So in Plato, besides the dialectic of the ideas, we have another dialectic. Plato does not indeed speak § n The °f it under that name, but he conceives it Platonic dia- apparently in a manner analogous to what lectic of Nature. we mean by the dialectic of development. It is the movement, the process of continual formation, the yeveo-L?, as he calls it, of nature. It is not, or at least he certainly does not intend it to be, immediate like the eternal world of the ideas. But Plato's Nature, if it presuppose the eternal ideas, is itself a presupposi tion in regard to thought, as it was for all the philo- 46 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
sophers before him. Nature is not a presupposition in regard to thought in general, for Greek philosophy throughout its whole history cannot be said to have ever succeeded in withdrawing from the ambit of the laws of nature; on the contrary nature is for it an abstract entity, whose position, whatever it be, has no real importance for those who look only at the inner and concrete meaning of philosophical systems. Can we then say of nature so conceived, a nature which in itself, abstractly thought of, becomes^ but in so far as it comes to be thought, is, and in so far as it is, comes to be thought, — can we really say of this nature that it moves and generates and regenerates itself con tinually? In so far as we do not think it but only feel it, yes: but in so far as we think it (and how have we come to speak of 7ei/eo-t? if we do not think it?) it does not move and can no longer be moved; it becomes rigid and petrified in the very fact that it is object of thought. And indeed Plato as the result of his criticism of sensations, and of the consequent opinions, finds no other elements intelligible except the ideas, archetypes, the images of which lying in the depths of the soul are awakened by means of the stimulus of those very sensations. So that though we begin by seeing confusedly the movement which is in travail with all natural things, we are not arrested by this first giddy intuition, but pass thence to the contemplation of the fixed and immutable and intelligible ideas. They are the deepest reality of nature, precisely because they are withdrawn from the restlessness of the sensible appearances, or rather because they have not, like these, a character which actually contradicts the reality which thought conceives as already realized. Yet even for Plato there is a iv NATURE FOR ARISTOTLE 47 material element which in nature is added to the pure ideal forms without disturbing their motionless perfec tion. But this matter is precisely what from the Platonic standpoint is never made intelligible. Plato says it is non-being. It is something for which in thought's paint-box there are no colours, since whatever is pre sented to thought and therefore exists for it, is idea. And what can genesis itself be, in its eternal truth, but idea? It would not be, were it not idea. To be, then, means that from this lower world of birth and death we are exalted into the hyperuranion of the eternal forms. And we know that when Plato had posited the trans cendence of the ideas it was no longer possible for him to redescend into the world of nature.
Aristotle, although he has been called the philo sopher of becoming, had no better success. He denies the § 12 The Platonic transcendence. The ideal forms Aristotelian immanent in the matter form nature. They are subjected to the movement by which alone it is possible for the ideas to be realized in matter. There is no substance which is not a unity of form and matter. He thinks of the world therefore as mass animated by eternal movement which brings the eternal thought into act. Yet even for him thought thinks nature as its antecedent: thinks it therefore as an already realized reality which as such can be defined and idealized in a system of fixed and un changeable concepts. Indeed there is no science for him which is not the act of the intellect. It is the human intellect corresponding, a static correspondence moreover, to the eternal intellect, which is incarnate in the material world in virtue of the purpose which rules the movement. So that nature for Aristotle, as for Plato, is not an object of science in so far as it is nature; 48 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
and in so far as it is an object of science at all it is no longer nature, no longer movement, but pure form. It is a concept and a system of concepts. The Aris totelian becoming, in so far as it is not and cannot be the becoming of thought, remains a mere postulate. As thing thought of, it is not becoming; as becoming, it cannot be thought.
