Benedetto Croce

“ 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. ”

“ The company of the fair beloved will weary, the political ambition realized will leave the soul empty, literary fame will seem the shadow of vanity. Perhaps too, we shall change our side, like the sick man who cannot rest on his bed of feathers, and begin to follow other ends; the lover deluded with matrimony will turn to other loves; the ambitious man, weary of political life, will think of new ambitions, or of that of not having any, and of retiring to so-called domestic peace; the seeker for literary fame will long for ease, silence, and forgetting. ”

“ What is the universal? It is the Spirit, it is Reality, in so far as it is truly real, that is, in so far as it is unity of thought and willing; it is Life, in so far as realized in its profundity as this unity itself; it is Freedom, if a reality so conceived be perpetual development, creation, progress. Outside the Spirit nothing is thinkable in a truly universal form. Æsthetic, Logic, Historic, this very Philosophy of the practical, have demonstrated and confirmed this truth in every way. ”

“ The measure of the law, on the other hand, since it is abstract, hesitates between the universal and the individual and is without the strength of either. To carry out the law? But it is only the pedant of life who proposes to do such a thing, as it is only the pedant of art who attempts to apply the rules of art. The true artist follows the impulse of his æsthetic conscience, the practical man the initiative of his practical genius. What is called the single act, observance and execution of the law, obeys, not the law, but the ethical or practical principle, and obeys it individually. ”

“ Freedom is an indissoluble nexus of necessity and freedom: the force that tends to annul it is anti-freedom, the scission of that nexus, the analysis of that synthesis. On the one hand it aims at making liberty fall into nothingness, by compelling it to the inertia of the fact, and on the other, to make a leap into the void, by impelling it to will, a sterile endeavour—two movements that are one-sided and absurd, and become identified through the considerations already established in relation to determinism and arbitrarism. ”

“ Nor should he find any difficulty in discovering everywhere activity, development, consciousness, with its antitheses of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Certainly the stars do not smile, nor is the moon pale for sorrow: these are images of the poets. Certainly animals and trees do not reason like men; this, when it is not poetry, is gross anthropomorphism. But nature, in her intimate self, longs for the good and abhors the evil, she is all wet with tears and all a-shiver for joy; strife and victory is everywhere and in every moment of universal life.
Optimism and pessimism; critique. ”

“ The infinite, inexhaustible by the thought of the individual, is Reality itself, which ever creates new forms; Life is the true mystery, not because impenetrable by thought, but because thought penetrates it to the infinite with power equal to its own. And since every moment, however beautiful, would become ugly, were we to dwell in it, so would life become ugly, were it ever to linger in one of its contingent forms. And because Philosophy, not less than Art, is conditioned by Life, so no particular philosophical system can ever contain in itself all the philosophable ”

“ The dialectic conception of reality as development, that is, as a synthesis of being and not-being, can certainly be termed optimistic, but in a very different signification to that of abstract optimism. The synthesis is the thesis enriched with its antithesis, and the thesis is the good, being, not the bad or not-being. But who will wish seriously to oppose this logical consequence? Is it not a fact that men hope and live, although in the midst of their sorrows? Is it not a fact that the world is not ended and does not appear to have any intention of ending? ”

“ 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 value of our individual life is conditioned for each of us, and we must guarantee and defend it as vehicle of the universal, and we must be ready to throw it away, as a useless and pernicious thing, when it does not serve this end, or rebels. But the value of every being dear to us is not less conditioned, and Jesus said with reason, when preparing himself for his divine mission, that he had come to separate men from their wives, their sons, their friends, and from their native land. That separation in union, that union in separation, is the moral activity, individual and universal. ”

“ They are the two moments of the volitional act, distinct and united, which act is the unity of both, and therefore, as was said, is at once free and determined.
This consciousness of necessity and liberty inseparably united is found in all men of action, in all political geniuses, who are never inert or reckless: they feel themselves at once bound and unbound; they always conform to facts, but always to surpass them. The fatuous, on the other hand, oscillate between the passivity of the given situation and the sterile attempt to overleap it, that is, to leap over their own shadow. ”

“ And if even the ferox animus of Shylock has found defenders, as symbol of the tenacity with which we must make our own rights respected, yet Portia also will always find her supporters, as symbol of ingenious rebellion against an unjust law.
Absurdity of the fraud against ones self and against the moral law.
But what is altogether irrational and yet seems to be admitted by Jesuitic morality, is the fraud against oneself, and so against one's own moral conscience. To defraud one's own conscience, to rebel against it with violence or with artifice, is contradiction, wilfulness, evil. ”

“ The sage who recalls to man the absolute empire that he possesses over his passions and exhorts him never to be troubled and to repeat the twenty or four-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, so that the spirit may have time to recuperate its strength, to resist and to conquer, seems to utter the insipid babble of one who has never truly loved and hated, and to measure the full and overflowing souls of others on the model of his own empty or almost empty soul. ”

“ Punishment can be conceived and willed as a mere utilitarian menace, to prevent others from performing certain classes of actions, even if they be ethically of the highest value; or as moral solicitude for the amelioration of society and the individual himself who has erred, by obliging him to re-enter himself and change his mind. Even the pain of death can be directed to this end and death that has given or restored to the guilty a day, an hour, an instant of that human life, of that contact with the infinite, which he had lost, may be held not to have been in vain. ”

“ If Economy do not give the universal truth of Philosophy, nor the particular truth of History, Philosophy and History are in their turn incapable of making the smallest calculation: if Economy have not eyes for the true, Philosophy and History have not arms to break and to dominate the waves of fact, which would oppress man with their importunity and finally prevent him from seeing. Hence the absurdity of philosophism and historicism ”

