From Kant to Croce: Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800-1950 9781442694484

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
PART I. Introduction
1. A Strange History (Bobbio I)
2. Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I)
3. Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I)
4. Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)
5. Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II)
6. The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)
7. Primacy (Gioberti I)
8. The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)
9. A Natural Method (Mamiani)
10. Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa)
11. Facts and Laws (Villari)
12. Real and Ideal (De Sanctis)
13. Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
14. Matter and Idea (Labriola)
15. No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti)
16. A Revelation (Croce I)
17. History under Art (Croce II)
18. What Is Distinct? (Croce III)
19. What Is Living? (Croce IV)
20. What Is Dead? (Croce V)
21. Materialism (Gentile I)
22. Idealism (Gentile II)
23. Actualism (Gentile III)
24. Manifestos (Croce and Gentile)
25. Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I)
26. The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI)
27. Philosophy in Prison (Gramsci II)
28. Still a Strange History (Bobbio II)
Notes to Part I
PART II. Translations
1. Baron Pasquale Galluppi of Tropea. Elements of Philosophy
2. Antonio Rosmini. A Sketch of Modern Philosophy
3. Vincenzo Gioberti. The Moral and Political Primacy of the Italians
4. Vincenzo Gioberti. Introduction to the Study of Philosophy
5. Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere. The Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy
6. Bertrando Spaventa. The Character and Development of Italian Philosophy from the Sixteenth Century Until Our Time
7. Pasquale Villari. Positive Philosophy and Historical Method
8. Francesco De Sanctis. The Principle of Realism
9. Francesco De Sanctis. The Ideal
10. Marianna Bacinetti Florenzi Waddington. Pantheism as the Foundation of the True and the Good
11. Marianna Bacinetti Florenzi Waddington. Remarks on Pantheism: The Infinite, the Finite, God, and Man
12. Francesco Fiorentino. Letters on The New Science to the Marchesa Florenzi Waddington
13. Francesco Fiorentino. Positivism and Idealism
14. Antonio Labriola. History, Philosophy of History, Sociology, and Historical Materialism
15. Benedetto Croce. History Brought Under the General Concept of Art
16. Benedetto Croce. Logic as Science of the Pure Concept
17. Benedetto Croce. What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel
18. Giovanni Gentile. The Philosophy of Praxis
19. Giovanni Gentile. The Rebirth of Idealism
20. Giovanni Gentile. The Act of Thinking as Pure Act
21. Giovanni Gentile. The Foundations of Actual Idealism
22. Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals
23. A Reply by Italian Authors, Professors, and Journalists to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist Intellectuals
24. Antonio Gramsci. Notebooks: 11 (1932−3), Introduction to the Study of Philosophy
25. Benedetto Croce. History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century: Epilogue
26. Antonio Gramsci. Letters from Prison
References and Abbreviations
Name Index
General Index

Citation preview

FROM KANT TO CROCE MODERN PHILOSOPHY IN ITALY, 1800−1950

THE LORENZO DA PONTE ITALIAN LIBRARY General Editors Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella, University of California at Los Angeles Honorary Chairs Honorable Dino De Poli Mr Joseph Del Raso Esq. Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti Honorable Anthony J. Scirica Advisory Board Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California John Scott, University of Western Australia Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago

FROM KANT TO CROCE

Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800–1950

Edited and translated with an introduction by Brian Copenhaver and Rebecca Copenhaver

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-1-4426-4266-9

Printed on acid-free paper The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Copenhaver, Brian P. From Kant to Croce : modern philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950 / Brian P. Copenhaver, Rebecca Copenhaver. (Lorenzo da Ponte Italian library series) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4426-4266-9 1. Philosophy Italian – 19th century. 2. Philosophy, Italian – 20th century. 3. Philosophers – Italy – Biography. I. Copenhaver, Rebecca, 1971– II. Title. III. Series: Lorenzo da Ponte Itallian library series b3601.c66 2011

195

c2011-904229-0

This book is published under the aegis and with financial assistance of: Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; the National Italian American Foundation; Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione Generale per la Promozione e la Cooperazione Culturale; Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione Generale per i Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali, Servizio per la promozione del libro e della lettura. The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP)

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments Part I: Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

A Strange History (Bobbio I) Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I) Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I) Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II) Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II) The Mother Idea (Rosmini III) Primacy (Gioberti I) The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II) A Natural Method (Mamiani) Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa) Facts and Laws (Villari) Real and Ideal (De Sanctis) Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington) Matter and Idea (Labriola) No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti) A Revelation (Croce I) History Under Art (Croce II) What Is Distinct? (Croce III) What Is Living? (Croce IV) What Is Dead? (Croce V) Materialism (Gentile I) Idealism (Gentile II) Actualism (Gentile III)

vii 1 3 7 11 14 24 27 36 40 45 48 53 60 66 77 86 90 92 99 106 112 118 126 131

vi

Contents

24 Manifestos (Croce and Gentile) 25 Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I) 26 The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI) 27 Philosophy in Prison (Gramsci II) 28 Still a Strange History (Bobbio II) Notes to Part I

142 147 153 159 163 173

Part II: Translations

191

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Galluppi, Elements Rosmini, A Sketch Gioberti, Primacy Gioberti, The Ideal Formula Mamiani, Renewal Spaventa, Italian Philosophy Villari, Positive Philosophy De Sanctis, Realism De Sanctis, The Ideal Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism I Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism II Fiorentino, Vico and Kant Fiorentino, Positivism Labriola, Materialism Croce, The Concept of Art Croce, Logic Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel Gentile, Praxis Gentile, Idealism Gentile, The Act of Thinking Gentile, Actual Idealism Manifesto I Manifesto II Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy Croce, Liberty Gramsci, Letters

193 245 264 278 312 343 371 401 413 418 422 429 447 463 484 515 533 642 665 683 695 706 713 717 753 762

References

779

Name Index

805

General Index

825

Preface and Acknowledgments

Because of what it is – the history of a modern nation’s philosophy for more than a century – the story told in this book is important, and we hope to have told it in an illuminating way, by providing two things: a collection of (mostly) short pieces by leading philosophers of the period; and an introduction to those texts that is also an episodic history of the philosophy of the period. By limiting ourselves to a dozen or so figures of the first magnitude, we have omitted others of like interest. A different story and a richer one would include Acri, Berti, Cantu, De Meis … and whole alphabets of voices that will be mainly silent here. Other stories can be told about Italian philosophy in other periods. In fact, some are already familiar to anglophone readers because many philosophers who worked in Italy in ancient, medieval, and early modern times – from Pythagoras to Vico – are prominent in the Anglo-American canon of Western philosophy. But no such prominence or familiarity attaches to most of the thinkers studied here, at least from an anglophone perspective. Benedetto Croce, of course, is the great exception: the end of his long life and career in 1952 marks one terminus of our story. The other terminus is the death of Immanuel Kant in 1804, near the start of the nineteenth century. The story then moves from Germany, and the competing idealisms invented there by Kant and Hegel, to Italy, where Croce and Giovanni Gentile responded decades later with new kinds of idealism. Gentile was assassinated before the Second World War ended, Croce died a few years after the war, and with them ended the era of Italian philosophy that is our topic. We have chosen pieces from many genres: textbooks, technical treatises, learned essays, chapters from monographs, political manifestos, talks to learned societies, notes for university lectures, academic inaugural

viii

Preface and Ackowledgments

addresses, philosophical letters, personal letters, unpublished meditations, and unpublished drafts of philosophical studies. Except for one – Croce’s post-mortem on part of Hegel’s philosophy – they are relatively short, and when we could, we have kept them intact, without omitting parts of them. Again, when it was feasible, we have used first editions or other early versions of works that sometimes had long afterlives – the point being to tell the story as it happened at some particular moment. Croce and Gentile, for example, because they attained eminence and kept it for decades in highly charged political circumstances, often republished and revised their early writings in situations that invited changes of wording or content. In such cases, although the excellent new national editions usually (and correctly) reflect the latest state of the text during the author’s lifetime, we have tried to look at the issues through evidence less carefully sorted by the authors, hoping that it might be more faithful to an original moment. The originals of texts not yet available in critical editions are sometimes erratic in orthography, punctuation, typography, and other details, and in translating them we have aimed for consistency rather than mirroring the state of any text exactly. In the same spirit, bibliographical form has been lightly regularized in some notes composed by the original authors. In most cases, however, notes to the translations are by the editors. When this is not so – when notes or parts of notes are by the authors – those parts will be identified by the symbol [a], whereas the symbol [e] will identify parts of notes added by the editors. Where neither [a] nor [e] occurs in a note, the editors have written it. Where the symbol [a] occurs, cross-references will refer to page numbers in the original Italian text and may not correspond to the English translation. Because our Introduction is substantial, we have tried to minimize editorial notes; nonetheless, these vary in scope and purpose. In Galluppi’s account of Kant, for example, which was formative not just for the direction of later Italian philosophy but also for its terminology, references to Kant’s German are meant to illuminate Galluppi’s Italian (and hence our translation), not to identify Galluppi’s source by chapter and verse. On the other hand, although Croce does not usually bother with citations in his attack on Hegel, it is sometimes possible to locate the statement by Hegel that Croce has in his sights, and doing so is often crucial to understanding him – Croce, that is. We cite the same references in the notes to the Introduction and in the notes to our translations. For some works the references list multiple editions because more recent

Preface and Ackowledgments

ix

authors, like Croce and Gentile, used versions of texts unknown to earlier authors, like Gioberti and Rosmini. Even for the same author, styles and motives of citation vary widely in the texts translated here, in part because they differ so much in genre and format. When we started this project about six years ago, one of us was working on Thomas Reid, the other on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Because Eugenio Garin’s classical study of Pico had been published in 1937, and because Pico and Garin were both Italian philosophers, questions emerged about the philosophical background in Italy for Garin’s early views on Pico. And since Garin had formed his views during the ventennio, questions followed about the Fascists, Fascist culture, Gentile and so on, and these led to more questions about earlier Italian philosophers – Rosmini, Gioberti, Spaventa, and others – of whom Gentile was an acute reader and about whom he wrote abundantly. Then it became clear that in these earlier chapters of Italian philosophy Thomas Reid was remarkably influential. We studied Reid’s Italian influence in Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2006), and in Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008) we moved on to Croce. We have used both articles for our Introduction. We thank Remo Bodei, Alexander Broadie, Antonio Capuano, Massimo Ciavolella, Michele Ciliberto, Roberto Esposito, David Glidden, Harvey Goldman, Emanuele Levi Mortera, Hans Lottenbach, Rosella Pescatori, and Donald Verene, for their criticism and advice. And for the inextinguishable fire of inspiration we thank Benedetto Croce, that great ironist, who, in making the case that history must be brought under the general concept of art, asked this question: ‘Truly, what psychological novel is more interesting than the history of philosophy?’ Finally, we have dedicated this book to one mother, one wife, and the same extraordinary person – Kathleen Copenhaver – who might not answer Croce’s question as we might like it to be answered. Brian Copenhaver Rebecca Copenhaver

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PART I Introduction

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1

A Strange History (Bobbio I)

When Norberto Bobbio died in 2004, an obituary in the Guardian recorded his passing and remembered his career for that newspaper’s anglophone readership. The Guardian praised Bobbio as ‘Italy’s leading legal and political philosopher,’ noting that he was also ‘one of the most authoritative figures in his country’s politics. His status was marked by the Italian president’s immediate departure for Turin to be among the first mourners, and an extensive discussion of his writing in the media.’1 For an American president (or, these days, an English prime minister) to rush to the funeral of a philosopher, even a very great one, is hard to imagine – especially if the deceased philosopher had persistently attacked that dignitary in the mass media. The Guardian article goes on to explain how such a thing came to pass in Italy, and not long ago. Bobbio grew up in the industrial city of Torino in a wealthy family that sympathized with Fascism, but in his hometown university he also talked with left-wing intellectuals at a time when such conversations were risky – during Mussolini’s regime, the ‘twenty years,’ as Italians call that tormented time.2 Publishing on logic, analogy, existentialism, and phenomenology, he won his first chair at Siena in 1940, and towards the end of the war he spent time in prison. After the occupation, Bobbio ran unsuccessfully for public office, but his academic career prospered. He also began writing regularly for La Stampa, one of Italy’s leading national newspapers, and he brokered crucial transactions between Italy’s two leading political groups, which aggregated around the Communists and the Christian Democrats. ‘In the year of his retirement,’ explains the Guardian,

Part I: Introduction ‘he was nominated by the Italian president to one of the five life senatorships, and sat in the upper house as an independent socialist. Indeed, in 1992, he came close to being elected president as a compromise candidate. But he confessed to finding decision-making difficult.’3

At the end of the day, then, Bobbio was a philosopher. But Bobbio was more than what the anglophone world calls a ‘public intellectual.’ He was an active, effective, and famous politician on a national scale. The same can be said of most of the Italian philosophers studied in this book, all of whom were active politically and publicly in one degree or another. This fact alone makes the history of modern Italian philosophy unlike anything that could have been observed about practitioners of that discipline in England or the United States. To be sure, some philosophers in these countries have been active and prominent in national politics: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey are conspicuous exceptions to the rule that for most Anglo-American philosophers the effective reach of their public politics (as distinct from their political activity as private citizens) has not gone far beyond the walls of universities. Quite a different experience had been common for Italian philosophers since the French Revolution, and Bobbio continued this tradition of public engagement into our own time. In Bobbio’s hands, then, newspapers were a medium for philosophical messages, as in his opinion piece published by Il Contemporaneo in 1955, in an issue that printed several reflections on the ten years that had passed since the end of the war. Placed next to an article about Antonio Gramsci (1891−1937), who in those days was a figure of revolutionary reverence in Italy, Bobbio’s essay is titled ‘Our Speculative Genius.’4 This is how it starts: It seems to me that the major result of these ten years of free discussion is that we have discovered – up to the point of considering them intolerable – our cultural deficiencies. And that’s all. That these deficiencies have then been healed we lack the courage to affirm. You might actually say that in looking for remedies … we have fallen back into some of our old mistakes. I’m talking mainly about philosophy … Fascism fostered our complex of cultural and moral ‘primacy,’ having found the ground already richly seeded with idealism.5

Writing as a philosopher, Bobbio surveys the cultural scene in post-war Italy, finds it wanting, and puts the blame on philosophy. He also remem-

4

A Strange History (Bobbio I)

bers the crimes of Fascism, of course, which he connects with ‘idealism’ and ‘primacy.’ The former term would have been understood by educated English readers at the time: what Bobbio means by ‘idealism’ is the legacy of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially as developed by J.G. Fichte and G.F.W. Hegel before 1831 and imported to Italy a little later. The word ‘primacy,’ however, would have mystified most anglophone readers, although Bobbio’s Italian audience knew exactly what he was talking about. He has in mind a political historiography invented by Vincenzo Gioberti (1801−52), one of the nineteenth-century thinkers studied in this book. Briefly, Gioberti’s very influential theory was that Italy was the source of all Europe’s wisdom, including the philosophical kind: hence Italy’s primacy.6 In 1955, of course, few Italians thought of Italy as primary in any way, except patriotically – di cuore. Nonetheless, as Bobbio explains, from Gioberti’s ideas and their descendants during years that were decisive for our intellectual development, we learned a strange history of European thought. According to that theory, philosophy had already blossomed and matured in Germany with Hegel but withered away there and was transplanted to Naples and environs, where it seemed to be acclimatized finally and permanently, having gained new vigor and having sprouted new shoots, as it prepared to spread its shadow from that spot over the whole world.7

The implication is that Mussolini’s imperial fantasies had been nourished by earlier dreams that Italian idealism would conquer the world intellectually. According to Bobbio, this improbable vision put Italian thinkers in the habit of ignoring any more realistic thoughts from abroad. ‘Anything written outside of Italy,’ he explained, was most often treated as a heap of nonsense and foolishness, if not just as boring stupidity. The attitude to different currents of thought was either pity or impatience. Guido De Ruggiero (my choice of a respectable person and an anti-fascist is deliberate) took upon himself the thankless task of the fearless gravedigger. His History of Contemporary Philosophy – I don’t know if it is still read – was a string of miscarriages, justly interrupted and sagaciously punished by the Providence of History, as we awaited the splendid era of Italian idealism. Anything new in the air, and ten pages of summary condemnation in La Critica would make the air fit to breathe again.8

5

Part I: Introduction

La Critica is the journal that Benedetto Croce (1866−1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875−1944) launched in 1903.9 Until 1943, and even during the two decades of Fascism, Croce used it to maintain his enormous authority – surpassed only by Gentile’s in a different register – over Italian intellectual life. De Ruggiero, originally a follower of Gentile in the time when he and Croce began to part ways, had run afoul of the great man as early as 1913. The depth and duration of Croce’s power, and of Gentile’s, over people like De Ruggiero is at the centre of Bobbio’s complaint. Although positivism, pragmatism, neo-scholasticism, a nascent existentialism, and other philosophical traditions never fell silent in Italy, the voices of the mighty idealists rang very loud. The two of them – Croce mainly through words, Gentile often through institutions – dominated Italian thought for decades, at first in a great cultural partnership, eventually by unremitting political enmity.10 Either way, their warring versions of idealism were for many years the prevailing options in Italy, until Bobbio could condemn idealism in 1955 (three years after Croce’s death) as the source of Italy’s misunderstanding of herself. By that time, however, idealism, its predecessors and its rivals, had lived a long life in Italy, sketched in the introduction to this book and illustrated by writings of philosophers whose names are mostly unknown outside the peninsula.

6

2

Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I)

Consider two lists of thirteen names each: first, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, Cicero, Plotinus, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventura, Machiavelli, Bruno, Campanella, Galileo, and Vico; next, Galluppi, Rosmini, Mamiani, Gioberti, Spaventa, Villari, De Sanctis, Fiorentino, Florenzi Waddington, Labriola, Croce, Gentile, and Gramsci.11 What these names have in common is that they all belonged to Italians, either by birth or by residence. All were also philosophers, but the second group, except Gramsci, Croce, and perhaps Gentile, is invisible in the current anglophone history of philosophy. And yet the cause of their obscurity is a reason for remembering them: the story of philosophy in Italy from Kant through Croce is so remarkable, not only by Anglo-American standards but also from a European (or ‘Continental’) point of view, that understanding it better will illuminate the larger history of the discipline. The heart of the Italian anomaly, very briefly, is that idealism of a Hegelian kind thrived in Italy long after it had expired elsewhere, until after 1952, when Croce died and the catastrophe of Fascism and two world wars could finally be addressed from other philosophical perspectives. Until then, the liberal Croce and the Fascist Gentile dominated Italian culture, and the philosophy favoured by them was the idealism on which, at first, they had collaborated, until theory and practice made them bitter enemies. Meanwhile, much of Italian philosophy had become hostage to their eventually antagonistic systems, confining their friends as much as their enemies. An ideological history of philosophy, tuned to the story of the new Italian nation, was another part of the lasting framework that Gentile and Croce created – Gentile especially. Seeing his own ‘actual idealism’ as the telos, in a Hegelian sense, of what had gone before, Gentile produced what is still the grand narrative of

Part I: Introduction

post-Kantian thought in Italy. The thirteen Italians studied here are key figures in Gentile’s story.12 In this version of the history of Italian philosophy, Antonio Rosmini (1797−1855) is an ancestor of Gentile’s idealism, along with Pasquale Galluppi (1770−1846), Rosmini’s most distinguished predecessor, and Terenzio Mamiani (1799−1885) and Vincenzo Gioberti, his most outspoken opponents. All four philosophers were active in the first half of the nineteenth century, and all but Galluppi lived through the Napoleonic Wars, the Restoration, the Revolutions of 1820−1 and 1831, the more turbulent Revolutions of 1848−9, and their disheartening aftermath. Only Mamiani survived to see Italy become a united nation in 1860, but all four had parts to play, sometimes leading parts, in the birth of modern Italy.13 Two of these philosophers, Mamiani and Gioberti, wrote extensively about earlier Italian thought, from antiquity onward, as the root of all Western philosophy, thus linking current affairs with Italy’s glorious past and providing the background for Gentile’s later historiography, whose more immediate inspiration was Bertrando Spaventa, a Hegelian who wrote mainly after 1860. After Gioberti had announced the primacy of Italian philosophy, Spaventa offered a more sophisticated view: that the ancient wisdom revived in Italy during the Renaissance had then circulated through Europe until Kant and Hegel prepared the way for another Italian revival in the nineteenth century, coinciding with Italy’s national unification.14 Consider another list: Aristotle, Berkeley, Condillac, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Malebranche, Plato, Reid, Smith, and Stewart. These are the thirteen non-Italians who figure most prominently in the historical part of the work that made Antonio Rosmini famous, the New Essay on the Origin of Ideas, published in 1830.15 The philosophical core of the New Essay is a theory of ideas, what Rosmini called an ‘ideology,’ presented in the third of its four volumes, after 700 pages of historical analysis. Rosmini’s history depicts modern, post-Cartesian philosophy as progressive, moving through two stages of improvement after an initial collapse when French Cartesians neglected their master’s ‘spiritualism,’ permitting Locke and Condillac to promulgate their disastrous ‘sensism.’ The first effort to overcome this scandal, according to Rosmini, was the work of ‘the Scottish School,’ led by Thomas Reid and including Dugald Stewart. The second attempt was Kant’s, building on Plato and Leibniz.16 Sensism was the main target of Rosmini’s polemics, both philosophi-

