look at the condition and dialectic in thought, then the thinking or metaphysical causality, as or every other form of the concept of conditionality, is relieved of all the difficulties we have enumerated. For the fundamental difficulty of metaphysics is to understand in what way the one can generate another than itself, in what way the identical can generate the different. But when by the " one " metaphysics means the " I," this " I " is precisely found to be the self-engendering principle of the other, of difference from self. So, when empiricism acquires the consciousness of the immanent relation of the other, precisely as other, in its condition, which is the " I," it will still continue to see the other and the manifold, but with the unity and in the unity.
So, then, just as metaphysical reality and empirical 198 FREEDOM AND PREVISION reality are each (in the unconsciousness of abstract § 19. Necessity thought) posited as conditioned, that is and freedom. as necessity without freedom, so the reality of concrete thought posits itself as condition of that unconditioned which is then shown to be con ditioned. And thereby it posits itself in the absolute ness of its position, as the Unconditioned which in being necessary is free. The first unconditioned we may call Being, the second unconditioned, Mind. The one is the unconditioned of abstract (and there fore false) thought, the other is the unconditioned of concrete (and therefore real) thought. Being (God, nature, idea, fact, the contingent) is necessary without freedom, because already posited by thought. It is the result of the process: the result which isy precisely because the process has ceased. That is, we conceive it as having ceased by fixing and abstracting a moment of it as a result. The necessity of the future, object of the divine foreknowledge, comes by conceiving the future itself as " being," or as something which confronts thought. (So that we know what " can be " only by reason of thought which when it posits it confronting itself, in so far as it does so, posits itself confronting itself.) This necessity is the necessity of natural fact, of fate, of death, necessity thought of naturalistically. It excludes the miracle of the resur rection which mind alone can work, and does work when nature obeys it, and that is when nature is no longer simply nature but itself also mind.
The necessity of being, however, coincides with the freedom of mind, because being, in the act of § 20. The thinking, is the act itself. This act is the causa sui. positing (and thereby it is free), presuppos ing nothing (and thereby it is truly unconditioned).
CAUSA SUI 199 Freedom is absoluteness (infinity of the unconditioned), but in so far as the absolute is causa suil Sui, we must notice, supposes the self, the subject, the self- consciousness, whence the being caused is not an effect, but an end, a value, the term to which it strives and which it gains. Such freedom is not a negation of the necessity, if we do not mean a necessity which competes with the abstract objectivity of being, but a necessity which coincides with the necessity of being, which in the concrete is the mind's dialectic.
Such a dialectic, in resolving all multiplicity and thereby every condition into its own unity, in positing § 21. An itself as the principle of every synthesis objection. of condition and conditionate, eliminates even the category of conditionality from the concept of mind, once more re-establishing the infinite unity of it. Moreover, as the criticism of individuality enabled us to discover the concept of individualization, and the criticism of space and time gave us the concept of the infinity of the mind in opposition to the indefiniteness of nature, and gave us also the concept of the eternity and true immortality of mind, so now, through the criticism of the category of condition, we have gained the real concept of freedom.
Metaphysicists and empiricists will not be com pletely satisfied with this concept of freedom which we have now given. Restricted to their false view, and the concept which follows from it, of a reality pre- 1 The expression is Spinoza's; but Spinoza retains the meaning which Plato's ab'To KIVOUV (Phaedrus, 245 c) and Plotinus's eavrov eW/ry^/xa (Enn. vi. 8, 1 6) must have. Compare my edition of the Ethica, Bari, Laterza, 1915, pp. 295-296. Spinoza's substance, like Plato's idea and Plotinus's God, is the abstract unconditioned, which cannot be causa sui, because it is not mind but its opposite. The sui therefore is a word deprived of its proper meaning1.
200 FREEDOM AND PREVISION CH.
supposed by the subject, they will maintain that by the a -priori synthesis of the condition and conditionate in the dialectic of mind, which is posited as subject of an object and so as unity of condition and con ditionate, all that we have succeeded in finding is an epistemological relation. Beyond this, they will say there always remains the metaphysical or real relation, at which the metaphysicist aims with his causality, and which even the empiricist has in view when he conceives mind conditioned by a nature in itself. It may even be, they will say, that the subject's cognitive activity posits its own object in positing itself, in knowing, as the unconditioned condition of the phenomenon. This cannot mean that it is uncon ditioned realiter; that it is realiter is a condition of every thinkable object. Mind is dialectic on the basis of the condition to which it is really bound.
