Part 18

As to the other concepts and to the disputes to which they gave rise, it will be opportune to mention repentance and remorse. Spinoza does not see that it has value as a necessary negative moment, for he declared: _Poenitentia virtus non est, sive ex ratione non oritur; sed is qui facti poenitet bis miser, seu impotens est. Nam primo prava cupiditate, dein tristitia vinci se patitur;_ and he concludes by assigning to it value for altogether empirical motives. Men rarely live (he says) _ex dictamine rationis_; and yet repentance and other similar affections do more good than harm, and if it be necessary to sin _in istam partem potius peccandum. Terret vulgus, nisi metuat._[16] But it was Hegel who instituted a regular persecution of the concept of repentance and remorse. There are certain passages in his works that should be read in connection with this question, in order that we may clearly see how he had an eye to contingent and historical events in his criticism. "In the Christian world in general (he writes) there is in force an ideal of the perfect man, who cannot exist as multitude in a people; and if this ideal is found realized in monks, quakers, and such-like pious folk, it must be remarked that a mass of these sad creatures does not constitute a people, just as lice and parasitic plants cannot exist by themselves, but only on an organic body. In order to constitute a people, it would be above all desirable to destroy that lamblike gentleness of theirs, that vanity which is occupied solely with their own persons, the caring for them and holding them dear, and has always before it the image and consciousness of its own excellence. For life in the universal and for the universal demands, not such vile and listless gentleness, but an energetic gentleness, not a thinking of oneself and one's own sins, but of the universal and of what should be done for it. To him who nourishes so false an ideal, men must always appear to be affected with weakness and corruption, and that ideal to be so constituted that it can never be translated into reality. They attribute importance to trifles, to which no reasonable person pays special attention, and believe that such weaknesses and defects exist, even when they are not remarked. Nor should we admire their greatness of soul, but note rather that their corruption lies precisely in standing still and looking at that which they call weaknesses and errors, and in making out of nothing something that exists. A man with such weaknesses and defects is immediately quit of them, if he do not attach to them importance." The observations that Hegel makes in his _Æsthetic,_ regarding the type of the Magdalen in Italian art, are in this respect especially curious. "In Italian painting the Magdalen appears, both within and without, as the _beautiful sinner;_ sin in her is as seductive as conversion. But here neither sin nor sanctity are to be taken too seriously. She was pardoned, because she had loved much; she sinned through love and beauty; and the affecting element lies in this, that she has scruples about her love, and beautiful and sensible as she is, sheds torrents of tears. But her error is not that she has loved so much; her beautiful and moving error is precisely that she believes herself to be a sinner, whereas her sensitive beauty gives the impression that she could not have been otherwise than noble and of lofty senses in her love."[17]

[Sidenote: _The doctrine of the passions._]

V. The relation between the passions or desires and the will has rather been studied at the moment of strife between the will and the passions, than for itself and within its two terms, although Aristotle had already begun an analysis as to the diversity of appetites or βούλησις in respect to the intention or προαίρεσις, observing that the intention relates only to what can be done, whereas the appetition relates also to things that are impossible.[18] The opposed schools of the Cynics and Cyrenaïcs, Stoics and Epicureans, and others such, were chiefly concerned with the antithesis of the passions and the rational will; but the formulæ of all these schools, if they have some empirical value as precepts of life more or less suitable for definite individuals, classes and times, possess none or very little for philosophy. Cynics and Cyrenaïcs, Stoics and Epicureans, they seem rather to be monks following this or that rule than philosophers. The question as to the mode of freeing oneself from the passions and of dominating them, which lingered till the treatises of Descartes and Spinoza, has also a chiefly empirical character. G. B. Vico took up a position opposed to the two opposed degenerations arising from those practical tendencies, that of "quenching the senses," and of "making a rule of them." He despised both Stoics and Epicureans as "monastic or solitary philosophers," and maintained as "a philosopher politician," that it is needful "not to tear away his own nature from man, nor to abandon him in his corruption," but "to moderate the human passions and to make of them human virtues."[19] Rarely has the defence of the passions enjoyed an equally limpid philosophical enunciation; as a rule, and even in Hegel, it has been directed chiefly against certain social tendencies, rather than against philosophical doctrines.[20] The absolute abandonment to the passions or their absolute destruction, are theories that have not had true and proper representatives.--The confusion between the various meanings of the word "passion," understood now as appetition, or concrete and actual passion, now as a state of the soul (joy and sorrow), now as volitional habit, is to be found in the various treatises that we have already had occasion to record. It is natural that their character of indifference when understood as habits should have often been observed. Thus for Descartes, _elles sont toutes bonnes de leur nature et nous n'avons rien à éviter que leurs mauvais usages ou leur excès._[21]

[Sidenote: _Virtues and Vices._]

