graphy, not because the one is constituted before the other, but because the unity which stands at the foundation of both when we distinguish them one from another is philosophy and not historiography. It is, that is to say, the active understanding, and not the object under stood, in which that activity is made manifest. To say it is the latter is, I am always insisting, to view the matter from the tran scendental point of view.
CHAPTER XIV ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY IN introducing the concept of art in its distinction from the concept of philosophy, I will first direct § i. The char- attention to what appears to me the acterofart. crucial point in this distinction. A philo sophical system excludes nothing thinkable from the field of its speculation. It is philosophy in so far as the real, which the mind aims at understanding, is the absolute real, everything whatever which it is possible to think. On the other hand, a work of art, although it, too, expresses a world, expresses only the artist's world. And the artist, when he returns from art to life, feels that he returns to a reality different from that of his fantasy. The poet courts life, but a life whose value consists precisely in its not being inserted into the life which the practical man sets before him as his goal, nor into that which the philo sopher tries to reconstruct logically in his thinking. The impossibility of such insertion lies in the fact that the poet's " life " is a subjective free creation detached from the real, a creation in which the subject himself is realized and, as it were, enchained, and posits himself in his immediate abstract subjectivity. The kind of dream situation described by Leopardi in his poem " Alia sua Donna," and in his " Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare," is what every poet CH.XIV THE SUBJECTIVITY OF ART 221 and every artist experiences in regard to his own ideal, and, in general, to every creature of his imagination.1 1 The stanza of the poem is: Viva mirarti omai Nulla spene m' avanza; S' allor non fosse, allor che ignudo e solo Per novo calle a peregrina stanza Verra lo spirto mio. Gia sul novello Aprir di mia giornata incerta e bruna Te viatrice in questo arido suolo lo mi pensai. Ma non e cosa in terra Che ti somigli; e s' anco pari alcuna Ti fosse al volto, agli atti, alia favella, Saria, cosi conforme, assai men bella.
(Henceforth to behold thee living no hope remains, unless it should be when my spirit, naked and alone, sets forth on new, untravelled ways to seek its abiding-place. When my earthly sojourn newly opened, dark and drear, even then I had my thought of thee, a wanderer on this barren waste. Yet on earth is nothing which resembles thee, and were there anything even to compare to thee in face, in action and in speech, however like it be to thee, it still falls short of thy beauty.)
The following is the passage from the " Dialogue between Torquato Tasso and his familiar Spirit."
Tasso. Were it not that I have no more hope of seeing Leonora again, I could believe I had not yet lost the power of being happy.
Spirit. Which do you consider the sweeter, to see the loved lady, or to think of her?
Tasso. I do not know. When present with me she seemed a woman; far away she appeared and appears to me a goddess.
Spirit. These goddesses are so amiable, that when any of them approaches you, in a twinkling they doff their divinity, detach their halo and put it in their pocket, in order not to dazzle the mortal who stands before them.
Tasso. What you say is only too true. But does it not seem to you a great fault in ladies, that they prove to be so different from what we imagine them?
Spirit. I do not see that it is their fault that they are made of flesh and blood and not of nectar and ambrosia. What in the world possesses the thousandth part or even the shadow of the perfection which you think ladies have? I", surprises me that you are not astonished to find men are men, creatuico of little worth and unlovable, since you cannot under stand why women are not angels.
Tasso. In spite of this I am dying to see her and speak to her again.
Spirit. Well, this night I will bring her to you in your dream. She shall 222 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY This is the deep ground of truth to which Manzoni has given expression in an essay in which he subjects § 2. Art and to criticism the historical novel as a form history. of art (Del romanzo storico e in genere de componimenti misti di storia e d* invenzione). He rightly rejects the romance which mingles invention with history as poetry, because the poet's invention or rather his creative subjective freedom is the very essence of poetry, and poetry can allow no limitation in the adjustment of it to the facts of historical reality. Yet he is wrong in so far as he would deduce from this an aesthetic defect in every his torical romance. The poet can idealize history with no greater restriction of his freedom than any other abstract material taken as the object of his artistic contemplation imposes on him. Has not Manzoni himself idealized history in / promessi sposi? The history, indeed, or whatever the material of art be, is not prized for any value it may possess in itself considered in separation from the art which invests be beautiful as youth and so courteous in manner that you will take courage and speak to her more freely and readily than you have ever spoken to her. And then you will take her hand and look her full in the face, and you will be surfeited with the sweetness that will fill your soul. And to-morrow whenever you think of this dream you will feel your heart overflowing with tenderness.