That the basis of mind cannot possibly be nature is clear from what we said in proof of the purely epistemological value of the reality which we call nature. Nature as space and time, for example, is no more than an abstract category of thought. Mind abstracts from its own infinity which is a root of space, and from its own eternity which is a root of time. As a basis of mind, to take another example, nature cannot be race, another naturalistic concept, which so many historians and philosophers of history suppose it necessary to assume as a principle of the historical explanation of human facts. This is evident to every one who recognizes that the individuality of a race is realized and characterized in its history. The history of a race is not the spiritual activity conditioned by the race, but the very meaning of the concept of race when withdrawn from the abstractness of the naturalistic THE REAL SYNTHESIS 201 position in which it is an empty concept, and carried into the realm of spiritual reality where alone it can have meaning: a realm in which it is no longer the race, but the history, the mind. What is it in general you wish to prove? Is it that you can think something which is a condition of your mind, your mind which is actualized in you in thinking its condition? The condition must be, if you succeed in thinking it, a reality unthought (not entering into the synthesis of your thought). That is, it must be thought to be unthought. Berkeley will laugh at you. We will be content to point out to you that it is an abstraction which can only live in the synthesis of thought.
To escape the tangle we must keep before our mind that the transcendental " I " is posited as empirical, and as such it is conditioned.
unconditioned And if by reality we are not meaning and the con- only what is in the object of experience L (pure experience), then undoubtedly our synthesis, in which the " I ' is an unconditioned absolute, free, and therefore a condition of every thing, is a purely epistemological and not a real synthesis. But in meaning by reality the object alone cut off from the subject, we must by this time be convinced that we are meaning something which is meaningless. The only remedy is to look deeper, to go to the root of the reality wherein the object is the life of the subject, whose synthesis is therefore absolutely real.
We see here at last how the oscillating of thought between the concept of mind as pure act and the con cept of mind as fact, as object of experience, generates the historical antinomy of mind which only in the exact concept of the pure act can find its adequate solution.
CHAPTER XIII THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY AND ETERNAL HISTORY WHAT we call the historical antinomy is the antinomy which arises from the concept of mind as pure act when we consider it in its essential relations § i. What is meant by the with the concept of history. We can historical formulate it in the thesis: " Mind is history, because it is dialectic development," to which is opposed the antithesis: " Mind is not history, because it is eternal act." It is the antinomy in which at every moment we find ourselves entangled in study ing and understanding man, who presents always two aspects, each of which appears to be the negation of the other. For we cannot understand man apart from his history in which he realizes his essence; yet in history he can show nothing of himself which has that spiritual value entirely on account of which his essence comes to be conceived as realizing itself in history.
In what way and why is man history? Man is history because the essence in virtue of which he is con- traposed to the necessity of nature is freedom. Nature is, mind becomes. Mind becomes, in so far as it is free. This means that it realizes its end. Its life is value, it is what ought to be. It is knowing truth, creating images of beauty, doing good, worshipping God. The man who is man for us is one who knows truth and to whom we can therefore communicate our CH. xiii THE POET AND THE MAN 203 truth (which we cannot do to the brute). When he errs we believe he can be turned from his error in as much as he can correct himself, that is, knows the truth, not completely realized at a moment (that, strictly speaking, would not be a realizing but an already realized being) but in realizing it. This is the man into whose society we enter and who in history is our neighbour, since our society is not limited to those few men of our time who come within the sphere of direct personal relationship.
The language we speak, the institutions which govern our civil life, the city in which we live, the § 2. Explana- monuments of art which we admire, the tions. books, the records of our civilization, and the religious and moral traditions which, even if we have no special historical interest, constitute our culture, bind us by a thousand chains to minds not belonging to our own time, but whose reality is present in us and intelligible only as free spiritual reality. Our historical consciousness is peopled with names of nations and of men, the actors in this reality of civilization, its prophets, artists, men of science, statesmen, generals. With the energy of their minds they have created the spiritual world which is the atmosphere in which our soul breathes. To take an example, let us suppose it is Ariosto's Orlando Furioso we are reading and enjoying, finding in it food for our imagination and re-living it. History can tell us the origin of this poem. It can tell us that there was a man, Ariosto, who was the author, whose mind, which created this work of art, we can only know in the poem itself. Ariosto, then, is a man for whom we can only find a place in the world when we think it in the form of time and in the form of space. In the series of years he was 204 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY CH.