In saying that the whole ancient philosophy stopped at the concept of reality as presupposed by thought, we mean that this was inevitable because ancient philo- throughout the whole period it never sophy failed to became possible to conceive, and in fact understand ancient philosophy never did conceive, history. '.
history. '.
history, -progress. It never conceived a reality which is realized through a process, which is not a vain distraction of activity but a continual creation of reality, a continual increase of its own being. Nature, as Plato and Aristotle conceive it, supposes a perfec tion of being which must be realized in it, but this perfection of being lies behind its back. Man's thinking presupposes the reality of its own ideals, and can strive towards them; but only if it is alienated from them. In the beginning there shines a light, and this must be the goal of human efforts: the golden age, the </>vo-t? (as opposed to the v6/j,o<i) of the Sophists, the Cynics and the Stoics, lies behind us, as in the Platonic idealism the ideal world precedes our corporeal life.
The idea of history, the idea of the life of the human mind, as seriously entering into the formative § 14. Primacy process and development of reality itself, of the concept was never so much as suspected through- of progress. out fae whole course of the ancient philosophy nor even in the medieval so far as that WE ARE THE OLD 49 WE ARE THE OLD 49 continues the ancient. Even at the beginning of the modern era we find Bacon speaking of an instauratlo ab imis which is to cancel the past of science as lost labour. We find Descartes equally denying the value of tradition, and conceiving reason abstractly as the power of the empirical individual, who must commence or recommence scientific inquiry by himself alone and start from the beginning. Yet we may hear one voice entirely new, though never understood by his contemporaries, that of Giordano Bruno. In the Cena de le Ceneri (1584) he championed the freedom of the new scientific thought against the authority of Aristotle. We have need indeed, he remarked, to trust the judgment of the old; but the old are not the ancients, it is we who are the old, we who come later and are therefore wiser by the experience and reflexion of the ages lived through.1 Bruno is perhaps the first to affirm that the mind has a development which is an increase of its power, and therefore its true and proper realiza tion. It is the first indication of the modern concept, wholly idealistic and Christian, of the importance of history.
How many are there even to-day who appreciate this concept of history as progress, gradual realization of humanity itself? The dialectical conground of the ception is possible on one condition only, concept of an(} that is that in history we see not a past but the actual present. This means that the historian does not detach himself from his material and set up res gestae as the presupposition and already exhausted antecedent of his historia 1 Cf. my article " Veritas filia temporis," 1912, in Giordano Bruno e lafilosofia del Rinascimento, Florence, Vallecchi, 1920.
E 50 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
rerum gestarum. If he does and trusts to what is called the positive element of historical events, instead of to their organic spirituality, he comes to consider history in the same way as that in which the naturalist considers nature. It is commonly supposed that historical positivism stands on the same basis as naturalistic positivism. But it is not the same, for the naturalist, in so far as he is such, is necessarily positivist. He must set out with the presupposition that nature is and that it can be known; and its knowability depends on its being, whether its being is known or not. We mean by nature something the mind finds confronting it, something already realized when we are brought into relation with it; and positivism is nothing but the philosophy which conceives reality as fact, independent of any relation to the mind which studies it. History presents, indeed, in the positive character of its events, an analogy with nature; but its intelligibility consists in the unity of the real to which it belongs on the one side and in the mentality of the historian on the other. The history of a past is impossible if it is found unintelligible (if, for example, it is attested by undecipherable documents). Between the personages of history and ourselves there must be a common language, a common men tality, an identity of problems, of interests, of thought. This means that it must pertain to one and the\ same world with ourselves, to one and the same process of reality. History, therefore, is not already realized when we set out on our historical research; it is our own life in act. If then nature is nature in so far only as it precedes the thought of nature, history is history in so far only as it is the thought of the historian.