Tasso. What consolation! A dream in exchange for truth.
Spirit. What is truth?
Tasso. I know no more than Pilate knew.
Spirit. Well, let me tell you. Between knowing the truth and the dream there is only this difference, that the dream is always and many times sweeter and more beautiful than the truth can ever be.
Tasso. Is a dreamed pleasure then as good as a real pleasure?
Spirit. It is. Indeed I know a case of one who, when his lady has appeared to him in a kindly dream, the whole next day he avoids meeting her and seeing her, because he knows that the real lady cannot compare with the dream image, and that reality dispelling the illusion from his mind, would deprive him of the extraordinary delight the dream gave.
ART ESSENTIALLY LYRICAL 223 it. The material of art has worth, means, is what it is, by reason of the life it lives in the poet's soul. The matter is not there for its own sake but for the soul's life, for its feeling. It represents the " I " as it stands in its subjective immediacy.
This is Croce's meaning when he says that art is always and essentially lyrical. And it is what De § - The Sanctis meant when he said, with equal lyrical character truth, that art is form in which the con tent is fused, absorbed, annulled. But philosophy also is form, as thought, in whose actuality is the object's life. The difference is that art is the form of subjectivity, or, as we also say, of the mind's immediate individuality. Therefore in Leopardi we are not to look for philosophical thought, a world concept, but for Leopardi's feeling, that is, his person ality, the very Leopardi who gives concrete life and soul to a world — which is yet a system of ideas. Take Leopardi's soul from his world, go to his poems and prose not for the expression of his feeling but for a philosophy to be discussed and made good by rational arguments and you have destroyed Leopardi's poetry.
This individuality, personality, immediate sub jectivity, is not opposed to the impersonality which § 4. The im- ^as Deen rightly held to be an essential personality of character of art. Without this imperson- art- ality where would be the universality, infinity or eternity by virtue of which the work of art at once soars above the empirical individual, be coming a source of joy to all minds, conquering the force of ages and endowed with immortality? The impersonality uf which Gustave Flaubert,1 an exquisite 1 Cf. Antonio Fusco, La filosofia dell' arte in Gustavo Flaubert, Messina, 1917.
224 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY CH.
artist who reflected deeply on the nature of art, who had no doubt his exaggerations and prejudices, speaks, was this universality of mind as a transcendental I," constituting the present reality of every " I." The personality which must be excluded from art is rather that which characterizes the empirical I, the Self withdrawn from the perfect light of self-conscious ness, which in art must prevail in all its effulgent power.
Self-consciousness is consciousness of self; but with a difference. Consciousness of self is one side § « The indi- on^y? tne thesis, in the spiritual dia- viduality of lectic in which consciousness of the object artistic work. ^s other than self is the antithesis. Art is consciousness of self, a pure, abstract, self-con sciousness, dialecticized it is true (for otherwise it could not be realized), but taken in itself and in abstraction from the antithesis in which it is realized. Thence it is imprisoned in an ideal, which is a dream, within which it lives feeding on itself, or rather creat ing its own world. Even to common sense, for which the real world is not created by mind, the art world appears a subjective creation. And the art world is in fact a kind of secondary and intermittent creation made possible by the creation which is original and constant, that in which mind posits itself in spatializing itself, in the absolute meaning of that term.
