I. Distinction between history of the practiced principle and history of the liberation from the transcendental.
I. A first warning to bear in mind concerns the historical inquiry as to the varying recognition of, or failure to recognize the practical reason in respect to the other forms of the spirit. This series of thoughts is not to be confounded with that other historical process, so long and so intricate, which had its origin in the debate between St. Augustine and Pelagius (or perhaps rather in the opposition between Platonic mysticism and Aristotelian humanism), and through analogous debates, arising afresh during the Middle Ages and onward to modern times, culminating in the strife for the independence of morality and the practical reason in general from religion, which took place in the seventeenth century. The account of the various incidents of that debate perhaps occupies a larger space and a different place in the special histories of Ethic than it deserves. For it is not concerned with an entirely ethical or practical problem, but with that general philosophical movement which produced the progressive elimination of the transcendental and founded the immanentistic consideration of the real: a necessary condition for the conceivability of philosophy itself. In this lay the great importance of the affirmation that the practical and the moral spirit of man reveals itself as constant in the midst of the most various and opposed religious beliefs. This amounts to saying that it is independent of religion and knowable naturally and humanly, without the necessity of having recourse to the authority of revelation and of making shipwreck in mystery. It is customary to say that in the seventeenth century free-thought definitely won the victory upon the point most ardently contested, and in this connection are recorded the names of Charron, Grotius, Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle. To these could be added that of G. B. Vico, who conceived of Providence as immanent and considered that morality arose from "a sense common to all men," from a judgment "without any sort of reflection," foundation of the natural rights of man. But should the word "definite" be really used here? Whenever the idea of the transcendental reappears, even in the timid form of agnosticism, the autonomy of the practical reason is denied, or at least again put in doubt (and with it that of the whole human spirit).
Two examples only of this must suffice, but they are conspicuous. Emmanuel Kant, not having been able to surpass the mystery that he had formulated—the principle of the practical reason—the categoric imperative remained suspended in the void, and in that void it invokes in relation to itself faith in a personal God and in a transcendental future life, which shall conciliate virtue and happiness, at variance in the life lived upon earth. This scrap of mystery which Kant allowed to remain in his system, suffices to obscure that autonomy of the practical reason and that concept of spiritual productivity which he had affirmed with so much energy. Another example, perhaps even more characteristic, is furnished by the Ethic that was prevalent for three centuries in the English School. It was a utilitarian Ethic and therefore incapable of truly founding moral reason. What was the consequence of that incapacity when recognized as such? Nothing but the renewed introduction of mystery, the explanation obtained by means of the idea of a personal God, assuming that most extravagant form known as "theological utilitarianism." By this theory, moral actions that in this life do not receive adequate recompense and seem to be unjustified from the utilitarian point of view, are rewarded by God in another life, thus finding their economic motive for being carried out in the present life. In our theoretic treatment of the subject, we do not concern ourselves with the controversy, already mooted in the Eutyphron, as to whether sanctity be loved by the gods as sanctity, or whether it be sanctity because it is beloved by the gods[1]—a question that in the Middle Ages was transformed into that other one, differently solved by Abélard, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus: whether the moral law be given by divine decree, or whether the idea of God does not of necessity coincide with the idea of moral law. We do not treat of this, since we are occupied with the practical, not with theology or antitheology, and consider that the contest between philosophy and theology has been already solved and surpassed in the theory of knowledge. For the same reason, it seems to us that we should not trace its history in the History of the Philosophy of the Practical.[2]