8

Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I)

cal and historical. ‘In the whole history of philosophy,’ he thundered, ‘… no confusion has ever been as vile or as degrading for human nature as that devised by the sensists of the preceding century, who extinguished the divine light of human understanding by confining it entirely within sensations that wild animals have in common with humans; they ignored the real distinction between sense and intellect, between sensation and the idea.’17 If the heretic Locke fathered this error, Condillac was his heir and the arch-heretic of sensism. He led the French away from the spiritual truth that Malebranche had laboured to preserve. ‘Love of system’ persuaded Condillac ‘to reduce Locke’s two principles of sensation and reflection … to one faculty alone, to sensation,’ which ‘performs two operations so distinct that they are called by different names … sensing external things and … judging the same things.’18 Condillac’s mistake was the gross and infantile blunder of ‘a waxwork sophist,’ as Rosmini called him, but his superficiality was seductive – even in Italy, where knowledge of French was as common among educated people as ignorance of German, not to speak of English. Writing more than a decade after Napoleon’s final defeat, Rosmini was still sensitive about the French connection in a period that he called ‘a time of philosophical servitude.’ When the French battalions swept into a disunited Italy after the Revolution of 1789, they brought an aggressive culture with them, Enlightened ideas that would threaten Restoration pieties. From Rosmini’s perspective, sensism was the philosophical face of this godless evil, the heinous crime of a secular Enlightenment.19 To make matters worse, the Abbé Condillac had spent ten years in Italy, tutoring the young Duke of Parma and attracting Italian disciples. With special pride, then, Rosmini notes that it was an Italian who exposed Condillac’s empty dogmatism even while he still tyrannized the French. He dates this revelation to 1812, when the physician Michele Araldi attacked Condillac’s views on natural science, adding that ‘at the time when Royer-Collard began his lectures in 1811, the only philosophy in France was Condillac’s.’ Rosmini took these words from the introduction to the French translation of Reid’s complete works, which Théodore Jouffroy began to publish in 1828. The Pierre Paul Royer-Collard that he mentions was a French politician and philosopher who had turned against Condillac even before Araldi, in 1811. One of Royer-Collard’s students was Victor Cousin, the cosmopolitan prodigy who succeeded him at the Sorbonne in 1815, lectured on Scottish philosophy, and – after being silenced for eight years by the Restoration government – finally

9

Part I: Introduction

began to publish his lectures in the 1820s. Jouffroy, Reid’s translator, was also Cousin’s student. Thus, although Reid’s Inquiry had been available in French since 1768, and hence accessible to Italians, Rosmini’s New Essay followed another French revival of Reid that was two decades old. The chronology helps explain Rosmini’s hatred of Condillac, as well as his admiration for Reid.20 Rosmini’s discussion of Reid and Dugald Stewart fills more than twothirds of the first volume of the New Essay, at the end of which Rosmini asks ‘if there is anything solid, anything that can really be called an addition to philosophical understanding in the views of the philosophers after Locke that we have reviewed in this whole volume? … I find nothing that deserves this status … except the questions raised by Reid about those who accepted simple apprehension as the first operation of the soul.’21

In the unheroic second phase of his history, which occupies Rosmini for more than two hundred pages, Thomas Reid turns out to be the only hero; for that reason, in Rosmini’s view, Reid was also Kant’s most important predecessor. A large part of Rosmini’s motivation for doing philosophy was to ensure that Roman Catholic theology had a basis in reason; another powerful motive was resentment of Italy’s intellectual dependence on foreigners in this critical task. Like other Italians, Rosmini knew that since Galileo’s time little philosophy done in Italy had won the respect of other Europeans. Even the brilliant and idiosyncratic Vico came into his own only in the nineteenth century. In this climate, some of Rosmini’s immediate predecessors – Melchiorre Gioia, Gian Domenico Romagnosi, and others – seemed, despite their best efforts, to be mouthpieces for Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, and the French Idéologues. Rosmini wanted to silence these ‘materialist and immoral’ ideas and find a native Italian voice for philosophy.22

10

3

Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I)

Born in the northeast of Italy and living most of his life there, Rosmini looked at first to French rather than German philosophers, even though Austria had replaced France as the dominant foreign power in Restoration Italy after 1815. Born far to the south, in Calabria, Pasquale Galluppi had meanwhile opened a channel to German thought, though it was indirect, through French interpretations or translations of German texts. And this eventual openness to novel influences followed a very conventional education.23 When Galluppi was born in Tropea, that Calabrian town was part of the Kingdom of Naples, and Galluppi was the son of an ancient noble family. His father the Baron sent him to study law at the University of Naples, but he found the provocative topics of biblical studies and theology more attractive. When his elder brother’s death ended Galluppi’s formal education, family duties called the new heir back to Tropea, where he married in 1794, eventually fathering fourteen children. Like many young aristocrats, however, he had also acquired the republican sympathies that helped make him a local cultural force. He stirred up a few theological squabbles, but more serious trouble came in 1799 when a failed revolution in Naples caused him to be held hostage as a republican.24 Galluppi’s first contact with philosophy had come in the local schools of Tropea, where another Neapolitan, the illustrious Antonio Genovesi (1713−69), still ruled the Enlightenment curriculum. At first, his deeper philosophical reading was quite predictable: Wolff, Leibniz, and Descartes were the conspicuous figures from beyond the peninsula. Then around 1800 he discovered Condillac, who led him to Locke and to meditating on a philosophy of his own. His first public effort was a short

Part I: Introduction

treatise of 1807, On Analysis and Synthesis, which, despite its title, reflects no knowledge of Kant. Galluppi’s mature philosophical work emerged twelve years later, while he also declared himself politically in occasional pieces on freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and related topics.25 Beginning in 1819, Galluppi presented his system as a response to Kant in the six volumes of a Philosophical Essay on the Critique of Consciousness (1819−31). In contemporary terms, his central questions were about mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology. A stunningly successful companion to the Essay was another six-volume work, the Elements of Philosophy (1820−7), which saw five editions during Galluppi’s lifetime, long remained the standard textbook of philosophy in Italy and made its author famous. But Galluppi’s magnum opus was the Essay, whose title proclaims its engagement with Kant; it is a long debate with the sage of Königsberg driven by great historical learning and meant to establish ‘the true philosophy of experience’ in opposition to the critical philosophy. In Galluppi’s story of philosophy prior to his own, the provisional victor is not Kant but Thomas Reid.26 In 1827 Galluppi followed these ponderous volumes with something much shorter: his Philosophical Letters on Developments in Philosophy Relating to the Principles of Human Cognitions. Despite its brevity, this original review of modern philosophy from Descartes through Fichte is of great importance; it has been called the first substantive history of philosophy written in Italian.27 In 1829, before Rosmini had completed his own New Essay, Galluppi wrote to tell him that he disagreed with his theory of being, but he courteously sent Rosmini the Elements while explaining that he did not have a spare copy of his still incomplete Essay. He included another item, however − the Philosophical Letters in its 1827 version − which Rosmini then cited in the New Essay of 1830. This shorter edition of the Letters that Rosmini saw ended with a section on Kant, an early and influential introduction to the critical philosophy in Italian. But later editions after 1838 added another letter condemning ‘the deeply respected Rosmini’ for obscuring the key point of the objectivity of cognition. Had Rosmini seen this material before he published in 1830, he might have been less kind to Galluppi, whom he corrects on a number of points in notes but treats with great respect in the text of the New Essay.28 Near the end of his life, after two decades of savage battles that eventually caused the Church to put his books on the Index, Rosmini expressed regret at Galluppi’s continuing influence on the Catholic faithful. ‘How can Galluppi be regarded in Rome as a philosopher of sound doctrine

12

Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I)

when by his subjectivism he puts man in God’s place as the foundation of truth?’ Even so, by the time Rosmini first encountered Galluppi, his southern rival was well on the way to fame. In 1831 he was called to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in Naples. He was already a celebrity in Italy, and in the rest of Europe he was an eminent philosopher. Cousin, the great philosophical fixer of the age, had been a channel to the non-Italian world since Galluppi had translated Cousin’s Philosophical Fragments. Cousin then arranged Galluppi’s election to the Académie Française in 1838, when his last major philosophical effort, the Philosophy of Will (1832−42), was still incomplete. He died a pious Catholic in Naples in 1846.29

13

4

Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)

Galluppi described his philosophy of experience as salvaging Kant’s failure to find a secure basis for human cognition. He divides the exposition of this philosophy in the Elements into five parts filling more than six hundred pages. His names for these five parts are ‘pure logic,’ ‘psychology,’ ‘ideology,’ ‘mixed logic,’ and ‘moral philosophy and natural theology,’ each of them followed by a ‘summary in questions and answers.’ At the end of the mixed logic, he also provides an ‘exposition and evaluation of the transcendental philosophy.’ Translated here are Galluppi’s digest of Kant, one of the first of its kind in Italian, along with the little catechisms on psychology, ideology, and mixed logic.30 Galluppi’s psychology is a predictable product of the tradition in which he was educated. It is a standard empiricist theory of ideas. More precisely, mental states and operations are modifications of a mind which is a substance independent of the states and operations that modify it. Moreover, each of us is conscious of all our mental states and operations, as Locke had taught, and consciousness is a kind of inner sense. Unlike Locke, however, Galluppi does not make consciousness as inner sense a mere analog of sensory perception: in fact, he maintains that every mental state is ‘accompanied by a sensation of it.’31 The mind – or soul – also has a sensation of itself as modified by its states and operations. Such modifications of mind are of two kinds: actions, which include willing, judging, and reasoning; and passions, which include pains and pleasures. Faculties of mind are capacities either to produce actions through mental activity as an efficient cause or to be affected in certain ways by the mind’s objects and their properties. Galluppi regards intentionality as mind’s primary feature: accordingly, sensibility and consciousness are the two passive faculties that ‘give

Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)

the mind the objects of its thoughts.’ Objects of sensibility are external, while objects of consciousness are internal to the mind itself and its modifications. The first object given to the mind is the ‘I that senses objects outside it,’ and it is given by consciousness. In other words, the primal moment of consciousness is reflexive – the mind’s conscious sensing of its own sensory perception of an external object or property.32 There are also two active faculties that operate on objects given by sensibility and consciousness: analysis and synthesis. Analysis divides and distinguishes its objects by acts of attention and abstraction. Attention separates not only objects that are already naturally independent – such as a person and the tree next to her – but also those that are independent of one another but contingently connected – such as a person’s body and her head. Abstraction separates things that are not metaphysically independent: modes and substances, for example. Galluppi is a nominalist: he holds that universals are nothing over and above the particulars that instantiate them. Nevertheless, by abstraction we can form the ‘universal idea of man, tree, body, and so on …’ apart from ‘the determinations without which they cannot exist.’33 Synthesis unites objects presented by sensibility and consciousness in three ways: real, ideal, and imaginative synthesis. Real syntheses are judgments affirming modes that actually inhere in various subjects. Ideal syntheses are judgments expressing merely logical relations – such as the ‘equal to’ relation. Ideal syntheses may be objective or subjective: objective if the terms of the relation are existing objects; otherwise subjective. Imaginative syntheses form complex ideas of various objects. If the object is physically and nomologically possible, the imaginative synthesis is practical; if not, it is poetic.34 Galluppi adds one more active faculty: imagination, of which memory and recollection are species. Each reproduces a past perception – which is why it is a species of imagination – plus an additional perception of having had that past perception and recognizing it as such. The law of association of ideas governs this recognition. When perceptions are reproduced directly, as one perception gives rise to another by the law of association (I perceive the preacher standing before me as the same preacher I saw last Sunday, for example), the recognition is a memory. When perceptions are reproduced indirectly by memories of other perceptions (I recall an acquaintance after he reminds me that we have already met), the recognition is a recollection.35 Up to this point, nothing in the Elements differs greatly from other accounts of cognition current in the early nineteenth century. Unlike Galluppi’s psychology, however, his ideology departs markedly from tra-

15

Part I: Introduction

ditional empiricism. He claims that the first object given the mind is given by consciousness rather than sensibility, and that the cognitions necessary for human understanding are derived from that first object, which is the ‘I that senses something outside the I.’36 Such ‘primitive cognitions’ are data of experience, but not of sensibility.37 Galluppi thus discards the key distinction between sensation and reflection used by Hume to argue that we have no legitimate ideas of causation, substance, identity, and so on. Galluppi’s primitive cognition is experiential because it involves a sensation that is also a perception inasmuch as it is of something real. The sensation that directs the mind to the ‘I that senses something outside the I’ is a sensation of consciousness rather than of sensibility. Since it directs us to real objects and their relations – primitively, the I and the something outside the I – this first cognition is the ground of the objective cognition of substances, modes, and relations, but this is ruled out, according to Galluppi, by Hume’s system and by Kant’s. If the primitive cognition and the sensation that directs it are analysed, the analysis will ground ideas of substance and mode as well as of cause and effect. The I is a substance, and its sensing of something outside it is a modification of itself. No mode exists independently of the substance that it modifies, but analysis abstracts the one from the other and forms a real cognition of both from the data of experience. Likewise, the I is an efficient cause of its own willing, and the effects of its willing are given in experience. No effect exists independently of its cause, but – as with modes of substances – analysis abstracts one from the other and forms a real cognition of both from the data of experience.38 According to Galluppi, the only real relations – relations that do not depend on the mind – are of substances with modes, and of causes with effects. Logical relations such as identity, difference, equality, and inequality, as well as spatio-temporal relations, are merely ideal in the sense that they are nothing over and above the mind’s organization of its own thoughts and the objects of its thoughts. The items organized are real, but the organizing principles are ideal. Our idea of duration, for example, is not derived from an experience of duration; rather it is derived from experience of a particular type of causal relation: generation. We experience effects of generative causes, and because effects presuppose prior causes, we form an idea of duration from these experiences.39 Galluppi’s ideology ends with a proof of the existence of the Absolute, which depends on other proofs: first, that there is no effect without a cause; next, that an infinite series of effects is impossible. To establish the first point, Galluppi uses a proof by cases:

16

Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II) 1. An effect is something that comes to be; 2. what comes to be either (a) does not depend for its existence on something else, or else (b) it does so depend; 3. but if (a) it does not depend, it is not an effect, which eliminates the entailment that there is an effect without a cause; 4. and (b) if it does so depend, that on which it depends must be an efficient cause of its existence.

Next comes his proof that there cannot be an infinite series of effects. For a closed finite series of effects – A, B, C, D, E – wherein each effect depends for its existence on the item preceding, if we posit the series, we will posit at least one effect without a cause: in this case, A. But no effect is without a cause, so such a series is impossible. What is true of a series of five effects will be true of any other series, including an infinite series. Thus, an infinite series of effects is also impossible. In other words, whether the series is finite or infinite, its first member cannot be an effect at all since effects, by definition, have causes. From these two conclusions, one of them assuming a good analogy between finite and infinite sequences, Galluppi next infers the existence of the Absolute: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

There is no effect without a cause; an infinite series of effects is impossible; that anything exists entails the existence of the Absolute as first cause; but the I exists; and the I is not the Absolute; therefore, the I is an effect of the Absolute, which is its first cause.40

The third premise, which is meant to follow from the two before it, claims that the existence of any effect depends ultimately on a first cause. The fourth premise, writes Galluppi, ‘is a primitive truth of fact,’ derived perhaps from the primitive cognition of ‘the I that senses something outside the I.’ The fifth premise requires yet another proof, from the indiscernibility of identicals. In a compressed version: the Absolute is immutable, but the I is not immutable; therefore, the I is not the Absolute. Finally, the Absolute is the cause of the I, because, while the Absolute can exist without the I, the I needs the Absolute for its existence. The I’s existence is thus contingent rather than necessary; hence, it must have been brought into being by an Absolute which, according to Galluppi, must be a volitional rather than a natural cause, and therefore intelligent.41

17

Part I: Introduction

The conclusions about the Absolute that end Galluppi’s ideology obviously depend on scholastic natural theology. The mixed logic that follows is Galluppi’s epistemology, whose Cartesian ancestry is likewise obvious, taking this next part of his system even farther from the traditional empiricism implicit in the psychology. Galluppi takes primitive cognition to reveal a primitive truth that admits no proof: namely, that we have some real cognitions. ‘Real’ in this case describes the cognition of an object (or property) that exists independently of the cognition. The Cartesian cogito is an example of the kind of truth provided by primitive cognition: one real thing that we know is the existence of the I that thinks. The I is equipped with faculties of consciousness, sensory perception and testimony which are grounds of judgment, and a ground is legitimate or illegitimate depending on whether the judgment grounded is true or false, under normal conditions and proper use. ‘That I am a thing that thinks’ is a judgment grounded legitimately, and it is this grounding, rather than any proof, which is its justification.42 Consciousness, sensory perception, and testimony can all be legitimate grounds of judgments expressing truths of fact. Direct perception of relations among ideas – a function of consciousness alone – is the legitimate ground of judgments expressing rational or metaphysical truths. Accordingly, Galluppi once again asserts the primacy of consciousness by claiming that it is the only direct ground of judgment. All judgments produced by other faculties, such as sensory perception, memory, and testimony, derive their legitimacy indirectly from consciousness, which alone gives us knowledge of the existence and functioning of the other faculties. His notion of consciousness leads Galluppi to treat perception as causal and direct: consciousness reveals that perceiving is thinking of an extra-mental object that causes that same thinking.43 Galluppi argues that sceptics go wrong by trying to prove the primitive judgments that neither require nor admit proof. Any such proof would claim two sources of legitimacy: from the faculties that ground the judgments constituting its premises; and from the reasoning that allows inference from one premise to another. But appeal to these sources makes the proof viciously circular. (The alternative is a kind of foundationalism.) Galluppi also objects to another common form of sceptical argument: from individual cases of error or disagreement among observers, the sceptic concludes that all judgments are false or that there is no reality that would make at least one party to a dispute mistaken. Conclusions of such arguments are more universal than their premises, Galluppi

18

Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)

claims, which violates inductive requirements for reasoning. He insists with Descartes that error is the product of the limitations of the human mind and of our carelessness about such limitations.44 Galluppi could oppose the sceptics because he thought he had succeeded where Kant (in his view) failed: namely, in securing the possibility of knowledge by the account of primitive cognition that culminates in his mixed logic. Before the mixed logic begins, however, the ideology closes with an ‘Explanation and Evaluation of the Transcendental Philosophy.’ For the most part, Galluppi’s digest of Kant is just that – a brief account of transcendental philosophy as presented in the first Critique.45 The text closely follows the order of Kant’s masterpiece; its textual accuracy and detail are striking, especially in so brief a statement. Indeed, Galluppi sometimes seems impatient with himself, occasionally interrupting his exposition with succinct objections and criticisms. Apart from a few rhetorical jabs, the first substantial criticism follows Galluppi’s exposition of the roles played in cognition by the intuition, the understanding, and the transcendental unity of apperception. His objection is a standard one, first offered by F.H. Jacobi and aimed at the first edition of the Critique.46 At the point where Galluppi intervenes, Kant has established – among other things – the subjectivity of the notion of cause: its source is the understanding rather than sensory experience; and it applies to objects of experience only insofar as causality is one of the categories of the understanding, which, in conjunction with the forms of intuition, make objects of experience possible. In particular, the notion of cause does not apply to objects independently of our experience. At the outset of his long and intricate argument, however, Kant has also claimed that knowledge begins when objects affect our sensory organs. How can objects cause changes in sensory systems, initiating a process that results in experience, if the causal features of the environment are themselves a function of experience? ‘A difficulty will surely emerge as you think about this,’ Galluppi maintains. ‘This philosophy has two canons: that sensation comes to us from objects; and that we have no informative communication with objects taken by themselves, called noumena. I do not understand how these two canons agree with one another – nor how they can be made to agree.’47

He then criticizes Kant for his reaction to Hume’s problem. His argument is a reductio:

19

Part I: Introduction 1. Transcendental idealism holds that cognition of causal connections originates in the cognitive faculties; 2. the same system holds that what originates in the cognitive faculties is subjective; 3. it also holds that what is subjective is necessary; 4. and it agrees with Hume that there are no necessary connections among the perceptions that constitute empirical objects; 5. therefore, the connections among the perceptions that constitute empirical objects are not subjective (by 3 and 4); 6. but if such connections are not subjective, they must be objective; 7. therefore, cognition of causal connections cannot originate in the cognitive faculties, contrary to the claims of transcendental idealism.48

The motivation of Galluppi’s familiar (and misplaced) criticisms emerges at the beginning of the ‘Explanation and Evaluation,’ where he introduces the senses of the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ as he uses them to interpret Kant. ‘Subjective means what comes from the mind, from the cognizing subject, and not at all from the object cognized. The latter, the component of cognition that comes from the object, is called objective.’ Given Galluppi’s education, this rendering of the subjective/objective distinction is unsurprising. It arises from the roughly Cartesian distinction between an inner world of subjectivity, which is direct, immediate, and transparent, and an outer world represented objectively by ideas present to subjectivity.49 In some sceptical scenarios, the world outside the mind does not exist, but representations given in subjectivity nevertheless remain constant: such representations are regarded as merely subjective, however, rather than objective. When combined with the conception of an ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world, the distinction between objective representation and merely subjective representation turns into a remarkably non-Cartesian distinction between a subjective inner realm populated by mere appearances, and an objective, extra-mental realm populated by things that are real. Moreover, in the century and a half between Descartes and Galluppi, when many philosophers worried about the origins of ideas, the foregoing framework suggested a natural etiological reading of the subjective/objective distinction: cognitions originating in the mind alone are subjective; cognitions originating in normal sensory experience of extra-mental objects are objective. Kant himself used ‘subjective’ to mean both ‘originating in the subject’s faculties’ and ‘lacking application to objects’; ‘subjectivitySF’ and

20

Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)

‘subjectivityNO’ are Patricia Kitcher’s labels for the two senses.50 But Kant did not use ‘objective’ to name a cognition’s having originated in sensory experience as a property of that cognition. Instead, he called the cognitions that we have by virtue of sensory experience ‘empirical.’ Moreover, Kant’s core notion of objectivity is not etiological; it is transcendental: a cognition is objective if it is a necessary condition of the possibility of any objects of thought and experience at all. Hence, the differences between Galluppi and Kant are not merely terminological. On Galluppi’s understanding of the terms in play, Kant’s famous description of the problem of the Transcendental Deduction becomes a paradox: ‘the difficulty … is namely how subjective conditions of thinking should have an objective validity, that is, yield conditions for the possibility of all cognition of objects.’51 But the problem of the Deduction (despite its name) is not logical; it is epistemological. It poses this question: how can cognitions originating in the faculties of a subject alone have the legitimacy characteristic of objective experience? For Kant, their legitimacy derives from their being necessary for the very possibility of objects of thought or experience. Galluppi confuses his own notion of subjectivity with Kant’s. When Kant claims that cognition of spatio-temporal and causal-substantival features of the world originates in a subject’s faculties rather than in sensory experience, Galluppi takes Kant’s claim as equivalent to the view that these are not real features of objects: ‘The transcendental philosophy … treats many objective elements as subjective, and it treats them as inherent in our cognitive faculty, antecedently to any datum of experience whatever. Moreover, it treats these subjective elements as in themselves empty of reality and as lasting phenomena.’52

