[PART THIRD PHILOSOPHY AS HISTORY (1911-1921)]
[I. WORKS AND DAYS]
A retrospective view of the system—Germs of development—The return to history—Croce's attitude during the war—Essays on the great poets.
To the reader of the three volumes of the Filosofia dello Spirito, which were published before 1910, the whole of Croce's thought appeared as a solidly constructed system, in which the four grades or forms of spiritual activity were studied in their intrinsic essence, and presented in their relations as completing the cycle of living reality, in contrast with that reality which the mind postulates outside its living self, and which the system reduces to a complex practical product of the mind, a collection of material helps subservient to the essential forms of its activity. Knowledge and action, reciprocally implicated, are the substance of reality; and both knowledge and action, rising, the first, from the intuition to the concept, the second, from the economic to the ethical will, attain the universal, all-including values which we express by the words Beautiful, True, Useful and Good, but only and in so far as they realize themselves in the concrete and individual. A universal more universal than that which is present in the individual act is inexistent, or exists only as an impotent abstraction renouncing the concreteness and reality of the individual, and therefore also that true universality which has no being outside this action, this thought, this life. The soul of the system, slowly extricating itself from the traces of naturalism or intellectualism, which are still visible in the Estetica, is the logic of the pure concept, which resolves in the concrete universal the dualisms of nature and spirit, of fact and value, of life and thought, and, finally, of history and philosophy. But while this logic can be seen at work in all the parts of the system, and is, in fact, the form towards which all Croce's thoughts seem to have constantly tended from the time of his earliest philosophical essays, yet, to an attentive eye, it is possible to discover the successive stages by which it actually incorporated itself in the system. In particular, we have been able to point to the effects of the later meditations on the philosophy of will, on one side, on a more intimate understanding of the pure intuition as the lyrical intuition, on the other, on the identification of the definition with the individual judgment, and thereby on the relations between history and philosophy. On the whole it can be said that two apparently contrasting directions were at work within the system itself: one reflecting Croce's mental need for clear and fine distinctions, the other, that deep consciousness of the unity of the real, without which all distinctions tend to solidify themselves into dead abstractions.
If we imagine two students of Croce's philosophy, endowed with antagonistic philosophical temperaments, the one a dialectician, the other a mystic, we can easily conceive them as the founders of two diametrically opposed schools of thought. The first would have emphasized the rigorous distinctions, the formal character, the intellectual precision of the system; he might have retained the identification of philosophy and history, but to him these words would have stood only for the names of two formal disciplines, and not for the concrete life of the human spirit which is present in them. The second would have passed lightly over the distinctions, and probably considered them as partaking of the same unreality which belongs to scientific or legal abstractions; and by obliterating the logical processes without which the mind of man is unable to grasp and to express itself, he would have taken refuge in an ineffable, though not necessarily silent, contemplation of the underlying unity. This hypothesis is not a criticism of Croce's philosophy; it is merely the indication of the fact that, when the system appeared as completed, new problems, and therefore new errors or new truths, were bound to grow out of the elements of the system itself. And nobody was more conscious of this fact than Croce himself, who concluded his volume on the Filosofia della Pratica by expressly warning his readers of the inexhaustibility of thought, which is one with the infinity of reality and of life. No philosophical system is final, because life itself has no end. Every system of philosophy, being conditioned by life, can do no more than solve a group of problems historically given, and prepare the conditions for new problems and new systems. Of his own work in relation to his readers, he conceived as of nothing more than an instrument of work.
In these last few chapters we shall see Croce himself at work on the new problems generated by his own system, trying "more rigidly to eliminate the last remnants of naturalism, and to put a stronger accent on the spiritual unity,"[1] yet constantly defending his conception of the spirit as the unity of distinctions, especially against the mystical tendencies of the new actual idealism. While never, in the course of his whole life, has he limited his activity to mere systematic thinking, during the last eleven years he has shown a more marked tendency to return from a philosophy, which is all a meditation of the formal problems of history, to those concrete works of history, by which he was started on his philosophical career; to return to them, however, with a mind in which the original uncertainty and obscurity has given place to a definite consciousness of the nature and purpose of history. The passage from the more philosophical to the more historical stage is marked by the publication of a fourth volume of the Filosofia dello Spirito, in which, under the title of Teoria e Storia della Storiografia, he collected a number of essays written between 1912 and 1913, containing an elaboration of the theory of history already expounded in the Logica. This volume does not form a new part of the system, but rather the natural conclusion of the whole work, since the problem which it discusses is the one towards which tended all his former inquiries into the forms of the spirit, into their concrete life which is development and history, and the consciousness of which is historical thought. But before proceeding to analyze this final form of Croce's theory of history, we shall give a rapid account of the rest of his intellectual activity from 1910 onward.
As during the preceding eight years, the Critica continues to this day to be the main organ of Croce's work and influence, and in the Critica the greatest part of his writings are still published for the first time. The general features of the Critica have remained practically unchanged, except that his series of essays on the Italian literature of the last fifty years (which he collected in 1914-15 in the four volumes of La Letteratura della Nuova Italia) has been followed by studies on Italian historiography from the beginning of the nineteenth century to our day (since 1914), by essays on some of the greatest European poets (since 1917), by notes on modern Italian and foreign literature (since 1917), and by the Frammenti di Etica (since 1913), containing discussions of particular problems of contemporary morality. But practically all the reviews and essays published in the Critica and elsewhere are now being collected in the edition of his complete works, of which a full list will be found at the end of this volume. In 1912, for the inauguration of the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas, he wrote his Breviario di Estetica, which we have partly utilized in our exposition of his æsthetic doctrine, and which he reprinted in 1920 in his Nuovi Saggi di Estetica, which also contains his most significant philosophical essays of the last four or five years. His Contributo alla critica di me stesso ("Contribution to the Criticism of Myself") was written in April, 1915, on the eve of Italy's entrance into the war, and is the best essay in existence on the development of his thought.