On the other hand, the erroneous form of the defence of the passions, consisting of making them the preparation or cause of the virtues, is already to be found in the English philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (More, Shaftesbury, etc.); and in the celebrated _Fable of the Bees_ of Mandeville, it assumes the aspect of a paradoxical theory, in which the vices are looked upon as promoters and factors of progress, morality as inefficacious and harmful for this purpose. And La Rochefoucauld had written: "_Les vices entrent dans la composition des vertus comme les poisons dans la composition des remèdes._"[22]

[Sidenote: _The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher._]

All these are false or crude forms, in which is involved the doctrine of the right to individuality, and they have always constituted and still constitute its danger. This doctrine received its most energetic expression in the romantic and preromantic period, thanks above all to Schleiermacher, after it had been referred to in a rather vague way by Jacobi.[23]

"For some time" (writes Schleiermacher in the _Monologues_) "I too was satisfied that I had discovered Reason; and venerating equality with the _Unique Being_ as that which is most lofty, I believed that there was one single measure for every case, that action should be in all of them the same, and that each one is distinguished from the other only in so far as it occupies a place of its own in space. I believed that humanity manifested itself differently only in the variety of external facts; but that the internal man, the individual, was not a being peculiarly (_eigenthümlich_) constructed, and that each was everywhere equal to the other." "But afterwards was revealed to me that which instantly raised me to a high state of exaltation: it became clear that every man must represent humanity in his own way, in an altogether individual combination of its elements, in order that it may manifest itself in every mode, and that everything most different may issue from its bosom and become effectual in the fulness of time and space.... Owing to this thought, I felt myself to be a work individually willed and therefore elected by the Divinity and such that it must enjoy a particular form and culture; and the free act to which this thought belongs has collected and intimately joined together the elements of human nature in a peculiar existence."

"While I now do whatever I do according to my spirit and sense, my fancy places before me as very clear proof of the internal determination, a thousand other modes, in which it would be possible to act otherwise without offending the laws of humanity: I rethink myself in a thousand different forms, in order to discover with the greater certainty that which is especially mine."[24]

[Sidenote: _Romantic and very modern theories._]

But this peculiarity (_Eigenthümlichkeit,_) opportunely placed in relief by Schleiermacher, and a thought much loved by the Romantics (Herder, Jacobi, G. Humboldt, the Schlegels, etc.), is often seen to degenerate into individual caprice, even in those times, as may be observed in the sort of caricature which Frederick Schlegel made of the Fichtian I, become the individual I, and in the notorious _Lucinde,_ to which the same Schleiermacher inconsiderately devoted a series of letters of comment and defence. The last offshoots of the Romantics were Max Stirner and Frederick Nietzsche: in the former the value of individuality becomes changed into an affirmation of spasmodic egotism; in the second there is a continuous mixture of true and false, of good and of bad individuality, as is natural in a writer whose _Eigenthümlichkeit_ was rather that of a poet than of a thinker.

[Sidenote: _The concept of development and progress._]

VI. We have discussed elsewhere Hegel's concept of development, and his thought as synthesis of opposites, which essentially belongs to the Hegelian philosophy and has been superficially treated and adopted by other philosophical schools, and this is not the place either to retrace their history or to demonstrate into what errors Hegel fell through abusing the truth that he had discovered. Among the errors of that philosophy (as for that matter of all contemporary philosophies and of those that have followed one another down to our own day), is to be noted the persistence of the concept of Nature as a mode of reality opposed to the mode of the Spirit, whence came a dualism that was not effectually surpassed, save in appearance. The doctrine of development by opposites is to be understood as accepted and maintained here, with the correction of the concept of nature, and also the doctrine of the synthesis of opposites, free from the use or abuse of it by Hegel for distinct concepts (and worse still, for empirical concepts). As for the concept of Providence, which is neither Fate nor Fortune, nor the work of a transcendent God, this, in its modern form, goes back to the _Scienza nuova_ of Vico and is not to be confounded with the personal religious beliefs that Vico held and kept distinct from his philosophical concept as to immanent Providence. The same concept reappears in the Hegelian philosophy under the form of the Idea, or of the _astuteness of Reason,_ which avails itself of men as its instruments and managers of business.[25] Finally, the conception of cosmic progress was extraneous to the oriental world, to the Græco-Roman, and to the Christian worlds, prevailing in turn in the latter that of decadence from an original state of perfection and of circles or returns. In its modern form it takes its origin from thinkers free of these religious views, who merge in the philosophies of becoming and of evolution. But the concept of progress destroyed itself in many of these rationalistic philosophies, the "disappearance of evil" being posited as possible (Spencer), and a definite state of perfection conceived (though transferred from the past into the future), that is to say a Reality that should be Reality, indeed, perfect Reality having ceased to be development, that is to say, itself.