The resulting picture of Kant is not uncommon, and it arose during Kant’s own lifetime; he produced a second edition of the first Critique partly to dispel the interpretation, which turns him into an empirical idealist like Berkeley. In Berkeley’s non-Kantian world, tables, chairs, and other ordinary objects are mere appearances in the sense that they are exhausted by properties having the same status as the secondary qualities introduced by indirect realists: they are not only subjectiveSF; they are also subjectiveNO. But unlike Berkeley, Kant holds that these ordinary objects of sensory experience are real, substantial, and spatio-temporal. With Hume, he agrees that cognition – of substance, cause, duration, and other key

21

Part I: Introduction

features of objects of experience and thought – does not and cannot originate in sensory experience. But he rejects Hume’s claim that the tribunal of reason finds such cognitions illegitimate. Hence, the goal of the Deduction is to secure the legitimacy of cognitions that are a priori in the sense of originating the cognitive faculties themselves. Their legitimacy is secured by showing how they are required as interpretative functions that take a manifold given by sensibility and produce conceptions that exhibit the kind of uniformity and regularity required of genuine experience rather than mere subjective feeling. By confusing the notion of a prioricity with the indications of a priori cognitions, Galluppi further distorts Kant’s notion of objectivity. ‘The philosophy that I am investigating declares the following basic principle: what is necessary, invariable and universal in our cognitions is subjective, pure and a priori; by contrast, the accidental, contingent and variable will belong to the object, will be an objective element.’53

For Kant, universality and necessity are marks or indications of whether a cognition is a priori, and yet a cognition is a priori not because it is necessary or universal, but because it originates in the cognitive faculties themselves, rather than in sensory experience. In other words, a cognition is a priori in virtue of being subjectiveSF. But being subjectiveSF does not entail being subjectiveNO. Indeed, if the Deduction succeeds, it does so by showing how subjectiveSF cognitions can be objective precisely because they are applicable to objects in the strictest sense: they are conditions of the possibility of knowledge of objects. Kant’s objectivity is not what is accidental, contingent, and variable; it is what is valid for all experience. The accidental, contingent, and variable in our experience, according to Kant, is subjectiveNO – subjective in the sense of being contingent on the sensory organs and bodily features of particular individuals. Given Galluppi’s view of the subjective/objective distinction, it is not hard to see why Kant’s theory troubled him. By the end of his mixed logic, he wants to have secured the existence of the Absolute. And he agrees with Kant that the notion of the Absolute does not come from analysis of sensory experience. Combine this thesis with Galluppi’s further understanding of Kant: if the Absolute does not originate from sensory experience, then, in Kant’s system, it must originate in the cognitive faculties themselves; but if it originates in the cognitive faculties themselves, it is a merely subjectiveNO notion. The Absolute becomes as illusory as a

22

Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)

straight stick that looks bent in water, and Kant’s transcendental idealism blocks Galluppi’s lifelong effort to rescue empiricism from the sensists in a system that would support both theology and science.54 In the end, Galluppi had less success as a champion of bien-pensant empiricism than as an uncommissioned emissary of the transcendental philosophy that he opposed. When he began his life-long debate with Kant in 1819, Born’s Latin translation was the best route to the first Critique for Italians who could not read German. As more Italians made direct and indirect contact with Kant, and Galluppi rose to academic eminence, his persistent engagement with the critical philosophy – especially in the widely read Elements – gave thousands of young Italians their first acquaintance with the thinker whom Antonio Rosmini would also attack as ‘the sophist of Königsberg.’55

23

5

Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II)

Galluppi had grown up in the Europe of the ancien régime, of which Rosmini had no experience, though he certainly shared Galluppi’s commitment to traditional Christian theism. By the time he entered the University of Padua to study theology in 1816, Napoleon was on St Helena, and the monarchs of Europe were trying to rebuild what the French Revolution had destroyed. Like Galluppi’s family, Rosmini’s was noble and hence in a position to profit from the Restoration. But even after his ordination in 1821, the young priest was stirred by the Italian patriotism that Italy’s Austrian masters found seditious. Rosmini soon moved on from his youthful politics to the institutional project that became his life’s most enduring work. In 1828 he drafted the charter for a new religious order, the Institute of Charity, grudgingly recognized by Pius VIII in 1829 and still active today.56 Although followers of Rosmini in contemporary England have translated a large part of his enormous philosophical output, among professional philosophers in the anglophone world the readership for it is small.57 In his own time and place, however, Father Rosmini was a celebrated figure. His earliest philosophical polemics were aimed at other Italians – Gioia, Romagnosi, and the poet Ugo Foscolo – judged by the young priest to have gone over to the Jacobin heresy of sensism. He also knew some Kantian philosophy even before studying at Padua, and by the time the New Essay began to appear he had read the first Critique in Latin.58 This was in the same year, 1828, when he wrote the constitution for his new order. The shorter philosophical pieces that preceded the New Essay attracted the attention of reformers in the Catholic Church. But when he also produced books on moral philosophy, natural law, and society, Gregory XVI advised him to stick to his writing and stay out of religious politics, stalling the full approval of the Institute until 1838.

Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II)

Taking this papal counsel to heart, Rosmini moved to Stresa on Lake Maggiore, leaving only for brief periods until he died there in 1855. But his retreat was not purely spiritual. He continued to debate the great public figures of his day – Lammenais the French reformer, Cattaneo the Italian republican, and, of course, Cousin, Galluppi, Gioberti, and other philosophers. Among his philosophical peers in Italy, Mamiani was Rosmini’s first major target, but the Jesuits were deadlier enemies. Affronted by Rosmini’s Treatise on Moral Conscience of 1839−41, the Society declared war on its author, and hostilities continued until Pope Gregory silenced both parties. When Gregory died in 1846, many hoped that the next pope might find a better way to confront modernity than by declaring the newly invented railroads to be tools of Satan. When the conclave chose a liberal, joy rang loud in the streets, and then the new Pius IX invited Rosmini to Rome. The greatest expectations seemed not too great; even the Jesuits held their tongues. And yet Rosmini chose this moment to launch yet another philosophical polemic – this time circulating lectures on Gioberti that accused him of pantheism. As the events of 1848 raced on, Rosmini responded with public statements on Italian unity, constitutionalism, and social justice. Meanwhile, his old rival Gioberti had returned from exile to join the government in Torino, where he invited Rosmini to appear and then to undertake a mission to persuade Pius IX to join the struggle against Austria. The Pope received Rosmini graciously, encouraging talk of a red hat, but then the government in Torino fell and Rosmini resigned his mission. The Pope kept him close by in Rome until revolutionary violence shook the city, ending all thoughts of reform in the Vatican. Rosmini returned to Stresa, more exposed than ever to his enemies. When tongues wagged in the Curia, some of his books appeared on the Index. One was The Five Wounds of the Holy Church, begun in 1832 but withheld for fifteen years, for obvious reasons. The five wounds that Rosmini wished to heal were the Church’s cultural isolation, ignorant clergy, divided bishops, secularized authority, and exploited property. He proposed that the people and clergy freely elect their own bishops, thus liberating the Church from corruption while preserving a less powerful papacy with more integrity. Having made his formal submission to the condemnation of his vexatious books, Rosmini nonetheless went on to write more.59 But his replies to his enemies now went unpublished, along with his Theosophy, a massive revision of his philosophical system, though he allowed some studies of philosophy and spirituality to appear in print. He also kept talking with Alessandro Manzoni and other members of

25

Part I: Introduction

his own political generation, as well as the Cavour family, whose time was still to come. In 1854, the year before the philosopher died, Pius IX presided over a session of the Congregation of the Index that cleared Rosmini’s books of blame. But more than thirty years later another pope – Leo XIII, who declared Thomas Aquinas to be ‘the chief and master of scholastic doctors’ – extracted forty propositions from Rosmini’s writings and condemned them once again.60

26

6

The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)

The reader of the first volume of Rosmini’s New Essay finds herself far from the turbulence of 1848 and its sad sequel. The scene of this volume is the Scottish Enlightenment, mainly Reid and other members of the ‘Scottish School,’ after which the second volume turns to the German Enlightenment – to Leibniz and Kant as heirs of Plato. These three philosophers ‘posited something innate to explain the fact of the origin of ideas … but what they posited was excessive and arbitrary.’ Plato was more excessive than Leibniz and Leibniz more than Kant, the most restrained of the three, who ‘kept as innate only the forms of ideas, leaving it to sense experience to present their matter.’ In another way, however, Kant went too far, distilling seventeen different forms, by Rosmini’s count, out of his ‘metaphysical chemistry.’61 Where Kant did too much, Reid did too little, as Rosmini explains: ‘I have counted Reid among those who put too little of the innate in the human mind, Kant among those who put too much, even though Kant’s system is a development of Reid’s. The reason is that Reid did not actually foresee Kant’s conclusions and posited as innate only an instinct for judging the existence of bodies, not realizing that it was impossible, once he had agreed to this, to put a stop to it.62

Rosmini’s understanding – or misunderstanding – of Reid, and of Reid’s relation to Kant, is only a prelude to a system that he thought superior, both to the Critical Philosophy and to the Philosophy of Common Sense. His arguments for this position are long and intricate, filling more than eight hundred pages of the third volume of the New Essay. Fortunately, Rosmini also left a number of summaries of his system, including

Part I: Introduction

a Sketch of Modern Philosophy, published posthumously and translated here. Although Rosmini’s thought evolved after 1830, partly in his many philosophical polemics, partly in response to political and religious attacks, the ‘ideology’ summarized in the Sketch is very close to the New Essay.63 The central question of philosophy for Rosmini is the origin of ideas, which ‘comes down to finding out where the object of knowledge comes from.’64 It cannot come from sensation alone, either by inference or abstraction: this will be Rosmini’s reply to Locke’s sensism. Against Reid’s nativism he will hold that it cannot originate in a ‘primitive, mysterious and inexplicable’ faculty of the mind. And to Kant’s idealism his rejoinder will be that it cannot arise from the subject’s mental activity.65 After a historical review of the rise and fall of these systems, parallel to the account in the New Essay, the ideological argument of the Sketch begins with two types of cognition, which Rosmini calls intuition and affirmation or judgment.66 Intuition is the mental operation by which one comes to have – or to think – an idea. It is not opposed to judgment in the way that passive sensation is opposed to active understanding. On the contrary, intuition is an act of the intellect that must precede all judgments. Intuitive cognition for Rosmini is of things as possible, while judgmental cognition is of things as subsistent or not subsistent. In the act of intuition, ideas present things as possibilia – things for which subsisting and not subsisting are both possible. In the act of judgment, things presented to the mind as ideas are then affirmed as subsisting or not subsisting. Before forming a judgment about a tree, for example, and thereby affirming or denying its subsistence in the actual world, one must already have intuited an idea of a tree in the world of possibility. Because the act of judgment takes as its object what the act of intuition presents, intuition is prior to judgment. Moreover, because the object of judgment is just the object supplied, as an idea, by intuition, it is intuition rather than judgment that accounts for the objectivity of cognition. Strictly speaking, only intuition is cognition of an object; judgment merely affirms or denies the subsistence of objects already presented by intuition. Judgment is cognition of beliefs about objects as subsisting or not, while intuition is cognition of possible objects, which are ideas.67 Ideas are the means by which things are present to the mind. They are different in kind from sensations and cannot be derived from them, logically or psychologically. They are also objective because they are general and universal, unconstrained by the particular realities given in sense impressions. Ideas are objective and hence representational.68

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The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)

In fact, Rosmini’s idea has more in common with our notion of a conception than with empiricist ideas as copies of sense impressions. Accordingly, just as Rosmini’s idea is like our conception, his act of intuiting is like our act of conceiving or apprehending. Such intuiting yields a mental state with a content, a representational content presented to the mind. Like conceiving or apprehending, intuiting supplies this representational content but does not establish the subsistence or non-subsistence of what is represented. In the act of intuition one thinks an idea, and by ideas things are presented to the mind as possible. To represent as subsisting what the idea presents as possible requires another act, a judgment. Rosmini also holds that ideas are mental states rather than mental activities, thus distinguishing ideas from the acts or operations by which one comes to have ideas.69 Although the idea is objective, the act of intuition is subjective, the act of a subject. By distinguishing the subjective act from the objective idea, Rosmini wants to keep the subjectivity of the act apart from the objectivity of the idea. With this boundary clearly marked, it will not be any act of the subject that endows the idea with its representational, intentional, objective character, which is a character that it has essentially. Regarding this essence as an achievement of the subject – whether by abstraction (as empiricists believe) or by judgment (as transcendental idealists believe) – is a surrender to subjectivism. What we cognize by intuition or by judgment is obviously not nothing, and, so Rosmini asserts, it is also not ourselves; hence, ideas are not us or modifications of us. Unlike things subsisting in the world, ideas are also purely possible, existing in a way that the senses cannot detect. Because objects of cognition are supplied in the first instance by an intuition that presents only possible objects, and because such objects cannot be objects of sense, sensation cannot, in principle, be the origin of our ideas of objects. We cannot sense ideas, yet evidently we know them. Knowing, concludes Rosmini, is therefore not sensing – ‘a new and conclusive refutation of sensism.’70 If the senses cannot produce ideas, where do ideas come from? To answer this question, Rosmini examines special features of ideas, starting with two that he regards as primitive: universality and necessity. Ideas are universal because they may be realized in indefinitely many individuals and yet remain self-identical and unexhausted. And ideas are necessary just because they are possible. Unlike real, finite beings whose subsistence is contingent – beings that might or might not subsist – ideas as possible objects are necessarily possible: ‘for the possible object, we can never think that it is not – that it is not possible, in other words.’ One

29

Part I: Introduction

cannot think that the possible idea of a tree is not possible, which convinces Rosmini that ideas are necessary because they are possible.71 From the two primitive features of necessity and universality, Rosmini briskly derives two secondary features of ideas, infinity, and eternity. As universal, ideas are infinite, unlike the finite particulars that instantiate them. As necessary, they are also eternal: they must be, and so they must always have been and always will be. From these exalted properties, Rosmini reminds us, Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas inferred that ideas are located in God, and on this basis Malebranche constructed his theory of human knowing as vision in God. Rosmini describes himself as close to Malebranche – and to Bonaventura – but he also takes care to distinguish ideas as we have them from ideas as they are in God. In their divine locale, ideas are identical with God, so that Christ, who is God, is also God’s Word – simple, infinite, and selfimmediate – while human words and language are discursive, reflecting the multiplicity and limitations of ideas as received in the merely human mind. Our ideas retain some features of the divine originals, however, which persuades Rosmini that ideas must come from God, the longsought origin of ideas.72 Rosmini acknowledges, however, that the origin of ideas needs a better explanation, especially in light of differences between the human versions of ideas and the divine. How can such ideas be classified, and how might classification show how beliefs arise upon judgment from ideas already intuited? A first classification distinguishes the pure idea of being, completely indeterminate, from all other ideas, all more or less determinate. All ideas that are at all determinate must contain the purely indeterminate idea, which is absolutely without determination and completely universal. Purely ideal or possible being, in other words, is the element common to all ideas – including the pure idea itself. Within the immense but smaller (by one) class of determinate ideas, Rosmini’s second classification distinguishes completely determinate concrete ideas from incompletely determinate abstract ideas. A concrete idea of a star, for example, will include all the star’s properties – its colour, magnitude, and so on. An incompletely determinate idea of the same star, lacking one or more such properties, becomes more or less abstract. Both abstract and concrete ideas remain general, however, because both are universal, not individual. However, if an idea sheds all the properties of the object presented – if the idea becomes wholly indeterminate – it is simply the pure idea of being.73 At this point Rosmini divides his quest for the origin of ideas into two

30

The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)

branches, one leading to the purely indeterminate idea, the other to its determinations. The origin of the pure idea of being is God and only God. But sensation is involved in the origin of our more or less determinate ideas – both abstract and concrete – of such things as stars, trees, and books. Every person has the pure idea of being, along with sensations which are occasions for forming all other ideas as determinations of the pure idea. When I see a star, the sensation of light is the occasion for adding the determination of luminosity to the indeterminate idea. Various sensations thus provide occasions for various ideas, all equally possible but also determinate in varying degree. These ideas then figure in the act of judging whether the objects presented as possible actually subsist. This process of judgment is perception. ‘In the judgment by which we assert that the star is before my eyes – which is called the perception of the star – the idea is already contained.’ The order of this process – from pure idea, to more or less determinate ideas occasioned by sensation, to perception – is not obvious from the phenomenology of perception. It emerges only from our ability to universalize and abstract.74 Consider two events: a person sees a particular star and has a sensation; the same person then forms a judgment, thinking ‘this is a being that gives light.’ Although the second event is a perception that assumes an idea of the star, the mind can isolate this idea from the rest of the perception, the sensible and particular part, by the operation of universalization. Universalizing what was perceived, the mind preserves what Rosmini calls an ‘image’ of the star but subtracts its subsistence, treating it instead as possible, a pure but fully determined idea.75 The idea of the star minus only its subsistence is concrete, determinate but still universal. Having been occasioned by sensation, it is discovered by the mind, which treats as possible and universal what the sense of sight presents as subsistent and particular. Concrete ideas formed by the mental operation of universalization are specific types that can serve as exemplars of indefinitely many particular individuals, all identical except when they are individuated. Ideas formed by abstraction are also determinate, but not completely so. Subtracting the star’s determinations makes the idea of it more and more abstract, first lacking colour, then magnitude, and so on. Such generic ideas are unlike the specific ideas formed by universalization; they are more like descriptions of classes than images of individual members of classes.76 Having traced all ideas that are determined, in one degree or another, to sensation by way of mental operations, Rosmini now faces the harder

31

Part I: Introduction

task of finding the origin of the only fully indeterminate idea, the pure idea of being, which he will call ‘the Mother Idea.’77 If he succeeds, his ‘ideology’ or theory of ideas will be complete; he will have exhausted the relevant universe, which contains only the indeterminate idea and its indefinitely many determinations.78 Before taking the final step, he states eight corollaries of the foregoing argument; he will need them to establish the grand principles of psychology, theology, and morality that derive from his ideology. These corollaries summarize what Rosmini claims to have demonstrated: the purely indeterminate Mother Idea of Being, prior to all other ideas, cannot come from sensation, which is determinate, or from mental operations, which only add or subtract determinations. The Mother Idea is a requirement for any mental operation, in fact; lacking this Idea, the mind or intellectual soul cannot really be intelligent or rational. If the absence of the Idea from the soul deprives it of intelligence, while the presence of the Idea preserves it, Rosmini concludes that the Idea must be that light of the mind which everyone assumes and no one defines. But since this illuminating Idea is what makes the human soul intelligent, the light of the mind is the form of intelligence in the soul. Taken absolutely, it is the first idea, the Mother Idea, and the idea per se, prior to all other ideas, productive of them, and entirely independent of sensation.79 Common sense acknowledges a light of reason that is natural in humans and distinguishes them from other animals. Rosmini’s argument has shown, he assures us, that this light is the Idea of Being. We know from common sense that the Idea is part of human nature, not acquired but innate, planted there by the Creator. That the Idea is also self-evident, and thus accessible to common sense, is one of its necessary features since evidently it is known even though nothing else – nothing determinate, that is – can make it known. In fact, it is the Mother Idea that makes everything else known since everything else known must have being and must be known to have being. At last Rosmini has found the fundamental principle of his ideology. All ideas – concrete and abstract, specific and generic – are born of the same Mother Idea of Being, which is given in nature. Known of itself and not reliant on sensation, this Idea enters into the definition of all things but is itself undefined, susceptible only to the sort of description that Rosmini has provided. From the Mother Idea, which is the first principle of ideology, follow the first principles of psychology, theology, and morality. From one of the corollaries previously stated, we know that ideal being is the form or

32

The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)

essence of the intellectual soul. Since this essence is not spatial or corporeal, it follows that the soul is spiritual and therefore immortal. Since the Idea of Being is always being in its essence, the same essence that is non-spatial is also non-temporal, and yet the union of the Idea with the human soul is temporal. Hence, non-temporal being, the light of the human soul, must be prior to the soul; it must be the eternal light of the intellect that is God. God is also the end or purpose of the immortal soul, which gives the soul its duty and forms the basis of morality.80 Rosmini’s Mother Idea thus arms him with a comprehensive reply to godless sensism, whose roots he traced to the ‘immoral’ ideas of Locke and Condillac, regarding their systems as leading inevitably either to a sceptical or an idealist dead end.81 The obverse of Rosmini’s antipathy for Locke was his admiration for Reid, whose negative work refuted the empiricist theory of ideas, while his positive work replaced empiricism with a better, though still defective system. The genius of Reid’s theory of ideas, as Rosmini saw it, was ‘not to go beyond the fact. The fact tells us that the human mind perceives substance and being, things that do not fall under the senses and are altogether different from sensations, yet the mind perceives them on the occasion of sensations.’82 Pitting Reid against Locke, Rosmini depicts Reid’s quarrel with the older theory of ideas as a disagreement about the primary item of mental activity. To Locke he assigns the doctrine that the primary and original activity of mind is simple apprehension, to Reid the view that this activity is judgment. The result, he maintains, is paradoxical. On the one hand, judgment cannot be prior to simple apprehension because I cannot judge something of which I have no apprehension. On the other, apprehension cannot be prior to judgment because all original operations of the mind (except imagination) involve belief in the present or past existence of the object apprehended. Instances in which I apprehend an object independently of such a belief are products of abstraction from previous apprehensions in which belief is ingredient.83 Needless to say, Rosmini takes himself to have eliminated the contradiction that arises from his interpretation of Reid. But is that interpretation accurate? On the point that concerns Rosmini, in fact, Reid does not disagree with Locke: namely, about whether judgment requires apprehension of the thing judged. The disagreement is about two other issues: first, whether judgment is comparison of ideas; second, whether imagination, which does not involve a judgment about the existence of the object represented, presupposes perception, which does involve such a judgment. Reid denies that judgment is comparison of simple

