Читать книгу The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic - Benedetto Croce - Страница 8

Practical and theoretic life.

A glance at the life that surrounds us would seem more than sufficient to establish, without the necessity of special demonstration, the existence of a circle of practical activity side by side with the theoretical. We see in life men of thought and men of action, men of contemplation and of action, materially distinct, as it were, from one another: here, lofty brows and slow dreamy eyes; there, narrow brows, eyes vigilant and mobile; poets and philosophers on the one side; on the other, captains and soldiers of industry, commerce, politics, the army, and the church. Their work seems to differ as do the men. While we are intent upon some discovery just announced, in chemistry or in physic, or upon some philosophy that comes to shake old beliefs, upon a drama or a romance that revives an artist's dream, we are suddenly interrupted and our attention is called to spectacles of an altogether different nature, such as a war between two states, fought with cannon or with custom-house tariffs; or to a colossal strike, in which thousands upon thousands of workmen make the rest of society feel the power of their numbers and of their strength, and the importance of their work in the general total; or a potent organization which collects and binds together the forces of conservative resistance, employing interests and passions, hopes and fears, vices and virtues, as the painter his colours, or the poet his words, sometimes making like them a masterpiece, but of a practical nature. The man of action is from time to time assailed as it were with nausea at his orgies of volitional effort and eyes with envy the artist or the man of science in the same way as polite society used to look upon the monks who had known how to select the best and most tranquil lot in life. But as a general rule they do not go beyond this fleeting feeling, or if they do resolve to cease their business on the Ides, they return to it on the Kalends. But the contemplative man in his turn also sometimes experiences this same nausea and this same aspiration; he seems to himself to be idle where so many are working and bleeding, and he cries to the combatants: "Arms, give me arms,"[1] for he too would be a miner with the miners, would navigate with the navigators, be an emperor among the kings of coal. However, as a general rule, he does not make more out of this than a song or a book. Nobody, whatever his efforts, can issue from his own circle. It would seem that nature supplies men made precisely for the one or for the other form of activity, in the same way as she makes males and females for the preservation of the species.

Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions.

But this mode of existence with which the practical activity manifests itself in life, as though physically limited, has no certainty, when separated from the theoretical life, nor is it, as might be believed, a fact that imposes itself. Facts never impose themselves, save metaphorically: it is only our thought which imposes them upon itself, when it has criticized them and has recognized their reality. That existence and that distinction, which seem so obvious that one can touch them with one's hand, are at bottom nothing but the result of primary and superficial philosophic reflection, which posits as essentially distinct that which is so only at a first glance and in the mass. Indeed, if we continue to meditate with the same method and assumptions as in the first instance, we shall find that those very distinctions, which reflection had established, are by reflection annulled. It is not true that men are practical or theoretical.

The theoretical man is also practical; he lives, he wills, he acts like all the others. The so-called practical man is also theoretical; he contemplates, believes, thinks, reads, writes, loves music and the other arts. Those works that had been looked upon as inspired entirely by the practical spirit, when examined more closely, are found to be exceedingly complex and rich in theoretic elements—meditations, reasonings, historical research, ideal contemplations. Those works on the other hand that had been assumed to be manifestations of the purely artistic or philosophic spirit, are also products of the will, for without the will nothing can be done; the artist cannot prepare himself for his masterpiece for years and years, nor the thinker bring to completion his system. Was not the battle of Austerlitz also a work of thought and the Divine Comedy also a work of will? From such reflections as these, which might be easily multiplied, arises a mistrust, not only of the statement first made, but also of the inquiry that has been undertaken. It is as though one had filled a vessel with much difficulty and were then obliged to empty it anew with a like effort, to find oneself again facing the vessel, empty as before. Or one adheres to the conclusion that neither the theoretic nor the practical exists as distinct, but that they are one single fact, which is one or other of the two, or a third to be determined, manifesting itself concretely in infinite shades and gradations, which we arbitrarily attempt to reduce to one or more classes, separating and denominating them as distinct in a not less arbitrary manner.