[1] _Kr. d. prakt. Vern._ p. 119.

[2] _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ §§ 4, 15.

[3] Lotze, _Grundzüge der Ethik_ (Leipzig, 1884), pp. 26, 30-31; Wundt, _Ethik_² (Stuttgart, 1892), pp. 463-464.

[4] _Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience_ (Paris, 1898).

[5] _Tract, theol.-pol._ vi. c. 6; _Ethica,_ p. iv. intr.; _Epist._36 (_Opera,_ pp. 208, 378, 597).

[6] _Kr. d. pr. Vernf._ p. 79.

[7] _System der Sittenlehre,_ in _Werke,_ iv. pp. 198-205.

[8] See my study: _Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel_ (Bari, 1907).

[9] _Médit._ iv.

[10] For example, _Compendio di Etica_ (Roma, 1907), p. 56.

[11] _Mentor,_ iv. c. 2, § 19 _sqq._

[12] _Hippias minor,_ 375.

[13] Pascal, _Provine,_ i, iv.; Hegel, _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ § 40.

[14] _Enc._§ 248.

[15] _Allg. prakt. Phil._ pp. 121-122; _Einl. i. d. Phil._ (trad, ital.), pp. 118, 171, 224.

[16] _Ethic,_ iv. prop. 54, p. 480.

[17] _Gesch. d. Phil._ ii. 240-241; _Vorles. üb. Aesth._ ii. 162-163.

[18] _Eth. Nicom._ Bk. iii. cc. 2-3, 1111-1113.

[19] _Scienza nuova seconda,_ degn. 5.

[20] _Phän. d. Geistes,_ pp. 484-486; _Encycl._ § 474; _Phil. d. Rechtes,_ § 124; _Phil. d. Gesch._ pp. 39-41.

[21] _Traité des passions,_ iii. § 211.

[22] _Maximes,_ n. 182 (Ed. Garnier, p. 43).

[23] _Woldemar,_ pp. 112-113.

[24] _Monologen,_ in _Werke,_ i. 366-368, 372.

[25] See the study of Hegel mentioned.

THIRD SECTION

UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL

[Sidenote: _Double result; precedence of the theoretical over the practical and of the practical over the theoretical._]

The study of the practical activity in its relations that we made in the first section has removed all doubt as to the thesis that the practical activity presupposes the theoretical, or that _knowledge is the necessary precedent of volition and action._[1] But the succeeding study of the practical activity in its dialectic having led to the result that the practical activity is reality itself in its immediacy, and that no other reality (or we may say _other nature_) is conceivable outside will-action, compels us also to affirm the opposite thesis, that the theoretic activity presupposes the practical, and that _the will is the necessary precedent of knowledge_.[2] And it is a precedent, not indeed in the sense admitted from the beginning, of the necessary implication of the will in every theoretical act, as will to know, by means of the unity of the Spirit[3] (for this will is subsidiary and not constitutive; but if it become constitutive it produces, as has been seen, wilfulness and the theoretical error[4]), but precisely in the sense of a constitutive will, without which no knowledge would be thinkable.

Knowledge, indeed, is knowledge of something: it is the remaking of a fact, an ideal recreation of a real creation. If there have not previously been a desire, an aspiration, a nostalgia, there cannot be poetry; if there have not been an impulse or a heroic deed, the epic cannot arise; if the sun do not illumine a landscape, or a soul invoke a ray of sunlight upon the countryside, the picture of a luminous landscape cannot exist. And if there be not a world of reality that generates a world of representations, Philosophy, which is the search for the universal, is not conceivable, nor History, the understanding of the individual.

[Sidenote: _Error of those who maintain the exclusive precedence of either._]

The indubitability of this affirmation, which no force of sophistry can destroy, renders fallacious both the opposite theses, which have several times been variously proposed and maintained: the exclusive priority of the theoretic, and the exclusive priority of the practical.

Those who maintain them enter into so desperate a contest with reality, that in order to issue from it without too much dishonour, they are finally compelled to call in the aid of a third term, which is in turn either thought that is not thought, or will that is not will, or something grey that contains in itself thought and will, without being either the one or the other, nor the unity of that duality. On the one hand is postulated a Logos, a thought _in se_ (one does not understand how this can ever think and be thought), and it is made to adopt the resolution (which one does not understand how it can ever adopt) of coming forth _from itself_ and creating a nature, in order to be able to return finally to itself, by means of this alienation, and to be henceforth _per se,_ that is to say, able to think and to will. The defect of this artificial construction, its mythological and religious origin, can be said to have been already revealed, in the comparison employed with reference to it by the author who maintained it (Hegel), to the effect that the Logos is God _before_ the creation of the world: a God, that is to say, altogether unreal and absurd. On the other hand, the excogitation of a _blind Will_ (Schelling, Schopenhauer) completely tallies with this Thought that does not think because it has not previously willed, and that does not truly will because it has not previously thought, and all of a sudden fashions for itself the instrument of knowledge, to succeed in surpassing itself in this alienation from itself, by means of liberation from willing obtained in the contemplation of the ideas and in asceticism. Here, too, we must repeat that the one error passes over and converts itself into the other, and this inevitable conversion causes the other secondary and hybrid forms of theory to have but slight interest, those in which the priority has been conceived as that of fancy, or feeling, or the unconscious, or the indifferentiated, and the like, all of which represent vain efforts to suppress one of the two fundamental forms of the spirit, or to derive them from a third, which consciousness does not reveal.

