Part 2

The practical and the so-called third spiritual form: feeling--Various meanings of the word: feeling, a psychological class--Feeling as a state of the spirit--Function of the concept of feeling in the History of philosophy: the indeterminate--Feeling as forerunner of the æsthetic form--In Historic: preannouncement of the intuitive element--In philosophical Logic: pre-announcement of the pure concept--Analogous function in the Philosophy of the practical--Negation of feeling--Deductive exclusion of it.

III

RELATION OF THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY WITH THE THEORETICAL 33

Precedence of the theoretical over the practical--The unity of the spirit and the co-presence of the practical--Critique of pragmatism--Critique of psychological objections--Nature of theoretic precedence over the practical: historical knowledge--Its continual mutability--No other theoretic precedent--Critique of practical concepts and judgments--Posteriority of judgments to the practical act--Posteriority of practical concepts--Origin of intellectualistic and sentimentalistic doctrines--The concepts of end and means--Critique of the end as plan or fixed design--Volition and the unknown--Critique of the concept of practical sciences and of a practical Philosophy.

IV

INSEPARABILITY OF ACTION FROM ITS REAL BASE AND PRACTICAL NATURE OF THE THEORETIC ERROR 53

Coincidence of intention and volition--Volition in the abstract and in the concrete: critique--Volition thought and real volition: critique--Critique of volition with unknown or ill-known base --Illusions in the instances adduced--Impossibility of volition with erroneous theoretical base--Forms of the theoretic error and problem as to its nature--Distinction between ignorance and error: practical origin of latter--Confirmations and proofs--Justification of the practical repression of error--Empirical distinctions of errors and the philosophic distinction.

V

IDENTITY OF VOLITION AND ACTION AND DISTINCTION BETWEEN VOLITION AND EVENT 73

Volition and action: intuition and expression--Spirit and nature--Inexistence of volitions without action and inversely--Illusions as to the distinctions between these terms--Distinction between action and succession or event--Volition and event--Successful and unsuccessful actions: critique--Acting and foreseeing: critique--Confirmation of the inderivability of the value of action from success--Explanation of facts that seem to be at variance.

VI

THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL 86

Practical taste and judgment--Practical judgment as historical judgment--Its Logic--Importance of the practical judgment--Difference between practical judgment and judgment of event--Progress in action and progress in Reality--Precedence of the Philosophy of the practical over the practical judgment--Confirmation of the philosophic incapacity of the psychological method.

VII

PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION, RULES AND CASUISTIC 103

Justification of the psychological method and of empirical and descriptive disciplines--Practical Description and its literature --Extension of practical description--Normative knowledge or rules: their nature--Utility of rules--The literature of rules and its apparent decadence--Relation between the arts (collections of rules) and philosophic doctrines--Casuistic: its nature and utility--Jurisprudence as casuistic.

VIII

CRITIQUE OF THE INVASIONS OF PHILOSOPHY INTO PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION AND INTO ITS DERIVATIVES 121

First form: tendency to generalize--Historical elements that persist in the generalizations--Second form: literary union of philosophy and empiria--Third form: attempt to put them in close connection--Science of the practical, and Metaphysic: various meanings--Injurious consequences of the invasions--1st, Dissolution of empirical concepts--Examples: war and peace, property and communism, and the like--Other examples--Misunderstandings on the part of the philosophers--Historical significance of such questions--2nd, False deduction of the empirical from the philosophic--Affirmations as to the contingent changed into philosophemes--Reasons for the rebellion against rules--Limits between philosophy and empiria.

IX

HISTORICAL NOTES 144

I. Distinction between history of the practical principle and history of liberation from the transcendental--II. Distinction of the practical from the theoretical--III. Minglings of the Philosophy of the practical with Description--Vain attempts at a definition of empirical concepts--Attempts at deduction--IV. Various questions--Practical nature of error--Practical taste--V. Doctrines of feeling--The Wolfians--Jacobi and Schleiermacher--Kant--Hegel--Opponents of the doctrine of the three faculties. Krug--Brentano.

