The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic

Part 1

PHILOSOPHY OF THE

PRACTICAL

ECONOMIC AND ETHIC

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF

BENEDETTO CROCE

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

B.A. (OXON.), M.R.A.S.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1913

NOTE

Certain chapters only of the third part of this book were anticipated in the study entitled Reduction of the Philosophy of Law to the Philosophy of Economy, read before the Accademia Pontaniana of Naples at the sessions of April 21 and May 5, 1907 (Acts, vol. xxxvii.); but I have remodelled them, amplifying certain pages and summarizing others. The concept of economic activity as an autonomous form of the spirit, which receives systematic treatment in the second part of the book, was first maintained in certain essays, composed from 1897 to 1900, and afterwards collected in the volume Historical Materialism and Marxist Economy (2nd edition, Palermo, Sandron, 1907).

B. C.

NAPLES,

19th April 1908.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

"A noi sembra che l' opera del Croce sia lo sforzo più potente che il pensiero italiano abbia compiuto negli ultimi anni."--G. DE RUGGIERO in La Filosofia contemporanea, 1912.

"Il sistema di Benedetto Croce rimane la più alta conquista del pensiero contemporaneo."--G. NATOLI in La Voce, 19th December 1912.

Those acquainted with my translation of Benedetto Croce's Æsthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic will not need to be informed of the importance of this philosopher's thought, potent in its influence upon criticism, upon philosophy and upon life, and famous throughout Europe.

In the Italian, this volume is the third and last of the Philosophy of the Spirit, Logic as Science of the Pure Concept coming second in date of publication. But apart from the fact that philosophy is like a moving circle, which can be entered equally well at any point, I have preferred to place this volume before the Logic in the hands of British readers. Great Britain has long been a country where moral values are highly esteemed; we are indeed experts in the practice, though perhaps not in the theory of morality, a lacuna which I believe this book will fill.

In saying that we are experts in moral practice I do not, of course, refer to the narrow conventional morality, also common with us, which so often degenerates into hypocrisy, a legacy of Puritan origin; but apart from this, there has long existed in many millions of Britons a strong desire to live well, or, as they put it, cleanly and rightly, and achieved by many, independent of any close or profound examination of the logical foundation of this desire. Theology has for some taken the place of pure thought, while for others, early training on religious lines has been sufficiently strong to dominate other tendencies in practical life. Yet, as a speculative Scotsman, I am proud to think that we can claim divided honours with Germany in the production of Emmanuel Kant (or Cant).

The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed with us a great development of materialism in its various forms. The psychological, anti-historical speculation contained in the so-called Synthetic Philosophy (really psychology) of Herbert Spencer was but one of the many powerful influences abroad, tending to divert youthful minds from the true path of knowledge. This writer, indeed, made himself notorious by his attitude of contemptuous intolerance and ignorance of the work previously done in connection with subjects which he was investigating. He accepted little but the evidence of his own senses and judgment, as though he were the first philosopher. But time has now taken its revenge, and modern criticism has exposed the Synthetic Philosophy in all its barren and rigid inadequacy and ineffectuality. Spencer tries to force Life into a brass bottle of his own making, but the genius will not go into his bottle. The names and writings of J. S. Mill, of Huxley, and of Bain are, with many others of lesser calibre, a potent aid to the dissolving influence of Spencer. Thanks to their efforts, the spirit of man was lost sight of so completely that I can well remember hearing Kant's great discovery of the synthesis a priori described as moonshine, and Kant himself, with his categoric imperative, as little better than a Prussian policeman. As for Hegel, the great completer and developer of Kantian thought, his philosophy was generally in even less esteem among the youth; and we find even the contemplative Walter Pater passing him by with a polite apology for shrinking from his chilly heights. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that estimable Kantians and Hegelians did not exist here and there throughout the kingdom in late Victorian days (the names of Stirling, of Caird, and of Green at once occur to the mind); but they had not sufficient genius to make their voices heard above the hubbub of the laboratory. We all believed that the natural scientists had taken the measure of the universe, could tot it up to a T--and consequently turned a deaf ear to other appeals.

