The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic

by Benedetto Croce

The Wolfians.

We owe the word and the concept of feeling (Gefühl and sometimes also Empfindung) principally to the Leibnitzian-Wolfians and to the German thinkers under the influence of Wolff (Mendelssohn, Tetens, Sulzer, Riedel).

Jacobi and Schleiermacher.

By means of the speculation of Jacobi, on the other hand, feeling was called upon to fulfil the functions of a true and proper metaphysical organ. He had demonstrated in a rigorous and irrefutable manner that the form of the empirical sciences and of the abstract intellect, since it proceeds by nexus of cause and effect, is incapable of attaining to the infinite, and had assigned the affirmation of God to the "sense of the supersensible," to "immediate knowledge," and to "feeling." After Jacobi, the same position was assumed by Schleiermacher, who maintained that it was impossible to know God by means of the intellect and to treat Him as an object, since He is indifference of thought and being. He can be known only by feeling, which is indifference of all determinate functions of ideal and real, of thought and being. The neocriticists and agnostics of to-day, with their appeal to feeling in all truly philosophical questions, are followers, often unconscious and certainly less coherent, of Jacobi and Schleiermacher.

The concept of feeling in the Kantian philosophy can be said to derive its importance from the meeting of two unsatisfied wants, namely, that which sought a concept for the æsthetic activity and that which sought a forma mentis proper to philosophy. Indeed, the Critique of Judgment corresponds to feeling, the first part of which consists of an inquiry into the nature of the beautiful and of art. The second part (critique of the theological judgment) is an anticipation of the concrete concept, or of that organ of speculative thought which the Critique of Pure Reason had not discovered.

Hegel.

Feeling, therefore, cannot but lose importance in the Hegelian philosophy, which makes of art a form of knowledge, and of the teleological judgment the logic of the idea or philosophical logic, resolving also in it the demand of Jacobi, whose feeling or immediate knowledge is shown to be logical knowledge and supreme mediation. In Hegel feeling is nothing but a class of spiritual facts, the lowest of all, that in which theory and practice are still indistinct. But this class has a merely psychological value in his system, not philosophical and real (which is not clearly recognised by him). Indeed, feeling, which was absolute knowledge for Jacobi and for Schleiermacher, is placed, not in the sphere of the absolute spirit, nor in that of the objective or practical spirit, but in the subjective spirit, or Psychology. The "doctrine of the three faculties" (Dreivermögenslehre), as was called that elaborated from Mendelssohn to Kant and promulgated in the Kantian philosophy, did not, however, remain without opponents in the nineteenth century; from Krug (1823) to the youthful Fichte, and in more recent times Brentano (1874).

Opponents of the doctrine of the three faculties. Krug.

Krugs confutation is wrongly combated by Hamilton and discredited by Brentano, for it proceeds with perfect correctness, and is founded on the correct philosophical principle that' there are no other activities of the spirit conceivable, save those directed either inwardly or outwardly (immanent or theoretical and transcendent or practical), and that therefore there is no place for feeling, which would be a mixture of the two activities, and consequently a failure of direction or inactivity, nothing, therefore, but a poor, rudimentary knowing or willing, that is, a psychological class, not a philosophical category.

Brentano.