SECOND SECTION

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS DIALECTIC

I

NECESSITY AND FREEDOM IN THE VOLITIONAL ACT 173

The problem of freedom--Freedom of willing and freedom of action: critique of such distinction--The volitional act, both necessary and free--Comparison with the æsthetic activity--Critique of determinism and arbitrarism--General form of this antithesis: materialism and mysticism--Materialistic sophisms of determinism--Mysticism of doctrine of free will--Doctrine of necessity-liberty and idealism--Doctrine of double causality; of dualism and agnosticism--Its character of transaction and transition.

II

FREEDOM AND ITS OPPOSITE. GOOD AND EVIL 192

Freedom of action as reality of action--Inconceivability of the absolute absence of action--Non-freedom as antithesis and contrariety--Nothingness and arbitrariness of non-liberty--Good as freedom and reality, and evil as its opposite--Critique of abstract monism and of dualism of values--Objections to the irreality of evil--Evil in synthesis and out of synthesis--Affirmative judgments of evil as negative judgments--Confirmations of the doctrine--The poles of feeling (pleasure and pain); and their identity with the practical opposites--Doctrine relating to pleasure and happiness: critique--Empirical concepts relating to good and evil--To have to be, ideal, inhibitive, imperative power--Evil, remorse, etc.; good, satisfaction, etc.--Their incapacity for serving as practical principles--Their character.

III

THE VOLITIONAL ACT AND THE PASSIONS 215

The multiplicity of volitions and the struggle for unity--Multiplicity and unity as good and evil--Excluded volitions and passions or desires--Passions and desires as possible volitions--Volition as struggle with the passions--Critique of the freedom of choice--Meaning of the so-called precedence of feeling over the volitional act--Polipathicism and apathicism--Erroneity of both the opposed theses--Historical and contingent meaning of these--The domination of the passions, and the will.

IV

VOLITIONAL HABITS AND INDIVIDUALITY 229

Passions and states of the soul--Passions understood as volitional habits--Importance and nature of these--Domination of the passions in so far as they are volitional habits--Difficulty and reality of dominating them--Volitional habits and individuality--Negations of individuality for uniformity and criticism of them--Temperament and character--Indifference of temperament--Discovery of one's own being--The idea of "vocation"--Misunderstanding of the right of individuality--Wicked individuality--False doctrines as to the connection between virtues and vices--The universal in the individual, and education.

V

DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS 246

Multiplicity and unity: development--Becoming as synthesis of being and not-being--Nature as becoming. Its resolution in the Spirit--Optimism and pessimism: critique--Dialectic optimism--Concept of cosmic progress--Objections and critique--Individuals and History--Fate, Fortune, and Providence--The infinity of progress and mystery--Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of history--Illegitimate transference of the concept of mystery from History to Philosophy.

VI

TWO EXPLANATIONS RELATING TO HISTORIC AND ÆSTHETIC 262

Relation between desires and actions; and two problems of Historic and Æsthetic--History and art--The concept of existentiality in history--Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and the existing, desires and the non-existent--History as distinction between actions and desires, and art as indistinction--Pure fancy and imagination--Art as lyrical or representation of feelings--Identity of ingenuous reality and feeling--Artists and the will--Actions and myths--Art as pure representation of becoming, and the artistic form of thought.

VII

HISTORICAL NOTES 273

I. The problem of freedom--II. The doctrine of evil--III. Will and freedom--Conscience and responsibility--IV. The concept of duty--Repentance and remorse--The doctrine of the passions--Virtues and vices--V. The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher--Romantic theories and most modern theories--VI. The concept of development and progress.

