Benedetto Croce

“ Scepticism is the proclamation of mystery made in the name of thought;—a definition the contradictoriness of which leaps to the eye. It is mortally wounded both by the ancient dilemma against scepticism and by the cogito of Descartes. Nevertheless, since a singular tenderness for the idea of mystery seems to have invaded the contemporary world, it is desirable to leave open no loophole whatever for misunderstanding. The mystery is life itself, which is an eternal problem for thought; but this problem would not even be a problem, if thought did not eternally solve it. ”

“ A hundred or a thousand narratives lacking authenticity are not equal to the poorest authentic document. An authentic narrative is both a document and remains; it is the reality of the fact as it was lived and as it vibrates in the spirit of him who took part in it. The search for veracity and the criticism of the value of sources are reducible in the ultimate analysis, to the isolation of this genuine resonance of fact, by its liberation from perturbing elements, such as the illusions, the false judgments, the preoccupations and passions of the witness. ”

“ But this does not suffice in philosophy. We may attain to ecstasy by the recitation of a poem or the execution of a piece of music, just as it is, without altering it anywhere. But it does not seem possible to possess a philosophic proposition, save when we have translated it, as we say, into our own language, when in reality, relying upon its results, we formulate new philosophic propositions and solve new problems that have presented themselves in our souls. For this reason no book ever completely satisfies us. Every book quenches one thirst, only to give us a new one. ”

“ Having left the Eden of pure intuition and entered the field of history, it is not given us to retrace our steps. There is no returning to blessed and ingenuous ignorance; innocence is lost for ever, and we must no longer aspire to it, but to virtue, which is neither innocent nor ingenuous. Why does what seems good to the Protestant seem bad to the Catholic? Evidently, owing to the different conception that each forms as to this world and the world above us, death and life, reason and revelation, criticism and authority, and so on. ”

“ Indeed, he who produces an error has no power to twist or to denaturalize or stain the truth, which is his thought itself, the thought which acts in him and in all men; indeed, no sooner has he touched thought than he is touched by it: he thinks and does not err. He possesses only the practical power of passing from thought to deed; and his doing, in fact his thinking, is to open his mouth and emit sounds to which there corresponds no thought, or, what is the same thing, no thought which has value, precision, coherence and truth. It is to smear a canvas to which no intuition corresponds ”

“ Certainly, all the forms of the spirit have a common object, which is Reality; but this is not because reality is separated from them, but because they are reality: they therefore have not, but are this object. Thus the forms of knowledge have not a theoretic object, but create it: they themselves are that object. Philosophy has the pure concept for method and object; art has intuition; science the empirical concept, and so on. If we wished to treat of methods in a special Logic, we could not do otherwise than repeat what we have already said in respect to the character of each form. ”

“ How can the beauty of the song of Farinata be demonstrated to one who denies it, and will neither appreciate the soul contained in that sublime poem, nor accomplish the work necessary to attain to the possibility of such an appreciation, nor will, on the other hand, humbly confess his own incapacity and lack of preparation,—how can we forcibly demonstrate to him that that song is beautiful? ”

“ It is vain to set against this the example of great philosophers without historical culture, as it is vain in the case of the necessity of historical knowledge for æsthetic criticism to bring forward instances of those who, although without any historical knowledge, have yet given far more true and more profound judgments upon art than the historically learned. If those judgments are true, then the critic supposed to be ignorant of history is not ignorant of it. He has somehow absorbed, scented in the air, divined with rapid perception those actual facts that were applicable to the given case. ”

“ There is a form of scepticism which would like to appear critical and refined and which takes the name of agnosticism. It is a scepticism limited to ultimate things, to profound reality, to the essence of the world, which amounts to saying that it is limited to the supreme principles of philosophy. Now, since the principles of philosophy are all equally supreme, such agnostic scepticism extends its affirmation of mystery over neither more nor less than the whole of philosophy and consequently over the whole of human knowledge. ”

“ In order to find the inmost meaning of life, we must seek, not the light, but the shade, not speech, but silence. In silence, reality raises its head and shows its countenance; or, better, it shows us nothing, but fills us with itself, and gives us the sense of its very being. The unity and [Pg 12] universality that we desire are found in action, in the practical form of the Spirit: in the heart, which palpitates, loves, and wills. Knowledge is knowledge of the single, it is representation; the eternal is not a matter of knowledge, but of intimate and ineffable experience.
Empiricism. ”

“ We know in order to act; and he who acts is interested only in that knowledge, which is the necessary precedent of his doing. But since our knowledge is all destined to be recalled as occasion serves for action, or to aid us in the search for new knowledge (which in this case is a form of acting) , the practical spirit is impelled to provide for the preservation of the patrimony of acquired knowledge. Without doubt, speaking absolutely, everything is preserved in reality, and nothing that has once been done or thought, disappears from the bosom of the cosmos. ”

“ The definition as answer to a question and solution of a problem.
For every definition is the answer to a question, the solution of a problem. Did we not ask questions and set problems, there would be no occasion for giving any definition. Why should we give them? What need could there be? The definition is an act of the spirit and every act of the spirit is conditioned. Without contradiction, there can be no agreement; without the shock of multiplicity there can be no unity; without the travail of doubt that calls for peace, there can be no affirmation of the true. ”