living from 1474 to 1533 of our era, and his life was spent in the part of the spatial universe we name Italy, and in various different localities of that peninsula. But the Ariosto who wrote the Orlando Furioso does not fill the fifty-nine years which elapsed between the poet's birth and his death; that Ariosto belongs only to those years during which the composition and correction of the poem occurred. And no more than we can say that Ariosto is his own father can we call the Ariosto of the years in which his poem was written the Ariosto of his earlier years. The Ariosto of the years before the poem, in the life he then lived, in his reading and in the first essays of his art, is indeed the antece dent which renders historically intelligible the author of the poem, or rather, the reality of his divine poetry. We see, then, that in knowing Ariosto we know two quite different men: one is a mind, the un conditioned, a condition of every conditionate, an act which posits time and all temporal things; the other is a reality like any which is conditioned by its antecedents. The one Ariosto is eternal, the other historical. One an object of aesthetic criticism when we see in Ariosto solely the eternal beauty of his art; the other an object of historical criticism, when we see in Ariosto solely fact, conditioned in time and in space, and intelligible, like every other fact, in relation to its conditions.
If instead of a poet we take a philosopher, he will in exactly the same way duplicate himself before us into two personalities. One will be the personality of the philosopher in reading whose works (if we under stand them) we make his thought our thought. Thereby we know it as mind, appreciate and judge it; it is his true personality in the strict meaning of the xni THE PROCESS AND ITS STAGES 205 word. The other personality is that by which he is fixed in the particular age in which he lived, and his thought is determined by the conditions of the culture of that age, or rather, by the historical antecedents of his speculation. This being given he could not think but as he did think, just as the animal born a cat does not bark but mews.
In general, when the mind is historicized it is changed into a natural entity; when its spiritual s History value only is kept in view, it is withdrawn and spiritual from history and stands before us in its values. eternal ideality. This presents no difficulty so long as the eternal reality of mind comes to be con ceived as a hypostasis of the content of mind, in the way that Plato conceived the idea, which, in its tran scendence, is, by definition, withdrawn from contact with the historical flux. But when the transcendence is demolished, and we conceive spiritual reality in its eternity no longer as something fixed but as process in act, then we no longer have history outside the eternal, nor the eternal outside history. The difficulty then consists precisely in the concept of reality which is both eternal and historical. It consists in the concept, by which, in the example of the Orlando Furioso, the poem itself, even while we distinguish it in knowledge from its antecedents, yet in itself is a process which develops by degrees, each degree presupposing those which have gone before and being what it is by reason of them, and in that way conditioned by them. And the philosophy of a philosopher, when we regard it in its maturest and most perfect expression, can only be understood as a system of ideas developed stage by stage just as the poem is.
It was this difficulty of conceiving the eternity in 2o6 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY the history and the history in the eternity, which led § 4. Plato and Plato to deny value to history and to Protagoras. imprison all being in a transcendent reality. And it leads the empiricists of all times (from Protagoras onwards) to deny any absolute value, any value raised above the plane of particular and contingent conditions. And the antinomy arises from the impossibility of confining ourselves either with Plato to a transcendent value which is not mind (a negation of history), or with Protagoras to the purely historical fact of mind (a negation of its value). It arises of necessity, for Plato and for Protagoras alike, in their contradiction.
How is the antinomy solved? It is solved, as all antinomies are solved, by bringing the spiritual reality, § 5. Solution of value and history, from abstract thought the antinomy, to the concrete. The spiritual reality actually known is not something which is different from and other than the subject who knows it. The Ariosto whom we know, the only Ariosto there is to know, author of Orlando Furioso, is not one thing and his poem another. And the poem which we know is known when it is read, understood, enjoyed; and we can only understand by reason of our education, and that is by reason of our concrete individuality. So true is this, that there is a history not only of Ariosto, but of criticism of Ariosto, criticism which concerns not only the reality which the poem was in the poet's own spiritual life, but what it continues to be after his death, through the succeeding ages, in the minds of his readers, true continuators of his poetry. The reality of Ariosto for me then, what I affirm and what I can refer to, is just what I realize of it. So then, to realize that reality to the best of THE POET AND THE POEM 207