THIRD SECTION

UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL

Double result: precedence of the theoretical over the practical, and of the practical over the theoretical--Errors of those who maintain the exclusive precedence of the one or the other--Problem of the unity of this duality--Not a duality of opposites--Not a duality of finite and infinite--Perfect analogy of the two forms: theoretic and practical--Not a parallelism, but a circle--The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and object--Critique of the theories as to the primacy of the theoretical or of the practical reason--New pragmatism: Life conditioning Philosophy--Deductive confirmation of the two forms, and deductive exclusion of the third (feeling).

SECOND PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS

FIRST SECTION

THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC

I

DISTINCTION OF THE TWO FORMS IN THE PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS 309

The utilitarian or economic form, and the moral or ethical form--Insufficiency of the descriptive and psychological distinction--Deduction and necessity of integrating it with induction--The two forms as a fact of consciousness--The economic form--The ethical form--Impossibility of eliminating them--Confirmations in fact.

II

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM 323

Exclusion of materialistic and intellectualistic criticisms--The two possible negations--The thesis of utilitarianism against the existence of moral acts--Difficulty arising from the presence of these--Attempt to explain them as quantitative distinctions--Criticism of it--Attempt to explain them as facts, either extraneous to the practical or irrational, and stupid--Associationism and evolutionism. Critique--Desperate attempt: theological utilitarianism and mystery.

III

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ECONOMIC FORM 337

The thesis of moral abstractionism against the concept of the useful--The useful as means, or as theoretic fact--Technical and hypothetical imperatives--Critique: the useful is a practical fact --The useful as the egoistic or the immoral--Critique: the useful is amoral--The useful as ethical minimum--Critique: the useful is premoral--Desperate attempt: the useful as inferior practical conscience--Confirmation of the autonomy of the useful.

IV

RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMIC AND ETHICAL FORMS 348

Economic and ethic as double degree of the practical--Errors arising from conceiving them as co-ordinated--Disinterested actions: critique--Vain polemic conducted with such Supposition against utilitarianism--Actions morally indifferent, obligatory, supererogatory, etc. Critique--Comparison with the relation between art and philosophy--Other erroneous conceptions of modes of action--Pleasure and economic activity, happiness and virtue--Pleasure and pain and feeling--Coincidence of duty with pleasure--Critique of rigorism or asceticism--Relation of happiness and virtue--Critique of the subordination of pleasure to morality--No empire of morality over the forms of the spirit--Non-existence of other practical forms; and impossibility of subdivision of the two established.

V

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY AND THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF ECONOMY 364

Problem of the relations between Philosophy and Science of economy --Unreality of the laws and concepts of economic Science--Economic Science founded on empirical concepts but not empirical or descriptive--Absoluteness of its laws--Their mathematical nature--Its principles and their character of arbitrary postulates and definitions--Its utility--Comparison of Economy with Mechanic, and reason for its exclusion from ethical, æsthetic, and logical facts--Errors of philosophism and historicism in Economy--The two degenerations: extreme abstractism and empiristical disaggregation--Glance at the history of the various directions of Economy--Meaning of the judgment of Hegel as to economic Science.

VI

CRITIQUE OF THE CONFUSIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY 382

Adoption of the economic method and formulæ on the part of Philosophy--Errors that derive from it--1st, Negation of philosophy for economy--2nd, Universal value attributed to empirical concepts. Example: free trade and protectionism--3rd, Transformation of the functions of calculation into reality--The pretended calculus of pleasures and pains; and doctrines of optimism and pessimism.

VII

HISTORICAL NOTES 391

I. Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness--II. Importance of Christianity for Ethic--The three tendencies that result from it: utilitarianism, rigorism, and psychologism--Hobbes, Spinoza--English Ethic--Idealistic Philosophy--III. E. Kant and his affirmation of the ethical principle--Contradictions of Kant as to the concept of the useful, of prudence, of happiness, etc.--Errors that derive from it in his Ethic--IV. Points for a Philosophy of Economy--The inferior appetitive faculty--Problem of politics and Machiavellism--Doctrine of the passions--Hegel and the concept of the useful--Fichte and the elaboration of the Kantian Ethic--V. The problem of the useful and of morality in the thinkers of the nineteenth century--Extrinsic union of Ethic and of economic Science, from antiquity to the nineteenth century--Philosophic questions arising from a more intimate contact between the two--VII. Theories of the hedonistic calculus: from Maupertuis to Hartmann.