33

Part I: Introduction

ideas; it is an act of the mind that predicates something of an object presented by conception. He also holds that perception, memory, and imagination are different in kind rather than degree; that imagination presupposes perception and memory; and that perception and memory consist in a conception and belief. According to Reid, any distinction between conception and simple apprehension will be between the act ingredient in all operations of the mind (save sensation) and that same act made an object of reflection by abstracting from the judgment that naturally attends it in perception and memory. Contrary to Rosmini’s view of him, Reid does not hold that judgment or belief precedes conception or apprehension – temporally, logically, or metaphysically.84 Despite Reid’s explicit statements to the contrary, Rosmini saw the dispute between Reid and Locke as about awarding primacy either to simple apprehension or to judgment, and he resolved the putative paradox as follows: first, innate in each of us is the intuition of the Mother Idea of being, which is wholly indeterminate, necessary, and universal; second, sensations are occasions for forming more or less determinate ideas through acts of judgment that predicate subsistence to ‘the complex of sensations received and joined to one another in a given way.’ Rosmini calls this act of judgment ‘the intellective perception of bodies.’85 Intellective perception is judgment, but only the universal, undetermined Mother Idea accounts for the intellective nature of perception, and this Idea is prior to all judgment. Hence, judgment both is and is not the primary mental act. It is not the primary mental act because mentality itself presupposes a prior act – intuition – by which we think the Mother Idea. And yet it is primary because, given that we are intellectual beings who intuit the Mother Idea, our first mental act is to form the idea of subsisting things by predicating subsistence of what gives rise to our sensations. Simple apprehension does not precede judgment; intuition precedes judgment. Simple apprehension is achieved by abstracting from ideas of subsistent things to ideas already formed in intellective perception by an act of judgment.86 Against this background, Rosmini’s criticism of Reid is not that he takes judgment to be the primary activity of mind but that he takes mental activity to be governed by arbitrary, inexplicable, innate laws of nature. According to Rosmini, Reid’s nativism is correct: we actually possess innate, a priori knowledge – the Mother Idea of being, which is necessary and universal. But what Reid deems to be knowledge of the first principles of common sense, though it is innate, is neither necessary nor universal. It is contingent on laws of the human mind, laws that could

34

The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)

have been and could be otherwise than they are, that govern only those beings whose minds happen to be as they are. Such laws of nature cannot explain our innate knowledge, Rosmini insists. By leaving perception, memory, imagination, and all other operations of the mind mysterious and unexplained, Reid condones the scepticism and idealism that he seeks to refute.87 Reid’s naturalism is also condemned by its inevitable result: Kant’s transcendental idealism – a pedigree that would have irked the sage of Königsberg. If Reid’s mistake was to hold that the objectivity of perception is secured by regular laws of nature, Kant’s was to secure it solely by the activity of the thinking subject. Adopting Reid’s notion of the law-like activity of mind, Kant adds that the laws applied in cognition have their origin in the mind itself. Only by applying such laws can we cognize objects, so that ‘our understanding is actually what partly creates its object on its own.’ If Reid’s world is an illusion that lacks the authority of reason, according to Rosmini, Kant’s world is a self-created delusion.88 Although Rosmini admires Reid as a progressive force in philosophy, he therefore accuses him of having planted the seed that grew into that poison tree. Thus, while agreeing with Reid about ‘the fact’ of what common sense reveals, he parted ways with him when the fact turned out to be rooted in naturalism. By itself, concedes Rosmini, Reid’s naturalism and nativism did not add up to full-blown subjectivism; his error was a venial sin of omission, and it did not complete the task of securing the objectivity of ideas. In the hands of ‘the sophist of Königsberg,’ however, nativism became subjectivism of the most corrosive kind – a critical scepticism that turned dogmatic with Fichte. Kant, as Rosmini misunderstood him, made the objectivity of ideas an arbitrary effect of the mind itself.89

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7

Primacy (Gioberti I)

Like Rosmini, Vincenzo Gioberti was a priest who came of age in postNapoleonic Europe, but his faith was less settled than Rosmini’s and his politics more dissident. He was born in 1801 in Torino, which had just been annexed to France and remained French until Vittorio Emanuele I was restored in 1814 as King of Sardinia and Piedmont. Since Gioberti’s family was lower middle class, a career in religion could be a path to success. After studies with the Oratorians and then in the theological faculty of the University of Torino, he found a post as court chaplain, before taking his theological degree in 1823 and being ordained in 1825. Besides the usual diet of ancient, Christian, and Enlightenment classics, he read Alfieri, Chateaubriand, Foscolo, Manzoni, Schlegel, and other Romantics who lit the fire of his fervent patriotism.90 In the midst of revolutionary turmoil in Torino, Vittorio Emanuele abdicated in 1821, but the revolutionaries had been plotting with Carlo Alberto, the abdicated king’s younger brother. Carlo Felice, the older brother, moved quickly to claim the throne and suppress the revolution, maintaining control until 1831, when he died and Carlo Alberto succeeded him. Meanwhile, secret societies – from the Sublime Perfect Masters in the north to the Carbonari in the south – had rallied to the banner of Italian independence and liberal reform, sometimes gathering enough strength to organize militarily. By the 1830s, Giuseppe Mazzini’s voice in these conspiracies was loud, and critical of the new king, whose agents detected sympathy for Mazzini’s Young Italy in young Father Gioberti and the ‘academy’ that he organized to discuss politics and philosophy. The police held Gioberti for a few months before forcing him into exile, first in Paris, then in Brussels. By 1833, he was writing abundantly, both journalism and philosophy. In 1834 he published a letter in Mazzini’s

Primacy (Gioberti I)

newspaper, Young Italy, turning Vico and Bruno into icons of Italian religious identity. A theological Theory of the Supernatural followed in 1838; an Introduction to the Study of Philosophy in 1840; and in 1843 his most celebrated work, On the Civil and Moral Primacy of the Italians.91 The Primato stirred the hearts of Gioberti’s countrymen and won him enormous acclaim. It was a manifesto for an independent Italian nation that would give its citizens constitutional liberties and achieve unity in a confederation of regional powers headed by the pope and governed from Piedmont. In this lengthy polemic, Gioberti reviews the many fields for which he claimed Italian primacy over the centuries, one being philosophy. But the seventh and current stage of Italian philosophy, in Gioberti’s view, was a mere imitation of Scottish and German systems: the upshot was the need for a native Italian reform of the discipline.92 The key to Gioberti’s reform is ‘protology,’ a metaphysical and practical realism grounded in legends of the ancient Italic teachings of indigenous Pelasgians and of Pythagoreans who colonized Italy from Greece. Their realism enabled the Italic sages of the West to escape the extravagant pantheisms and dualisms that infected the Orient and thus to grasp the importance of creation as the essence of God’s relationship to the universe that he brought into being. Firmly rooted in this native wisdom, Italian thought endured through six more epochs, from (2) the Roman era, through (3) the Church Fathers, and (4) the scholastics of the Middle Ages, until (5) the classicists of the fifteenth century tried to revive a paganism that no longer suited the peninsula. As Gioberti tells the story, this new classicism failed just at the moment when Luther was hatching his heresies. The next generations in Italy, led in a decadent age by Machiavelli, Galileo, and Paolo Sarpi, abandoned pure philosophizing for politics and science.93 Vico returned to philosophy, but in his own day (6) he was not understood. The teachings of Descartes – ‘Protestantism applied to philosophy’ – had meanwhile deceived even the Italians with rationalist psychology and sensism, which had been lurking in Christian philosophy since the days of Abelard – another French dissident. Gian Domenico Romagnosi managed to temper ‘the servile habit of Gallic theorizing’ but could not shake off the French yoke, which others traded for servitude to other foreigners like the German, Hegel. Of his immediate predecessors in Italy, the best in Gioberti’s estimation was Galluppi, who fought sensism with Reid’s system and made the best that could be made of ‘psychologism.’94 ‘Such is the final form of Italian philosophy,’ Gioberti decreed, while dismissing the seventh age of the Italian intellect as

37

Part I: Introduction a clever imitation of Scottish and German teachings. Our brave and honoured Galluppi is the Reid of Italy, drawing people back to the truth … by deep analysis, but without breaking through the boundaries of observation and experiments. Armed with these implements, Galluppi gloriously vanquished the sensism of his predecessors … with that shrewd forbearance, experimental and inductive, that produces useful discoveries in the sphere of internal facts – the application of Galileo’s method to psychology. But direct sensation is not enough for philosophy to be a science. Sensible phenomena cannot be completely explained without rising higher and entering the secret sanctuary of reason. Thus, as the Scottish School was displaced by the Critical School in the previous period, in our time Rosmini succeeded Galluppi … cleverly reviving the errors and pretensions of German Cartesianism – of Kantianism, in other words.

In Gioberti’s eyes, Reid once again surpasses Kant, not to speak of Rosmini, whose second-hand Kantianism he saw as abandoning Reid’s common sense but gaining nothing in the bargain, producing nothing better with its subjectivism than the defective empiricism that it sought to replace. ‘To substitute German rationalism for French sensism,’ Gioberti concluded, was ‘to leap from the frying pan into the fire, which should give pause to those few who still see some good in Rosminianism.’95 While in exile, Gioberti had written a book to survey the Philosophical Errors of Antonio Rosmini (1841−4) and to correct Rosmini’s followers, but he also drew a polemical portrait of Rosmini’s enemies in The Modern Jesuit (1846−7), responding to an attack on himself by the flamboyant Carlo Curci, S.J. After the enormous success of the Primato, Gioberti’s attack on the Society as the main impediment to unification attracted Catholics who were encouraged by his very different vision of national religion as a framework for national politics. The policy was called ‘NeoGuelf’ in reminiscence of pro-papal and anti-German positions taken by Italians in the Middle Ages. And when Carlo Alberto decided that The Modern Jesuit could be published in Torino, it was a sign that its exiled author could return, as he did in 1848, elected to the new Assembly and then acclaimed as its president. But the Neo-Guelf project dissolved in 1849, and Gioberti resigned his office, about a month before the Piedmontese army was routed at Novara. He died in 1852, once again an exile in Paris.96 Before all was lost, when Gioberti still thought he could create a unified Italy with help from the pope, he chose Rosmini as his spokesman in this crucial negotiation. But when the transactions were philosophical

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Primacy (Gioberti I)

rather than political, his view of his compatriot was negative – hostile, in fact, and friendlier to ‘the perception of the Scots.’ Gioberti thought that he needed Reid and the Scots to support his own ‘Ideal Formula,’ which he had previewed in the Primato and envisioned as displacing Rosmini’s system. Like Rosmini and Galluppi, he also saw himself as building on Reid’s refutation of the empiricist theory of ideas. Faced with the claim that ‘a mental entity is the object of our thought,’ he explained, ‘Reid has thoroughly exposed the falsity of this notion with regard to knowledge of bodies.’ Reid’s treatment of ideas encouraged Gioberti to ‘extend his doctrine to the whole intuitive truth, standing on the same basis as the Scottish philosopher – on direct and objective evidence, in other words.’ ‘After the direction given to psychology by the Scottish School,’ Gioberti insisted, the claim ‘that the idea is a subjective unknown’ is impossible to maintain.97

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8

The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)

Gioberti recorded the brunt of his assault on that claim in the fourth chapter of his Introduction: ‘The Ideal Formula.’98 His goals there are two: first, to derive a formula that expresses a judgment which is foundational both ontologically and epistemically; and second, to explain why the philosophical method of his day (which he calls psychologism) had failed to find such a formula. Psychologism, according to Gioberti, depends on reflection, conceptual analysis, and imaginative synthesis of ideas to reach ontological conclusions about extra-mental reality. This method, he maintains, leads to sceptical and idealist mistakes in epistemology and naturalist and pantheist errors in ontology. By starting with ideas in the mind and confining philosophy to analysing, synthesizing, and reflecting on ideas, psychologism reverses the order of nature, making the mind, its activities, and its contents prior and primitive, when, according to Gioberti, psychology actually presupposes a deeper ontology. Nonetheless, because Gioberti needs not just ontological but also epistemic foundations, he certainly wants the Ideal Formula to be a mental item – a judgment made by a subject and residing in the subject’s mind. Contrary to psychologism, however, this judgment is not produced by mental activity; it is revealed to the mind. Gioberti’s search for an ideal formula is the search for a primitive, foundational, revealed truth that has been obscured by a defective method, putting psychology where ontology ought to be.99 A successful exposition of this revealed truth, Gioberti concedes, will need a reflective psychology. But at the centre of that psychology he puts a distinction between intuition and reflection, and a view of their distinct roles in the origin of concepts of the real and the possible. Cognizing possibilia presupposes cognizing realia because an idea of the possible

The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)

abstracts from an idea of the real. I cognize the real by intuition, but I cognize the possible by reflecting on ideas presented in intuition. When I reflect on an idea of the real as an idea, I abstract from it to an idea of the possible, which lacks concreteness and individuality, thereby transforming a concrete and particular idea of something real into an abstract and general idea of something possible.100 Gioberti’s illustration is the familiar one of a triangle. Having seen that triangle over there, I acquire an idea of a particular real triangle. Then I reflect on that idea, as an idea, to get to another idea – an idea of a possible triangle, and of those there are infinitely many. Having first acquired a concrete idea of a real triangle, in other words, I then reflect on it to form an abstract idea of possible triangles. This abstract and general idea, which is of triangles in general, has none of the particularity of the concrete idea presented in sensory intuition.101 These distinctions reveal the origins of concrete and abstract ideas grounded in realia, ideas given first as particular by sensory intuition and then abstracted and generalized by reflection to form ideas of possibilia. But Gioberti identifies another type of non-sensory intuition, the ‘primitive intuition’ that presents us with pure reality: Being. Like sensory intuition, this other kind is immediate and direct. It is also non-inferential, non-discursive, and not the product of any mental activity. Present to this simple and autonomous intuition are objects as they are in themselves. Unlike objects of sensory intuition, moreover, these objects are substances, not properties of substances.102 According to Gioberti, I am presented in primitive intuition with a judgment that expresses the idea of real Being: ‘Being is necessarily.’ This judgment is unlike others in two important ways: first, it does not predicate the necessity that it asserts but clarifies it as a property already inherent in Being; second, it is not my spontaneous and autonomous act but a revelation to me by Being itself in unmediated primitive intuition. The judgment that Being reveals in intuition then becomes an object of my reflection, which – unlike my absolute receptivity to the primitive intuition – requires voluntary, active judgment.103 When I reflect on the judgment revealed in primitive intuition, Gioberti argues, I form the reflective judgment that ‘Being is.’ But my reflective judgment gets its epistemic standing from the judgment already expressed in primitive intuition. The primitive intuition – as divinely revealed – is objective, certain, and truth-making for the reflective judgment. The reflective judgment is the primitive human judgment because it is the human mind’s first act upon being given the primitive judgment as a revelation. Both

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Part I: Introduction

epistemically and etiologically, the reflective judgment is the basis of sound philosophizing, but real Being – God – ‘is the first philosopher’ insofar as reflective judgment starts with a prior judgment revealed by God.104 Gioberti’s view is that when I am presented, immediately and directly, with real Being in primitive intuition, I have positive experience of the concreteness, singularity, and individuality of Being, which is absolute and infinite, lacks nothing, and has no limitations. By contrast, all contingent things are limited, imperfect, and individuated by their various imperfections, giving rise to my negative experience of their concreteness, singularity, and individuality. Insofar as real Being is unlimited and without negative concreteness, singularity, and individuality, it is also abstract, general, and universal. Real Being is thus both concrete and individual, because its positive reality is maximal, and also abstract and universal, because it is infinite, absolute, and free of form. Real Being is thus the synthesis of the real, which is concrete and individual, with being, which is abstract and general. All real created things depend causally on real Being, and all ideal, possible things depend on the intuition of real Being by way of reflection. Finally, real Being creates speech as a ‘second revelation’ mediating between the divine judgment given in intuition and the human judgment achieved by reflection. Real Being reveals the divine judgment to primitive intuition in a linguistic form – a proposition – which reflective judgment can then communicate: ‘Being is necessarily.’105 The three words in this statement stand for the three elements of the divine judgment (call them a, R, and b), each of which actually stands for the same idea – the idea of Being (B) – expressed in three ways: aB RB bB. But to be explicit and complete, an ideal formula must be composed of two elements joined by a third, and those three elements must express and unite three different ideas to form a single, unitary judgment: two of the ideas must differ both from each other and from the idea of Being, but they must stand in a relation to the idea of Being that is both correct and not tautologous. Let ax Ry bz, where x  y  z, be the form of that formula. Because real Being uses speech as a ‘second revelation,’ Gioberti deploys linguistic analysis to determine the next version of the formula that he needs. The term ‘existence,’ he maintains, is tied to the idea of Being not only conceptually but also etymologically. He takes the etymology of the Latin ex(s)istere (‘appear,’ ‘arise,’ ‘emerge,’ ‘come into being’) to show that the word itself expresses movement from potency to act. Its components are the preposition ex (‘from,’ ‘out of’) and the verb

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The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)

sistere (‘put,’ ‘plant,’ ‘cause to stand,’ ‘cause to appear’). The preposition indicates movement from inside to out, and the verb expresses the concept of substance. The analysis of existere thus takes us to ‘one substance, found potentially in another, which thereby passes to an actual state and begins to stand on its own.’ And ‘existence is the reality proper to an actual substance, produced from a distinct substance that contains it potentially.’106 Because the idea of some existing substance necessarily entails the idea of another substance as effect entails cause, the idea of existence necessarily entails the idea of Being as the first and efficient cause of existence. The idea of a first and efficient cause, a creative cause (C), connects the idea of existence (E) with that of Being (B). Being is a first cause because it is not the effect of a prior cause, and it is efficient because it produces substances rather than mere forms. As a first and efficient cause, Being is necessarily a creative cause. Humans are also efficient causes, but their causal reach extends only to forms, not to Being itself, and their power to bring about changes of form depends on the antecedent first cause.107 Gioberti’s candidate for the ideal formula, ‘Being creates existences,’ is composed of (i) a primitive judgment passively received in intuition and affirming the necessary reality of Being – ‘Being is necessarily’ – and (ii) a primitive, passive perception of a fact: the fact that existing things have been created. Intuition thus gives us ideas not only of Being (B) and existence (E), but also of the fact (C) that unites them. The primitive judgment (B), that ‘Being is necessarily,’ is necessary and epistemically foundational. The primitive fact (C) – the fact that the first and efficient cause creates everything else that exists – is free and contingent and ontologically foundational. And although created things exist, the contingent existence (E) that they have is not the same as the necessary Being (B) of the Creator.108 At this point, Gioberti has found the elements needed for an ideal formula: B, C, and E, where B  C  E. Since the form of his formula must be ax Ry bz, where x  y  z, the form aB RC bE will do, and that is the form of ‘Being creates existences,’ which thus qualifies as the Ideal Formula. As plain as that may be, Gioberti complains that philosophers have obscured the Ideal Formula in two ways: first, by overlooking the special creative character of what connects existence and Being in the formula, because, unlike existence and Being, that connective item is an unfamiliar dynamic relation rather than the usual static substance; second, by starting with reflective judgments and ending with ontological conclusions, psychologism reverses the order of nature. Human judgment has

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Part I: Introduction

an object given to it – revealed to it – by real Being, which makes the primitive judgment of that object epistemically and etiologically foundational. Treating it as merely derived will yield only scepticism. More important: by relying on reflection, a subjective, human activity, to discover an objective, extra-mental reality, psychologism reverses the order of creation – from Being to existence. According to Gioberti, Being, creation, and existence are passively given; they are revealed, in intuition – immediately, directly, and in their natural order – not as inferred by reflection. Intuition witnesses creation as a fact, witnessing it in the order of its happening: from Being to existence. In other words, intuition is given the fact of creation in its objective temporal order. The mind, writes Gioberti, is the ‘direct and immediate spectator of creation.’109 Reflection, by contrast, represents Being and its creative activity in a subjective temporal order. Because sensible objects make the strongest impression on the mind, the reflecting mind begins with ideas of extramental things and then ascends inferentially to Being. By proceeding in that order, psychologism misses two crucial truths: that reflection on the idea of real Being presupposes the presentation of real Being to the mind; and that this presentation itself presupposes that real Being presents itself – reveals itself – to the mind. Because real Being reveals itself in the act of creation, and specifically in the form of speech (‘God said, let there be light,’ and so on), it reveals itself as both ontologically and epistemically foundational: real Being is at once the creative ground of existence and the epistemic basis of objective judgment.110

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9

A Natural Method (Mamiani)

Gioberti was not the first Italian of his day to look to Scotland for philosophical salvation, nor was he the first to follow Vico in exhorting Italy to revive past intellectual glories of her own. When Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere published his Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy in 1834, he had been writing for more than a decade. Born in Pesaro in 1799, he made contact in the 1820s with the Florentine literary circle established by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, a businessman of Swiss family who began to publish his Antologia in 1821. Mamiani’s reviews appeared regularly in this influential new journal, multiplying his personal contacts and building the base for a long life in public affairs.111 The scene of Mamiani’s first success was the Papal States, a large band of the Italian peninsula that ran diagonally from south of Rome to north of Bologna. In these papal lands the Restoration was very harsh. Government was entirely ecclesiastical, and a reactionary gang called Sanfedisti opposed the revolutionary Carbonari with their own weapons of terror. When the repressive Leo XII died in 1829, Austria found a replacement for him in Pius VIII, a choice that naturally annoyed the French and provoked the young Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to hatch his own conspiracy in Rome. This juvenile plot failed, but it sparked protests and fortified resistance in the northern Papal States, where a revolutionary government in Bologna greeted a new pope in 1831 by declaring its independence. One of the members of the Bologna Assembly was Mamiani, who became a minister and then an exile when Austria quickly crushed the uprising.112 The book that Mamiani published in Paris in 1834 was both ideological and historical. Like Galluppi, he wanted to embrace idealism and reject sensism without entirely abandoning empiricism, and he saw a

Part I: Introduction

path to this goal in history – or in mytho-history. Mamiani was inspired by two earlier Neapolitans: Vico’s star had been rising among Romantic intellectuals; and in 1806 Vincenzo Cuoco had finished his utopian romance, Plato in Italy. Thus equipped, Mamiani discovered the roots of a primordial Italian philosophy in the ancient Greek colonies of Sicily and the peninsula.113 He found that Archimedes had begun a philosophical restoration in Italy, even though fate opposed his lofty design. … It seems that the Italic school could not rise … such were the depths into which extravagant Eleatic dogma had plunged it. In fact, this same school had produced three great principles of philosophical method: first, a primal certainty, residing in the subjective state of our consciousness; second, Zeno’s dialectic, containing the results and rules of the technique of demonstration; third, the intention … to satisfy reason’s demands by … way of apodictic science. If one wants to add to this the observational, experimental, and inductive spirit of old Empedocles, the whole result might include all the best principles of philosophical method … No thinker of later times has been able to surpass [Archimedes]. Had he been allowed to found a school of wisdom … he would have started that restoration of all knowledge that was delayed by seventeen hundred years and more. At that time, with Galileo’s potent help … the principles of method, the hidden seeds that we have seen surviving in the ancestral Italic school, finally sprouted.114

Seeking a ‘natural method’ for the progress of science, Mamiani located its principles in Galileo and the Renaissance philosophers who came before him. Valla, Leonardo, Pomponazzi, and other early modern figures are heroes in Mamiani’s history, whereas in Gioberti’s view their revival of ancient wisdom had failed and left Italy defenseless against post-Cartesian sensism. Before either Gioberti or Mamiani declared himself philosophically, Rosmini had offered his own system as an answer to sensism, but Mamiani found it wanting, ending his summary of the New Essay with a poetic rebuke from Dante: ‘man does not know whence comes understanding of the first cognitions.’ Rosmini replied voluminously in 1836 with The Renewal of Philosophy in Italy Proposed by Count Terenzio Mamiani and Examined by Antonio Rosmini Serbati, his first sustained salvo as a philosophical artillerist.115 Twelve years later, on the day when Gioberti’s Torino government asked Rosmini to undertake his mission to Pius IX, Mamiani resigned the ministry to which Pius had appointed him three months earlier. When

46

A Natural Method (Mamiani)

the reactionaries who controlled the Pope blocked movement towards lay rule, Mamiani left for Torino to help Gioberti, but he soon returned to government in Rome, while Mazzini consolidated his power there and the young Garibaldi entered the Constituent Assembly. By the end of 1848 the revolutionaries had forced Mamiani out, but he continued his political work in Genoa and Torino, joining Cavour’s government in 1860 and playing a leading role in public affairs until his death in 1885. In 1870 he founded the journal that eventually became the Rivista italiana di filosofia, the first national organ of its kind, but by this time he had turned away from empiricism to a mystical Platonism.116 The motives of Mamiani’s earlier quest for a ‘natural method’ recall Galluppi’s hopes for a ‘true philosophy of experience,’ without Rosmini’s or Gioberti’s metaphysical ambitions – and without their philosophical depth.117 In one sense, Mamiani’s project foreshadowed Italian positivism in aiming to justify the ways of science to a God-besotted culture. But since Mamiani claimed to have found the origins of his scientific method in the glory days of the Italian Renaissance (a French name that he did not use) – in Bruno, Campanella, and Galileo, not Bacon, Descartes, and Locke – the same enterprise not only reinforced Gioberti’s boasting about Italian primacy but also anticipated the less bombastic historiography of philosophy that Bertrando Spaventa would offer.