Insufficiency of the psychological method in philosophy.

By describing this process of ordinary reflection, in relation to reality and by demonstrating its philosophic impotence, has at the same time been demonstrated the nature and the impotence of the psychological method, applied to philosophical problems. For psychological philosophy, though contained in ponderous treatises and in solemn academical lectures, does not really achieve more than ordinary reflection, or rather, is nothing but ordinary reflection. Having classified the images of the infinite manifestations of human activity, placing, for instance, will and action side, by side with thought and imagination, it looks upon this classification as reality. But classes are classes and not philosophical distinctions: whoever takes them too seriously, and understands them in this second sense, finds himself eventually obliged to admit that they possess no reality. Thereupon he declares with shouts and protestations the non-existence of the faculties of the soul, or rather their existence as a mere mental artifice, without relation to reality. He may do more than this and throw overboard the criterion or distinction itself, together with those false distinctions, proclaiming that all spiritual manifestations are reducible to a single element. This element turns out in the end to be precisely one of the rejected classes; hence the attempt to show that facts of volition are nothing but facts of representation, or that those of representation are nothing but facts of volition, or that both are nothing but facts of feeling, and so on.

Necessity of the philosophical method.

We must then remain perfectly indifferent to the affirmations or negations of this psychological philosophy. If it affirm the existence of the practical activity, we must not put faith in it until we have recognized its existence by the philosophical method, and equally so in case it should deny it. The philosophical method demands complete abstraction from empirical data and from their classes, and a withdrawal into the recesses of the consciousness, in order to fix upon it alone the eye of the mind. It has been affirmed that by this method the individual consciousness is made the type and measure of universal reality, and it has been suggested, with a view to obviate this restriction and danger, that we should extend observations, so as to include the soul of other individuals, of the present and of the past, of our own and of other civilizations, thus completing (in the accustomed phrase) the psychological with the historical and the ethnographical methods. But there is no need to fear, because the consciousness which is the object of the philosophical inquiry is not that of the individual as individual, but the universal consciousness, which is in every individual the basis of his individual consciousness and of that of other individuals. The philosopher who withdraws into himself is not seeking his own empirical self: Plato did not seek the son of Aristo and of Perictione, nor Baruch Spinoza the poor sickly Jew; they sought that Plato and that Spinoza, who are not Plato or Spinoza, but man, the spirit, universal being. The remedy proposed will therefore seem not only useless, but actually harmful; for in an inquiry whose very object is to surpass the empirical itself, is offered the aid of a multiplicity of selves, thus increasing the tumult and the confusion, where there should be peace and silence; offering, in exchange for the universal that was sought, something worse than the individual, namely, the general, which is an arbitrary complex of mutilated individualities.

Constatation and deduction.

It may seem, however, that the result of such an inquiry as to the form and the universality of consciousness would merely possess the value of a statement of fact, not different from any other statement, as when we say, for instance, that the weather is rainy, or that Tizio has married. If these two last facts be indubitable, because well observed, in like manner indubitable, because likewise well observed, will be an affirmation concerning the universal consciousness. And since both affirmations are true, there is certainly no difference between them, or between truth and truth, considered as such. But since single and contingent facts, like the two adduced in the example, are single and contingent, precisely because they have not their own reason in themselves, and because the universal is the universal, precisely because it is a sufficient reason to itself, it clearly results that we cannot assume that truth has been definitely established from the universal standpoint of consciousness, save when the reason for this also has been seen, that is to say until that aspect has been simply enunciated and asserted, as in the case of a single fact. To affirm the existence of the practical form of activity, side by side with the theoretical, means to deduce the one from the other, and both from the unity of the spirit and of the real. We do not intend to withdraw ourselves from this duty and exigency; and if we limit ourselves here at the beginning to the assertion of its existence and to the demonstration that the arguments brought against it are unfounded, we do so for didascalic reasons, certain that in due course we shall be able to free this assertion from what it may contain of provisional, that is to say, from the character itself of assertion.