Since, then, the most characteristic feature of art is the raising of self-consciousness in its abstract im- § 6. History of mediacy to a higher power, it thus de- art as history taches itself from general consciousness and withdraws into the dream or fantasy. Hence it is clear that a history of art, in so far as it is art, is inconceivable. Every work of art is a self-enclosed INDIVIDUALITY OF ART 225 individuality, an abstract subjectivity empirically posited among all other such in an atomistic fashion. Every poet has his own aesthetic problem which he solves on his own account and in such wise that it withdraws him from any intrinsic relation with his contemporaries and successors. Moreover, every poet in each of his works propounds and solves a particular aesthetic problem, so that his works, so far as we regard exclusively their character as art, are the expression of a spiritual reality fragmentary in its nature and from time to time new and incommensur able with itself. There is no genre, there are only particulars. Not only is there not an aesthetic reality such as literature, constituting for the historian of literature a genre, the development of which he sup poses himself to trace, but there is not even an aesthetic reality answering to such a phrase as, for example, "the art of Ariosto." Each of Ariosto's comedies, satires, poems or other works, is an art by itself.
It is true we write histories of literature and of the single arts, and, as we said in the last chapter, to understand Ariosto is to understand his language, and to do this we must get away from his poem, and from himself as a definite individual, and go back and immerse ourselves in the history of the culture out of which has germinated his whole spirituality, the spiritu ality expressed to us in the poet's words. But when we have learnt the language and can read the poem, we have to forget the whole of the long road we have had to travel in order to learn it. Then there is our own mentality acquired by what we have learnt and what we have been, we have to loosen that and forget ourselves in the poet's world and dream with him drawing aside with him out of the high road along which Q 226 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY in history spiritual reality travels, just as when we are dreaming the world is forgotten and all the bonds which bind us to the reality of the objects in which dialectically our real life is made concrete are broken. So though it is true that a history of the literature or art of a people is possible, such as we have, for example, in De Sanctis's Storia delta letteratura italiana^ one of our noblest historical works, one in which we feel as it were the very heart-beat of the dialectical life of mind, yet if such a history would be something more than a gallery or museum in which works of art are collected which have no intrinsic art- relation to one another, — unless it be the light thrown on them by the proximity of kindred works of the same school or of the same period and therefore generally of the same or similar technique,1 — if it would be more than this then it can only be a history of mind in its concreteness, out of which art bursts forth as the plants spring from the soil. So that a history of art in its aesthetic valuations must always necessarily break the historical thread, and when the ends are reunited the thread ceases to be a pure aesthetic valuation. Aesthetic valuation is fused in the general dialectic of history, the standpoint of which is the unique value of mind as the constructor of history. In short, when we are looking at art we do not see history and when we are looking at history we do not see art.2 Much the same, conversely, holds of religion. Re ligion is not philosophy. We saw this when treating § 7. Religion, of the immortality of the soul. Religion may be defined as the antithesis of art. Art is the 1 Technique is an antecedent of art. In art technique is overcome and annulled. This is clearly shown in B. Croce, Problemi di estetica, pp. 247-255.
2 Cf. " Pensiero e poesia nella Divina Comedia," in my Frammenti di estetica, Lanciano, 1920.
xiv THE MOMENT OF RELIGION 227 exaltation of the subject released from the chains of the real in which the subject is posited positively; and religion is the exaltation of the object, released from the chains of the mind, in which the identity, knowability and rationality of the object consists. The object in its abstract opposition to knowing is the real. By that opposition knowing is excluded from reality, and the object is therefore eo ipso unknowable, only affirmable mystically as the immediate adhesion of the subject to the object. It is the position of Parmenides, and from it Gorgias derived the first motive of his negation of the possibility of knowing.1 In its absolute unknowability the object not only will not tolerate the presence of the subject but will not even tolerate the presence of other objects. And as there is no atomism which does not necessarily resolve itself into unity, so there is no pure polytheism which does not lead to the idea of a higher divinity which confers the divine power on all the others. The strictly religious moment of religion can only be the moment of mono theism, for in that the object is posited in its opposition to the subject, and the subject cancelled, and there remains no possibility of passing from it and positing other objects, or of differentiating it in any way as first.2 If, then, we accept this position of the divine, as the absolute, immobile and mysterious object, c g Im_ is it possible for us, from the religious possibility of a point of view, to conceive a history, a history of development? But a development can only be of the subject, and religiously the subject has no value. On the other hand it is 1 Cf. Sistema di Logica, i. pp. 151-153. 2 Cf. / discorsi di religione, Firenza, Vallecchi, 1920.
