Raffaello Piccoli

“ The fact is that there is no difference between intuitive knowledge, or expression, and art, except a purely extensive and empirical one: that is, we call a poet or an artist a man who possesses this expressive power in a higher degree than the rest of mankind; we call a poem or a work of art an expression which is fuller, more complex, more elaborate, than those which are the product of our common intuitive activity, mere waves of the continuous stream of spiritual life, in which they are constantly interrupted by and mixed with reflections and volitions, with logical and practical facts. ”

“ We cannot think the pseudo-concepts, but they help us to think; we cannot will the laws, but they help us to will. The concept of law is akin to that of plan or design; in practice, a plan or design, and its execution, are one and the same thing, as we act by constantly changing our design, because reality, which is the foundation of our action, is in perpetual change. But this unreality of the plan, as distinct from the concrete individual action, does not deprive the plan itself of its practical uses, which are universally recognized, and which are identical with the uses of law. ”

“ The true distinction between history and chronicle is not, therefore, a literary or material one, but a distinction between forms of spiritual activity: history is the living consciousness, and, therefore, an act of thought or knowledge; chronicle is the dead record, which we preserve by a mere act of will, because we know that some day the dead record itself may come back to life, transform itself again, under an impulse rooted not in the past but in the present, into a living thought. ”

“ Art is a category of apperception, and in art, the whole of natural and human reality—which is either beautiful or ugly according to its various aspects—becomes beautiful because it is perceived as reality in general, which we want to see fully expressed. Every character, or action, or object, entering into the world of art, loses, artistically speaking, the qualifications it has in real life, and is judged only inasmuch as art represents it with more or less perfection. Caliban is a monster in reality, but no longer a monster as an artistic creation. ”

“ Impatience with a master who was not of the kind we had been accustomed to, who could not be easily digested, surpassed and disposed of, but had as much energy and courage, as light a step and as curious a mind, as the most gifted among his pupils, prompted a good deal of immature and capricious criticism, which was but a means for an arbitrary liberation. It was an amusing sight to see Croce assailed and, to the satisfaction of his critics, destroyed, with weapons that nobody could have provided but Croce himself, and a dwarf victoriously brandishing against the giant a toothpick for a sword. ”

“ It must, and will, answer only for itself, and the only claim that we can put upon it is that of internal coherence. Both the theories of the arts and the theories of the genres, when we try to treat them as true and rigorous, and not as mere practical expedients, manifest the absurdity of their task through their incapacity to give precise and absolute definitions. Every work of art expresses a state of mind, and every state of mind is irreducibly individual and new: a complete classification would therefore be only that in which every class has under itself a single intuition. ”

“ Philosophies have sprung up in all times from the soil of religious thought, and more or less completely resolved in themselves, and logically clarified, the obscure substance of myth. This is Croce's clear-cut, unequivocal solution of the problem of the relations between philosophy and religion: there is no place reserved anywhere in his system for an either internal or external revelation other than that perpetual revelation of truth, which is at the same time history and philosophy. ”

“ The Ptolemaic cosmography, which is the visible form of mediæval thought, a system of the finite universe, of which the Earth is the centre, and which leaves an infinite space for the seat of the only real, transcending existences, beyond the compass of the heavenly spheres, and as if it were outside itself, loses its hold on the imagination, and therefore on the conscience of men, long before Copernicus and Galileo read in the skies a new system of an infinite universe, within which, or nowhere, the divine principle must live and work. ”

“ A law, being a volition of a class of actions, and therefore of an abstraction, is in itself an abstract or unreal volition. What we actually will is not the law, but the single, individual action under the law: the reality of the law is only in its execution. In the individual execution, however, what realizes itself is not the law, but the practical principle, economic or ethic, of which both the observance and the non-observance of the law are particular determinations; the individual practical problems can never be foreseen seen by the law, which is by its nature general and abstract. ”

“ The denial of the autonomy of the ethical form, the attempt to reduce the ethic to the economic, the morally good to the individually useful, is the substance of the many theories that go under the name of utilitarianism. But this reduction of the practical activity to a single principle clashes in every instant of our life against the distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest action, between the things that have a price and those that have none, between actions which have a moral motive and those that have only a utilitarian one. ”

“ What to the purely utilitarian conscience is the good of now and of to-day, the same conscience, awakened to a greater light, repudiates as evil. The imaginative vision of the poet, in which truth expresses itself, sensuous and finite, and yet pregnant of its infinity, dissolves like mist in the sun in the clearness of the logical concept, and is then restored in its right by the historical and critical consciousness to which that truth is poetry. ”

“ It is impossible to make history without judgment, and, therefore, history is in a sense irreducibly subjective. But the subjectivity of history is not the arbitrary and capricious subjectivity of the individual historian, who introduces his own passions and tendencies into the historical narrative: it is the subjectivity of thought, of the earnest and dispassionate research of truth, which coincides with the only conceivable objectivity. What we call objective truth is not reached by renouncing thought, but only by making our thought deeper and truer. ”