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10

Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa)

If many Italians thought that the antidote for sensism had to be some kind of idealism, something more modern than the Platonic kind was already available from the prolific Hegel, who had begun his career with the Phenomenology in 1807 and died in 1831. Another decade passed, however, before Italian thinkers took much notice of Hegel, and by then his reputation was declining elsewhere in Europe. Few Italians could read him in German, and in any language his books were hard to find on the peninsula. Some learned about Hegel by travelling and teaching abroad, others from personal contacts with foreigners. Cousin was a crucial agent in these international communications, but in Italy the first important advocate of German idealism was Ottavio Collechi (1773−1847), a defrocked Dominican who had worked in Russia and Germany before returning to teach privately in Naples. Collechi was a critic of Galluppi and a devout Kantian who saw Hegel as a pantheist, but not so the students whom he attracted in the years before 1848.118 One of these young people was Bertrando Spaventa, who recalled decades later that ‘even before 1848 Hegel and the earlier German philosophers were known – perhaps better then than now – in Naples; besides Galluppi, old Collechi studied him, also Cusani, Ajello, Gatti and my dear friends Tari and Calvello.’ Besides Spaventa himself, other leaders of this first generation of Italian Hegelians, including some outside Collechi’s Neapolitan circle, were Stefano Cusani (1815−46), Francesco De Sanctis (1817−83), Stanislao Gatti (1820−70), Domenico Mazzoni (1783−1853), Giambattista Passerini (1793−1864), and Augusto Vera (1813−85).119 Spaventa was born in solid, middle-class circumstances in Bomba,

Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa)

near Chieti in the Abruzzi, in 1817. To prepare their careers, the family sent him and his younger brother, Silvio, to a local seminary until places opened at the prestigious Montecassino around 1838. Although Bertrando had no wish to be ordained, he deferred to the family’s needs, and in 1840 he left Montecassino for Naples as a priest, teaching privately there while also learning German and English. He soon made contact with Collechi’s group and heard his new teacher defend Kant against Galluppi, but the real excitement among his peers was about Hegel. When Collechi died in 1847, his students turned the funeral into a political demonstration, displaying the kind of Hegelianism that agitated the authorities in those troubled months before Marx and Engels published their Manifesto of 1848. Father Spaventa’s eulogy showed more respect by praising his teacher as the most expert Kantian of his day.120 The official Italian philosopher of the moment, however, was Galluppi, and in Naples his main advocate was Luigi Palmieri (1807−96), who inherited Galluppi’s chair in 1847. This distinguished appointment made Palmieri secure, while the younger Spaventa had to open a private school to earn his living. What Palmieri heard about Spaventa’s teaching scandalized him, moving him to complain in his prolusione (inaugural address) that ‘today we are thoroughly infected with Teutonic influences because there are those among us who would like to inoculate our youth with German pantheism, especially as it is garbed in the grand and noble cloak provided by the works of G.F. Hegel.’ Having lost his school to these complaints, Spaventa turned to private tutoring, and then he lost his brother’s support as well when the police ran Silvio out of Naples. Early in 1848 Silvio returned to found an opposition newspaper and win office in the new government, but when the government collapsed a year later, he was the first of the former deputies to be arrested. Bertrando, despite his quieter habits, was then accused of plotting regicide, and in 1850 he fled to Florence and then Torino, leaving Silvio still behind bars.121 During the next decade, Bertrando’s career as a political journalist was meteoric. In 1852 he joined a new magazine, Il Cimento, which took on the Jesuits and their new periodical, Civiltà Cattolica. Spaventa made himself Cimento’s most powerful weapon, and when the magazine folded he moved his guns in 1855 to a political daily, Il Piemonte, which published his ‘Jesuit Saturdays’ on a schedule that tracked the Saturday publication date of the Jesuit journal. Each of his satirical pieces opens with a telegraphic digest – mocking analogous items in Civiltà Cattolica – of recent Jesuit achievements and insights, such as the following:

49

Part I: Introduction ‘The Virgin Mary, anti-revolutionary; natural effects of the new dogma; prophecies by Blessed Leonard; universal peace … and papal supremacy in all things; justifying the Massacre of St Bartholemew’s Day; the arithmetic of assassins; preaching against modern education; the need for a new Massacre of St Bartholemew’s Day against free-thinkers; Father Bresciani’s candies and sherbets; Michele Amari, hydrophobe; the three thousand syllogisms of Père Mantignon.’

While exercising his genius for Rabelaisian comedy, Spaventa continued to read Hegel from the point of view of the Hegelian Left, seeing idealism as a philosophy of emancipation. His own thinking, informed by new German work on the history of philosophy, also responded to Gioberti and the Neo-Guelf view of Italian history. As Gioberti presented it, Italy’s primacy was primordial, perennial, and therefore static, whereas Spaventa saw Italy’s intellectual past as dynamic – a progressive exchange of ideas with the rest of Europe. Historical research – including research about Giordano Bruno and other Renaissance thinkers devalued by Gioberti – thus becomes a prelude to understanding philosophy in its modern condition, and history also grounds a critique of positions taken by contemporary followers of Galluppi (empiricism), Rosmini (supernaturalism), and Gioberti (Neo-Guelf ontologism).122 By 1859 Spaventa had won a chair at Modena, but he moved quickly to Bologna and then Naples, where in 1862 he delivered the prolusione and lectures best known by the title that Gentile gave them: Italian Philosophy in Relation to European Philosophy. His core notion – that ideas developed in Italy by Bruno, Campanella, and Vico circulated through Europe and then returned to Italy by way of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel – is essentially the same in the various forms through which it evolved in these years, though the term ‘circulation’ occurs only in the Bologna prolusione of 1860 translated here: To pick up again the sacred thread of our philosophical tradition; to revive the consciousness of our free thought by studying our leading philosophers; to search in philosophies of other nations for seeds received from the forefathers of our philosophy and then given back to us in new and better organized form; to understand this circulation of Italian thought whose meaning we have mostly lost; to recognize this return of our thought to itself in the great theoretical insight of our most recent philosopher; to know, in short, what we were, what we are and what we ought to be in the movement of modern philosophy, not limbs isolated and cut off, as it were,

50

Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa) from the life of the world’s peoples, nor captives bound to the triumphal chariot of a particular people, but a nation free and equal in the community of nations – this, gentlemen, has always been my life’s desire and pursuit.

When the call soon arrived for Spaventa to bring his stirring vision to Naples, it came from his old friend, De Sanctis, who was now minister of education. And brother Silvio was running the police. Times had changed.123 And yet changing times had not eliminated Neo-Guelf opposition to Hegel in Naples. Since Hegel was a foreigner and Spaventa a Hegelian, the Giobertians there – including his old nemesis, Palmieri – complained that he was un-Italian, replying to every objection with Gioberti’s Ideal Formula, which Spaventa mocked as an amulet or an incantation. ‘There is no corner of life and existence,’ he wrote, ‘to which they have not applied it, hammering it in by force, like a nail in a plank. And they think that having this nail in your pocket is enough to solve every problem. If they need to say that it’s raining or getting hot, they do not know how to say so except by starting with the Formula. Being creates the existent: therefore it rains. Being creates the existent: therefore it’s hot. And so on and on.’124

Having established himself as Hegel’s champion in Naples, Spaventa also stayed active in politics, but in his own quiet way, never making a speech in the legislature, to which he was elected several times. Nonetheless, philosophy and politics were two faces of the same coin for him and his contemporaries in the new Italy, as in the many debates on the role of Italy’s ancient Church in a new State. When Mamiani took a conservative stance on this issue in 1869, he had already found an ally in the positivist historian Pasquale Villari (1827−1917), who had recently declared himself philosophically in the widely read prolusione on Positive Philosophy and Historical Method (1866), which is also translated here. Spaventa exposed the point of this odd alliance between science and faith: if positivist criticism showed metaphysics to be impossible, it could be handed over to the clergy at no loss.125 During this same period, however, Spaventa actually called himself a positivist, meaning only that his idealism would respect the facts of human history. Starting with Hegel’s logic after his move to Naples, his philosophical project was to reform Hegelian idealism and make it intelligible to Italians. Accordingly, his Principles of Philosophy (1867) is a

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Part I: Introduction

study of logic as metaphysics – or the reverse – in the Hegelian manner, and his Studies on Hegel’s Ethics (1869) deal with practical philosophy. In later years, Spaventa sustained his critique of empiricism and defense of metaphysics, most notably in a study of Kant, Comte, and Mill on experience. He also kept on with his regular university lectures until he died in 1883.126 Spaventa’s inaugural address of 1860, delivered at a decisive moment for Italian politics, was itself a cardinal event in the story of Italian philosophy: by evaluating the previous half-century, the speech sets the agenda for the future of Italian idealism. Several decades later, both Croce and Gentile would recognize Spaventa’s key role not only as a pioneering Hegelian but also as a critic of Italian philosophy who found a way to rediscover its links with European thought without forgetting its native character. Addressing the youth of Bologna in their early days as citizens of a united Italy, Spaventa had polite words of praise for Galluppi, Rosmini, and Mamiani but awarded highest honours to Gioberti for having found a way out of the timid psychologism that he (Spaventa) regarded as always prey to scepticism. He also saw Gioberti’s system as perfecting earlier insights of Bruno and Campanella, while framing that earlier era as the Italian analog of the age of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Finally, he made the case for Vico’s originality in having rescued speculative thought from vacuous abstraction by embedding it in a theory of history and human development.127

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11

Facts and Laws (Villari)

In the year of Spaventa’s death, Villari published a response to Henry Buckle’s History of Civilization in England. Inspired by Auguste Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive (1830−42), Buckle had claimed that historians could find scientific laws by observing the basic forces of nature, and that such laws would reach beyond politics to the whole human condition. Villari was well qualified to introduce Buckle to Italy, having been a leading Italian voice for historical positivism since the memorable address that he gave to promote it in 1865. But this native Neapolitan had also studied with the Hegelian De Sanctis in the heady months before 1848, when he was arrested and forced to move to Florence and then the University of Pisa. He held the chair of history there until 1865, when he returned to Florence and its Institute for Advanced Studies. In 1863, two years after its publication in Italian, Villari’s History of Girolamo Savonarola and His Times was translated into English and became a best-seller. The same success greeted the English Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times, which appeared first in Italian between 1877 and 1882. Before introducing its protagonist, the English Machiavelli of 1892 gives 230 pages to a general account of the Italian Renaissance, as influential a statement in its day as the works of Burckhardt or his English interpreter, John Addington Symonds.128 Thus, from an anglophone perspective, Buckle’s reviewer of 1883 was the most famous Neapolitan intellectual, but Villari had moved a long way from his early days with De Sanctis and Hegel. His ‘Positive Philosophy and Historical Method’ of 1865 had declared allegiance to positivism in the most conspicuous way: it was a prolusione inaugurating his appointment to a chair in Florence, which he held until 1913. His cultural authority was enormous, extending from history and philoso-

Part I: Introduction

phy to the arts and economics, and political ambition of the same scope brought him elected offices and ministerial appointments. After 1873 he held elective posts several times; in 1891 he was minister of education; in 1898 he became president of the Italian Historical Institute and a member of the Crusca, a very prestigious academy; and in 1902 he was named president of the Lincei, living fifteen more years to enjoy these exalted honours.129 Positivism, however, the philosophical position that Villari advocated, had been in decline since the early 1890s, having reached its peak in Italy in the previous decade.130 And Villari spoke for only one type of Italian positivism, the kind promoted by historians and philologists who wanted to make their scholarship scientific. Other positivists – like Andrea Angiulli (1837−90) and Salvatore Tommasi (1813−88) – were more interested in psychology, medicine, biology, evolution, and Darwinism, especially the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820−1903). The later career at Padua of the long-lived Roberto Ardigò (1828−1920) was a persistent focus of contention: he left the priesthood in 1869 when his commitment to a naturalist theory of cognition compelled him to break with the Church. Later, in an 1891 essay on ‘Naturalist Positivism in Philosophy,’ Aristide Gabelli (1830−91) reasserted the claims of a humanist positivism against the evolutionist naturalism that he found dogmatic. In the same year, this was also Villari’s aim when he asked, Is History a Science?131 Villari’s answer starts in a measured way, recalling the rush of enthusiasm for Buckle’s effort ‘to transform history into an exact science’ but also noting how quickly the excitement died. Realizing that history cannot be a social physics, he nonetheless argues for a scientific historicism in which positivism is a method rather than a systematic science. It is this method, unburdened by metaphysical commitments, that historians must bring to bear on moral and social problems. But just as Spaventa had denounced Villari’s first positivist declaration of 1865, so Spaventa’s cousin, Benedetto Croce, was ready to demolish this later statement, at first dismissively in a work translated here, ‘History Brought Under the General Concept of Art,’ and then more thoroughly in later works on historiography.132 Before Villari became a patriarch of positivism in his later years, he had been its prophet in his youth, a record that made him too tempting a target for Croce to resist. Generations later than Croce’s would still remember Villari’s 1865 speech as a manifesto for ‘the ideology of the new progressive Italy,’ in the words of Eugenio Garin. Villari himself noted that ‘at the time I was the first to discuss positivism in Italy,

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Facts and Laws (Villari)

and so when I published my speech in Politecnico in Milan, a lively debate started.’133 Taking his inspiration, as so many others had done, from the Kantian requirement for constraints on reason, Villari argued that no sound thinking can be systematic or metaphysical. Moreover, because historicity is humanity’s defining feature, sound thinking about the human condition cannot simply mimic the sciences of nature, which are not historical. Nonetheless, Villari admired the post-Newtonian sciences for their incontestable success. He found the progress of the natural sciences evident in a clear consensus about what the facts are and about the laws that make the facts coherent. Philosophy, by contrast, had never known such consensus. In philosophy there was simply no sign of the progress made by the natural sciences, only an eternal parade of systems contradicting one another. Metaphysics had been the main arena of ceaseless disputing between monists and dualists, materialists and pantheists, nominalists and realists, Panglosses and Candides, until Kant tried to call a halt by declaring reason ‘powerless to prove the objective value of its own ideas. Reason can certainly be said to have an idea of time, space, beauty and so on, but do these have value outside us? That, according to Kant, is the question that can have no answer.’ Since unaided reason has no sure answers, since it has no access to certain and objective first principles, it is useless to construct any further metaphysical truths or systems on a foundation that only keeps crumbling.134 If Kant had shown that traditional metaphysical systems were the minutes of an interminable debating contest that ‘always ends in ruins,’ his insight did nothing to stop later philosophers from constructing postKantian or anti-Kantian systems of their own. It was not only tradition but also basic human instinct that kept raising questions that seemed to need metaphysical answers. Who am I? What is my purpose? What shall I do? These and other perplexities also seemed to confound practical matters of politics, law, morality, and culture, ‘all the sciences that deal with people and society … the moral sciences.’ Philosophy ought to provide a foundation for the moral sciences, or so it seemed.135 Since philosophy could never actually secure such a foundation, the old questions got no final answers and the systems just kept multiplying until ‘the spirit became weary,’ pushing some impatient critics to an obvious demand: no more metaphysics. A less drastic measure would not eliminate metaphysics but reform it, recognizing that even a futile metaphysics responds to something ineliminably human, and hoping that reform might discover a more plausible metaphysics to ground the moral sciences.136

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Part I: Introduction

Astronomy had once been astrology, after all, and chemistry had once been alchemy. Perhaps, by historical analogy, something more sensible might also come out of philosophy, if some other science could be a model for it. Such a model could not be a mathematical science, however, because the origins of mathematics are unknown (leaving no basis for historical comparison) and its methods of proof and calculation are useless to the philosophy of Villari’s conception, which had never proven anything and did not calculate. Perhaps a good model for philosophy would be scientific but not mathematical.137 Another analogy that is developmental, not just historical, sustains this suggestion. Since sciences are products of the human mind, all sciences – even philosophy – should reflect patterns of development that are evident not only in the lives of human persons but also in the histories of human peoples, as in the ‘ideal eternal history’ derived by Vico from his studies of antiquity. A recent theory of the same type was Comte’s positivism, which Villari treats as the equal of John Stuart Mill’s positivism in its influence on him.138 Comte, as summarized by Villari, had divided human development into three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive. In the primitive theological stage, everything later called ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ was done by priests who addressed natural phenomena as if they were divine persons or gods. In the next metaphysical stage, philosophers interpreted the same phenomena as products of metaphysical principles, but since they could never agree on those principles, contradictory metaphysical systems proliferated. Philosophy, according to Villari, is retarded in its development, and the philosophers who practise it are still stuck at the metaphysical stage, unlike the real scientists whose work has advanced to the highest or positive stage.139 When natural science was at the metaphysical stage – still part of philosophy, in fact – it was all just warring systems and no progress, just like philosophy as Kant found it. Natural philosophy was not yet science in the modern sense, but the delay was not from any lack of observing or reasoning, either inductively or deductively. Speaking of leading Italian thinkers of the Renaissance, and thinking of them in comparison with Francis Bacon, Villari notes that they ‘observed, induced and deduced’ without results, until Galileo ‘took the cart of the natural sciences, put it on wheels and pushed it down the road at high velocity so that the sciences have still not stopped and perhaps will never stop again … [following] one of the most extensive revolutions in the history of the human spirit.’140

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Facts and Laws (Villari)

Galileo’s revolution in method had two parts, negative and positive. The negative part, preferring ‘just one small and certain truth to a thousand large truths that are uncertain and hypothetical,’ excluded the traditional metaphysical quest for essences that had always ended in frustration. The positive part required induction from phenomena to laws, followed by repetitions of controlled experiments to verify the laws thus induced, but never proceeding by reason alone from hypothesis to hypothesis without intervening experimental checks. The products of the two-stage method were also two: facts and laws, the latter understood as relations among facts. Laws are answers to ‘how’ questions, putting aside the ‘why’ questions that have no scientific answers.141 Galileo’s method permitted systems only inasmuch as less general laws might be subsumed under more general laws, a humble goal compared to the ingenious metaphysical extravaganzas that use ‘why’ questions to ask about essences. Thinking of Gioberti and Rosmini, Villari describes how such systems still clashed in his day, but without effect: ‘One philosopher says: being creates the existent, and this is the point of departure for building a system. But another philosopher says: possible being, and from here starts a voyage toward a second system. And so it goes with many other words – the Absolute, the idea, nature, substance – that give rise to just as many other systems.’