SECOND SECTION

THE ETHICAL PRINCIPLE

I

CRITIQUE OF MATERIALISTIC AND OF FORMALISTIC ETHIC 425

Various meanings of "formal" and "material"--The ethical principle as formal (universal) and not material (contingent)--Reduction of material Ethic to utilitarian Ethic--Expulsion of material principles--Benevolence, love, altruism, etc.; and critique of them--Social organism, State, interest of the species, etc. Critique of them--Material religious principles. Critique of them--"Formal" as statement of a merely logical demand--Critique of a formal Ethic with this meaning: tautologism--Tautological principles: ideal, chief good, duty, etc. Critique of them--Tautological significance of certain formulæ, material in appearance--Conversion of tautological Ethic into material and utilitarian Ethic--In what sense Ethic should be formal; and in what other sense material.

II

THE ETHICAL FORM AS ACTUALIZATION OF THE SPIRIT IN UNIVERSAL 440

Tautological Ethic, and its partial or discontinuous connection with Philosophy--Rejection of both these conceptions--The ethical form as volition of the universal--The universal as the Spirit (Reality, Liberty, etc.)--Moral actions as volitions of the Spirit--Critique of antimoralism--Confused tendency of tautological, material, religious formulæ in relation to the Ethic of the Spirit--The Ethic of the Spirit and religious Ethic.

III

HISTORICAL NOTES 452

I. Merit of the Kantian Ethic--The predecessors of Kant--Defect of that Ethic: agnosticism--Critique of Hegel and of others--Kant and the concept of freedom--Fichte and Hegel--Ethic in the nineteenth century.

THIRD PART

LAWS

I

LAWS AS PRODUCTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL 465

Definition of law--Philosophical and empirical concept of society--Laws as individual product: programmes of individual life--Exclusion of the character of constriction: critique of this concept--Identical characters of individual and social laws--Individual laws as the sole real in ultimate analysis--Critique of the division of laws into judicial and social, and into the sub-classes of these. Empiricity of every division of laws--Extension of the concept of laws.

II

THE CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS OF LAWS. CRITIQUE OF PERMISSIVE LAWS AND OF NATURAL LAW 481

The volitional character and the character of class--Distinction of laws from the so-called laws of nature--Implication of the second in the first--Distinction of laws from practical principles--Laws and single acts--Identity of imperative, prohibitive, and permissive laws--Permissive character of every law and impermissive character of every principle--Changeability of laws--Empirical considerations as to modes of change--Critique of the eternal Code or natural right--Natural right as the new right--Natural right as Philosophy of the practical--Critique of natural right--Theory of natural right persisting in judicial judgments and problems.

III

UNREALITY OF LAW AND REALITY OF EXECUTION. FUNCTION OF LAW IN THE PRACTICAL SPIRIT 497

Law as abstract and unreal volition--Ineffectually of laws and effectuality of practical principles--Exemplificatory explanation--Doctrines against the utility of laws--Their unmaintainability--Unmaintainability of confutations of them--Empirical meaning of these controversies--Necessity of laws--Laws as preparation for action--Analogy between practical and theoretical Spirit: practical laws and empirical concepts--The promotion of order in reality and in representation--Origin of the concept of plan or design.

IV

CONFUSION BETWEEN LAWS AND PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL LEGALISM AND OF JESUITIC MORALITY 511

Transformation of principles into practical laws: legalism--Genesis of the concept of the practically licit and indifferent--Its consequence: the arbitrary--Ethical legalism as a simple special case of the practical--Critique of the practically indifferent--Contests of rigorists and of latitudinarians and their common error--Jesuitic morality as doctrine of fraud on moral law--Concept of legal fraud--Absurdity of fraud against oneself and against the moral conscience--Jesuitic morality not explainable by mere legalism--Jesuitic morality as alliance of legalism with theological utilitarianism--Distinction between Jesuitic practice and doctrine.