HISTORICAL MATERIAL 51 Whoever does not feel this identity of self with history, whoever does not feel that history is prolonged and concentrated in his consciousness, has not history confronting him, but only brute nature, matter deaf to the questionings of mind. A history so conceived cannot prove a progress, because it cannot be conceived dialectically as a process of formation. It cannot be so conceived for the same reason as that which pre vented Plato and Aristotle perceiving the dynamical life of nature. A history which is finished, self-con tained, done with, is necessarily represented as all gathered and set out on one plane, with parts which are called successive, though they have no real and substantial succession, that is, an intrinsically necessary order, in which what comes after cannot go before because it implies and therefore presupposes that which comes first. There can be no such order in the history which is simply the matter of historical representation, for the order of an historian's presenta tion of material is a nexus and unity which belongs to his mind. Strictly, history is not the antecedent of the historian's activity; it is his activity. This is confirmed in the fact that every organization of historical elements, although each element has its own colour and meaning as positive historical fact, bears the imprint of the historian's mentality (political, religious, artistic, philo sophical). There is not a material element of history which remains point for point the same in the various representations which different historians offer, nothing which when we have despoiled a history of all the historian's subjective particularity — according to the usual empirical conception — we can fix in its skeletal objectivity.
What we have said of the concept of history, repre- 52 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT sented as existing antecedent to the mind of the historian, should suffice to clear away the absurdity in absurdity of the evolutionist notion of a the concept of nature, conceived in the same way, that is, as a reality presupposed by the mind which knows it and therefore independent of the reality of that mind. Such is the nature which Darwin and his followers strive to conceive as an evolution. It is not posited as immediately and simultaneously present, but as being formed and forming itself step by step, not in virtue of a law governing the whole of nature as the process of one spiritual reality, but according to the law of natural selec tion, the survival of the fittest. It is called selection by a lucus a non lucendo since no one selects. The selection results from the inevitable succumbing of the feebler and the adaptation of the stronger to the environment. From this mechanical law, directing a reality which has been set beyond the reach of mind, self-subsistent in its brute nature, there is con ceived to arise, as an effect of the mechanism itself, the highest form of animal and its soul. This soul is reason and will, a reality which puts it in opposition to all other kinds of animal and to all nature, which it understands and exercises lordship over. Now, subtract mind, sup pose it not yet to have come to birth, and evolution then stands to nature, as Darwin conceived it, in the same relation as that in which dialectic stands to the world of Platonic ideas, that is, it ceases any longer to be process because it implies a system of relations all of which are already posited and consolidated. Let us imagine that there really is a moment at which one given species exists, and that at this moment there does not yet exist the superior species which, according to the iv NATURAL SELECTION 53 evolutionist theory, must issue from it, then the least reflexion will show us that the passage of the one grade of nature into the other is unintelligible unless with the mind we pass from that moment, in which as yet the second grade does not exist, to the successive moment in which there is the first and the second grade and their relation. So that in general, in the whole chain of evolution, however long we imagine it, the first link of it is always presented as together with all the others even to the last: that is, even to man who is more than nature and therefore, by his intervention alone, destroys the possibility of conceiving nature in itself as an evolution. This amounts to saying that an indispensable condition of understanding nature, as we understand history, in its movement, is that the object be not detached from the subject and posited in itself, independent, in its unattainable transcendence. As transcendent object it can only be effectively posited as object already thought and thereby it is shown to be immanent in the thinking, but considered abstractly in a way which separates it from the thinking itself. And then it is obvious that what we find within the object is what we have put there.
To Hegel belongs the merit of having affirmed the necessity of the dialectical thinking of the real in its § 17. Criticism concretcness. He put to the proof and of the Hegelian showed the impossibility of the dialectical dialectic. thinking of the real if we begin by separat ing it from the act of thinking and regard it as in itself and presupposed by the act of thinking it. Hegel saw clearly that we do not conceive reality dialectically unless we conceive it as itself thought. He distinguished the intellect which conceives things, from the reason which conceives mind. Intellect 54 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.
abstractly represents things analytically, each for itself, self-identical, different from all the others. Reason comprehends all in the unity of mind, as each self- identical and at the same time different, and therefore both different from and identical with all the others. And yet Hegel himself, when he would define, in the moments of its rhythm, the dialectical nature of thought, the thought which understands itself as unity of the variety and things as variety of the unity, instead of pre senting this dialectic as the archetypal law of thought in act, and thereby its presupposed ideal, could not avoid fixing it in abstract concepts. Thence his concepts are immobile, actually devoid of any dialectical character, and we are left unable to understand how the concepts by themselves can pass one into another and be unified in a real continuous logical movement.