II. The distinction of the practical from the theoretical.
II. The true and proper history of the practical principle, conceived as autonomous, and of the problem concerning the identity or the distinction of the practical from theory, has a different line of development. As a rule this problem is referred back to the celebrated sayings of Socrates, that virtue is knowledge and vice ignorance, and to the corrections that Aristotle, while accepting, proposes in them, when he takes note of the part that belongs to the non-cognoscitive element. But, as often happens, those sayings and those corrections have been taken as being more profound than they genuinely were and could be. This, if it have not aided the exactness of historical interpretation, has nevertheless stimulated and fecundated thought. On reading without prejudice the parts of the Memorabilia, of the Platonic dialogues, of the Nicomachean Ethics, and of the Magna Moralia that relate to it, it appears evident that what is treated of in them is the altogether empirical question of the importance that mental development has for practical life, and whether knowledge suffices for this, or natural dispositions and discipline of the passions be not also necessary. Aristotle replied to Socrates, who had insisted upon the element of knowing, conceiving virtue as knowledge (λόγος), by modifying the statement with the assertion that virtue is not indeed simply knowledge, but is with knowledge (μετὰ λόγου). In these very ingenuous considerations is to be found at the most implicitly, but certainly not explicitly, the problem that was only stated later on; and it would be rash to classify Socrates as an intellectualist and Aristotle as a voluntarist. It is certain that the Aristotelian philosophy, in accordance with good sense, preserved the distinction between the two forms of the spirit, the theoretical and the practical, the reason and the will, a distinction that has also passed into the scholastic philosophy (ratio cognoscibilis, ratio appetibilis) and into that of the Renaissance. But it remained always vague, sometimes brought into prominence, sometimes, on the other hand, attenuated. Almost dissipated in those who conceive the principles of the practical as something similar or analogous to mathematical truths (Cudworth, Clarke, Wollaston, etc.), it always reaffirms itself when importance is given to the affections and passions, as is the case with many thinkers of the seventeenth century (Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Vico); and the doctrines of the Scottish school of sensationalists contributed not a little to keep it alive.
It seems indubitable that Emmanuel Kant is to be connected to some extent rather with this last tradition than with that of the intellectualists: with Kant the practical reason possessed a domain of its own altogether distinct from and almost antithetical to the domain of the theoretical. But it is erroneous to present the successors of Kant as forgetful of the practical reason and as resolving every spiritual manifestation in the theoretical form of the spirit. For instance, Fichte, who had a very strong consciousness of the peculiarity of the practical activity, did not do this, nor did Hegel, though as commonly as unjustly accused of being a cold intellectualist. It should suffice to recall how Hegel always opposed that view of Plato and of other thinkers (for example Campanella) who assigned the government of the State to philosophers, a view in which the resolution of the practical into the theoretical spirit and of the will into knowledge seemed to become concrete. For Hegel, on the contrary, the domain of history is different from that of philosophy; history is indeed the idea, but the idea that shows itself in a natural and unconscious manner, and philosophical genius is not political genius. Nor must we forget the importance that he accorded to passion, to custom, to what is called the heart and is wont to be opposed to the brain and to argument. For Hegel, the will is not thought, but a special kind of thought, that is to say, thought which translates itself into existence, the impulse to give oneself existence. Whereas in the theoretical process, the spirit takes possession of the object and makes it its own by thinking, that is by universalizing it, in the practical process a difference is also stated and determined, which on the other hand consists of its own determinations and ends. The theoretical is contained in the practical, since there cannot be will without intelligence; but, on the other hand, the theoretical contains the practical, since to think is also to act. Hegel, in short, distinguishes the practical from the theoretical and unifies them, while retaining the distinction.[3] What is not perhaps altogether clear to him, notwithstanding his view that history is the idea in a natural and unconscious mode, is the unreflective character of willing. To have given relief to this character, although in the exaggerated and inacceptable form of the will as blind and unconscious, is the merit of Arthur Schopenhauer, who is indeed far from standing alone in assigning an eminent place to the will, but connects himself with all the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, and in the first place with Fichte and Schelling.