“ But shall our ideals lose their value when we understand that they have no separate, transcendent reality? That every action carries its own value within itself, and that therefore unless we constantly realize those ideals in our concrete and individual actions, in every one of our actions, the ideals themselves will be but empty shadows? Every ideal, however high and comprehensive, is but an empirical concept derived from a class of actions in which we have recognised a moral value ”

“ If we should imagine that infinite whole, in its infinite detail, as present for one moment to our mind, all we could do, would be instantly to proceed to forget it, in order to concentrate our attention on that detail only which answers to a problem and, therefore, constitutes a living and active history. That whole is not something of which we can affirm the existence at any given moment, but the eternal phantasm of the thing in itself, the limiting concept of the infinity of our doing and knowing: a naturalistic construction similar to the external and material reality of physical science. ”

“ History is but this perpetual cycle of death and resurrection, in which what is concrete distinction in the act transforms itself into opposition in the process, producing the terms of a new problem and becoming the source of the new creation. Thus the whole method of Croce's philosophy reveals itself as directed towards a realistic conception of life, and the distinctions within the concept are not abstract forms, but the very structure of reality.
The professional philosopher moves always and only in the rarefied atmosphere of the pure concept. ”

“ I am not trying to establish an Italian pedigree for the kind of philosophy to which Croce belongs: nowhere are national distinctions so futile as in the history of thought. But the Italy of the Renaissance shares with India and with Greece the purely material privilege of having given birth to a vision of the world and its problems, which is national only in the sense that it was elaborated for a certain time at least by minds belonging to a single nation. ”

“ To Croce such a conception of the progress of philosophy is unacceptable. Philosophy as an abstract category, as one of the forms of the spiritual activity, has no origin in time, is not limited to the men we call philosophers, but acts in every moment of the life of the spirit on the material offered by history, which it contributes to create, and does not, therefore, progress any more than the categories of art or of morality. But it progresses in its concreteness, as art and the whole of life do; because life is development, and development is progress. ”

“ When, in this struggle, the single volition does not assert itself fully, we become the prey of that multiplicity, willing a volition which is not the one that we ought to will, and that in a way we feel we will; hence a will that is divided against itself, an action which is not positive but negative, not a true action, but a kind of passivity. When the single volition conquers the passions, when one impulse or desire becomes the will, all the other possible volitions lose their actual value, multiplicity gives way to unity, passivity to action, evil to good, death to life. ”

“ Or, to say the same thing in different words, philosophy was a system, not in the sense that a rigid logical scheme could once and forever fit the ever moving stream of reality, but because it is impossible to think the distinctions without the unity, or the unity without the distinctions. That which appears to us, psychologically, as the main characteristic of Croce's mind, transforms itself into the intrinsic logic of his system, in which the principles of unity and of distinction are, as we shall see, fundamental. ”

“ We have only to turn our attention to the greatest part of our modern histories of literature, whether written by a single philologist or by a learned society, to realize that [Pg 260] that which is philology in them is not history, but repertory; and the rest, which is history, is not philology, but a vivid reaction, an act of present life, by which some at least of the documents of the past (since some philologists are men) have suddenly become part of the actual experience of the writer, answered his spiritual need, stirred that which is still human in his soul. ”

“ But contemporary history rigorously ought to be only history in the actual making, the immediate present and the consciousness of the immediate present. All history, however, is contemporary history in this rigorous and precise sense; it is a condition of all history that it should live, be present in the mind of the historian; all history springs directly from present life, since only an interest of our present life can induce us to inquire into the past, which, by being made history, is no longer a past but a present. ”

“ The universal is mind or the spirit; it is reality, as unity of will and thought; it is life grasped in its depth as that same unity; it is freedom, since a reality thus conceived is perpetual development, creation, progress. Man, in willing the universal, turns from his individuality to that which transcends it, to the spirit, or reality, or life, or freedom, not as abstract ideals, but as they realize themselves in his individual action. The volition of the individual, of one's individual existence, is necessarily the first step ”

“ To say that the equation is never perfect, is only another way of saying that every particular historical problem continually raises new problems of thought, and that Croce's thought finds therefore in itself the motives of its own development, the springs of its own life. Where passion and reason ultimately coincide, the roots of the development are taken away, and death takes the place of life. ”

“ Thus, from a different angle, Croce's theory of error reaches the same conclusion as his general theory of logic, the identity of philosophy and history; and philosophy appears as a perpetual development, a history that never can repeat itself, since every affirmation of the truth transforms itself into a new element of reality, into one of the conditions determining every new problem and every new solution. ”

“ We do not realize morality in the universal, but always a given moral volition, not the abstract virtues, but the concrete works. Although a moral action is not only our individual pleasure, yet it must be that, too, or we should never be able to realize it. On the other hand, the mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediate pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yet it leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyond our individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. ”

“ Croce himself is in no need of a new name for it, since he considers it one with the general practical activity, will or action.
The definition that we have given of the pure concept seems to clash against an insuperable difficulty arising from the multiplicity of concepts. If the concept is an elaboration of reality as a universal, how can we admit the existence of more than one concept? Beauty and truth are both concrete universals, and yet they are not the same universal: they have the same logical form, but they denote different aspects of reality. ”