The difficulties which he and many who ventured on his tracks had to meet in the deduction of those first categories of his Logic, by which the concept of becoming, the specific character of the dialectic, is constituted, are classical. Becoming is an identity of being and non-being, since the being which is not, becomes. And so Hegel has to move from the concept of being, pure being, free from every determina tion, which is indeed the least which can be thought, and which we cannot not think, in its absolute inde- terminateness, whatever abstraction is made from the content of thought. Is it possible to pass from this concept of being, posited in this way before thought, and defined by means of its own indefiniteness, to the concept of becoming and so to prove that nothing is but all becomes? Yes, according to Hegel; because being as such is not thinkable, or rather it is only thinkable as self-identical with and at the same time different iv HEGEL'S CRUX PHILOSOPHORUM 55 from itself. It cannot be thought, because when we attempt to think it deprived of all content, absolutely indeterminate, we think of it as nothing, or non- being, or being which is not; and the being which is not, becomes. But it has been said, if the absolute indeterminateness of being equates it with nothing, we are then without the unity of being and non-being in which becoming consists: there is not that contra diction between being and non-being of which Hegel speaks, and which is to generate the concept of becoming. For if being is on the one hand identical with, and on the other hand different from, non-being.
then there is a being which is not non-being and a non-being which is not being; and there is wanting that unity of the different which gives rise to becoming. Being, as pure being, in such case would be extraneous to -non-being, as pure non-being, and there could not be that meeting together and shock of being and nothing from which Hegel thought to strike the spark of life. In the end we are left, from whichever side we approach, with two dead things which do not amalgamate in the living movement.
We might easily have brought forward other and different kinds of arguments, for this is Hegel's crux § 18. Reform of philosophorum^ round which battle has been the Hegelian waged. Every one feels the necessity of giving an account of the concept of becom ing, and yet no one is satisfied with Hegel's deduction of it.1 That deduction is vitiated by the error already indicated in distinguishing the dialectic which is understood as a dialectic of thing thought, from 1 I have given a short critical exposition of the principal attempts at interpretation in the volume already alluded to: La Riforma della Dialettica hegeliana, chap. i.
56 MIND AS DEVELOPMENT CH.IV the true dialectic which can only be conceived as a dialectic of the thinking outside which there is no thought. The being which Hegel must prove identical with non-being in the becoming, the being which alone is real, is not the being which he defines as the indeterminate absolute (how can the indeter minate absolute be other than the indeterminate absolute?), but the being of the thought which defines and, in general, thinks. As Descartes saw, thought is in so far as we think. If thought were something that is, it would not be what it is — act. It is in not-being, in self-positing, in becoming, that it is.1 So that all the difficulties met with in the Hegelian dialectic are eliminated as soon as we acquire a clear consciousness of the immense difference between the reality which Plato and Aristotle con ceived dialectically, the reality also which in the ordinary notion of history and the evolutionist notion of nature are conceived dialectically, and the reality which modern idealist philosophy defines as dialectic. For the one, reality is thought of, or thinkable, which is the same thing; for the other, reality is thinking.
Get rid of the ordinary and unconscious abstraction according to which reality is what you think, and which yet, if you think it, can be nowhere but in your thought. Look with steady gaze at the true and concrete reality of the thought in act. The dialectical character of the real will then appear as evident and certain as it is evident and certain to each of us that in thinking we are conscious of what thinks, just as in seeing we are conscious of what sees.
