The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic

by Benedetto Croce

Tautological Ethic and its connection with Philosophy, either partial or discontinuous.

If the strange idea of an ethical principle that should be formal, in the sense of its not being known exactly what it is and how it is justified, has ever been able to arise, this is due to two erroneous philosophical conceptions, of which one can be called partial, the other discontinuous philosophy. According to the first conception, man is capable of knowing something of reality, certainly, but not all: he perceives and arranges the data of experience by means of the categories, but he is aware of the limitation of his thought and of the impossibility of attaining to the heart of the real, which he does, it is true, end by attaining in a certain way, but only with the heart, not with thought. This being stated, and coming to the case of Ethic, man hears the voice of conscience in himself, the command of the moral law; he cannot think of any sophism to escape it: but precisely what that law is, he is unable to say; the idea of a divine ordinance of the world which presents itself to his spirit, may also be affirmed by the heart, but never by thought. The second conception is confounded by some thinkers with the first and becomes partial philosophy or agnosticism; but if we observe closely, it is distinct from the other. For here it is not actually asserted that the foundation of morality is unknowable, but it is said to be unknowable in the circle of Ethic, or that such knowledge goes beyond that circle. Ethic establishes the moral law, deduces or arranges beneath it ethical precepts and by means of them judges single actions. Ethic is ignorant as to whether that law really exists, or what may be its precise universal content. It hands this problem over to Metaphysic, or to general Philosophy, which solves it in its own way, or is presumed to be capable of solving it. In this conception, then, there arises a question as to competence and hierarchy between thought and thought, between particular and general philosophy; whereas, in the former, is affirmed the absolute incompetence of thought.

Rejection of both these conceptions.

But we do not run the risk of colliding with the obstacle placed before us with these philosophical views, because we have constantly rejected them both throughout the whole of our exposition of the Philosophy of the spirit and have demonstrated their falsity. Partial Philosophy is a contradictory concept: thought either thinks all or nothing; and if it had a limit it would have it as thought and therefore as surpassed. Whoso admits something unknowable, declares everything unknowable, and inevitably falls into total scepticism. Nor is the idea of a discontinuous philosophy divided into a whole and its parts, with the whole outside the parts and the parts outside the whole less inconceivable; so that, while Ethic is being studied, the whole (complete Philosophy) seems problematical; and a part (Ethic) can be known to some extent without knowing the whole (the whole of Philosophy). This is a false view, ultimately derived from the empirical sciences, in which it is possible to apprehend one order of phenomena independently of the others; and to apprehend phenomena without explicitly posing or by dismissing to another occasion the philosophical problem as to their truth. Philosophy is a circle and a unity and every point of it is intelligible only in relation to all the others. The didascalic convenience of exposing a group of philosophical problems separately from others—or also (if it please others, as it has not pleased us) of dividing the exposition into particular philosophical sciences, and into general Philosophy (also called Metaphysic)—should not lead to the misconception that the indivisible is really being divided. The whole of Philosophy is at once enunciated with the first philosophical proposition; and the others that come after will all be nothing but explanations of the first.

The ethical form as volition of the universal.

Therefore, since we have never denied faith to thought, nor broken in pieces the unity of Philosophy, we have no secret to reveal at this point; not even a poor secret, like the exponents of discontinuous Philosophy, who solemnly make known at the end what they have assumed from the beginning. Our formal ethical principle is never empty form that must only now be filled with a content. It is full form, form in the philosophical and universal sense, which is also content and therefore universal content. We have not restricted ourselves to defining the ethical form as universal form, which would have resulted in tautologism; but we have defined it volition of the universal, thus distinguishing it from the economic form, which is simply volition of the individual. And if we now ask ourselves what is the universal, we must reply that the answer has already been given, and that whoever has not yet understood, whoever indeed has not understood it for some time, will never understand it. The universal has been the object of all our Philosophy of the Spirit, and we have always had to keep it before our eyes, in studying, not only the practical function, but any other function of the spirit; just as we cannot have the idea of the branch of a tree without the idea of the trunk from which it springs and without which there would not be the branch of a tree. That concept, then, is not a deus ex machina to appear unexpectedly at the end of the play and hastily bring it to a conclusion, but the force that has animated it from the first to the last scene.

The universal as the Spirit (Reality, Liberty, etc.).

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. Every other concept brought forward reveals itself (and has revealed itself beneath our analysis), either as a feigned universal, or as something contingent that has been abstracted and generalized, or as the hypostasis of certain of our particular spiritual products, such as mathematical formulæ, or as the negation of the Spirit, on which is conferred positive value (first with metaphor and then with metaphysic).

And the moral individual who wills the universal, or that which transcends him as an individual, turns precisely to the Spirit, to real Reality, to true Life, to Liberty. The universal is in concrete the universal individualized, and the individual is real in so far as he is also universal. He is not able to assert one part of himself without asserting the other (under the penalty of stopping half-way, dimidiatus vir, and so of again becoming nothing). But in order to assert them both, he must first posit the one as explicit and the other as implicit, and then make the other also explicit. Man as economic individual, at the first moment (so to speak) of his revealing himself to life and to existence, cannot will, save individually: will his own individual existence. There is no man, however moral he be, who does not begin in this way. How could he ever surpass and finally deny his own individual life, if he had not first affirmed it and did not reaffirm it at every instant? But he who should stop at that affirmation of the individual, regarding the first stage of development as the resting-place, would enter into profound contradiction with himself. He should will, not only his own self individualized, but also that self, which, being in all selves, is their common Father. Thus he promotes the realization of the Real, lives a full life and makes his heart beat in harmony with the universe: cor cordium.

The moral individual has this consciousness of working for the Whole. 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. Thus it happens that the soul of a simple and ignorant man, altogether devoted to his rude duty, vibrates in unison with that of the philosopher, whose mind receives into it the universal Spirit: what the one thinks at that moment, the other does, thus attaining by his own path to that full satisfaction, that act of life, that fruitful conjunction with the Real, which the other has attained to by a different path. It may be said that the moral man is a practical philosopher and the philosopher a theoretic actor.