228 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY impossible that the mind should fix itself at the simple religious standpoint by annulling itself as subject, because the very annulling cannot occur without an affirmation of the activity of mind. Mind is borne, as by its own nature, from time to time aloft above every religious standpoint, shaking itself free in its autonomy by criticizing its concept of the divine and thereby proceeding to ever more spiritual forms of religion. So that in its religious ness mind is immobile, it moves only by continually overcoming its own religious moment and absorbing it in philosophy.
The history of religion accordingly either takes a rationalistic form, and then it depreciates the true and . essential religiousness of every particular religion as religion, by annulling the value which history of each religion in claiming for itself cannot philosophy. but deny to Qthers> History of religion then becomes the history of the human mind, the mind polarized in the moment of its antithesis, withdrawn from its true dialectic, and dialecticized abstractly as a consciousness in which the moment of free self- consciousness is suppressed. It is then no longer a history of religion but a history of the fundamental dialectic of the mind, which is a synthesis of con sciousness and self-consciousness in which religion is deprived of its abstract religiousness and becomes philosophy. Or the history of religion takes a form which maintains the specific value of religion; and then it no longer finds matter for history. History means development, that is a unity of a multiplicity, whereas the religious consciousness admits no multi plicity, it admits neither preparatory theophanies, nor increase and progress such as a dogmatic HISTORIES AND HISTORY 229 development which is other than a merely analytical commentary.1 As with art, so with religion, in each case his tory is constructed by bringing it into the universal history of the dialectical development of mind. In this development art and religion are spiritual positions, concepts of reality, and in being such are, essentially, history of philosophy. So that a history of art and a history of religion, in so far as they are really con ceivable and therefore possible to carry out, are histories of philosophy, and even so they are histories in time which are resolved into an ideal history just to the extent that they are shown in their own nature to belong to the history of philosophy.
1 See Gentile, // modernismo e i rapporti tra religione e filosofia, Bari, Laterza, 1909, pp. 65-78. For the whole of the discussion in this chapter on the abstractness alike of art and of religion and of their concreteness in philosophy, cf. Gentile, Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, Bari, Laterza (1913-1914), vol. i. part iii. chap. 4, and vol. ii. part ii. chaps. 2 and 4.
CHAPTER XV SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY WE not only distinguish philosophy from art and religion, we also distinguish it from science. Although § i. Science science has the cognitive character of philo- and philo- sophy yet stricto sensu it is not philosophy, sophy. jt j^g not t]ie universalit;y of its object which philosophy has, and therefore it has not the critical and systematic character of philosophy. Every science is one among others and is therefore particular. When a particular science transcends the limits of its own special subject-matter it tends to be transformed into philosophy. As particular, that is, concerned with an object which itself is particular and can have its own meaning apart from other objects which coexist with it, science rests on the naturalistic pre supposition. For it is only when we think of reality as nature that it presents itself to us as composed of many elements, any one of which can be made the object of a particular investigation. A naturalistic view is the basis, then, of the analytical character of every science. Thence the logically necessary tend ency of science in every period towards mechanism and materialism.
Again, every science presupposes its object. The science arises from the presupposition that the object CH.XV PRESUPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE 231 exists before it is thought, and independently alto- § 2. Character- gether of being known. Had science to isdcs of apprehend the object as a creation of the subject, it would have first to pro pound the problem of the position of the real in all its universality, and then it would no longer be science, but philosophy. In presupposing the object as a datum to be accepted not proved, a natural datum, a fact, every particular science is necessarily empirical, unable to conceive knowledge otherwise than as a relation of the object to the subject extrinsic to the nature of both. This relation is sensation or a knowing which is a pure fact on which the mind can then work by abstraction and generalization. Science, therefore, is dogmatic. It does not prove and it cannot prove its two funda mental presuppositions: (i) that its object exists; (2) that the sensation, the initial and substantial fact of knowledge, which is the immediate relation with the object, is valid.1 Philosophy, on the other hand, proposes to prove the value of the object, and of every form of the § 3. Character- °DJect) in the system of the real, and its istics of why and how. It gives, or seeks to give, philosophy. an account not only Of the existence of the objects which the particular sciences dogmatically presuppose, but even of the knowing (which itself also is at least a form of reality) whereby every science is constituted. And therefore philosophy, in being systematic, is critical.
