Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy

by Raffaello Piccoli

A material distinction, as of formal disciplines, between history and philosophy still survives in Croce's theory, philosophy proper being considered as the categoric or methodological moment of history—a distinction roughly corresponding to the one he made in his logic between the individual judgment and the definition. But philosophy itself is profoundly modified once we fully realize that its historical character implies the abandonment of certain features which are constantly associated in our minds with the idea of philosophy, because of its early associations with mythology and the positive religions ions. To these belong the belief in the existence of a fundamental problem of philosophy, which remains the same throughout the history of human thought, and of which the various philosophies are but successive approximations to an answer; the consequent stress laid on the unity of the system rather than on the fine and clear distinctions; the research of an ultimate truth; and finally, the prejudice by which the philosopher is regarded as a Buddha or priest, freed from human passions and human illusions, resting in the pure contemplation of a truth, which, by being tom from the soil of active life that has borne it, cannot but wither away and become as empty and unreal as the Buddha's own Nirvana frankly professes to be. Metaphysics to Croce is the last incarnation of theology; and the professor of philosophy in our universities, with a culture formed exclusively on the books of the great philosophers of the past, unmoved by the passions and problems of life, is but the heir of the mediæval master of theology. "A strong advancement of philosophical culture ought to tend towards this result: that all the students of human things, jurists, economists, moralists, men of letters, that is, all the students of historical matters, should become conscious and well-disciplined philosophers; and the philosopher in general, the purus philosophus, should no longer find place among the professional specifications of knowledge."[6]

We shall not follow our author in all his developments of the theory of history. It suffices to say that these developments are obviously but new presentations, made here and there more precise and more coherent, of the various problems already discussed in the preceding volumes of the Filosofia dello Spirito. We shall thus recognise in Croce's criticism of the philosophy of history as a special discipline, distinct both from history as such and from a so-called general philosophy, his polemic against transcendence, either metaphysical or naturalistic; and in his claim for the positivity of history, his theory of value, by which the only real values are the positive ones, coinciding with the fact, while negative values are but expressions of feelings and desires. In the light of this theory, since history is obviously concerned with that which is, and not with that which is not, the limits of historical judgment are clearly established, in the way in which we saw them established for literary criticism. As the literary critic is never concerned with anything but with expression, or art, or beauty, non-expression, non-art, non-beauty being as such inexistent, and truly existent only as manifestations of the logical or practical activity of man; so the historian at large will never meet negative values, but positive facts only, which assume the aspect of ugliness, or error, or immorality, only in the dialectic process of reality, in the creation of a higher form of life. His affirmation of the positive fact is sufficient judgment, and it becomes an implicit moral judgment whenever the consciousness of the historian is a moral consciousness, without any need for him to usurp the function of the moralist or of the judge in apportioning praise or blame on the objects of his history.

Against the humanistic or pragmatic conception of history, which finds the reasons and motives of history in the abstract individual, as against the opposite view, for which the true history is only that of the collectivity, of the institutions, of the human values, Croce reasserts his concept of the actuality of the spirit, in regard to which the individual is as much of an abstraction as the society or the value which does not entirely realize itself in the fact. The object of history is neither Pericles nor Politics, neither Sophocles nor Tragedy, neither Plato nor Philosophy; but the universal in the individual, that is, Politics, Tragedy, Philosophy, as Pericles, Sophocles, and Plato, or Pericles, Sophocles, and Plato as particular moments of Politics, of Tragedy, and of Philosophy.

As there are no special philosophical sciences, and then a general philosophy, which should be outside or above them, but whenever we think of reality under one of its aspects or distinctions, we think of the whole of reality in one of its determinations, so there are no special histories, the limits of which can be definitely stated, and above them a general history, which would in a new form revive the myth of universal history. We have seen how literary history, for instance, tends inevitably to become the whole spiritual history of a nation; and the same applies to all special histories, whether political or moral, or philosophical. There are divisions of history, according to the quality of the objects, to time and space, but such divisions are mere empirical classifications, practical instruments or literary expedients; and we can use as the foundation of such divisions even the ideal distinctions of the fundamental forms of spiritual activity. But when these distinctions are understood as actual distinctions of the aspects of the spiritual life, of which we make history, then all the other aspects will inevitably be present in the particular distinction, once we truly apprehend it in the fulness of its relations. In this sense, history is always special or particular, because it is only in the special and particular that we can grasp the effectual and concrete universality, the effectual and concrete unity.

Finally, the difference between the history of man and the history of nature is not a difference in the object but in the method of history. The whole of reality is spiritual reality, and nature apprehended in its concreteness and actuality, if we are able to recreate it within ourselves, becomes actual, concrete, contemporary history as much as any part of human history. On the other hand, the application of empirical and abstract concepts, the practical manipulation of the data of human history, transforms the history of man into mere natural history. This difference in method we have already analyzed in studying Croce's logic, and we shall only add here that the reader of Croce may often be tempted to regard Croce's conception of reality as limited to the human spirit only, and therefore to give a metaphysical interpretation to his exclusion of "nature." The correct interpretation is a purely epistemological one, and again and again Croce insists that in the whole of reality, which is development or life, man and nature are but empirical and abstract distinctions. On the other hand, Croce's interests are certainly more human than natural, and not only in the sense in which this is true of every man; in the more precise sense also that the effort to recreate within himself the consciousness of a blade of grass, which he advises the historian of nature to perform, clearly appeals to him so little, that he may even seem doubtful of its success. The accent is continually laid, in Croce's thought, on the history of man, and on the thought of man; to many of us, our dealings with nature (not the dead nature of Linnæus, but the living nature of Virgil and Shelley) would probably suggest a shifting of the accent by which the spirituality of nature, the continuity of the dynamic process from nature to man would become more emphatically affirmed than it is in any of Croce's writings. We are probably touching here on one of the possible, and probable, lines of development of Croce's philosophy; which, however, will not become actual until the historical problems of the living nature shall not urge Croce himself, or one of his successors, as powerfully as the problems of human history have moved him. At present, with very rare exceptions, the students of the history of nature are occupied in transforming their historical experience into classes and types and laws; but a time may come when from the naturalistic constructions we shall be able more frequently to recreate the life of which these are but the dead spoils, the accumulated vestiges, by the same process by which history re-kindles the old chronicles into new, contemporary life. That such a development is implied in Croce's own theory of history can hardly be questioned, though, when realized, it will undoubtedly react on more than one point of Croce's logic.

[1] Teoria e Storia, pp. 5-6.

[2] Teoria e Storia, pp. 15-16.

[3] Teoria e Storia, pp. 35-6.

[4] Teoria e Storia, p. 46.

[5] Teoria e Storia, pp. 51-2.