But all was not darkness in Villari’s picture of philosophy. Logic (except Hegel’s metaphysical logic) had always been capable of clear and certain conclusions, though with small application to practical human problems. Villari seems to have thought of logic as an empirical science that ‘observed facts and looked for laws in them,’ a description that applies more convincingly to the philosophical psychology of the day, in which he detected signs of progress.142 Nonetheless, after so many centuries of metaphysical web-spinning, some critics wanted to have done with it and simply eliminate metaphysics as a failed science like astrology or alchemy. Although Villari was more inclined to reform than to liquidate, he knew that reform would be difficult. Like any science, philosophy must submit its findings to verification. But the only means of verification are mathematical and experimental. Since he could find no mathematical proofs or experimental tests in philosophy, verification seemed impossible. What to do? Should philosophy just be abandoned as hopelessly pre-positive? Or might it be possible to repeat Galileo’s scientific revolution in the case of philoso-

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phy and thereby find a method to verify at least some of philosophy’s claims?143 Facing this choice, Villari took a pragmatic and restrictive view of philosophy as the study of what is human, while acknowledging that all we know about humanity is intra-mental. And then, outside the domain of morality, he limited philosophy’s scope to logic, mind, and epistemology, insisting that the mental phenomena that inform us about these topics must be studied as human, contingent, and mutable, not as abstract, eternal essences. Reason alone, which may be deluded, gives us no reliable access to these items. This is the problem: ‘to find a way to get from the I to what is outside the I by checking and testing the ideas that we find in ourselves.’ The solution – leaping across the chasm to other minds – is that ‘this idea that you find in yourself is generally found in almost all other people.’144 In the case of philosophical ideas about art, for example, we can rely on ‘the history of art as a check and as a sort of test of our theories.’ In general, since history has so much to do with politics, society, and moral choice, history will be a likely place to look for the facts that can serve as checks on the key philosophical claims of the moral sciences.145 Psychology is another promising source of experimental data. ‘After what Vico found – that the laws of the world of nations are the same as the laws of the human spirit that created this social world – from the one you can get the science of history and from the other the science of man, tested and demonstrated. For if history somehow gives you the external world on which to experiment and verify the inductions of your psychology, the psychology then becomes a torch that illuminates history. The laws of the one, if they are true, must be checked against the other, and viceversa.’146

Thus armed with the mutually verifying facts of history and psychology, Villari had hopes of solving a very large problem for human society, especially in Italy: namely, ‘to find the institutions that are the better aids to its progress.’ In this quest, his methodological convictions were as strong as can be imagined. ‘We are all convinced,’ he claimed, ‘that society’s laws are as inviolable as those of nature, and that … we should … manage and make use of them, just as we make use of natural laws and agents.’147 ‘Examining the whole human being,’ he continued, ‘from era to era and year to year, we will find that its life has a constant counterpart in the life of society and in the history of the human race. Every new idea,

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every faculty that we observe in the human person, inevitably gives rise to a new series of social facts,’ and on the basis of those facts we can proceed scientifically. Metaphysics has never progressed in this way, and yet the metaphysical ideas pondered by philosophers have been realized in society as religion, providing data that can be studied historically and psychologically. From such research we will ‘not get absolute and full knowledge of God, something … renounced for the present. But [we] can experiment and use history to test how the idea of God emerged.’ In this way, we may achieve ‘a practical, positive but also progressive knowledge of the human heart.’148 This positive knowledge will come only from applying ‘the historical method to the moral sciences … giving that method the same standing that the experimental method has in the natural sciences. Hence, positivism is a new method, definitely not a new system.’ It is certainly not traditional philosophy and does not try to answer all of philosophy’s questions. Unlike philosophy as previously practised, the positive method ‘renounces all absolute conclusions,’ limiting itself to the human case and studying ‘only facts and social and moral laws by patiently checking the inductions of psychology against history and finding the laws of the human spirit in the laws of history.’149

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Real and Ideal (De Sanctis)

Although Villari was a conspicuous target for the young and ambitious Croce, one of Croce’s heroes was Villari’s teacher, Francesco De Sanctis, remembered today as the first great literary historian and critic of modern Italy – above all for his History of Italian Literature (1870−1). Like other intellectuals of his generation, De Sanctis lived a life fractured by the epochal events of 1848 and 1860, which compelled him to think about human affairs in a broader and deeper way. Born in 1817 in the region of Avellino, east of Naples, he moved to the city in 1827 to pursue literary studies, meeting Leopardi and founding his own school there at the age of twenty-two, while also participating in Collechi’s Hegelian group. In 1849, having joined the failed insurrection in Naples of the previous year, he fled to Calabria and was arrested as a conspirator in Mazzini’s Young Italy. He then spent three years reading Hegel while jailed in the Castel dell’Ovo.150 Released in 1853, he went north to Torino, avoided active politics for a while, studied Dante but also wrote a poem about his imprisonment, ‘La prigione,’ whose sentiments were both revolutionary and Hegelian. He then began to produce the essays and journalism that marked him as a man of the Left and therefore unemployable. To find a job, he left for Zurich, where he taught literature and wrote until returning triumphantly to Naples in 1860, as governor of Avellino and minister of education, appointed first by Garibaldi and then by Cavour. He was also elected to the first national Parliament and raised his public profile by editing a daily newspaper. The first collection of his essays appeared in 1866, just before he started work on the History of Italian Literature, which is still in print. One of his best-known pieces from this period, ‘Science and Life,’ started as a prolusione, following his appointment to the University of

Real and Ideal (De Sanctis)

Naples in 1871. By 1875, however, the Left’s electoral success called him away from teaching to full-time politics, until bad health made him withdraw from ministerial duties as well in 1880. He was elected again as a deputy in 1882 and died in 1883.151 By the time De Sanctis passed away, the academic study of literature had turned positivist and unfriendly to idealism, even his moderate kind. Even the young Croce disliked his historicism, though he admired the criticism nonetheless – thinking better of the many essays than of the imposing History. It was Croce, however, followed by Gentile, who made De Sanctis a revered figure for Italian idealists of the twentieth century. And yet De Sanctis had insisted on limits to Hegelianism: no dogmas, no triads, nothing a priori, only the two experiential principles that he thought basic to modernity: ‘becoming as the basis of evolution and existence as the basis of realism.’ What he meant by ‘realism’ was much affected by his reading of Émile Zola’s naturalist fiction, which had begun to appear in 1867. The ‘relentless painter of that vast French corruption’ understood literature as aiming ‘to approach nature and reality’ because life itself – not the Beautiful or the Good or the True – is the object of art. The living always includes both the real and the ideal, and valuing them both is the critic’s task.152 The occasion for De Sanctis to write in philosophical terms about ‘The Principle of Realism’ was that he had read a book with that title by Julius von Kirchmann (1802−4), a distinguished German jurist who also became president of the Philosophical Society in Berlin in 1846. Having heard a good deal of loose talk in his own country about realism, De Sanctis set about to reduce the confusion, starting with a declaration of what realism is not: neither materialism nor sensism nor empiricism. Although Hegel had condemned empiricism, he would now be obliged to respect realism because it ‘puts thinking in as lofty a position as the Idealists do.’153 Idealists go astray, however, when they regard ‘thinking as the unique and direct source of being because what is highest and first in being can be learned only from thinking.’ Realists correctly object that being ‘can be known only by perceiving’ and that ‘the only purpose of thinking is to elaborate the content of perception.’ Knowledge needs two instruments, in fact, both thinking and perceiving. But both tools are forged in experience, which alone gives us our mental objects and their extra-mental referents – all the being that we can know. Only perception gives us the content of being, however, without which its forms would be empty thoughts.154 One perverse consequence of this realization, that both thinking and

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perceiving are necessary, is that philosophers have tried to reduce one to the other, ending in the unsettled disputes between idealists and materialists. ‘All the systems of monism are just a game,’ says De Sanctis, and the false unities of monism lead nowhere or everywhere: ‘depending on how good the magician is, we can get anything we want.’ A more useful inquiry, he argues, will start with the two propositions – ‘what is perceived exists’ and ‘what contradicts itself does not exist’ – whose joint product is realism. The first proposition tells us that thinking gets all its content from perception, the second that thinking discovers the truth by eliminating what is false from the deliverances of perception by forming concepts, constructing laws, inducing, analysing, synthesizing, and classifying. De Sanctis acknowledges that his ‘principle of Realism’ is nothing new; Bacon, Locke, and Hume recommended it; Newton and other natural scientists put it into practice. In fact, it just restates the even older scholastic maxim that ‘there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.’155 De Sanctis also recognizes a type of knowledge that has no content, the knowledge of forms which is vacuous just because of its purity and which is therefore the source of the contradictions and antinomies analysed by Hegel and Kant. Such knowledge is not of contents but of relations, the infinitely many relations that concepts can have with one another. In Hegelian terms, a content taken in isolation is a thesis, but its antithesis is a relation that stands in an infinite series of such relations, a ‘bad infinity’ unless a synthesis resolves it.156 The point of realism is not that there are no contentless forms or that they have no uses; De Sanctis conceded that such forms had proven themselves quite useful in mathematics and the natural sciences. The critical, historical point is that philosophers have always gone wrong by treating merely relational forms as if they could provide knowledge of real being. Because they could find no general laws in the particulars of experience, philosophers detached thinking from experience in order to make it capable of knowing universals. The result was that the ‘categories of pure knowledge … became the categories of primary being, and the Absolute was discovered.’157 To correct the absolutist error, De Sanctis applies a principle of realism that cannot be demonstrated, though he finds it supported by widespread observation and practical use. No one gets through life without relying on perception and trusting the principle of non-contradiction, which is enough to persuade him that these two core elements of realism are not just ‘empty formulas.’ They are ‘common to all people’ and provide ‘a solid foundation from which observation and induction can

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lead to truth.’ Once perception has been systematically corrected by thinking, the metaphysical mechanisms of other systems become obsolete. Realism too is a system, but not of the absolute kind. The order that thinking gives to perception is ‘a relational concept to which nothing in the object corresponds.’ But a provisional, instrumental order is no less useful for teaching, learning, and discovery, as long as the heuristic is not mistaken for an ontology.158 The great virtue of realism is that it ‘gets directly to its object’ without metaphysical encumbrance. Realism needs only perception corrected by thinking, and derives no ontological conclusions from its methodological principles. Although those principles may seem to exclude monism, a realist will not insist on that metaphysical likelihood. On the contrary, in all the traditional systems she will discover insights that have their advantages, as long as they are not exalted as absolutes. As a critic of the old systems, De Sanctis concluded that ‘the whole point of Realism is to develop all the richness found in existence.’159 He was happy to see a thousand blossoms in the garden of metaphysics because he understood realism not as a global alternative to any and all such theorizing but as a tool for detecting particular mistakes. All hypotheses must be screened by perception and critical thinking. Accordingly, realism submits philosophy to ‘the same philosophical test that applies to all the special sciences. It keeps whatever passes this test. Anything else will be a nice game but not the truth nor even a start on it.’ Still, the many grand systems recorded in the annals of philosophy will offer strong inducements to feigning hypotheses, ‘putting to use all the riches of imagination and sentiment. The genuine Realist philosopher rejects these aids, even at the cost of seeming flat and boring.’160 Realism may be dull and homely, but it is not the empiricism that Hegel rejected: near the end of his essay, De Sanctis emphatically repeats this point that he has already made. The upshot of the reminder is that his realism is ‘a recent development of Hegel’s teaching … When what is obscure and contradictory in Hegel … has been removed, Realism presents these teachings in their full truth and in a clear form.’ Anticipating Croce’s project, De Sanctis thus seems to regard his own account of remedial thinking as an upgraded version of Hegel’s logic.161 Hegel’s idealism had been notoriously doctrinaire, however – a warning to posterity that even realism might breed its own dogmas of sensism or materialism. The cautious and correct route for realists will be the one marked out by Bacon and Galileo, which is not a doctrine but a method, a properly modest undertaking. And yet De Sanctis worries that as philosophy

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lowers its sights, ‘many are discouraged and talk about the end of metaphysics … [and] poetry,’ while his hopes for both are eternal. ‘What are natural selection, the principle of heredity and evolution, the unconscious and the internal states of atoms but attempts at metaphysics,’ he asks, adding that ‘these concepts do not come from constructs of pure speculation, as they used to do … As results of long and patient observation … they are tools of Realism that construct new kinds of metaphysics … [that] can go nowhere without Realism as [their] passport.’ ‘We are deep in Realism,’ De Sanctis concludes: ‘the new generation runs after us with the same passion that made … us … run after Hegel.’162 Realism is the new Hegelianism, De Sanctis suggests. Hegel was surely an idealist, however, and De Sanctis has been hard on idealism. ‘The Ideal is dead.’ But wait. ‘The Ideal has risen!’ This paradoxical pair of ejaculations ends a short piece on ‘The Ideal’ which is even more occasional than ‘The Principle of Realism,’ but long enough to hedge a little on realism. Speaking – without much preparation, perhaps – to the Philological Circle of Naples in 1877, De Sanctis first observes that the members of the society are bound to do good for one another by a ‘feeling of duty,’ which is a ‘feeling of the Ideal.’ But this sentiment, he fears, must reflect a split personality. What is this talk about the Ideal, he wonders, ‘at a time when everything is Real … [and] the Ideal is dead and buried?’ He responds with a little eulogy for ‘the companion of my youth … [that] has stirred my heart many times.’163 De Sanctis assumes universal assent to the first premise of his speech: that infants and savages behave like animals; they differ from civilized adult humans in acting merely to preserve their lives, in not experiencing those lives as human. Only the human feeling of belonging to humankind will lead to reflection on that feeling, and thus to the moment ‘when a person conceives an idea of what was a feeling for him the day before.’ The generalizing of human qualities – patriotism, for example – is the birth of ideas. But ‘ideas become the Ideal … only when … imagination takes hold of ideas and … produces feeling … in such a way that the idea becomes like the pillar of fire that guides the human race … taking different forms in art, religion, philosophy and history.’164 How does this becoming come to be? Where does the Ideal come from? From the Real. By observing real things that are beautiful or ugly, for example, we think the corresponding ideas, from which we ‘then create the Ideal of art, which is the Greco-Latin Ideal.’ De Sanctis supposes that because ideals have cultural and temporal boundaries – Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Christian – they may decay if those boundaries break

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down. But when the decadent ideal turns into a prison, thinking aspires to freedom, a new ideal. And when freedom is not just for the individual but for all people, the still higher ideal of humanity emerges. We will have created ourselves by realizing the progress of history.165 Nonetheless, De Sanctis finds it an odd feature of his time that ‘we believe that the Ideal no longer exists. And I find not just … Realism … A still stranger phenomenon … [is our] looking more lovingly today on our animal part than on the human … thinking more of the monkey than of man.’ After Lavoisier and Darwin, the Ideal had faded into an illusion. Thinking was a residue of chemical reactions, morality an afterglow of metabolism, so that ‘all the qualities that are really human appear to be bestialized.’ Ideas are instincts, imagination is a mechanism, passion is just appetite.166 Peering through the gloom of a re-bestialized humanity, De Sanctis spots a glimmer of the Ideal. What cheers the old revolutionary is that modern people have found modern ways to protest the animal negation of the human. When all ideals have been banished from reality, the cries of pain must still compete with irony, laughter, and eruptive rage. And those cries are not the swan song of the Ideal. They are screams of birth: ‘in laughter, in the grotesque, in comedy, in pain and in indignation we see nothing more than the sign of something laboring that will bear is own fruits. At one time’ – before the Revolution, to be precise – ‘we used to shout, “The King is dead. Long live the King!” Now I say, “The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is risen!”’167

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Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)

After De Sanctis welcomed realism in his 1872 essay on ‘Science and Life,’ some critics thought he had surrendered to positivism, though Croce and Gentile would later deny it. In 1876, when the great critic published his ‘Principle of Realism,’ Francesco Fiorentino gave an inaugural address on the related themes of ‘Positivism and Idealism,’ and there was no doubt about his idealist credentials, though he acquired them only after completing an eclectic philosophical education based on Cousin, Galluppi, and Gioberti. Fiorentino was born in 1834 near the toe of the Italian boot, in Sambiase Catanzaro. He read law before moving to philosophy, at first the Neo-Guelf kind. Then, before taking his first job in a liceo in Spoleto, he fought the Bourbons in Calabria. When his very successful study of The Pantheism of Giordano Bruno appeared in 1861, his account of the martyred philosopher was passionately nationalist and still Giobertian. But by 1862, when he took the chair at Bologna recently vacated by Spaventa, he had begun to take German idealism seriously – Kant especially. His later appointments, accompanied by other important books on Telesio and Pomponazzi, were at Pisa and Naples, where he ascended again to Spaventa’s chair in 1883. By that time, Fiorentino stood politically with the Historical Right and won elective office by opposing the politics that De Sanctis supported.168 He died in 1884, just before the publication of his most enduring work, The Philosophical Resurgence [Risorgimento] of the Fifteenth Century, in the next year. Despite its title, the book is about the Renaissance, the period so effectively advertised under that French name by a Swiss historian of culture, Jacob Burckhardt, in a book published in German in 1860 – but not until 1876 in Italian. Ignoring the label that Burckhardt

Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)

(and Michelet) had made canonical, this first extensive study of Renaissance philosophy by an Italian claims to be about a Risorgimento, which now, both in Italian and in English, is the name not of the period that Fiorentino studied but of the era in which he lived. Only in the early twentieth century, while Gentile was reformulating the history of Italian philosophy, would the current usage of ‘Rinascimento’ and ‘Risorgimento’ become the norm in Italy. In effect, it was Risorgimento politics and philosophy that made the Renaissance a modern Italian property, decades after Spaventa had embraced the period that Gioberti disclaimed. Fiorentino’s book on Quattrocento philosophy was the sequel to Spaventa’s rejection of Gioberti’s historiography, and Fiorentino’s heirs in this regard were Gentile and Eugenio Garin.169 Fiorentino began to turn Spaventa’s theorizing into concrete history in 1868 with his detailed studies of Pomponazzi, Telesio, and other Renaissance philosophers. As an original thinker, however, he promoted views that were as much Kantian as Hegelian, aiming at a critique of the findings of positive science, especially evolutionary biology. The essay on ‘Positivism and Idealism,’ translated here, shows Fiorentino evaluating the claims of these competing positions.170 Earlier, in letters written from Bologna in the Spring of 1865, Kant’s was one of the systems that he sought to relate to Vico’s New Science.171 If Italian philosophy was to have a voice in the international conversation that Spaventa had described, a philosophical Vico who not only revises Descartes but also adumbrates Kant would have something to say to contemporary philosophers who could make little sense of a merely antiquarian Vico. On the other hand, Fiorentino realized that his syncretizing view of Vico’s thought would also annoy the Italian nationalists who needed their hero to be a complete original – as Descartes, the founding hero of French philosophy, had claimed to be. For almost a century after Vico died, in 1744, only a few innovators like Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi had paid much attention to the great Neapolitan, whose masterpiece found a German translator only in 1822, followed by the bestselling French abridgement of 1827 by Jules Michelet. Meanwhile, Cuoco and other Neapolitan progressives were making the case for Vico to their correspondents in other parts of the peninsula. The result of the ensuing Vico craze, according to Fiorentino, was uncritical adulation. He interrupted the applause with analysis of links and isomorphisms between the New Science and other ways of doing philosophy – not just philology.172 The medium for Fiorentino’s message was a series of epistolary essays addressed in 1865 to the Marchesa Marianna Florenzi Waddington, who

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was sixty-two when she published her own Essays on Psychology and Logic in 1864. Born in 1802 to the noble Bacinetti family of Ravenna, she first married an Italian, the Marquis Ettore Florenzi of Perugia, in 1819. When her first husband died in 1833, she married a Protestant expatriate, Evelino Waddington, in 1836. Meanwhile she had cultivated a long friendship with Ludwig I of Bavaria, who abdicated in 1848. (The King commissioned one of the several portraits of his companion that survive.) Although she befriended princes, the Marchesa was an untypical aristocrat: like few Italian woman of her time, she studied science – at the University of Perugia. She also organized salons and did risky work as a political journalist and a translator of foreign texts that the authorities disliked – a career that won her election (she was the first woman so honoured) to the Philosophical Academy of Naples in 1865, five years before her death in 1870.173 Her 1864 Essays open with schematic introductions to logic and psychology before proceeding to the special topic of the soul’s immortality. She examines the soul in the framework of German philosophy, naming Kant and Schelling but looking for a Hegelian solution to a topic that she thought not well handled by Hegel: the soul’s purpose and destiny. She finds immortality to be not just compatible with Hegel’s system but required by it. Importing Hegel into Italian philosophical culture for this purpose was benign: what harm could come of finding support from abroad for a key tenet of Roman Catholic faith – the immortality of the soul – whose career in philosophical theology had been long and troubled?174 The Marchesa’s private thoughts in the years just before she corresponded with Fiorentino were more threatening to conventional piety. She read his book on Bruno’s pantheism, and in a draft essay on that notorious doctrine, she not only endorses it but also attributes it to St Paul – the unholy nightmare of Spinozism revived in the previous century by Jacobi’s quarrel with Mendelssohn about Lessing. She explicitly denies the dogma of creation ex nihilo and identifies her impersonal God with the material universe, citing Bruno, an executed heretic, as her authority. Along the way, however, she makes use of Spinoza’s arguments before rejecting the version of divinity that she found in Schelling – an undeveloped deity that remains unaware of itself until it is fully realized in human reason. Although she mentions Gioberti only once, it is clear that she has read him as well as his great rival, Rosmini, who accused one another of the pantheism that she embraces.175 Although Schelling had published a book called Bruno oder über das

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göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge in 1802, he actually seems not to have read Bruno’s majestic Italian dialogues. Nonetheless, it was probably the appeal of Schelling’s title to an Italian readership that persuaded the Marchesa to translate it, and then to publish it in 1844 in the face of official resistance. A few years later, Spaventa drafted (but did not publish) the first modern Italian monograph on Bruno, thinking of him as the Italian Spinoza. To follow up his monograph on Bruno’s pantheism – dedicated to the Marchesa – Fiorentino also planned a large study of Giordano Bruno and His Times that he did not live to publish.176 In the year before her translation of Schelling’s Bruno appeared, Florenzi Waddington had launched her career as a philosopher with a collection of Various Thoughts that Mamiani encouraged her to publish. At this time of her life, however, she was as much a political agent as a philosopher. Despite her first husband’s official obligations to the papacy, in a city where papal rule was still a threat, she had long shared the anti-clerical instincts of the liberal circles in which she moved, always distrusting the Pope’s assertion of temporal power. She was never a republican, however, and thought Italy unready for democracy, but her commitments to nationalism and constitutional monarchy were passionate and openly declared, starting with the disturbances of 1830 in Italy and the rest of Europe. When Pius IX turned his back on the liberals after 1848, her private words were to ‘damn the butcher who usurps the name of the Vicar of Christ on earth! Pius IX has given us the hearts of tigers,’ while publicly concluding that ‘on the principles of reason the Protestant religion … is more plausible, more acceptable.’177 After the disillusionments of 1848 and their sorry sequel for local affairs in Perugia, the Marchesa found politics less attractive than philosophy in the next decade. She had known Fiorentino before 1861, when he dedicated his first book to her – and elicited her delight that this Italian thinker knew some German. Her own international network in philosophy was large and well established by this time. She had improved her German on visits to King Ludwig in Munich, where Schelling was the court philosopher. In 1860 she corresponded about Schelling and Bruno with Baron Karl Bunsen, who was her second husband’s (Evelino’s) cousin and the Prussian ambassador to Rome, Bern, and London. Evelino’s extended family was renowned in France as well. Charles Waddington-Kastus (probably a cousin) taught philosophy in Paris and wrote a study of Aristotle’s psychology that the Marchesa translated into Italian in 1856. One of Charles’s cousins became prime minister of France in 1879, and another was a distinguished politician. Such family and politi-