1 Such is the concept I have expounded in my book just referred to, as a reform of the Hegelian principle.
CHAPTER V THE PROBLEM OF NATURE HAVING posited a purely ideal dialectic, and a Logos, distinct from mind or thought thinking, which is the § i The Hegel- consciousness of it, the road lay open to ian problem of Hegel to deduce mind from the Logos by Nature. passing through nature. For by conceiving the dialectic of thing thought as a pure thinkable, he had found a way of conceiving nature dialectically, for nature is thing thought and not a thinking. But it proves to be only a road painted on a wall. For he kept open the possibility of conceiving nature dialecti cally only because he had not yet discovered the true dialectic and continued to use the old, unserviceable Platonic dialectic. When we make dialectic coincide with thought we cannot, as we saw in the last chapter, even propose the problem of the dialectic of nature: it becomes an absurdity. If in place of the false concep tion of history which opposes history to the mind which thinks it, we have been able to indicate and put in its place the true conception of history, and if that dialecti cal concept eliminates the opposition and reveals the infinite unity of mind consolidated in its actuality, then the criticism we are now bringing against the dialectical concept of nature digs still deeper the abyss which yawns between mind and the concept of a reality which is resistant to all dialectical thinking. Granted the 57 58 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE dialectical nature of mind, a limitation of its dialectic seems to carry with it a limitation of the reality of mind and so to force us to deny to it that infinity which we declared immanent in the concept of mind. Hence the problem arises: What is this nature which stands confronting the mind and is not susceptible of being presented dialectically? What is this nature which the mind finds outside itself as its own antecedent? Until we reply to this question it is clearly impossible to maintain our fundamental affirmation of the infinite unity of mind.
Before we can say what nature is we must first know whether the nature meant is thought of as general § 2. Nature as or universal, or as individual. Plato, individuality, following Socrates, who first originated the clear distinction between the general and the individual, was induced by the speculative transcendental tendency of his philosophy to think of nature as general, and so he turned the immediacy and positiveness of natural reality into the idea of the nature. The true horse is not for him the single, particular, individual horse but the species horse (not of course using the term in the empirical meaning of the naturalist). It is tVTroTT;?, horseness, and he tells us that it provoked the mirth of his opponent Antisthenes.1 Plato could not con ceive otherwise a nature which could be an object of science, or which could simply be, without an idea. But such a conception of nature fell under the criticism which Aristotle brought to bear on the Platonic transcendence. The Platonic doctrine makes the individual inconceivable, and it was the individual which, pressing upon thought with the demand that it be taken in its full actuality, 1 Simplicius, in Arist. Cat. 66 b 45 Br.
THE ARISTOTELIAN INDIVIDUAL 59 had generated the problem of the Socratic uni versal. For Aristotle, nature, in its opposition to thought, is posited as the unity of the form or idea with matter its opposite (Plato's non-being): for Aristotle's substance is precisely the individual which is that unity. And with Aristotle nature begins to be opposed to the universality of the idea, or of the pure thought with its own individuality, which brings the incarnation of the form into the matter: an incar nation, which is the actualizing of a power, due to the realization of the form itself, of which in the matter there is nothing but the abstract and inert possibility.
The concept of the individual has great importance in the Aristotelian philosophy. It affirms the necessity of overcoming the abstract position of the Aristotelian idea, which is actual thinking as thought, doctrine of the gut rather than a concept we should say it is a demand, or that it is the aspiration, of the Aristotelian thought to attain the immanent concept of the universal. The concept, indeed, is not attained; and it could not be attained so long as philosophy sought reality, and the reality of the individual, in thing thought instead of in thinking. It is shown indeed, that the individual we would distinguish from the idea, is distinguished as the process of realization from the reality which the idea will be. But this process of realization, as we have seen, from the Aristotelian standpoint, which coincides with the Platonic in making the reality thought of a presupposition of the thinking, is inconceivable except in so far as it has yet to begin (potency, matter), or is already exhausted (act, form). So that in analysing the individual it is necessary first to find 60 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE