We can consider the actual volition as intrinsically good, if we also approach it from the point of view of the multiplicity of possible volitions—impulses, passions, desires—striving to realize themselves at every moment of our life. Every single volition is the result of a struggle from which it emerges after having conquered all the other possible volitions. When, in this struggle, the single volition does not assert itself fully, we become the prey of that multiplicity, willing a volition which is not the one that we ought to will, and that in a way we feel we will; hence a will that is divided against itself, an action which is not positive but negative, not a true action, but a kind of passivity. When the single volition conquers the passions, when one impulse or desire becomes the will, all the other possible volitions lose their actual value, multiplicity gives way to unity, passivity to action, evil to good, death to life.
The passions can be empirically regarded as habits of the will, as inclinations towards one or another category of actions; by a further empirical elaboration, we can divide them into the various classes of virtues and vices, virtues being the passions or habits of rational actions, and vices the contrary ones. Individuality or personality, as an empirical concept, is nothing but a complex of more or less lasting habits, some natural and some acquired, or, more rigorously, the historical situation of the universal spirit in every instant of time, and therefore that complex of habits which historical conditions have produced. These habits are the material out of which we mould our life, and the first duty of every individual consists in exploring his own dispositions, in establishing what attitudes the progress of reality has deposited in him, at the moment of his birth and in the course of his individual life—to acquire a consciousness of what in religious terms we might call his vocation or mission; it is impossible for anyone to act except on the basis of his preëxisting personal habits of will. But temperament, or the empirical individuality, is not yet character, or virtue; and the respect that we owe to it, as the necessary condition of our action, must not be confused with the ultra-modern tendency which expresses itself in the cry for the rights of the individual temperament and for the free development of the passions. The individual has the duty of seeking his own self, but also that of cultivating himself in the light of reason; his empirical individuality is a mere datum, and his life is his own work. An education aiming only at the expression of individual idiosyncrasies (as so much of our modern education, at least in theory, is) is no education at all. The ideal is rather to be sought in such a perfect fulfilment of one's individual mission, however humble, that it should at the same time fulfil the universal mission of man.
The law of life is in the unity that conquers the multiplicity, in the will asserting itself above the passions. The reality is perpetual development, an infinite possibility transforming itself into an infinite actuality, gathering itself at every instant from the multiple into the one, only to disrupt itself again and produce a new unity. Multiplicity, contradiction, evil, non-being, on one side, and unity, coherence, good, being, on the other, are unthinkable outside the synthesis of life, which is activity, becoming, evolution. This concept of becoming or evolution is the one that modern thought has substituted for that of an immobile reality and of a transcendent divinity. And in Croce it becomes wide enough to embrace Hegel's speculative dialectic on one side, and the naturalistic evolutionism of the scientist on the other. The dialectic of will is the dialectic of reality, both spiritual and natural—or rather only and always spiritual, since nature cannot be distinguished from the spirit as a concrete reality of another order, but only as an abstraction of the practical intellect. What we call life in nature is consciousness in the spirit, and the history of nature is not qualitatively different from the history of man. The whole course of history cannot be regarded otherwise than as a continuous progress, a perpetual triumph of life over death; and its rationality, which we call Fate or Providence, is not the work of a transcendent Intelligence, but is a Providence realizing itself in die individual, working not outside or above, but within history itself. The mystery of which we are all conscious is not a part of reality, but only the presentment of future realizations, the infinity of evolution. The God transcendent, the empirical immortality, are mere figures and myths for the God living in nature and in the spirit of man, for the spirit of man, for the spiritual activity, which is life and death in one.
[1] See Filosofia della Pratica, part i, "L'attività pratica in generale," pp. 1-209.
[IX. ECONOMICS AND ETHICS][1]
The distinctions of the practical activity—The autonomy of ethics: utilitarianism—The autonomy of the economic form: abstract moralism—Relations of the ethical to the economic form—Pleasure and duty, happiness and virtue—Importance of the economic principle—Philosophy and the science of economics—The ethical principle; material ethics—Ethical formalism; the universality of the principle—The object of the ethical will—Croce as a moralist.
The preceding chapter deals with the practical activity in general, with the general concept of will or action. We must now introduce in that concept a distinction analogous to that by which the theoretical activity has appeared to us first as the knowledge of die individual or intuition, then as the knowledge of the universal or concept. But here, again, we shall not employ the merely descriptive and psychological method, nor yet attempt to deduce this distinction from the analogy between the theoretical and the practical activity; we shall appeal once more to the immediate test of consciousness, which in fact reveals two distinct forms of the will, the economic and the ethic. Economic activity is the one that wills and realizes only that which relates to the conditions of fact in which the individual finds himself; ethical activity, the one that wills and realizes that which, though related to those conditions, at the same time in some way transcends them. To one correspond individual, to the other, universal ends; on one is based the judgment on the coherence of the action in itself, on its adequacy to its individual end; on the other, the judgment on its adequacy to universal ends, which transcend the individual. If we recognise only the ethical form, we perceive very soon that it implies the other one, which we intended to exclude, since our action, though universal in its meaning, must always be something concrete and individually determined. We do not realize morality in the universal, but always a given moral volition, not the abstract virtues, but the concrete works. Although a moral action is not only our individual pleasure, yet it must be that, too, or we should never be able to realize it. On the other hand, the mere economic action, the satisfaction of our immediate pleasure, though it satisfies us in relation to our individual end, yet it leaves constantly unsatisfied that which we are beside and beyond our individual determinations, our deepest and truest being. And this dissatisfaction will last until we succeed in lifting ourselves above the infinite succession of individual ends, and in inserting in them a universal value. This passage or conversion from the purely economic to the ethic, from pleasure to duty, is designed by Croce as the conquest of that peace which is not of a fabulous future, but of the present and real; in every instant is eternity, to him who knows how to reach it. Our actions will be always new, because always new problems are put before us by the course of reality; but in them, if we accomplish them with a pure heart, seeking in them what lifts them above themselves, we shall each time possess the Whole. Such is the character of the moral action; which satisfies us not as individuals but as men, and as individuals only because the individual is a man, and as men only through the medium of individual satisfaction.
The denial of the autonomy of the ethical form, the attempt to reduce the ethic to the economic, the morally good to the individually useful, is the substance of the many theories that go under the name of utilitarianism. But this reduction of the practical activity to a single principle clashes in every instant of our life against the distinction between mere pleasure and duty, between the useful and the honest action, between the things that have a price and those that have none, between actions which have a moral motive and those that have only a utilitarian one. The utilitarians themselves, unable to pass over the distinction, have tried to explain it away as a purely quantitative one, defining morality as the utility of the greater number or as the interest or egotism of the race; but it is clear that these so-called quantitative distinctions are really qualitative ones: the utility of the greater number is no longer individual utility or immediate pleasure, the egotism of the race is no longer egotism, but a value which transcends the individual. A further attempt in the same direction consists in considering morality as born from the association between certain acts which are means to a pleasure, and that pleasure itself: a savage fights to defend his personal liberty or his life, a civilized man, forgetting that the tribe, or the city, or the state, are but means to preserve his life and his property, defends them for themselves, and allows himself to be deprived of both his property and his life for love of his country. But only through stupidity is it possible to mistake the means for the end, and, therefore, this theory actually reduces morality to what is practically irrational, a product of confusion and illusion; that is, to the contrary of the practical activity, which is, in its own sphere, rationality and wisdom. The mere enunciation of this theory, if true, ought to produce the dissolution of those false associations, and, therefore, the destruction of morality; if morality subsists, this is due to its rational character, which associationism has not succeeded in disproving. The last refuge of utilitarianism is in theology and mystery: the utility of moral actions is not of this world, but derived from the conception of another world in which God punishes or rewards us for our conduct on earth. But this kind of utilitarianism puts itself outside the field of philosophy, by emptying the symbols of religion of their moral content, which is their only logical justification.