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cal connections opened doors to Victor Cousin, Etienne Vacherot, and other French intellectuals.178 Thus, the woman to whom Fiorentino wrote his philosophical letters of 1865 had long since made her name. Since she had helped shape and guide the Romantic culture that brought German idealism into Italy, it was natural for the Marchesa to ask Fiorentino about Vico’s place in that circuit of ideas. Fiorentino’s chair at Bologna had come to him from Spaventa – also an admirer of Florenzi Waddington – and Spaventa had regarded Vico as the only creative Italian thinker of his age. Vico alone had really searched for the metaphysics of mind that Kant and Hegel would finally discover. But Fiorentino picked up the thread that ties Vico to Kant only in his third letter to the Marchesa, after dealing with Plato and Descartes in the first two. Fiorentino admired Vico’s genius and lamented the obstacles that kept him in obscurity, but he found these lesser facts insignificant in comparison to the larger rhythms of the spirit. Some of the New Science was latent in the Republic, he explained, and when the hinges of history were ready to turn, Vico was there to uncover what had been hidden. The politics of the Republic mirror a psychology. Faculties of reason, courage, and appetite correspond to aristocratic, martial, and democratic forms of government. In Vico this Platonic analogy becomes ‘an ideal eternal law [causing] … all forms of government [to] arise from one another in a way explained not by chance external circumstances but by the internal order of the faculties of the mind.’179 According to Fiorentino, Vico understood Plato’s psychology as grounded in metaphysics – as showing the way, in other words, to a modern philosophy of mind. But Plato had failed to reach that goal because he stopped at metaphysics, treating the human person as an abstract, ideal vehicle of contemplative reason, whose object is the True. Ever since the Fall, however, real, concrete humans have been far from ideal, once a perverse will corrupted them. And yet the same will that drove Adam and Eve out of paradise also equipped them to act in postlapsarian history, to do and to make the things about which they could be certain because only they themselves had done and made them. Hence, while the true knowledge of metaphysics may elude sinful humans, even sinners know what they have done, in a practical, historical sense: the history that humans make is most of what they can be certain about.180 In effect, this first letter of Fiorentino’s to the Marchesa revises the Table of Opposites used by the ancient Pythagoreans to classify everything – one/many, limited/unlimited, odd/even, straight/crooked,

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male/female, and so on – as somehow good or bad. Fiorentino’s new lists are metaphysics ideal abstract reason contemplation true

history real concrete will action certain

Such oppositions became motifs of later Italian philosophy, which was particularly good at expanding the sinister side of the table, adding transcendence, mysticism, obscurity, prejudice, and so on. Since the division is fundamentally moral, however, the dichotomy was hard to sustain for later idealists, who, like Fiorentino, also wanted to be realistic. Vico himself was a dichotomy, ‘half-modern and half-antique,’ according to Fiorentino, and even the modern half was antiquarian, in a sense, because it was philological. Although Descartes claimed to have dumped the baggage of Renaissance learning in order to construct a new method, not many educated people had followed his example by Vico’s time. Latin volumes by the ton, stiff with classical erudition, still fell heavy, if not stillborn, from the presses. Vico, reacting to the same pedantry that Swift ridiculed in The Battle of the Books, saw value but also disorder and aimlessness in this profusely bookish culture. So at first he decided to imitate Descartes by looking for rules of method to bring order out of the chaos – to look for certainty.181 At the same time, by applying philosophy (the true) to history and philology (the certain), Vico seemingly annulled the divorce that liberated Descartes from the clutter of the past. According to Fiorentino’s second letter, however, his real aim was ‘to enlarge the Cartesian method without altering it,’ meaning that the ‘sovereign mind’ that Descartes located in the doubting self was also Vico’s discovery, but on a higher plane. By minutely examining the textual remains of the earliest Latin, Vico discovered eternal ideas: he saw ‘truth converted into what is made in a mind located above our minds.’ The only strictly intellectual product of human making is mathematics, which is therefore the only certain human science. But Providence makes humans, whose primitive language preserves traces of divinely made certainties, especially the ‘ideal eternal law’ that regulates history itself.182 The trouble with Vico’s insight that primitive Latin is inherently philosophical is that history makes it implausible: Romans came late to

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philosophy, which they imported from Greece. In his third letter, Fiorentino explains how Vico’s struggle with this problem led him to revise his earlier views and discover his New Science, after surviving his critics and emerging from various blind allies. It was useless to shift the hunt for primitive language to the Etruscans, for example, because no one could (or can) read Etruscan. Intelligible and abundant evidence of Roman law, however, was as old as Rome itself.183 The laws of the Twelve Tables are crude, but law by its nature generalizes: since one general rule covers many particular deeds, law is ‘the natural mediator between theory and practice.’ But since the earliest Romans were not truly primitive, Vico began to use his data – the findings of philology – to go ‘back even farther, to the cave-dwellers … to the crude savage rites that inaugurated … the first civilization.’ The primitive was so alluring to Vico because it seemed to unveil the universal, the anthropological constants that ought to constitute human nature, thus making his new enterprise the human science which explains that nature.184 Vico’s philological quest for a new science was persistent and productive, in Fiorentino’s view, but not reflective. Unlike Kant, he ‘lacks the awareness of his own path … [which] is why the foundation of his philosophy constantly conflicts with his own teaching.’ Before writing the New Science, Vico had restricted human intellectual certainty to mathematics as the only science made by humans, but his masterwork expands the scope of the made to the natural, moral, and aesthetic sciences. Kant would also encounter contradictions that impeded his progress and made him slumber dogmatically, but he attended to them philosophically as antinomies. His aim, like Vico’s, was to give knowledge a stable foundation, but Vico had proceeded unreflectively. Hence, he only got glimpses of the findings that Kant would derive from the well-meditated arguments of his first Critique.185 ‘Kant completes Descartes by putting Vico’s presentiment into effect,’ according to Fiorentino, whose own diligence in the libraries had clarified Vico’s distinction between the cogito as a sign of the subject’s existence, on the one hand, and as a cause of that existence on the other. Certainty of S’s existence by way of S’s irrefragable conviction that S is thinking does not show that thinking makes S (or anything else) exist. Hence, the Cartesian project was incomplete when Vico took it up, not as a philosopher but as a philological prophet. Kant completed this vatic work when, like Vico, ‘he went beyond Cartesian consciousness,’ and then, unlike Vico, ‘moved up to … transcendental consciousness.’186 Fiorentino’s conclusion is an Italian historian’s platform for idealist

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philosophy: ‘Vico teaches how the human being makes history, Kant how the mind makes knowledge, and in this they both reveal that thinking is the supreme maker.’ This was in 1865. But in 1866 Villari brought his powerful advocacy of positivism into the philosophical conversation, and the effects of his prolusione were still strong a decade later when Fiorentino addressed the issue in ‘Positivism and Idealism.’ Like much Italian philosophy of the period, Fiorentino’s Pisa prolusione is self-consciously – and in his case – brilliantly rhetorical. It is a stunning piece of prose, setting a standard of eloquence that only Croce would surpass. The occasion, of course, demanded oratory: Fiorentino’s task was a formal address to the students of his new university, which he would help make the most distinguished in the new Italy.187 Fiorentino warns that positivism in Italy has been like an earthquake that makes a shaky building collapse all at once: the ruined edifice was speculative philosophizing about ideas; facts are the new seismic force; and Auguste Comte engineered the cataclysm. But Fiorentino looks at a side of Comte that Villari had ignored by focusing on the famous theory of stages. At first, Comte had treated quantification as the foundation of all science, which he saw ascending from mathematics through progressively more complex sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology to sociology, the implication being that the human science at the top of the ladder will be reductive, tracking its data down through the same hierarchy until it becomes as quantitative as physics. Because Comte later reversed himself to rule that ‘higher forms cannot be explained by lower forms,’ Fiorentino is friendlier to him than to the real villains of positivism: the British.188 Since, from Fiorentino’s perspective, the British philosophical tradition had long been suspicious of substances and causes and was now spellbound by utility, it was the perfect seedbed for the positivism that crossed the Channel from France. ‘If, as Macaulay said, the glory of modern philosophy lies in seeking the useful and shunning ideas, then, from Bacon until now, no nation has done more to make this maxim effective.’ Reductionism in the early Comte was as nothing, however, compared to the sceptical assassination of ideas attempted by John Stuart Mill. In Mill’s logic, Fiorentino could find no deductions, causes, laws, or definitions, only associations, sequences, conformities, and descriptions. He regards Mill’s inductive method as just bookkeeping with data, the ‘impoverishment of reason.’189 Mill’s positivism ‘is the genius of his nation, so horrified by ideas, so anxious to corner the facts.’ But the instinct feeds on ignorance of Kant’s

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two-sided conception of facts. On the one hand, facts in a spatio-temporal nexus of causes are all that we experience. On the other hand, something in our thinking about facts is required for experience but does not come from experience. Practice is the sphere in which this a priori is best grasped, as moral freedom, but the antinomy about facts is theoretical, a theory ignored or misunderstood by Mill, Spencer, and the other British positivists.190 Spencer at least tried to resolve the contradiction between moral freedom and natural necessity by treating human facts statistically. If the object of human science is not the individual person but the average man, individual aberrations will disappear in the statistical aggregate, making it possible to quantify (contrary to Comte’s understanding) the moral sciences. But Mill was obdurate. For Mill, there simply is ‘no reason that governs and unifies the forms that change through history, while for Idealism nothing happens without reason.’ There is no real history, only a sequence of accidents, and Mill is even prepared to put mathematics under ‘the rule of chance,’ which would make for large odds against a rational statistical science.191 Neglect of ideas in favour of facts is the core error of positivism, which inverts the basic idealist mistake of overvaluing ideas and disregarding facts. ‘Idealism puts too much trust in deductions based on the eternal fabric of cognition. Positivism wavers and worries too much about tying up loose threads.’ Fiorentino sees these positions as two faces of monism: naturalist and idealist. ‘Positivism gives nature the upper hand, and man does not figure in nature except as … a nameless atom.’ Idealists counter that only the conscious human atom takes cognizance of natural facts, discovers their laws, and thereby regulates nature scientifically. Comte’s final verdict was ‘close to this distinctly modern view: that without the human mind, nature is a closed book.’192 The question left unsettled by the contest of monisms is whether a unified philosophy can use the same method to comprehend the facts of nature and the thoughts of minds. The key breakthrough, moving by induction from facts to laws, was Galileo’s. Although his findings were only about natural facts, the excitement of a discovery that covers the whole natural universe motivated Descartes and Kant to look for mental truths of the same depth and scope. Despite what ‘Kant achieved in his immortal critique,’ the truths that he found had little bearing on the certainties of history that ought to be foundational for the moral sciences. It was Vico who ‘made the inductive method of the experimental sciences available to the science of the mind,’ though in a far less finished way than Galileo’s.193

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The bar to further progress was the difference between natural induction and historical induction, as Fiorentino sees it. Because the facts of nature are stable, he claims, ‘exactly identical as long as circumstances are the same,’ they are always ready for the scientist to assemble, disassemble, and test. The historian’s mental facts, by contrast, are fleeting, always changing in time and constantly altered by context, providing no basis for reliable induction or controlled experiment. Life, the object of the moral sciences, is a ‘fickle, gabbling Proteus that has no constant face.’194 Émile Littré, France’s great positivist lexicographer, had proposed treating historical data about the words of modern languages as a matrix of natural facts in which the sequence of linguistic forms would guide induction. What about the missing links? This was Fiorentino’s question, which made him even more sceptical about studying primitive languages, and, in general, about all ‘researches into origins,’ which are just guesswork. Such inquiries have no real method because there is no ‘equivalent of natural facts’ that can take the place of concrete observations. The results are more poetic than scientific.195 By Mill’s standards of positivity, in fact, there is little positive evidence of a kind that might lead to historical equivalents of the gas laws. ‘Unlike the … gases that surround the body … the moral and intellectual environment is not always given. It grows in the course of history … [as] both producer and product of that history.’ Because historical facts are mental, they are always mutable. In the end, they may be useless for science. But even Mill, in all his positivist parsimony, regarded ‘intellectual activity and the search for truth … [as] the chief cause that determines social progress.’ If thinking means so much to society, can the moral sciences do without a science of thinking?196 Fiorentino’s Kantian reply is that ‘Idealism can be empty and Positivism can be blind if one is detached from the other … What lights up the fact is the idea shining inside it, raising it from … mere accident to … lasting reality.’ Over the centuries, many people had seen many lamps swinging in many churches. The facts had always been there, long before Galileo grasped the law of the pendulum. And to discover such laws, observing and compiling facts are not enough. We used to choke on syllogisms; now it is mindless catalogs of data that crush us. The philosopher’s duty is to cure the disease and end the destruction that will continue unless the two monisms reform themselves.197 Fiorentino promises his students to promote reform by avoiding the ruinous extremes: ‘True Idealism must not neglect the results of the positive sciences nor neglect history,

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and true Positivism must remember that the most important of all facts is human thinking.’ His own method will be historical rather than positive – at least in the British sense – combining a deductive ‘internal history’ with an inductive ‘external history,’ respecting both ‘strict discipline of argument’ and ‘careful inquiry into the facts.’198

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14

Matter and Idea (Labriola)

Antonio Labriola was born the son of a school teacher in 1843 in Cassino, and in 1861 he went to Naples to study philosophy. Working with Spaventa and other Hegelians, he began by criticizing Eduard Zeller’s version of Kantian epistemology; then he studied Socrates, Spinoza, and Feuerbach. Despite the long shadows cast in Naples by Spaventa and De Sanctis, Labriola was never comfortable with Hegel. He aimed one of his early efforts at Augusto Vera’s Hegelian Lectures on the Philosophy of History, but this should be seen in the context of coolness between Vera and Spaventa. Like his father, Labriola taught school before rising through the ranks of the university, winning his first appointment at Rome in 1874, where he taught moral philosophy and education. Although he travelled in Germany and read German philosophy, it was probably his continuing interest in pedagogy that attracted him to one of the great German authorities in that field, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776−1841). And Herbart’s moral psychology gave Labriola more reasons to dislike Hegel.199 Herbart belonged to an earlier generation. He had succeeded to Kant’s chair at Königsberg in 1809 and moved to Göttingen in 1833. His Psychology as Science (1824−5) and General Metaphysics (1828−9) appeared in Hegel’s lifetime but took a much different, psychological approach to post-Kantian problems. Some of Herbart’s psychology is quantitative and empirical, but much of it is metaphysical and leads to a theory of value. His starting point for philosophy is reflection on empirical information – including the misleading information that makes us see simple monadic substances (of a Leibnizian kind) as subject to real change. Philosophy’s initial task is to clarify such unreliable reflections by applying tools of logic. But logical clarification reveals contradictions that can be resolved

Part I: Introduction

only at the next stage by metaphysics, which makes thinkable what logic clarifies. The real objects of metaphysical analysis belong to the extramental world, but the problems of aesthetics, left unresolved by logic and metaphysics, are values that stand outside reality and emerge from our thinking.200 Herbart convinced Labriola that human activity must be studied empirically and psychologically, not just sketched in grand Hegelian gestures, but this conclusion left him perplexed about idealism’s larger role in philosophy. He thought that the basis of morality had to be a kind of interior freedom, and yet it could not be the interiority of a pure transcendental subject. On the one hand, a theory of knowledge had to encompass concrete psychological processes governed by scientific laws. On the other hand, without guidance from ideal reason, psychological processes could not produce knowledge. Neither epistemology nor ethics could be reduced to psychology, and experience would always require the corrective of metaphysics. In 1887, when Labriola moved up a step in the university hierarchy, he marked the occasion with a prolusione on ‘The Problems of the Philosophy of History,’ which summarized his worries about idealism and applied them to this key Hegelian topic. Responding to German hopes for a human science (Geisteswissenschaft) whose rigour and results might match those of natural science, Labriola doubted that history could be a science of any kind. He was suspicious of Hegel’s proto-evolutionism and thought that positivist Darwinism could never account for complexities of value, meaning, and culture. In the end, history registers transformations of the human spirit that cannot be reduced to material change. And yet it seemed both necessary and possible to study the human condition genetically through a social psychology of the spirit. Applying the model of developmental embryology, researchers should study homologies of myth, custom, and language in a search for informative generalizations. A social psychology working along such lines would produce something sounder than a Hegelian philosophy of history, but – in Herbartian terms – metaphysics must always be available as a corrective to experience.201 Until the 1890s, the undogmatic Labriola had more questions than answers. But for some years he had been talking with the radicals and socialists who would give his politics a harder edge – with a mature philosophy of historical materialism undergirding the politics. After his formative experience in Naples in the early days of the unified nation, Labriola’s sympathies had been with the Historical Right, drifting left-

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ward only later and gradually. By the late 1880s, he was running for office and publicly active, much engaged in the movement to raise a statue of Giordano Bruno in Rome. Erected in 1889 on the spot where the Church had burned Bruno in 1600, the Roman statue is a late stage of Bruno’s iconography. The martyred philosopher had first entered Risorgimento politics as a hero of Spaventa’s historiography and as an icon of anti-clerical resistance – a rebuke to the treason of Pius IX that Florenzi Waddington abhorred. Three decades after unification, however, a subversive Bruno was no longer pleasing to the Roman authorities, so the new statue shows us a hooded prophet and a mystic seer. Mysticism was nowhere on Labriola’s agenda, but his treatment of politics and philosophy was always provisional, always correctible by experience – like the plans for Bruno’s statue.202 In the same year that a somber Bruno took his place in the Campo de’ Fiori, Labriola taught a course on the French Revolution that caused riots in Rome and had to be suspended. By this time, just before the foundation of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), he had also begun to correspond with Friedrich Engels and other eminent communists, quizzing them about the theory behind their practice. One of his correspondents was the syndicalist Georges Sorel, whose new journal published Labriola’s In Memory of the Communist Manifesto in 1895. Quickly republished by Croce, this essay became a charter document of the intellectual left in Italy.203 Engels and Marx had finally convinced Labriola that historical explanation could be scientific, objective, and naturalist, where the fundamental theorem of naturalism is that material conditions of production constrain all human activity. Nonetheless, human activity occurs not just in a material landscape but also in an ‘artificial terrain,’ which, like all artifice, is a human product. The scene of historical inquiry is this artificial environment that includes humanity itself as a human creation. Human beings make themselves, both as distinctly human members of society and also as individual agents. Philosophically sensitive materialism will help humans discover what must be done by humans, and that obligation will be the content of a philosophy of praxis based on historical development in a material world. In such a world, ideas by themselves are powerless; it is the human environment that gives the conditions of possibility of moral thought and action. Not as abstract rules but as regulative ideas, progress and perfectibility are nonetheless accessible to the historical materialist. And yet Labriola acknowledged the difficulty of bridging the theoretical gap

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between the material and the ideal, and he recognized the positivist account of this problem as a step forward in its time. His honest respect for philosophical dispute isolated him to some extent from other radical thinkers whose theorizing was more in the service of politics. Perhaps for this reason, in his later years he avoided the grand problems of Marxist metaphysics – the nuances of dialectical materialism, for example – and applied himself more to political economy. After an illness of several years that deprived him of his voice, he died in 1904.204 Labriola’s ‘History, Philosophy of History, Sociology and Historical Materialism’ dates from his last years, a decade after Croce had studied the same problems from a different perspective in his first major publication, ‘History Brought Under the General Concept of Art.’ Labriola’s influence on Croce was strong, certainly one of the reasons for the younger scholar’s growing interest in Marx during the 1890s, when he and Gentile formed their famous partnership. Like both those thinkers, Labriola wanted to improve the understanding of history. His essay of 1902−3 on the topic – actually notes for a course on the philosophy of history – is clearer than Croce’s 1893 effort, perhaps because Croce’s apprentice piece had cleared some of the ground.205 The word ‘history’ is ambiguous, he warns, because it refers both to events (history1) and to accounts of events (history2).206 Historia, the original Greek word, means ‘inquiries’ about past facts and thus belongs to history2, but by etymology the German Geschichte, from geschehen or ‘happen,’ refers to past happenings themselves, or history1. Although history1, the object of historical materialism as a philosophy of history, is Labriola’s topic, he does not ignore the attendant problems of history2, history as recorded, researched, and narrated. When people ask if history is a science, he notes, the question cannot be answered until one knows which history they have in mind. There is no autonomous science that produces history2. The required skills and techniques come from other special sciences, mainly philology, and obviously not from history1. Asking whether history1 is science or art involves a category mistake, like asking that same question about metabolism rather than about physiology as the study of metabolism. History1 might be the object of such a special science, but according to Labriola it is not: it belongs not to a special science but to a division of philosophy, the philosophy of history. That part of philosophy understands history1 as ‘an objective sum of events,’ neither random nor providentially planned but moved automatically by an internal development that drives and is also constituted by human activity, which includes all

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the arts and sciences as moments of that development. Accordingly, the aesthetic criteria, economic principles, or sociological laws that the special sciences discover – normally by way of history2 – are generalizations about history1: indeed, they are ‘history itself in action.’ This conception of objective history (history1) forces a change in the practice of narrative history (history2), which must now see its fundamental problems as philosophical, not literary or rhetorical.207 While thinking of history1 as objective, as just the events or facts themselves and the laws that govern them, we may also regard history2 as subjective, as some subject’s narrative of events or account of the facts or inquiry into them. Subjective historical narration is an ancient art that arose secondarily from moral, political, educational, and aesthetic needs. Much more recently, the equally subjective domain of historical research became scientific, more or less, and thus capable of criticizing older versions of history2. This change was important, but not as basic as another modern achievement, the new conception of history1 as objective. This deeper change mirrors transformations in the conception of humanity itself, whereby past human facts are viewed no longer as just past but sometimes as primordial, not always individual but often collective, not merely political but also social. Competent research into this re-conceived past certainly requires technical skills – different techniques, in fact, for different parts of the past. The effort needed to acquire such skills forces historians to specialize; not a few specialists become pedants; and pedantry crushes the art of narrative. The imagination needed to produce narrative at its best withers away. The depleted historical imagination needs refreshing, but a refreshed imagination alone will still be incapable of understanding the history1 represented by history2. All such representations are shaped by ‘conceptions and preconceptions’ of human nature. Reflection on the notion of history1 as objective exposes this fact and shows that in history2 absolute impartiality is an illusion.208 All seeing, whether of present objects or past events, is perspectival: we can look at things only from a point of view. To correct our historical vision, therefore, we need not just specialized techniques and critical methods to find and certify the facts, but also philosophy to understand them as historical events, ‘to acquire an adequate idea of the principles that direct events.’ Deciding whether the principle in play is physical or metaphysical, natural or cultural, mechanical or providential, individual or collective is not within the means of paleography, epigraphy, or codicology. If the medieval specialist (Labriola is thinking unkindly

