In accordance with the popular point of view which, as I have said, is shared by great philosophers, a distinction is made between the spirit considered as will and the spirit regarded as intellect, or as consciousness, or as thought, or whatever term may be used to indicate the becoming aware of this spiritual activity. But if the spirit in that it wills did not also think, we should be thrust back to the position which we have shown above to be untenable, and be forced to admit that the irreflective life of the spirit cannot be fused with the reflective life, and is therefore unaccountable and unthinkable. The will which qua will is not also thought, is in respect to thought which knows it a simple object, a spectacle and not a drama. It is nature and not spirit. And a thought which qua 133 thought is not will, is, in respect to the will which integrates it, a spectator without a spectacle. If there is to be a drama, and a drama which is the spirit, it is inevitable that the will be the thought, and that the thought be the will, over and beyond that distinction which serves if anything to characterise the opposition between nature and spirit.
Should we, returning to our comparison, demand of that motion which is spirit a moving mass; should we, grounded on the naïve and primitive conception which identifies knowing with the seeing of external things, demand within the sphere of the spiritual activity itself a doing in which knowing should find its object all ready made, we should continue to wander helplessly in the maze of things, and to grope in the mystery of the multiplicity of things, which are many and yet are not many. We would be turning our eyes away from the lode star which is the supreme concept of the spirit, and thereby show ourselves incapable of rising to that point of view which is the peculiar one of culture.
Culture, as the spirit’s life, which is a drama and self-awareness, is not simply effort and uneasy toil, it is not a tormenting restlessness which we may sometimes shake off, from which we would gladly be rescued. Nor is it a feverish excitement that consumes our life-blood and tosses us restlessly on a sick-bed. The spirit’s life is not vexation but liberation from 134 care. For the greatest of sorrows, Leopardi tells us, is ennui, the inert tedious weariness of those who find nothing to do, and pine away in a wasting repose which is the very antithesis of the life of the spirit. The negation of this life,—the obstacles, the hindrances, the halts it encounters,—that is the source of woe. But life with its energy is joy; it is joy because it is activity, our activity. Another man’s activity as the negation of our own is troublesome and exasperating. The music which we enjoy (and we are able to enjoy it by being active) is our enjoyment. But the musical entertainment in which we have no part disturbs us, interferes with our work, irritates us. Our neighbour’s joys in which for some reason we are unable to participate awaken envy in us, gall us, bring some manner of displeasure to our hearts.
Culture, then, as life of the spirit, is effort, and work, but never a drudgery. It would be toilsome labour if the spirit had lived its life before we began to work; if this life had blossomed forth, and had realised itself without our efforts. But our effort, our work is this very life of the spirit, its nature, in which culture develops. Work is not a burdensome yoke on our will and on our personality. It is liberation, freedom, the act by which liberty asserts its being. Work may sometimes appear irksome because the freedom of its movement is checked by certain resistances which have to be overcome and removed. But in such cases it 135 is not work which vexes us, but rather its opposite, sloth, against which it must combat. It follows then that the more intensely we occupy ourselves, the less heavily we are burdened by pain. For as our efforts redouble and the resistance is proportionately reduced, the spirit, which perishes in enthralment, is enabled to live a richer life.
Culture then is the extolment of our being, the formation of our spirit, or better, its liberation and its beatification. As the realisation of the spirit’s own nature, it is opposed to all suffering and is the source of blissfulness. But it must not be regarded as the fated, inevitable working out of an instinctive principle, or a natural law. The building of a bird’s nest, which is the necessary antecedent to generation and reproduction, cannot be looked upon as work; and it is fruitless to try to guess whether this act is a cause of pleasure to the bird or a source of suffering. Instinct leads the individual to self-sacrifice on behalf of the species. But not even this fact, vouched for solely by external inferences, authorises us to conclude that the fulfilment of an instinctive impulse is actually accompanied by pain. So that it seems wiser to keep off this slippery surface of conjecture. It will be sufficient to note here that an action prompted by instinct, conceived as merely instinctive and thoroughly unconscious of the end to which it is subservient, is in no way to be compared with man’s work. Human 136 occupation is personality, will, consciousness. The animal does not work. But culture we have said is work. For it is liberty, self-formation, with no existence previous to the process; whereas the laws which govern the development of natural being pre-exist before the development itself. Culture exists only in so far as it is formed, and it is constituted solely by being developed. And what is more, as we shall see in the next chapter, culture does not even count on a pre-existing external matter ready to receive its informing imprint.
To conclude then: culture is (in its becoming) only to the extent that the cultivated man feels its worth, desires it, and realises it. It is a value, but not in the sense that man first appreciates it and subsequently looks for it and strives to actualise it. The value which man assigns to culture is that which he gradually goes on ascribing to his own culture, and whose development coincides with the development of his own personality. What we ought to want is exactly what we do want; but we want just that which we ought to. The ideal, not the abstract, inadequate, and false one, but the true ideal of our personality, is that one toward whose realisation we are actually working. And the ideal of our culture is that self-same one towards which our busy person remains turned in the actuality of its becoming. But work implies a programme, and spirit means “ideal;” and when we speak of culture we signify 137 thereby the value of culture, of a culture which as yet is not but which must be. Life is the life of the spirit as a duty,—as a life which we live, feeling all along that it is our duty to live it, and that it depends on us whether it exists or not. And culture could not re-enter as it does in the life of the spirit, if it too were not a duty, that is, if it were not this culture to whose development our personality is pledged. So interpreted, culture, far from being a destiny to which we are bound, is the progressive triumph of our very freedom. On these terms only, culture is a growth, and the spirit a becoming.
This attribute, which is an ethical one, is not added to the attribute of Becoming any more than “becoming” was superadded to “freedom.” For just as Becoming develops the concept of freedom, so does the ethical develop and accomplish the concept of becoming. Freedom is never true liberty unless it is a process, an absolute Becoming; but Becoming can only be absolute by being moral. And it is therefore impossible to speak of learning which is not ethical.
It has often been repeated for thousands and thousands of years that knowledge is neither good nor bad; that it is either true or false. But is the True a different category from the Good? Are they not rather one sole identical category? Truth could be maintained in a place quite distinct from the grounds of morality, only so long as the world clung to that conception of 138 truth which was the agreement of the subject with an assumed external object. But now by truth we understand the value of thought in which the subject becomes an object to itself and thus realises itself; and in clarifying this new conception of truth, we discover that morality is identical with it. For knowing is acting, but an acting which being untrammelled conforms with an ideal—Duty. And in this manner we explain to ourselves why the mysterious and inspired voice of conscience has at all times admonished man to worship Truth with that same intense earnestness, with those same scruples, with that identical personal energy, which we devote to every phase of our moral mission. The cult of truth is in fact what we otherwise call and understand to be morality, namely, the formation of our personality, which can be ours only by belonging to all men, and which, whether or not ours, is not immediate, not a given personality, but rather one which is intent on self-realisation, on that sacred and eternal task which is the Good.
If we now feel culture to be free, to be a process, and an ethical one at that, we have succeeded in grasping its spirituality, and we are in a position therefore to proceed with security on that way which opens before the educator’s eyes, as he intently goes about his work of creation, or, if you so wish to call it, his task as a promoter of culture.