[Sidenote: _Problem of the unity of this duality._]

This however does not mean that the demand to conceive the link of that duality, or the unity of the theoretical and the practical, manifested in all these erroneous attempts, is not legitimate. But in order to conceive this, it is necessary to insist above all upon the reality of this duality, of which is sought the connection and the unity.

[Sidenote: _Not the duality of opposites._]

This connection cannot be the relation or synthesis of opposites. The theoretical is not the opposite of the practical, nor the practical the opposite of the theoretical: the opposite of the theoretical is error or the false, as the opposite of the practical is the volitional contradiction or evil. The theoretical, far from being negative, is positive, not less than the practical, and inversely. Neither form can therefore be in any way debased to a simple opposite. Opposition is intrinsic to the spirit and is to be found in each one of its forms: hence the general value of the spirit (activity against passivity, rationality and reality against irrationality and unreality, being against not-being) and that of its special forms (beautiful against ugly, true against false, useful against useless, good against evil). But precisely for this reason, it cannot constitute the character of one form in respect to the other: neither that of the true against the good, nor that of the beautiful against the useful, and so on.

[Sidenote: _Not duality of finite and infinite._]

Nor can the connection be thought as are thought the subdivisions of the theoretic and the practical forms, or according to the relations of individual to universal, of finite to infinite, the first of which terms conditions the second, but is conditioned by it only in an implicit manner. Of the two theoretical forms (and we shall see further on that the forms of the practical are also two), the æsthetic precedes the logical and is autonomous: a song, a story, a statue, do not express any concept; but the philosophy that gives the concept, is at the same time fancy, expression, word: the prose of the philosopher is his song. The æsthetic form is the knowledge of the individual; the logical that of the universal, which is also individual. But this relation that arises within the theoretic, as within the practical form, cannot be transported to the relation of the two forms without logical incoherence: the subdivision, so to speak, is not the division. Thought is not the finite in respect of willing, which is the infinite; nor is the will the finite in respect of thought, which is the infinite. Thought and will are both of them at once finite and infinite, individual and universal. He who passes from action to thought, does not limit his own being by becoming finite; nor does he limit it by passing from thought to action; or better, in both cases he makes himself finite to attain to the infinite; poet to open to himself the way to the thought of the eternally true; man of action, that he may dedicate his work to the eternal good.

[Sidenote: _Perfect analogy of the two forms, theoretic and practical._]

The two forms, theoretical and practical, both positive, both a connection of finite and infinite, correspond in everything, as has already appeared from our exposition, in which the appeal to the one from the problems of the other has always aided a better penetration of the nature of such problems and the finding of their solution. Thus in both there is genius and creation (geniuses of art and of thought, and geniuses of action); in both, reproduction and judgment take place in the same way (æsthetic taste, practical taste; history of art and history of philosophy, history of actions); in both arise representative concepts and empirical rules. The analogy will be better illustrated by what is to follow, when will be demonstrated the correspondence between art and economic, logical thought and ethicity, historical discrimination and ethical discrimination, empirical concepts and laws of action, and so on.

[Sidenote: _Not a parallelism, but a circle._]

If this analogy exclude the possibility of the two forms being _unequal,_ it must not, on the other hand, be perverted with the object of conceiving them _parallel,_ as would perhaps be pleasing to the parallelists of spirit and nature, soul and body; this is an expedient that is certainly easy, but certainly not satisfying. They are not parallel, but are on the contrary bound, the one to the other, in such a way that the one proceeds from the other. From the æsthetic apprehension of reality, from philosophical reflection upon it, from historical reconstruction, which is its result, is obtained that knowledge of the actual situation, on which alone is formed and can be formed the volitional and practical synthesis, the new action. And this new action is in its turn the material of the new æsthetic figuration, of the new philosophical reflection, of the new historical reconstruction. In short, knowledge and will, theory and practice, are not two parallels, but two lines, such that the head of the one is joined to the tail of the other; or, if a geometric symbol also be desired, such that they constitute, not a parallelism, but a _circle._

[Sidenote: _The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and object._]