Theories which deny the practical form of the spirit.
The doctrines which deny the practical form of the spirit are and cannot but be of two fundamental kinds, according to the double possibility offered by the proposition itself which they propose to refute. The first doctrine affirms that the practical form is not spiritual activity, the second that although it be spiritual activity, yet it is not in any way distinguishable from the already recognized theoretic form of the spirit. The second, so to speak, denies to it specific, the first generic character.
The practical as a fact of unconsciousness.
Those who maintain the first of these theses say:—We are unconscious of the will at the moment of willing and during its real development. This consciousness is only attained after one has willed, that is to say, after the volitional act has been developed. Even then, we are not conscious of the will itself, but of our representation of the will. Therefore the will, that is to say the practical activity, is not an activity of the spirit. Since it is unconscious, it is nature and not spirit. The theoretic activity which follows it is alone spiritual.
Critique.
Were we, however, to allow this argument to pass, the result would be that none of the activities of the spirit would belong to the spirit, that they would all be unconscious and all, therefore, nature. Indeed, the activity of the artist, at the moment when he is really so, that is to say in what is called the moment of artistic creation, is not conscious of itself: it becomes conscious only afterwards, either in the mind of the critic or of the artist who becomes critic of himself. And it has also often been said of the activity of the artist, that it is unconscious; that it is a natural force, or madness, fury, divine inspiration. Est Deus in nobis; and we only become conscious of the divinity that burns and agitates us when the agitation is ceasing and cooling begun. But what of the activity of the philosopher? It may seem strange, but it is precisely the same with the philosopher. At the moment in which he is philosophizing, he is unconscious of his work; in him is God, or nature; he does not reflect upon his thought, but thinks; or rather the thing thinks itself in him, as a microbe living in us nourishes itself, reproduces itself and dies: so that sometimes the philosopher has also seemed to be seized with madness. The consciousness of his philosophy is not in him at that moment; but it is in the critic and in the historian, or indeed in himself a moment after, in so far as he is critic and historian of himself. And will the critic or the historian at least be conscious? No, he will not be so either, because he who will afterwards criticize the historico-critical work is conscious of it, or he himself, in so far as he criticizes himself, and by objectifying himself occupies a place in the history of criticism and of historiography. In short, we should never be conscious in any form of the spiritual activity.
But this negation is founded on a false idea of consciousness: spontaneous is confused with reflex consciousness, or that which is intrinsic to one activity with that which is intrinsic to another, which surpasses the first and makes of it its object. In such a sense we can certainly not be conscious of the will, save in the representation which follows it, as we are not conscious of a poem, save at the moment of criticizing it. But there is also consciousness in the act itself of him who reads or composes a poem, and he "is conscious" (there is no other expression) of its beauty and of its ugliness, of how the poem should and of how it should not be. This consciousness is not critical, but is not therefore less real and efficacious, and without it internal control would be wanting to the formative act of the poet. Thus also there is consciousness in the volitional and practical act as such: we are not aware of this act in a reflex manner, but we feel, or, if you will, we possess it. Without it there would be no result. It is therefore developed in moments or alternatives of happiness and of unhappiness, of well-being and of malaise, of satisfaction and of remorse, of pleasure and of pain. If this be unconsciousness, we must say that unconsciousness is consciousness itself.
Nature and practical activity.
The practical activity may appear to be nature in respect of the theoretical, but not as something without the spirit and opposed to it, but as a form of the spirit opposed to another form, esthetic contemplation has in like manner, as has already been mentioned, appeared to be a natural force creating the world of intuition, which the philosophical activity of man afterwards understands and recreates logically. Hence art can be called nature (and has indeed been so called), and conversely philosophy has been called spirituality. This gives rise to the further problem: whether it be correct to consider nature (it is convenient so to call it) that which has afterwards been recognized in substance as spiritual activity; or whether the concept and the name of spirit should not be reserved for that which is truly altogether outside the spirit, and whether this something placed altogether outside the spirit truly exists. This point does not concern us here, although we are much disposed to admit that one of the mainstays of that absurd conception of nature as of the extra-spiritual is precisely the practical or volitional form of the spirit, so conspicuously different from the theoretical form and from the sub-forms of the same. We do not therefore hold those philosophers to have been so completely in the wrong, who have identified nature and will, for they have thus at any rate discovered one aspect of the truth.
Reduction of the practical form to the theoretical.