III. The mixtures of philosophy of the practical and description.
III. The mixture of philosophical concepts with empirical concepts and with rules is a vice common to nearly all treatises of the Philosophy of the practical, beginning with the Nicomachean Ethic, which, although in certain places loftily philosophical, should be placed in greater part rather at the head of the history of the works of the moralists and of writers on the practical, than of Ethic. The author himself recognized this practical character when he wrote, πάς ὁ περὶ τῶν πρακτῶν λόγος τύπῳ καὶ οὐκ ἀκριβῶς ὀφείλει λέγεσθαι.[4] And in this appears the prejudice that practical philosophy should be occupied with the practical: ἐπεὶ οὖν ἡ παροῦσα πραγματεία οὐ θεωρίας ἕνεκά ἐστιν ὥσπερ αἱ ἅλλαι (οὐ γὰρ ἵνα εἰδῶμεν τί εστιν ἡ ἀρετὴ σκεπτόμεθα άλλ' ἵν' ἀγαθοὶ ηινώμεθα, ἐπεὶ ούδὲν ἃν ἧν ὄφελος αὐτῆς), κτλ.[5] Even the greatest thinkers of modern times are not exempt from that characteristic. Emmanuel Kant, while recognizing that the division and treatment of duties do not belong to the Critique of the Sciences (he should therefore have excluded them from philosophy, which is always criticism), finally relegates them to what he calls the "system" (and is in truth the anti-systematic)[6] and writes the Metaphysic of Customs, divided into the doctrines of law and of the virtues. Fichte, in his System of Ethic, makes the applied follow the theoretical part. Hegel gives the doctrine of duties in the third part of his Philosophy of Law, which is entitled Of Ethicity (Sittlichkeit.) The Ethic of Herbart is intrinsically descriptive, for the author himself professed to wish simply "to describe the ideal of virtue,"[7] and the five practical ideas that he takes as principles were at bottom nothing but classes of virtue refined into ideas. Treatises of to-day are overflowing with empirical elements, as can be seen from those in English by Ladd and Seth, and by those in German of Paulsen, Wundt, and Cathrein. Sometimes a more concrete historical element is coupled in those treatises with the empirical classification of practical examples and institutions: as, for instance, in Cathrein, a modernized Jesuit, who exposes at length the moral views, not only of civilized people, ancient and modern, but also of the savages of Oceania, of Asia, of Cochin China, of the Hottentots and Boschimans, of the Botocudis, and so on. Questions of casuistry also survive in these treatises, such as whether and on what occasions it is permissible to tell a lie; this question is notably represented in the history of ideas, from the Socrates of the Memorabilia to Kant and Schopenhauer.[8] Kant added questions of casuistry to the various sections of the Metaphysic of Customs, as scholia to the system and examples of the way in which the truth of particular questions should be sought.[9]
Vain attempts at definitions of empirical concepts.
But the efforts of ancient and modern philosophers rigorously to define empirical concepts afford more interest than the external form of treatment, as do their efforts to modify or to simplify, or indeed finally to deduce them rationally. The Platonic dialogues, such as the Charmides, the Lachetes, the Protagoras, are most instructive in this respect. Here it is sought to define sophrosune, andreia and the other virtues, without arriving at any precise result, or rather arriving at the contradictory one, that each of these virtues is the whole of virtue, whereas it should only be a part of it. In the Republic is sought the relation of the four virtues, or rather of three of them, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, with justice, which forms as it were the foundation and unity of the whole. From such discussions arose the affirmation, to be found also in Cicero, that the virtues are inseparable from one another: virtutes ita copulatae connexaeque sunt, ut omnes participes sint, nec alia ab alia possit separari.[10] The difficulty of the Platonic inquiry is renewed with all those who have given definitions of the virtues and of the other empirical concepts, because, when they have achieved with much labour a definition which appears satisfactory, it is afterwards always found to be too narrow or too wide. Thus the definition given by Kant and by others (Fichte, Schopenhauer) of egoism, consisting in their view, of considering other individuals as means and not ends, is the definition, not of egoism, but of any form of immorality which debases the Spirit that should be the end, by means of its own caprices. The same is to be said of the definitions given by Fichte as to the duties inherent to this or that condition and state: the duties, for instance, of the learned, who should love truth, communicate it to others, rectify errors, promote culture,[11] and so on. These are all things that form part of the duty, not only of the learned, but of every man. The simplifiers are not more fortunate in their attempts to reduce the number of empirical concepts, for the concepts excluded by them have neither more nor less right to recognition than the others that they have accepted. Schopenhauer, for instance, when he rejects the class of duties toward oneself,[12] should also reject that of duties toward others. For others and ourselves are correlative terms, and we cannot be benevolent to others and malevolent to ourselves, just to others and unjust to ourselves. If this be met with the objection that the empirical self is not the object of duties, we must reply that neither are the empirical "others," but only that Spirit which is in all and constitutes all. In reacting against these unifiers and simplifiers, other philosophers (as for example Herbart) have maintained the indeducibility of the virtues or duties from a single principle, which means that they have received those concepts into their philosophy atomistically, and left them there as something not digested and not digestible, an extraneous element. If they had openly admitted this and drawn from it the legitimate consequence, and for that reason excluded those concepts from philosophy, they would really have contributed toward simplifying and unifying, by making it homogeneous. But Herbart, if he have no other merit, has at any rate declared that the Philosophy of the practical is not capable of solving all the problems that occur in life, and that we must always rely upon the answer of the heart, upon the delicacy of individual tact. And, therefore, while Kant still preserved casuistic questions in Ethic and professed to solve them rationally, Herbart showed that they lack the determinations that are of true importance in real cases, and that such questions are therefore as a rule either without meaning or insoluble (entweder gar keiner Fragen, oder im Allgemein unauflöslich).[13]