“ Philosophy, arises, in part, from an incapacity (in itself only a lack of habit) to think abstractly, that is to say, to hold pure thoughts firmly before the spirit and to move in them. In our ordinary consciousness, thoughts are clothed in and united with ordinary sensible and spiritual matter; and in our rethinking, reflecting and reasoning we mingle sentiments, intuitions and representations with thoughts: in every proposition whose content is entirely sensible (for example: this leaf is green) there are already mingled categories, such as being and individuality. ”

“ Thus the analogies of which the Philosophy of history avails itself, are false analogies, that is to say, metaphors and comparisons, transformed into analogies and concepts. It will declare, for instance, that the Middle Ages are the negation of ancient civilization, and that the modern epoch is the synthesis of these two opposites. But ancient civilization is nothing but an unending series of facts, of which each is a synthesis of opposites, real only in so far as it is a synthesis of opposites. ”

“ And to these errors of particular scepticism, errors of particular mysticism soon succeed. Thus we hear it said that there is no concept of the beautiful, as there is of the true or the good, but that it is only felt and lived; or, again, that there is no possible definition of what is good, since it concerns a thing that must be left to sentiment and to life; or, finally, that thought has value within the limits that abstraction has value, but that it is impotent before complete reality, because life alone is capable of comprehending reality, by receiving it into its very bosom. ”

“ He will console himself with the thought that philosophy, like life, is infinite.
Surpassing and continuous progress of philosophy.
The infinity of philosophy, its continuous changing, is not a doing and an undoing, but a continuous surpassing of itself. The new philosophic proposition is made possible only by the old; the old lives eternally in the new that follows it and in the new that will follow that again and make old that other which is new. ”

“ History, like art, seeks the true form of events, the pure and concrete form of real facts. But whereas art hardly touches the fugitive manifestations of the real, in order to rise above all reality, history attaches itself to those manifestations and becomes totally immersed in them. The ideas which the historian elaborates are not introduced by him into history, but discovered in reality itself, of which they constitute the essence. They are the outcome of the fulness of events, not of an extrinsic addition, as in what is called philosophic or theological history (Philosophy of history) . ”

“ When we have simply created again in ourselves the thought of a philosopher, we are in the same condition as he who has enjoyed a sonnet or a melody, by suiting his spirit to that of the poet or composer. ”

“ As such the phenomenology of error is an ideal and eternal circle, like the eternal circle of the truth. Its stages are eternally traversed and retraversed by the spirit, being the stages of the spirit itself. At every instant of the life of history and of our individual life there are represented the stages that have been surpassed and must again be surpassed: the lower stages return and announce beforehand the higher. ”

“ All that is born is worthy to perish; but in perishing, it is also preserved as an ideal moment of what is born from it; and the universe preserves in itself all that has ever been thought and done, because it is nothing but the organism of these thoughts and actions. Philosophy has rendered those concepts of God and of Immortality more exact, and has liberated them from impurities and errors and thus at the same time from perplexities and anguish ”

“ Such is ingenuous philosophy, which in reality exists only when bound and never when loose and ingenuous, as the name would suggest; philosophy abdita exists only as philosophy addita. Certainly, to the consciousness of doctrinaires, obscured with too much labour, we can sometimes oppose ingenuous consciousness, and to the pedantry of scholastic treatises we can oppose the truth of proverbs, of good sense, of children, of the people, or of primitive races. But we must not forget that in all these cases ingenuous is a metaphor which designates truth in contradistinction to what is not truth. ”

“ We may prefer one word to another, according to historical contingencies; and for our part we prefer the words pseudoconcept and pure concept, if for no other reason than to remind the makers of fictional concepts to be modest, and to flash above their heads the light of the only true form of concept, which is logical nature itself in its universality and in its severity. ”

“ When he discovered the a priori synthesis, Kant had laid his hand upon a profoundly romantic concept; but his treatment of it became afterwards classicist and intellectualist. The synthesis is the palpitating reality which makes itself and knows itself in the making: the Kantian philosophy makes it rigid again in the concepts of the sciences; and it is a philosophy in which the sense of life, of imagination, of individuality, of history, is almost as completely absent as in the great systems of the Cartesian period. ”

“ Here too, we must allow for the exigencies of exposition, whereby, sometimes, when we intend to emphasize the distinction, we are led to speak of the relation of one degree to another, as if they were distinct existences; as if the practical man really existed side by side with the theoretic man, or the poet side by side with the philosopher, or as if the work of Art stood separate from the labour of reflection, and so on. ”

“ Thus, every reality would be, on one side, end, and on the other, cause; on one side, motionless, on the other, changeable; man would have in himself something of the mechanical and something of the teleological; nature would be matter, but urged forward by a first cause which was non-material, that is, spiritual and final, or at least unknown—and so on. When it is demonstrated of a concept that it has been suggested by contingent facts, by this very fact we eliminate it from the series of true concepts, and substitute for it another concept, which is given as truly universal. ”