[6] L'arte come Creazione (1918), in Nuovi Saggi, p. 160.
[7] La Critica Letteraria come Filosofia (1918), in Nuovi Saggi, p. 217.
[IV. VERITAS FILIA TEMPORIS]
Quid est veritas?—Platonism, or transcendental idealism—Naturalism, or transcendental realism—The idea of progress—Progress and truth: evolutionism—Pragmatism—Croce's new pragmatism—The immanence of value—The actuality of Truth—Truth as history: the function of error and of evil—The foundations of Croce's thought.
There is one problem in the history of human thought, which, however conscious we might be of the multiplicity and historical contingency of philosophical problems, yet can appear to us as the ultimate or central one, if only because it is an abstract interrogation describing the attitude of the philosopher, and to which every concrete logical research, every act of thought, can be reduced. It is Pilate's question: Quid est veritas? What is truth?
The question itself has no definite meaning, until it receives from the individual thinker a definite content, which is history or experience, and the infinite variety of the answers it has received is due to the infinite variability of that content. But at all times man has been urged by a passionate desire to lift his own individual answer from the flux of life, to put it as it were over and against that experience from which it had emerged, not as the truth of his particular problem, but as an abstractly universal truth. It is by violently breaking the process of thought, and hypostatizing in essence the subject of his thought, abstracted from its object, or the object from its subject, and both from the creative activity which produces truth, that man has created, both in philosophy proper and in the minds of the multitude, a double transcendence, of pure ideas, on one side, of brute matter on the other, from which the two most common meanings of the word truth are derived.
The Platonic idealist, for whom the actual processes of life and thought are but shadows and remembrances of the Eternal Ideas in the hyper-uranian space, can be assumed here as the symbol of the transcendental idealist, for whom truth is adequation to an ideal model existing outside the mind. The most disparate types of philosophers belong to this herd, and among them many that commonly go under the name of realists, since the idealist who has fixed and objectified his ideas cannot help considering them as real essences, and dealing with them accordingly. The Aristotelian realist, the theologian, Hegel himself when postulating an original Logos, of which Spirit and Nature are the temporal explication, all can be gathered together in the goodly company of Platonists; and Platonists are to-day both the literal followers of German idealism, and the less barbarous among contemporary realists, who are in the habit of attributing an independent, absolute existence to logical or mathematical abstractions. But neither the ones nor the others seem to be in very close contact with the spirit of the age: what they mean by truth is not what is generally meant by truth to-day, except among those who still cling to the myths in which that form of transcendence expressed itself in past ages. The sturdiest, though hardly recognizable, survivals of Platonism are relics of formalistic logic, still very frequent in contemporary culture, and a belief in what might be called average truth, mechanically extracted from an external and material consensus of opinions. But with this conception of truth, we touch the border line between idealistic and naturalistic transcendentalism.
The most common attitude of contemporary thought (and the one that is therefore usually designated as common sense, and as such opposed to philosophy) is a naively naturalistic one. But it would be a mistake to regard it as a simple and spontaneous attitude, and to identify it, for instance, with the naïve intuition of the artist, with a first grade of knowledge as yet untroubled by logical problems. The artist's vision is more distant from naturalism than the philosopher's concept, since common sense, however unreflected and illogical, is in itself a philosophy, and, though it may sound paradoxical, a transcendental one. The artist constantly identifies himself with his object; in his consciousness, the distinction between subject and object has not yet arisen. But the naïve naturalism of which we are now speaking is posterior to the logical judgment, in which that distinction first appears; and is obtained by keeping separate the two terms of the judgment, each of which exists only in relation to the other, and by transforming that relation into a quality of the object. The unity thus disrupted is artificially reconstituted by abolishing the subject, that is, by treating the subject itself as merely an object among many objects, or as a mere abstract intersection of objects. It is with this form of naturalism that realism generally coincides, and its abstracting process is the one that has been recently systematized by the New Realists. The justification of the naturalistic conception of truth, as truth of description, and the motive of its present popularity, is that it rests on a method of knowledge which is indispensable to the natural and mathematical sciences, and that the sciences have come to usurp, in modern times, for reasons which are obvious to every one, the place of science. It is not the less true, however, that wherever that method is applied, it reduces the living reality of life and thought to a heap of dead, immovable abstractions. There is no real danger in this as long as the abstractions are taken for what they are, and used as instruments for the purposes of our doing and understanding; but when they are considered as a complete equivalent of the living reality, then we become their prisoners, and are shut out by them from all possibility of true understanding. It is especially from the misuses of this method in the historical and moral sciences, from the degenerations of sociology, psychology, and philology, that we must be constantly on guard; lest in the very sciences of the human spirit we should miss that which is their true object, the human activity which creates the world of history and the values of life.