Benedetto Croce: an Introduction to His Philosophy

Part 1

BENEDETTO CROCE

AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS PHILOSOPHY

RAFFAELLO PICCOLI

WITH A FOREWORD BY

H. WILDON CARR

JONATHAN CAPE

ELEVEN GOWER STREET, LONDON

1922

FOREWORD

This book is the account of the life and activity of one who is living and acting. Herodotus tells us the Greeks had a proverb which forbade them to pronounce any man happy before he is dead. We may certainly take his warning to this extent,--that we should refrain from attempting to fix a philosopher's thought so long as he continues to think. Benedetto Croce has, it is true, presented his Philosophy of Mind in such "questionable shape," that it gives the student the impression of finality, the feeling that a doctrine which throughout the history of philosophy has been struggling for expression has now at last come to light. But this appearance of finality is due to a certain artistic power which Croce possesses in an eminent degree, the power of reliving the past and making history interpret life. Beneath all his systematization there is the germ of a new life, a new life, which, will take form in new problems. While then we may say that no living philosopher has given so complete an appearance of finality to his doctrine as Croce has done in his Philosophy of Mind it is really the reflection of a work of art which serves only to conceal the living thought.

The publishers of this Introduction to the philosophy of Benedetto Croce by Dr. Raffaello Piccoli have courteously invited me to write this foreword inasmuch as I was the first to introduce this philosophy, otherwise than by translations, to the attention of English students. I do so very gladly. My own work was confined to the purely philosophical writings, my interest in them having been first aroused by the striking address on Æsthetic delivered by Croce to the International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1908. When I wrote my book, the Philosophy of Mind consisted of three volumes, the Estetica, the Logica, and the Pratica, but before I had completed my account I read in Croce's Journal Critica the announcement of the forthcoming publication of the fourth volume on the Theory and History of the Writing of History. Croce had, it seemed to me, closed his book on Practice with the plain indication, not that he had solved every philosophical problem, nor that philosophy was not an external problem, but that he had given an exhaustive account of the stages or degrees in their order as moments of the developing life of the mind, and that outside these degrees there were no others. The new work did not, indeed, either negative or qualify this conclusion, but it bore evidence of the ceaseless activity of his mind. Are we then, because the philosophy of Croce is still developing, to refrain from the attempt to interpret it on the ground that any meaning we may find in it is indefinite and insecure? Certainly not, for a philosopher's thinking unfolds and develops like a living thing, it is not constructed like a building, nor does it rest on foundations which may be unsound.

Dr. Raffaello Piccoli, a professor in the University of Pisa, and the author of this book, was born in Naples, Croce's city, in 1886. He himself as a young student came under the personal spell of the philosopher he writes about, and grew up in the intellectual atmosphere which his philosophy was creating. To this great advantage he has added another, for first in Australia, and later in the Universities of England and America he has acquired a perfect command of our language and a thorough knowledge of our philosophy. He is specially qualified, therefore, to give a first-hand account of Croce's literary and philosophical activity, and the kind of influence it has had in forming the mind of Modern Italy.

The author has not confined himself to an exposition of the philosophy of Croce in its narrow and technical meaning, he has given us an account of the whole of his literary and historical activity. He has traced the origin of his philosophy in the circumstances of his parentage, early life and education, and has followed biographically the formation of his philosophical theories and the direction of his philosophical interest. He has shown how his general trend of thought, his literary tastes and historical studies without any professional spur, by the very nature and force of the problems with which they confronted him, led to philosophy as the dominant and culminating interest of life.

Philosophers and philosophies have had in our generation to undergo the trial of a fiery furnace. The Great War and the passions aroused by it and the estrangement between nations nurtured in the same Western culture have been a fierce test of principles. In regard to every great leader we ask first how he reacted to the conflicting emotions of the international struggle. Dr. Piccoli has dealt with this latest and crucial period of Croce's activity in a very sympathetic spirit. Croce's attitude at one time exposed him to an extreme unpopularity. This was largely the result of misunderstanding. He has come through the ordeal with enhanced reputation. This, at least, is the author's judgment--the judgment of one who himself fought and suffered severely in the War.

The two great achievements of Croce are in the domain of æsthetical and ethical theory. Dr. Piccoli shows us each doctrine in its historical origin and in its relation to contemporary philosophy. The first is a reaction against the intellectualism of Hegel. In its affirmation of intuition it is in rather striking agreement with the philosophy of Bergson, although as Croce's approach is from the side of art and literature, and not like Bergson's from the study of biological science, it rather supplements than elucidates Bergson's theory. The second is a reaction against the school of Karl Marx and its materialistic interpretation of history.

At the present time Croce is directing his criticism on the new line of development which his own friends and colleagues are taking in regard to his own principles, in particular to the "actual idealism" of his colleague Professor Giovanni Gentile. To Croce this new doctrine spells mysticism, and of mysticism in all its forms he is the open enemy. On this point we may, I think, detect an inclination on the part of Dr. Piccoli to disagree with Croce. It will be seen, therefore, that we have in this book a very full and a very welcome account, brought right up to date, of one who is, as far as contemporaries can judge, forming the mind of the present age.

H. Wildon Carr

PREFACE

When, about a year ago, I undertook to write this little book for its present publishers, all that I had in my mind was a brief exposition of the solutions given by Croce to a number of philosophical problems of vital interest to the students of what were once called the Moral Sciences. I thought at the time that it would be possible to abstract such solutions and problems from the body of his Philosophy of Mind, which is a coherent and austere theory of knowledge of a kind that in the modern decadence of philosophical studies and of general culture is rapidly becoming unintelligible even to the most highly cultivated. I hoped that the specialized reader, for whom the larger aspects of Croce's thought have no appeal, and therefore no meaning, would be able to apply those particular solutions to the problems that confronted him in his particular branch of studies, by translating them into terms of his own naïve philosophy.

This plan had also a personal advantage, inasmuch as it did not compel me to a conscious revision of my own position in regard to those larger aspects of Croce's philosophy. But as soon as I began to think consistently of this book, the history of my own reactions to Croce's work came back to me so vividly that I found it impossible to set it aside; and I discovered that this supposed advantage was a delusion, towards which I had probably been drawn by a very human, very natural desire of avoiding the most obvious difficulties of my task.

As a young man, in my student days in Italy, I was a fervid and enthusiastic follower of Croce's ideas: one of the many who used to swear, as we were wont to say, in verba Crucis. To the generation who opened the eyes of their intellect in the dawn of the century, he had revealed what seemed to be the only safe path between the two precipices of a pseudo-scientific materialism on one hand, and of a mysticism on the other, which in all its many forms (traditionalism, modernism, pragmatism, intuitionism, æstheticism, super-humanism, futurism) could not be anything less than an abdication of thought for the sake of the emotions. And it should not be wondered at, if Croce's books, appearing at short intervals between 1900 and 1910, and building up what presented itself to us as a complete system of answers to all, or practically all, our most pressing spiritual questions, were received by us with deep gratitude but with very little constructive criticism. They covered such an enormous space on the map of European culture, that even for the most ambitious among us, they were very often the first introduction to entirely new fields of studies, and all we could do was to follow our guide in his voyages of rediscovery: to repeat within ourselves the strenuous experience of which each of those books was a report and a testimony.

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