Theories which deny the practical form of the spirit.

The doctrines which deny the practical form of the spirit are and cannot but be of two fundamental kinds, according to the double possibility offered by the proposition itself which they propose to refute. The first doctrine affirms that the practical form is not spiritual activity, the second that although it be spiritual activity, yet it is not in any way distinguishable from the already recognized theoretic form of the spirit. The second, so to speak, denies to it specific, the first generic character.

The practical as a fact of unconsciousness.

Those who maintain the first of these theses say:—We are unconscious of the will at the moment of willing and during its real development. This consciousness is only attained after one has willed, that is to say, after the volitional act has been developed. Even then, we are not conscious of the will itself, but of our representation of the will. Therefore the will, that is to say the practical activity, is not an activity of the spirit. Since it is unconscious, it is nature and not spirit. The theoretic activity which follows it is alone spiritual.

Critique.

Were we, however, to allow this argument to pass, the result would be that none of the activities of the spirit would belong to the spirit, that they would all be unconscious and all, therefore, nature. Indeed, the activity of the artist, at the moment when he is really so, that is to say in what is called the moment of artistic creation, is not conscious of itself: it becomes conscious only afterwards, either in the mind of the critic or of the artist who becomes critic of himself. And it has also often been said of the activity of the artist, that it is unconscious; that it is a natural force, or madness, fury, divine inspiration. Est Deus in nobis; and we only become conscious of the divinity that burns and agitates us when the agitation is ceasing and cooling begun. But what of the activity of the philosopher? It may seem strange, but it is precisely the same with the philosopher. At the moment in which he is philosophizing, he is unconscious of his work; in him is God, or nature; he does not reflect upon his thought, but thinks; or rather the thing thinks itself in him, as a microbe living in us nourishes itself, reproduces itself and dies: so that sometimes the philosopher has also seemed to be seized with madness. The consciousness of his philosophy is not in him at that moment; but it is in the critic and in the historian, or indeed in himself a moment after, in so far as he is critic and historian of himself. And will the critic or the historian at least be conscious? No, he will not be so either, because he who will afterwards criticize the historico-critical work is conscious of it, or he himself, in so far as he criticizes himself, and by objectifying himself occupies a place in the history of criticism and of historiography. In short, we should never be conscious in any form of the spiritual activity.

But this negation is founded on a false idea of consciousness: spontaneous is confused with reflex consciousness, or that which is intrinsic to one activity with that which is intrinsic to another, which surpasses the first and makes of it its object. In such a sense we can certainly not be conscious of the will, save in the representation which follows it, as we are not conscious of a poem, save at the moment of criticizing it. But there is also consciousness in the act itself of him who reads or composes a poem, and he "is conscious" (there is no other expression) of its beauty and of its ugliness, of how the poem should and of how it should not be. This consciousness is not critical, but is not therefore less real and efficacious, and without it internal control would be wanting to the formative act of the poet. Thus also there is consciousness in the volitional and practical act as such: we are not aware of this act in a reflex manner, but we feel, or, if you will, we possess it. Without it there would be no result. It is therefore developed in moments or alternatives of happiness and of unhappiness, of well-being and of malaise, of satisfaction and of remorse, of pleasure and of pain. If this be unconsciousness, we must say that unconsciousness is consciousness itself.

Nature and practical activity.

The practical activity may appear to be nature in respect of the theoretical, but not as something without the spirit and opposed to it, but as a form of the spirit opposed to another form, esthetic contemplation has in like manner, as has already been mentioned, appeared to be a natural force creating the world of intuition, which the philosophical activity of man afterwards understands and recreates logically. Hence art can be called nature (and has indeed been so called), and conversely philosophy has been called spirituality. This gives rise to the further problem: whether it be correct to consider nature (it is convenient so to call it) that which has afterwards been recognized in substance as spiritual activity; or whether the concept and the name of spirit should not be reserved for that which is truly altogether outside the spirit, and whether this something placed altogether outside the spirit truly exists. This point does not concern us here, although we are much disposed to admit that one of the mainstays of that absurd conception of nature as of the extra-spiritual is precisely the practical or volitional form of the spirit, so conspicuously different from the theoretical form and from the sub-forms of the same. We do not therefore hold those philosophers to have been so completely in the wrong, who have identified nature and will, for they have thus at any rate discovered one aspect of the truth.

