The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic

by Benedetto Croce

HISTORICAL ANNOTATIONS

The concepts of the useful and of the moral and the various attempts either to absorb the one in the other or to distinguish them, while recognizing their relations, are the problem on which has laboured the Philosophy of the practical as Ethic and Economic. Has this problem ever been fully solved? It will be permissible to doubt it, when we observe that a philosophical concept of the useful has been wanting until our own days; and that in consequence one of morality must also, strictly speaking, have been wanting, for it could not have been understood in its fulness and purity, owing to the obscure position of the term with which it is united.

Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness.

I. The utilitarian character of Greek Ethic has been affirmed on several occasions; but one experiences a certain repugnance in applying so precise a term to the documents of ancient thought that remain to us. Socrates, it is true, posited the useful as the supreme concept of morality, and identified the good life with eudæmonia; but for him that useful was nevertheless distinct from the merely pleasing, since it consisted in what is useful to man as man, and his eudæmonia bore much resemblance to the tranquil conscience of him who fulfils his proper duties. Plato (for example, in the Protagoras) expounds the doctrine that good things are nothing but pleasant things, and bad things painful; but this doctrine is enunciated in order to place in relief the thesis that man does not do wrong, save through ignorance, and because the bad seems to him to be the good; without saying that in other dialogues the distinction between pleasure and the good is recognized. Nor can the most systematic of the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, be called without reserve a hedonist, a eudæmonist, or a utilitarian, on the strength of his doctrine of happiness. Happiness is the supreme good, it is an end for itself; but virtue is already included for Aristotle in happiness, virtue which is found there, not as an adjunct, but intrinsic, for which exterior goods are indeed necessary, but only as instruments. The virtuous man must be a lover of himself (φίλαυτος), that is to say, just, temperate, liberal of his possessions, ready to yield honours and offices to his friends; lover of himself, then, in the lofty signification of the word (lover, not of the empirical, but of the metempirical ego), as opposed to the wicked man, who is his own enemy. Even Epicurus could not be included among the hedonists, since for him pleasure is not an end, but a means for calm, which is the true good, and calm is tranquillity of the spirit, which only the virtuous man can enjoy.

It is therefore more exact to consider Greek Ethic in its general character, not as eudæmonistic and utilitarian, but here also, in relation to the new problem that we now have before us (in the same way as was done above, in respect to practical intellectualism), as ingenuous; for in truth that problem did not constitute the centre of inquiries and discussions, as they present themselves in our times, nor were the different schools divided upon it. They were distinguished from one another (as has been already noted in respect to the doctrine of the passions), rather by the different rules of life respectively laid down by each as preferable. The antitheses of the Cynics and Cyrenaïcs, of the Epicureans and the Stoics, have but a superficial resemblance to those of the ethical rigorists or abstractionists, hedonists or utilitarians, which have appeared as the result of the antithesis between pleasure and pain explicitly stated in modern times. It would be difficult to point out ethical rigorists and utilitarians among thinkers truly and properly so called. In order to discover the utilitaristic attitude at that period of history, it would be necessary to have recourse to some rhetorician, such as Carneades, ready to maintain indifferently the most opposed paradoxes, or to Callicles and Thrasymachus, so magnificently portrayed in the Platonic dialogues. These were rather men of the world than philosophers, giving the immediate and violent impression of the struggle for life, and for this reason they were at conflict with Socrates, the philosopher, whom they sometimes treated as a clown and utterer of paradoxes, sometimes pitied as a child, a "suckling" child, and objected to him that philosophers do not understand one iota about politics (as often has been and often will be objected by politicians, not altogether without reason). If it be wished, all the same, to find a reference to later utilitarianism among the sophists, the hedonists and the Epicureans, or among the Stoics, with their conception of life as a war against the passions, something of future rigorism and asceticism, or in certain discussions among the Platonic dialogues as to the relation between pleasure and pain, a first trace of the discussions upon the same argument that have become most complicated in modern times, by all means let this be done, provided it be never forgotten that it is an affair of glimmers, rather than of vivid light, of antitheses hardly accentuated, not of those that are well defined and stand out clearly.

Importance of Christianity for Ethic.

II. The precise and it may be said violent affirmation of the antithesis, was the work of Christianity, which, conceiving pleasure and duty, nature and morality to be heterogeneous elements, did great service, both to the progress of civilization in general and in particular to Ethic. It is necessary to insist upon this, for the modern world was bound afterwards to react against this antithesis, and necessarily to assume an Antichristian, even a pagan attitude, and modern art and poetry are often inspired with an abhorrence of the tenebrous Middle Ages and of sad Christianity, and give a sigh of regret for Greece as for a lost Paradise, or a shout of jubilation as for a Paradise regained. But reactions are reactions and poetry is poetry: humanity never retraces its footsteps, though it is often wont to adorn the future with memories of the past. The Greece of our hearts is a new Greece, profoundly modified by Christianity; the Greece of Goethe and of Hegel is no longer the Greece of Sophocles and of Aristotle, but a Greece far richer and more intense. Thought, like life, never turns back, and if it be necessary eventually to attain to a theoretic conciliation between pleasure and duty, between the useful and morality, such a conciliation will be very different from that of still ingenuous Greek Ethic.

The three resulting directions: utilitarianism, rigorism, and psychologism.

The spectacle afforded by modern Ethic, from the Renaissance to the beginning of the nineteenth century, and also (with few exceptions) in the later periods is still altogether dominated by that antithesis, and therefore two currents are to be discerned in it: one that attaches itself to the first term of the antithesis, the useful, and denies the second, or resolves it in the first, the other, which denies the useful and retains moral duty as the exclusive form of the practical activity. This latter is rigoristic Ethic, child of Christianity and of ascetic oriental sources, which flowed into it together by direct filiation; the other is utilitarianism, child also, though illegitimate, of the distinction or rending asunder of the ancient unity of duty and pleasure, virtue and happiness, effected by Christianity. The antithesis sometimes seems to be solved and a Philosophy of the practical appears, which, without clinging exclusively to one term or the other, receives both into itself. But this philosophy, when it does not reveal itself at bottom (which generally happens), as masked utilitarianism, or (a less frequent case) rigorism attenuated in expression, has the defect of being, not philosophy, but an empirical description of the so-called principles of the practical, placed one beside the other, without a profound definition or deduction of either. This third direction may be called intuitionism or psychologism.

Hobbes, Spinoza.