“ We must banish every form of aristocracy from the Philosophy of the practical, as we have banished it from Æsthetic, from Logic, from Historic, esteeming it most harmful to the proper understanding of those activities. The aristocratic illusion is closely allied to that one which makes us believe that we, shut up in the egotism of our empirical individuality, are alone aware of the truth, that we alone feel the beautiful, that we alone know how to love, and so on. But reality is democratic. ”

“ The Spirit, which is infinite possibility passing into infinite actuality, has drawn and draws at every moment the cosmos from chaos, has collected diffused life into the concentrated life of the organ, has achieved the passage from animal to human life, has created and creates modes of life ever more lofty. The work of the Spirit is not finished and never will be finished. Our yearning for something higher is not vain. The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof of the infinity of that progress. ”

“ But in truth others, as individuals, have no rights that I too do not possess as an individual: I am another for the other, and he is an I for himself; and if each one provided for the good of others, neglecting and trampling upon his own good, the result would be perfectly identical to what would happen, were each one to provide for himself without concern for others. Morality demands the sacrifice of me for the universal end, but of me only in my merely individual ends ”

“ If theoretical and cognoscitive man were not at the same time volitional, he would not even be able to stand on his feet and look at the sky, and, literally speaking, if he were not alive, he would not be able to think (and thinking is both an act of life and an act of will, which is called attention) . Were he not to will, he would be unable to pass from waking to sleep and from sleep to waking. Thus in order to be purely theoretical, it is necessary to be at the same time in some degree practical; the energy of pure fancy and of pure thought springs from the trunk of volition. ”

“ Every action, however diverse, which conforms to ethical duty, conforms to Life; and if, instead of promoting Life, it should depress and mortify it, for that very reason it would be immoral. Where facts seem to demonstrate the contrary, the interpretation of facts is erroneous, since it affirms as a criterion of judgment a life which is not that true life, which, as we know, we serve even by dying—dying as an individual, as a collectivity, as a social class, or as a people. The most humble moral act can be resolved into this volition of the Spirit in universal. ”

“ For its opposite, far from being heterogeneous and different, is flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood of the concept itself, as negation is of affirmation. And the system has led us before the Spirit or Reality as development, which is the true reality of the real and synthesis of opposites. Logic deduces that the concept is synthesis of itself and of the distinct from itself, of the universal and of the individual, and that therefore Philosophy must flow into History, and mediate its comprehension. ”

“ Where is the æsthetic synthesis and the pure intuition? Where is the a priori of perception and of history? Where are all these fine things you talk of as though they existed, and that we neither see nor touch?—And for our part, we can henceforth let them say what they will, only praying in our hearts that God may illuminate them and make them discover (at least when they are near to death and the dense veil of their bodies has become more thin) that if the universals were things that it was possible to perceive as we do individual things, they would not be universals. ”

“ What interest is stronger and more personal than that which impels the man of science to the search for truth, which is his life? Morality requires that the individual should, in every case, make his individual interest that of the universal; and it reproves those who engage themselves in an insoluble contradiction between the individual interest of the universal and that which is merely individual. But it cannot claim to suppress the interest, that is, itself, in the same way that the volitional act dominates the passions, but cannot eradicate them without eradicating itself. ”

“ For Casuistic is nothing but the process of reasoning by which rules are made always more precise, passing from more general cases to those more particular, so that no one will ever be able to do without them.—If we take for rule of life this maxim: to avoid scientific polemics, because they constitute a waste of time, adding little to the progress of knowledge; in what way must we behave if a polemic be such that it enables us to gain on the one hand the time it makes us lose on the other? ”

“ Thus too, the philosopher, who solves a philosophical problem in a fantastic way, as would an artist, or, instead of a philosopheme, employs the historical, naturalistic or mathematical method, and so produces a myth, or a contingent fact universalized, or an abstraction in place of concreteness, that is to say, a philosophical error. It is also a philosophical error to transport philosophical concepts from one order to another and to treat art as though it were philosophy or morality as though it were economy. ”

“ For the only case in which the individual does not act is that in which he is dead or partially dead, be the death physiological or spiritual, that of a corpse or of a madman. The glory of putting poor madmen on a level with the guilty and the delinquent is to be left to the thinkers of the "new school of penal law." In every other case, man always acts, always wills, and is always responsible and free, because life, so long as it lasts, is nothing but a web of volitions and therefore of free acts. ”

“ For indeed, all really new and great discoveries come from the philosophers, gradually filtering down through technical treatises and reviews, until they reach the level of prose fiction and of poetry, which, since the Æsthetic, we know to be one and the same thing with different empirical manifestations. In truth, the philosophers alone go deeply enough into the essence of things to reach their roots. Thus some philosophy, generally in an extremely diluted form, becomes part of every one's mental furniture and thus the world makes progress and the general level of culture is raised. ”

“ The practical man knows well that the laws were a mere help, merely a preparatory stage to action, and that he must in each case face the actual situation as it arises, intuite and perceive it in its originality, and perform his own action with originality. But he who has accepted the legalitarian conception of the practical activity and has abandoned practical principles as useless or looked upon them as non-existent, now that he finds himself abandoned also by the laws, in which he had put too much trust, has no other guide on which to fall back save his own will. ”

“ And if we succeed in really obtaining our desire, if, while the moral conscience is for a moment suspended within us, we abandon ourselves to the execution of a project of vengeance and attain to it in spite of many obstacles, thus executing a masterpiece of ability, a practical masterpiece; even when, in this case, populus non plaudit, we for our part certainly nos nobis plaudimus, and feel most satisfied, at least so long as lasts the suspension of the moral consciousness; for we have done what we willed to do, we have tasted, though but for a little while, the pleasure of the gods. ”