The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic

by Benedetto Croce

The conception of feeling as a spiritual activity has answered to a want of research, which may be described as provisional excogitation. Whenever thought has found itself face to face with a form or subform of spiritual activity, which it was not possible either to eliminate or to absorb in forms already recognized, the problem to be solved has been endorsed with that word "feeling." With many this has passed for a solution. Feeling, in fact, has been the indeterminate in the history of philosophy, or rather the not yet fully determined, the half-determined.

Hence its great importance as an expedient for the indication of new territories to conquer, and as a stimulus against remaining obstinately shut up in old and insufficient formulæ. But hence also its fate: the problem must not be exchanged for its solution, the indeterminate or semi-determinate must be determined. Whenever the determination of the forms and sub-forms of the spirit has not been given in a complete manner, the category of feeling will reappear (and it will be beneficial); but at the same time will reappear the duty of exploring it and of understanding what is concealed beneath it, or at least what unsolved difficulty has caused it to reappear afresh.

Now we have already met with the concept of feeling on more than one occasion, when investigating the philosophy of the theoretic spirit, as something supplying a theoretical need outside the theoretic forms generally admitted, or as a special form of theoretic activity. Every time that we have done this, an attentive examination has caused it to disappear before our eyes, and has generally helped us, either to discover something previously unknown, or to confirm the necessity of contested categories.

Feeling as herald of the æsthetic form;

Thus it happened that when a special æsthetic function was not recognized and it was attempted to explain it, either intellectualistically, as nothing but an inferior form of philosophy, or historically, as a reproduction of the historical and natural datum, or almost as the satisfaction of certain volitional wants (hedonistic theory), the view of art as neither a form of the intellect nor of perception nor of will, but of feeling, was an advance, as also was the appeal to men of feeling to recognize and to judge it. As a result of this insistence, it was eventually discovered that art possessed an absolutely simple and ingenuous theoretic form, without either intellectual or historical contents, the form of the pure intuition which is that of the æsthetic and artistic activity. Whoever returns to treat of art as a product of feeling, after this discovery of the pure intuition, falls back from the determinate to the semi-determinate, and is at the mercy of all the dangers which arise from it.

As herald of the intuitive element in Historiography.

The theory of historiography owes its progress in like manner to the demonstration that it is impossible to deduce the historical statement from concepts, but that we must deduce it in final analysis from an immediate feeling of the real, that is to say, from the intuitive element, which inevitably exists in every historical reconstruction, as in every perception. On the other hand, and in altogether another sense, reacting against the false idea of an extra—subjective historical objectivity, to be found in the mere reproduction of the datum, it was made evident that no historical narration is possible without the reaction of feeling in respect to the datum. Thus was discovered the indispensability of the intellective element in the historical affirmation. Whoever has recourse to feeling as a factor in historiography, after this complete constitution of the historical judgment, returns from the clear to the confused, from light, if not to darkness, then to twilight.

Feeling as herald of the pure concept in philosophical Logic.

The concept of feeling has also been of capital importance in the progress of the Logic of philosophy. For how could we begin to explain that philosophy is constructed with a method altogether different from that of the exact disciplines (natural sciences and mathematics), without denying to those sciences the capacity of conquering the supreme truth, the true truth, full reality, and recognizing such capacity on the other hand to a special function called feeling or immediate knowledge? That function was void, that is to say, undetermined, because defined in a negative and not in a positive manner: feeling was something different from the abstract and arbitrary procedure of the exact sciences, from the abstract intellect, but its true nature was unknown. When this was at last known it was discovered that it was not a question of "feeling" or of "immediate knowledge," but of the intellect itself, in its genuine and uncontaminated nature, its pure and free activity, of intellect as reason, of thought as speculative thought, of that "immediate knowledge," which is true, intrinsic, perpetual mediation. Whoever henceforth returns to feeling, after the discovery of the pure or speculative concept, and believes it to be the creator of philosophy and of religion, fighting with it against the natural and mathematical sciences, behaves as he who should wish to return to-day to the flint-lock, for the excellent reason that it was an advance upon the bow and the catapult. Thus those who invoke feeling in philosophy are henceforth a little ridiculous. This does not imply that they were not at one time to be taken seriously, for this concept has been of great provisional assistance and has been as it were the compass of the new idea of philosophy.

Analogous function in the Philosophy of the practical.