Elsewhere in Europe Hartmann, Haeckel, and others were busy measuring the imagination and putting fancy into the melting-pot--they offered us the chemical equivalent of the wings of Aurora. We believed them, believed those materialists, those treacherous neo-Kantians, perverters of their master's doctrine, who waited for guileless youth with mask and rapier at the corner of every thicket. Such as escaped this ambush were indeed fortunate if they shook themselves free of Schopenhauer, the (personally) comfortable philosopher of suicide and despair, and fell into the arms of the last and least of the Teutonic giants, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose spasmodic paragraphs, full of genius but often empty of philosophy, show him to have been far more of a poet than a philosopher. It was indeed a doleful period of transition for those unfortunate enough to have been born into it: we really did believe that life had little or nothing to offer, or that we were all Overmen (a mutually exclusive proposition!), and had only to assert ourselves in order to prove it.

To the writings of Pater I have already referred, and of them it may justly be said that they are often supremely beautiful, with the quality and cadence of great verse, but mostly (save perhaps the volume on Plato and Platonism, by which he told the present writer that he hoped to live) instinct with a profound scepticism, that revelled in the externals of Roman Catholicism, but refrained from crossing the threshold which leads to the penetralia of the creed.

Ruskin also we knew, and he too has a beautiful and fresh vein of poetry, particularly where free from irrational dogmatism upon Ethic and Æsthetic. But we found him far inferior to Pater in depth and suggestiveness, and almost devoid of theoretical capacity. Sesame for all its Lilies is no Open Sesame to the secrets of the world. Thus, wandering in the obscure forest, it is little to be wondered that we did not anticipate the flood of light to be shed upon us as we crossed the threshold of the twentieth century.

It was an accident that took me to Naples in 1909, and the accident of reading a number of La Critica, as I have described in the introduction to the Æsthetic, that brought me in contact with the thought of Benedetto Croce. But it was not only the Æsthetic, it was also the purely critical work of the philosopher that appeared to me at once of so great importance. To read Hegel, for instance, after reading Croce's study of him, is a very different experience (at least so I found it) to reading him before so doing.

Hegel is an author most deeply stimulative and suggestive, but any beginner is well to take advantage of all possible aid in the difficult study.

To bring this thought of Hegel within the focus of the ordinary mind has never been an easy task (I know of no one else who has successfully accomplished it); and Croce's work, What is living and what is dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, as one may render the Italian title of the book which I hope to translate, has enormously aided a just comprehension, both of the qualities and the defects of that philosopher. This work appeared in the Italian not long after the Æsthetic, and has had an influence upon the minds of contemporary Italians, second only to the Philosophy of the Spirit. To clear away the débris of Hegel, his false conception of art and of religion, to demonstrate his erroneous application of his own great discovery of the dialectic to pseudo-concepts, and thus to reveal it in its full splendour, has been one of the most valuable of Croce's inestimable contributions to critical thought.

Part 2

I shall not pause here to dilate upon the immense achievement of Croce, the youngest of Italian senators, a recognition of his achievement by his King and country, but merely mention his numerous historical works, his illuminative study of Vico, which has at last revealed that philosopher as of like intellectual stature to Kant; the immense tonic and cultural influence of his review, La Critica, and his general editorship of the great collection of Scrittori d' Italia. Freed at last from that hubbub of the laboratory, from the measures and microscopes of the natural scientists, excellent in their place, it is interesting to ask if any other contemporary philosopher has made a contribution to ethical theory in any way comparable to the Philosophy of the Practical. The names of Bergson and of Blondel at once occur to the mind, but the former admits that his complete ideas on ethics are not yet made known, and implies that he may never make them entirely known. The reader of the Philosophy of the Practical will, I think, find that none of Bergson's explanations, "burdened," as he says, with "geometry," and as we may say with matter, from the obsession of which he never seems to shake himself altogether free, are comparable in depth or lucidity with the present treatise. The spirit is described by Bergson as memory, and matter as a succession of images. How does the one communicate with the other? The formula of the self-creative life process seems hardly sufficient to explain this, for if with Bergson we conceive of life as a torrent, there must be some reason why it should flow rather in one channel than in another. But life is supposed to create and to absorb matter in its progress; and here we seem to have entered a vicious circle, for the intuition presupposes, it does not create its object. As regards the will, too, the Bergsonian theory of the Ego as rarely (sometimes never once in life) fully manifesting itself, and our minor actions as under the control of matter, seems to lead to a deterministic conception and to be at variance with the thesis of the self-creation of life.

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