V

JUDICIAL ACTIVITY AS GENERICALLY PRACTICAL ACTIVITY (ECONOMIC) 526

Legislative activity as generically practical--Vanity of disputes as to the character of institutions, whether economic or ethical: punishment, marriage, State, etc.--Legislative activity as economic--Judicial activity: its economic character: its consequent identity with economic activity--Non-recognition of economic form, and meaning of the problem as to distinction between morality and rights--Theories of co-action and of exteriority, as distinctive characteristics: critique of them--Moralistic theories of rights: critique--Duality of positive and ideal rights, historical and natural rights, etc.; absurd attempts at unification and co-ordination--Value of all these attempts as confused glimpse of amoral character of rights--Confirmations of this character in ingenuous conscience--Comparison between rights and language. Grammar and codes--Logic and language; morality and rights--History of language as literary and artistic history--History of rights as political and social history.

VI

HISTORICAL NOTES 543

I. Distinction between morality and rights, and its importance for the history of the economic principle--Indistinction lasting till Tomasio--II. Tomasio and followers--Kant and Fichte--Hegel--Herbart and Schopenhauer--Rosmini and others--III. Stahl, Ahrens, Trendelenburg--Utilitarians--IV. Recent writers of treatises--Strident contradictions. Stammler--V. Value of law--In antiquity--Diderot--Romanticism--Jacobi--Hegel--Recent doctrines--VI. Natural rights and their dissolution--Historical school of rights--Comparison between rights and language--VII. Concept of law, and studies of comparative rights and of the general Doctrine of law--VIII. Legalism and moral casuistic--Probabilitism and Jesuitic morality--Critique of the concept of the licit--Fichte--Schleiermacher--Rosmini.

CONCLUSION 586

The Philosophy of the Spirit as the whole of Philosophy--Correspondence between Logic and System--Dissatisfaction at the end of every system and its irrational motive--Rational motive: inexhaustibility of Life and of Philosophy.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

This translation of Benedetto Croce's _Philosophy of the Practical_ (Economic and Ethic) is complete.

FIRST PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL

FIRST SECTION

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS

I

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY AS A FORM OF THE SPIRIT

[Sidenote: _Practical and theoretic life._]

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. Their work seems to differ as do the men. While we are intent upon some discovery just announced, in chemistry or in physic, or upon some philosophy that comes to shake old beliefs, upon a drama or a romance that revives an artist's dream, we are suddenly interrupted and our attention is called to spectacles of an altogether different nature, such as a war between two states, fought with cannon or with custom-house tariffs; or to a colossal strike, in which thousands upon thousands of workmen make the rest of society feel the power of their numbers and of their strength, and the importance of their work in the general total; or a potent organization which collects and binds together the forces of conservative resistance, employing interests and passions, hopes and fears, vices and virtues, as the painter his colours, or the poet his words, sometimes making like them a masterpiece, but of a practical nature. The man of action is from time to time assailed as it were with nausea at his orgies of volitional effort and eyes with envy the artist or the man of science in the same way as polite society used to look upon the monks who had known how to select the best and most tranquil lot in life. But as a general rule they do not go beyond this fleeting feeling, or if they do resolve to cease their business on the Ides, they return to it on the Kalends. But the contemplative man in his turn also sometimes experiences this same nausea and this same aspiration; he seems to himself to be idle where so many are working and bleeding, and he cries to the combatants: "Arms, give me arms,"[1] for he too would be a miner with the miners, would navigate with the navigators, be an emperor among the kings of coal. However, as a general rule, he does not make more out of this than a song or a book. Nobody, whatever his efforts, can issue from his own circle. It would seem that nature supplies men made precisely for the one or for the other form of activity, in the same way as she makes males and females for the preservation of the species.

[Sidenote: _Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions._]