In science, in so far as it is particular, with the naturalistic and materialistic tendency and by reason 1 On the dogmatic and non - systematic character of science cf. Sistema di Logica, vol. i. Introduction, chap. i.
232 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.
of it, there goes part passu the tendency to empiri- § 4. The cism and dogmatism. Through these two philosophy of tendencies science has continually come to set itself up as a form of philosophy and arrayed itself against the philosophy which has sought by overcoming mechanism, empiricism and dogmatism, to set forth the universal concept of the world in its metaphysical ideality. And so science, in the very spirit which rejects and opposes philosophy, is the partisan of a philosophy: the feeblest and most naive form which philosophy can assume.
In calling science naturalistic we do not mean to identify it with the sciences of nature alone. Besides § 5. Science and the natural sciences there are what are naturalism. called the mental and moral sciences. The moral sciences are equally naturalistic, in so far as they also fail to attain the universality and system of philosophy and have a particular and presupposed object as a fact. All the moral sciences have this character. This is why they are sciences and not philosophy. They build upon an intuition of the reality to which their object belongs, identical with the naturalist's intuition of nature, and therefore, albeit under another name, they conceive reality as nature. Their reality is positive, in the meaning that it is pre supposed and not posited by mind, it is therefore outside the order and unity which belongs to mind, pulverized in the inorganic multiplicity of its elements. The value of mind is therefore for these sciences inconceivable.
Even philosophy of mind ceases to be philosophy any longer and becomes simply science when it seeks to explain mind, both in its wholeness and in the elements of which empirically it appears to be con- THE MORAL SCIENCES 233 stituted, as a de facto reality. So, too, what is called the general theory of law falls outside the proper ambit of the philosophy of law, because it regards law as simply a diversified phenomenology, a complex of experiential data. The science with this subject- matter must comport itself just as every natural science comports itself towards the class of phenomena to which it refers, determining its general characters and de facto rules.1 We may say then that strictly philosophy has mind and the sciences have nature for their object.
Even the mathematical sciences, which have them selves established the postulates by which the world of pure quantity is constituted, do not treat even their own postulated reality in any way differently from the natural sciences. They have in common the particu larity of the object and the dogmatic character of the propositions, a dogmatic character which results from conceiving the object as self-subsisting in its absolute necessity, confronting the subject which can do no more in regard to it than presuppose it and analyse it.
Such being its nature, can there be a history of science in the true meaning of history? It is evident § 6 impossi- *kat ^or sc^ence there is no alternative, it bilityofa must exclude the concept of a unique history of history of science, for the very reason that science breaks up into sciences, each of which, in so far as it is science and not philosophy, is separated from the others and has therefore no essential relations with them. But besides being particular, every science is, as we have said, empirical and dog matic, because it presupposes the known to the 1 Cf. my Fondamenti della filosqfia del diritto, Pisa, Spoerri, 1916, chap. i.
234 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY ea.
knowing, precisely as Plato presupposed the ideas, which are purely the objects of its knowing, to the mind which knows them. And for the same reason that it is impossible to conceive a dialectic of the Platonic ideas and therefore in the Platonic theory a history of philosophy, it is impossible even to conceive the history of science. There being a definite reality to know, either we know it or we do not know it. If it is partly known and partly not, that can only mean that it has separable parts, and then there is a part which is completely known and a part which is completely unknown. Beyond truth, which is posited in a form which has no degrees, there is nothing but error, and between truth and error the abyss. The history of the sciences in fact for the most part assumed the aspect of an enumeration of errors and prejudices, which ought to be relegated entirely to the pre-history rather than to the history of science. History ought to be the development of science, and science as such can have no development, because it presupposes a perfect truth which we cannot reach by degrees but to which we suddenly leap. Therefore the concept which completely fits the naturalistic sciences is discovery, intuition, substantially identical