Reduction of the practical form to the theoretical.

Passing to the second thesis, which does not place the will outside the spirit, but denies to it the distinction between practical and the theoretical forms and affirms that the will is thought, there is nothing to be objected to it, provided that, as is often the case, "thought" be taken as synonymous with "spirit." In this case, as in that where it is affirmed that art is thought, we need only inquire, what form of thought is the will, as in the other what form of thought is art. It is not, for instance, logical or historical thought, and the will is neither imaginative, logical nor historical thought: if anything, it must be volitional thought.

But we have the genuine form of this thesis in the affirmation that the will is the intelligence itself, that to will is to know, and that action practically well conducted is truth. This thesis would not have arisen, had it not found support in the real situation of things (and what this support is will be seen when studying the relation of the practical with the theoretic activity, and the complicated process of deliberation). But, when tested here independently, it proves to be unsustainable.

Critique.

We must not oppose to it the usual observations as to the lack of connection between great intellectual and great volitional development, or the cases of those theoreticians who are practically quite ineffectual, of philosophers who are bad governors of States, of the "very learned" who are not "men" and the like; for the reason already given, that an observation is not a philosophical argument, but a fact which itself has need of an explanation, and when this has been done, it may serve as proof of the philosophical theory, but can never be substituted for it. But it is well to recall to memory the quite peculiar character of the will and the practical activity in respect of knowledge, intellectual light is cold, the will is hot. When we pass from theoretic contemplation to action and to the practical, we have almost the feeling of generating, and sons are not made with thoughts and words. With the greatest intellectual clearness, we yet remain inert, if something does not intervene that rouses to action, something analogous to the inspiration that makes run a shiver of joy and of voluptuousness through the veins of the artist. If the will be not engaged, every argument, however plausible it may seem, every situation, however clear, remains mere theory.

The education of the will is not effected with theories or definitions, æsthetic or historical culture, but with the exercise of the will itself. We teach how to will as we teach how to think, by fortifying and intensifying natural dispositions, by example, which suggests imitation, by difficulties to be solved (practical problems), by rousing energetic initiative and by disciplining it to persist. When an act of will has taken place, no argument will extinguish it. As an illness is not to be cured with reasons, so an affective and volitional state cannot be altered by these means. Reasoning and knowledge may and certainly do assist, but they do not constitute the ultimate and determining moment. The will alone acts upon the will, not in the sense that the will of one individual can act upon that of another (which is merely a fact among the facts perceived by him), but in the sense that the will of the individual himself, causing the previous volition to enter upon a crisis, dissolves it and substitutes for it a new practical synthesis, with a new volition.

The practical as thought which realizes itself. Recognition of its autonomy.

The evident paradox of the thesis which identifies without any distinction thought and will, theory and practice, has caused it to be modified and to be produced in another form, expressed in the definition; that the will is thought in so far as it is translated into act, thought in so far as it is imprinted upon nature, thought when held so firmly before the mind as to become action, and so on. Now it remains to determine what may be the relation between thought and will, and when this has been done, we shall see what is exact and what inexact in the above formulæ, of translating, imprinting, and holding fast. These formulæ are all logically vague, however imaginative they may be. But what is important to note here is that with the new turn given to the thesis that denies the peculiarity of the practical activity, this same peculiarity is unconsciously affirmed, because that transforming, that imprinting, that holding fast, which did not exist in the simple theory, conceal precisely the will. Thus the ultimate form of the negation comes to join hands with that of the affirmation, and we can consider undisputed the existence of a particular form of the spirit, which is the practical activity. We must now examine the relation of this form with the other from which it has been distinguished.

[1] Allusion to a verse of Leopardi in Canzone all' Italia.