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of Villari) wants to write history, he needs to learn philosophy – and from philosophers.209 Events, however well confirmed, have no meaning unless they are understood by philosophy, from which we learn that ‘progress … is history’s directive principle … the standard measure for classifying historical facts,’ leading to evaluative distinctions like ‘primitive or advanced, declining or static.’ The philosophical notion of progress adds value to facts assembled as history2, and only the prospect of evaluation justifies the huge labour of collecting and confirming facts. By providing a way to understand history1, philosophy enables historians to produce history2 in a principled way.210 The content of history1, according to Labriola, is ‘differences, oppositions and sequences of social forms,’ which would seem to be what sociology studies. In the broadest sense, where the object of study is ‘everything that can be an object of our thinking when society exists,’ Labriola agrees. Although investigations of these topics started with Aristotle, the new sociology is still immature because it misunderstands itself, claiming a global territory that ‘would occupy the whole field of the philosophy of history.’ While disclaiming interest in disciplinary boundaries, Labriola proceeds to defend the turf that he regards as philosophy’s property.211 The principles that shape history1 will not be found on the surface of events but within the deeper social structures of past societies, classified as large or small, stable or unstable, fixed or nomadic, agricultural or commercial, and so on, by a series of oppositions that eventually define classes ‘by the economic situation and by the functions that they fulfill … In this social analysis, we begin to see what the history really is.’ But such oppositions, if they remain what they are for ‘schematic sociology,’ are abstract, never really corresponding to the concrete particulars of the past. In practice, by the time the facts are accessible to the techniques of history2, they are already too complex to be understood by sociology.212 Nonetheless, history2 is about history1, and the content of history1 is essentially social. Only by understanding social contexts and motives can we evaluate wars, innovations, class conflicts, and other past events. Sociology, as a morphology of social types, is therefore useful to historians, but it is not their project just because it is abstract. Abstraction strips away much of what drives concrete historical development, which from a sociological perspective is always overdetermined. Although the heterogeneous content of history1 is primarily social, it is also constituted by tokens, not by the types that sociology studies. In the first instance, the token contents of history1 must be grasped empirically to answer such questions as why a particular revolution was the French Revolution

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of 1789. Since schematic sociology cannot answer such questions about history1, according to Labriola, neither the philosophy of history nor a philosophically informed history2 can be reduced to or absorbed by sociology. Therefore, the study of the social that adds value to facts will not examine ‘generic social forms … but … the complexity of these forms’ as concretely Athenian or Roman, republican or imperial, and so on. ‘The concept of … historical values, the values that refer to the … idea of progress, appears only in relation to these concrete and complex forms.’ The progress in question is not the same as evolution, which is either too broad, like the coming-to-be studied by metaphysics, or too narrow, like biological evolution or the evolution of a language. Concrete marks of historical progress are the elimination of slavery, the banning of commerce in wives, the guarantee of equality before the law, and so on. As philosophy comes to understand progress, faith in progress emerges dialectically as yet another mark of progress.213 What does it mean for sociology’s objects to be abstract while the contents of history1 are concrete? Does concreteness (as distinct from particularity) have anything do with matter, with the physical stuff of the world? Although Labriola does not face these questions directly, he sees the debate about reducing the philosophy of history to sociology as leading ‘us naturally to examine … historical materialism,’ where the real issue, he says, is whether or not the most basic conditions of human life are material.214 The materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach and the Hegelian Left offered no explanation of history, which is why Marx and Engels, making a new break with Hegelian idealism, called their distinctive doctrine ‘historical materialism.’ Labriola explains the importance of their position, and the name they gave it, by comparing history2 to psychology, which in its schematic form reduces all psychic phenomena, however complex, to sense data – ultimately, to biology – the problem being that many such phenomena are too complex for that reduction and require a social psychology. Just as biological materialism is too reductive for an effective psychology, so a merely physicalist materialism will be inadequate for historical understanding. Hence, ‘the task of historical materialism has been to find the material conditions of the historical social world. This task is parallel to – not derived from – what the pure positivists have called sociology.’215 Social phenomena, which qua social are irreducible, occur when people live and work together on any scale, from clan to empire. The bio-

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psychological states of the individuals who make up such groups do not explain their social behaviour, whose study needs a social psychology like the one developed by Herbart’s followers. The psychology of individuals ends up in abstractions because its forms lack social content – the ‘social fact [that] … becomes the real basis and subject of history.’216 But what is it for a fact to be ‘social’? The term acquired its meaning over the course of the nineteenth century through the work of many disciplines, ‘law, economics, mythology, linguistics and so on,’ until at last scholars began to talk about the sociology that Labriola regards more as an attitude than a science. Even if it were a complete science, a sociology of types could never replace philosophy or philosophically informed history2, and yet even an immature sociology changes how we think about the facts of history1 as social. Historical materialism, which is ‘history [history1] recounted in materialist terms,’ can therefore understand facts as social without being abstractly sociological.217 Labriola insists that his advocacy of historical materialism is not meant to prove that he is Marx’s rightful heir or to promote any political cause. If socialist politics were to languish for centuries, historical materialism would be no less valuable as a key to philosophical understanding. Labriola’s goal is ‘no abstract sociology, then, and no worrying about practical projects “when socialism comes,”’ but real, authentic philosophy of history … history recounted in an understandable way.’218 The philosopher, or the philosophically informed historian, who possesses this understanding may be expected to have the ‘social consciousness’ that sociologists talk about. They often take the bearer of that consciousness to be a we, whose constitution will obviously vary from group to group – scarcely a stable platform for science. Without the I, in fact, there is no we, since consciousness resides only in the individual. But that does not make the we just the sum of every I in its relevant group. The real we is both relational and material rather than mental: ‘its content lies in the bonds that connect individuals, bonds that are primarily material – bonds of shared blood, shared food, shared housing and economic cooperation.’ Between this we and the I, moreover, there is no ontological gap because the I is not a self-positing, transcendent spirit. The I and the we, both apperceptive, constitute their self-consciousness in the same material conditions of possibility.219 Although most individual consciousness is ‘nothing but a residue of custom and tradition,’ the progress of civilization that enlarges the realm of the I eventually drives it inward, where it discovers the we in the collective origins of the I. ‘The human race emerged from the horde that was a continuation of the animal horde … [where] the we was everything’:

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for Labriola it is ‘a settled empirical certainty’ that this was the primitive human condition, from which individual consciousness emerged only recently. He finds this illuminating, but not a reason to follow certain positivists in distilling metaphysical constructs – ‘the social organism, the collective spirit and so on’ – from sociology. A simpler view is that people are born into nature as social, not individual, with socially determined faculties of emotion, language, practical action, and so on. From this social ground the I eventually emerges, an I that can overrate its capabilities. Likewise overreaching were ‘all those scientists – idiots, more or less – who used to deduce language, law, justice and the state from choice, inventiveness and individual will.’220 Nonetheless, individuality is a momentous gain for human development that history will not discard because the progress of history empowers the individual. In fact, if a communist society were to arrive – ‘meaning only … that the means and instruments of production could no longer be private property but would belong to the collective through the exercise of labor needed for the production of material goods’ – more individuals, out of the many whom the bosses now enslave, would be free. This is not a utopian fantasy about a primitive golden age, Labriola insists, since it is grounded in the historical materialism which understands that ‘every society depends on the material conditions of its existence.’221 Those conditions – ‘the basic framework of society [that] depends on relations … among those who produce material goods directly by their labor’ – have varied throughout history, but the variation is rhythmic, not random, constituting the order and direction of history1. The first principle of the historical materialism that knows where history is headed is that humanity’s ‘various schemes of organization,’ especially the political kind, are ‘always in keeping with the corresponding state of the economic framework.’ The second principle is a more tenuous correspondence of myth, religion, morality, and other such forms ‘to a particular social condition.’ A third key point is ‘that the social framework … is a hierarchy … [of] families and classes in various relations of dependency and superiority,’ which explains why society is inherently unstable as the site of class struggle and the locus of the revolutions that move humanity forward. In its simplest and barest form, the historical materialism that applies these principles to history1 will suffice to account for worldhistorical events in their broad outlines, including their happening at particular times and places. But it will take a technically proficient and artfully constructed history2, a work of skill and imagination, to represent such events in competent and compelling narratives.222

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15

No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti)

Before Labriola discovered communism, and long before he offered his final account of historical materialism, a new journal called Mind had been founded in Britain. The first issue of 1876 included articles by Herbert Spencer on psychology, by John Venn on logic, and by Mark Pattison on philosophy at Oxford – the medley of science and philosophy that characterized the journal in its first decades. In 1878 Mind published a long piece on ‘Philosophy in Italy’ by Giacomo Barzellotti (1844−1917), who had studied in Florence with Augusto Conti, a liberalizing Giobertian, before travelling in Germany and then teaching at Pavia, Naples, and Rome. Positivism is the latest phase of Italian philosophy described by Barzellotti, who has nothing to say about Marxism. His tale begins after the Enlightenment, when ‘Italy had no speculative movement of its own’ and was ‘cut off from the current of Modern Philosophy.’ Thirty pages later, when the story had reached his own day, Barzellotti concludes that ‘there is as yet in Italy no true and proper speculative movement.’ This interim report to the anglophone world on modern Italian philosophy ends with a declaration of failure.223 Although Barzellotti’s brief history is comprehensive, building on Luigi Ferri’s Essay on the History of Philosophy in Italy in the Nineteenth Century (1869), the principal players in it are Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti. He recognizes that all three were talented thinkers, while lamenting their submission to Catholic dogma, an especially deep deference for Rosmini and Gioberti. He also explains the role of these two priests in the debacle of 1848−9. On the one hand, they gave the politics of the emerging Italian nation its intellectual foundation; on the other, the Catholic and supernaturalist character of that foundation made it hateful to those who inaugurated the new nation in 1860 in a climate of anti-

No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti)

clericalism. Even Gioberti repudiated his own Neo-Guelf program, but in posthumous works that had no immediate effect.224 After mid-century, as sceptics (Sante Ferrari and Ausonio Franchi), Platonists (Mamiani and Ferri), Hegelians (Spaventa and Vera), Herbartians (Francesco Bonatelli), and Neo-Kantians (Barzellotti himself) turned decisively against their three great predecessors, Barzellotti saw some hope in the new ideas descending from Germany, but too many Italians ‘erred in despising the German philosophy, while … the Kantians and Hegelians erred in wishing to make the Italians think wholly in the manner of Germans.’ When Mamiani founded a new philosophical academy in Genoa, Spaventa commented that ‘the academicians … had nothing more in common than their assembly-hall.’225 One very vocal sceptic was the eloquent Franchi, who aimed at the utter demolition of … the philosophy of the Italian schools, … which he identifies … with the scholasticism and theology of the Church of Rome … He goes too far … [and] fails to take sufficient account of the … modern philosophy … [in] Galluppi, Gioberti and Rosmini, and, above all, their historical value as paving the way for the national revolution and arousing us from our secular slumber…. To condemn them … it is enough for Franchi that they should substantially agree with the Catholic creed … [His is] the truest expression of the negative reaction that followed the attempt made by Rosmini and Gioberti to reconcile Catholicism with philosophy.

Since he was a sceptic, Franchi founded no school, as Barzellotti explains, so that ‘the only speculative doctrine … which has formed a school among us is Hegelianism … taught by Augusto Vera and Bertrando Spaventa … Vera … [being] the true and leading representative of the school.’ Barzellotti awarded the palm to Vera because of the international fame of his French translations of Hegel. (Also written in French was the history of contemporary Italian philosophy by Ferri that Barzellotti used.) ‘Among contemporary philosophers,’ he writes, ‘Vera is one of those who have cut themselves most adrift from the idea of nationality.’226 On the other hand, Vera was notorious as the Italian enforcer of Hegelian orthodoxy, the dogma that Barzellotti has in mind when he describes idealism’s failure in his country: ‘The evil … was that, whereas for the Germans Absolute Idealism was the last stage of one of the … most liberal speculative movements on record, for us, on the other hand, it was only an importation, accepted … for no other

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Part I: Introduction reason than that it represented a faith opposed to that which had hitherto been preached to them … Bertrando Spaventa saw this more clearly than any of the other Hegelians.’

Barzellotti thought Spaventa correct in his historical reconstruction of the channels of mutual influence between Italy and the rest of Europe, treating ‘Bruno as the precursor of Spinoza … Campanella as the precursor of Descartes [and] Vico [as] an indication from afar of the Idealism of Kant.’ The Kantian Barzellotti also thought Spaventa right to see Galluppi and Rosmini as Kantian and Gioberti as Hegelian. Nonetheless, ‘as a philosopher, Spaventa has no doctrines peculiar to himself.’227 Having found no other philosophy in the peninsula that was significant, original, and congenial to Italians, Barzellotti concludes that ‘in Italy as elsewhere the advance in historical and critical studies is bound up with … the positive philosophy’ as presented by Villari, Gabelli, and Ardigò. But the advance of positivism on the peninsula was stalled. Italian followers of the movement remained stuck in the outmoded views of Comte, which they could not distinguish from the newer work of Mill, Spencer, and other British thinkers because they knew so little about British philosophy. Having already appealed to his Protestant readers in England by denouncing papism, Barzellotti leads up to his conclusion – that the failure of idealism in Italy is the failure of his new nation’s philosophy – with applause for ‘the new and fruitful direction … in England,’ while also assuring his anglophone audience that in Italy ‘Mill, Spencer and Bain are the names in highest repute amongst our most cultured classes.’228 ‘Looked at from any point whatsoever,’ he writes, ‘the doctrines of Galluppi, Rosmini and Gioberti have been the only product of speculation which Italy of itself has yielded during this century, and [that] only … as they were the expression of a great moral and political crisis.’ After 1848 their enterprise collapsed, and what followed was intellectual discord, tempered only when the ‘great idealistic movement in its final outcome cross[ed] the Alps.’ But then it was the Italians who failed idealism, according to Barzellotti: Introduced among us, it found our minds, by long habituation to theological dogmatism, little, if at all, trained to severe criticism and rigorous analysis, and disposed to make philosophy a question rather of nationality than of science. Between the ‘ideal intuition’ of Rosmini and Gioberti and the ‘idea’ of Hegel there was no … possibility of a serious and fruitful discus-

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No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti) sion [with] the one … exclusively Italian … [and] the other … foreign…. Attempts … to naturalize the philosophy of Hegel among us have been attended, as yet at least, with no general or lasting results … either because our minds were already exhausted, surfeited or distracted, or because we altogether lacked that spirit of application and discipline which has contributed so much to the progress of science in Germany.229

As the nineteenth century entered its last quarter, anyone who read this bleak assessment of the state of philosophy in Italy would not have predicted that the twentieth century would begin with a titanic display of application, discipline, and genius from Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, who naturalized idealism so thoroughly in Italy that it towered over its rivals there for fifty years and more.

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Croce was born in 1866 to an upper-class family of Pescasseroli, in the middle of the peninsula and halfway between Rome and Naples. An adolescent crisis of faith turned him to history, drama, and poetry, to De Sanctis, Silvio Pellico, and Giosuè Carducci. While still a liceo student, he also attended university lectures given in Naples by his father’s cousin, Bertrando Spaventa, thus disobeying his mother, who enforced the family’s dislike of both Spaventa brothers. Physical catastrophe struck in 1883 when an earthquake killed Croce’s immediate family and forced him to move to Rome, where he lived with cousin Silvio and studied with him.230 Rome for Croce was a nightmare of doubt, depression, and suicidal impulses until he enrolled in the university and heard Labriola lecturing on Herbart’s moral philosophy, in which the young intellectual found a new compass. ‘I did philosophy when I was driven by the need to reduce my suffering,’ he wrote more than thirty years later, ‘and to give some direction to my moral and mental life.’ But Croce’s attraction to Labriola was as much historical as philosophical in this period when he was ‘entirely committed to research and scholarship.’ Perhaps Labriola’s historical materialism would make sense of the mass of information that the young scholar had been acquiring.231 In 1886, Croce moved back to Naples. Then he travelled for five years through Europe while working methodically on the cultural and political history of that city, making its story part of the annals of the new Italy. Deep immersion in the records of local Neapolitan history made him distrust the positivism revived by Villari in the celebrated essays of 1891 that asked Is History a Science? Although Croce needed history to make politics intelligible, he could find nothing foundational, nothing responsive to scepticism or relativism, in the labour of assembling data.

A Revelation (Croce I)

It was this practical disappointment that sent him back to Labriola and Herbart, and then on to Vico, Windelband, Simmel, Dilthey, and other philosophers of history and historical method. The same research introduced him to the many Germans who had written or were still writing about aesthetics – always a provocation to positivists.232 The product of Croce’s enormous diet of books was what seemed at the time to be a philosophical detour from a career in history. ‘Then, after much hesitation and a series of provisional solutions,’ he tells us, ‘in February or March of 1893, having thought it over intensely for a whole day, in the evening I drafted an essay that I titled “History Brought Under the General Concept of Art.” It was like a revelation of myself to me.’ He delivered his revelation to the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples on 3 March 1893.233

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History under Art (Croce II)

Croce begins by dividing all cultural production into two domains: science and art. If the two are mutually exclusive, and if history is not one of them, it must be the other. But the question framed by this distinction– ‘Is history science or art?’ – is vague and has led to weak answers, the commonest being that ‘history is science and art all at once.’ Only the recent German thinkers who have philosophized about history have replied in a rigorous way, maintaining that real history is strictly scientific and must always exclude art. Science seeks knowledge, art seeks pleasure, and the truly scientific historian will never confuse the two quests.234 The notions in play are really three, however – art, science, and history – and Croce suspects that the experts on history think too narrowly about art, too broadly about science. Their double error makes them devalue the more popular view, that ‘history shares the nature of art.’ After all, more than many other disciplines, history is tied to art – especially to literary art. Meditating on his own experience of reading and writing history, the young mandarin will side with the common folk to refute the German professors. He will also refute Villari – by snubbing him. Although the form of Croce’s question best known to Italians of the day – Is History a Science? – was the title of Villari’s recent lectures, Croce takes this formulation to have missed the point by failing to ask about art. He names Villari only in two footnotes, dismissing him as obtuse and irrelevant.235 A different error confounds other critics who discuss art but suppose that it aims at pleasure, when its real goal is ‘producing the Beautiful.’ Sizing up that lofty goal requires knowing what the word ‘beautiful’ means. ‘Heaven save me,’ Croce wails, ‘from getting into the endless and subtle disquisitions … of aesthetic science,’ and then he plunges into those very disputes on four fronts, against the sensualist who

History Under Art (Croce II)

Theory

Practice

Beautiful

True

Good

Useful

Aesthetics

Logic

Ethics

Economics

reduces beauty to pleasure; the rationalist who mistakes it for the True and the Good; the formalist who detects it in formal relations of pleasure; and the idealist who sees it as the Idea manifesting itself sensibly.236 Croce is confident that Kant has already put his first two opponents out of action. He simply decrees that sensualism is French or English pseudo-philosophy, but in passing he makes a substantive, prophetic, and yet muffled point against rationalism: that the Beautiful cannot be the same as the True and the Good because among all three items, ‘the highest idealities of the human spirit,’ the relations that obtain are of distinction, not identity. Although a footnote tells us that this ‘triad has become a bit ridiculous,’ a cheap target for ‘windy philosophers,’ it was good enough to hold Croce’s attention for more than half a century, which was long enough for the trio to evolve into a quartet.237 This is how he described his conception in 1948, four years before he died: ‘Over the centuries, and as if by consensus of the nations, the highest values, the forms or categories of reality and the Spirit, were gathered into the triad of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, which to me seemed integral with a fourth term, the Useful or the Economic or the Vital or whatever else it should be called.’238

Ultimately, among Croce’s four forms of the Spirit, two will be theoretical and two will be practical, each with its own science. Just as ethics and economics will be his practical sciences of the Good and the Useful, so will logic and aesthetics be his theoretical sciences of the True and the Beautiful. But in 1893, when Croce had yet to make his name by reducing history to art and thereby confuting the positivists, these large systematic thoughts were still to come.239 Aesthetics was the first of the four sciences to which Croce would give

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full expression, and it was aesthetics that would make him famous, first in his Aesthetic as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics of 1902, preceded by the ‘Fundamental Theses of an Aesthetics’ of 1900, a sketch prepared for the same hometown academy that published his ‘History Brought Under the Concept of Art.’ Despite its protests against aesthetic theorizing, that early essay on history and art put Croce on the path to his mature work as a philosopher, a path that led through art and aesthetics. Naturally, he wanted to clear the ground and eliminate competitors, the easiest marks being the sensualists and rationalists, leaving more time for the formalists and idealists.240 Croce identifies formalism with followers of Herbart who tried to extend his moral psychology into a full-blooded aesthetics, and no doubt it was Croce’s teacher Labriola who had taught him to respect Herbart. Croce saw the aesthetics of Herbart’s students as a mere anomaly, however, contrived and unproductive. Herbart’s rigour and his insights into the ‘simplest aesthetic facts’ had given him a plausible basis for formalism: although the primitive elements of music − for example, individual tones – have no aesthetic value in themselves, such values emerge in their relations to other tones, relations that can be formalized. But when left to his disciples, according to Croce, Herbart’s starting points turned into blind alleys.241 After the demise of sensualism, rationalism, and formalism, Hegelian idealism ruled the day in aesthetics, and Croce took his bearings on aesthetic idealism from the German Aesthetics of Eduard von Hartmann (1842−1906), best known for his Philosophy of the Unconscious, a postKantian and Hegelian response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism: although a blind dynamism drives the world and makes it wretched, Hartmann allowed that beauty, unlike pleasure, may be a remedy. Noting that idealism ‘locates the Beautiful in the expression of some thing, called the ‘sensible manifestation of the ideal’ in Hegelian terminology,’ Croce insisted that this cannot be just the psychological experience of expression and must be the expression of a content – of a meaning. Formalism is vacuous because forms without content are empty, and idealism would also be vacuous if – per impossibile – the idea were detached from its content. Objects of aesthetic judgment are beautiful as tokens of a type – manifestations of an idea or members of a kind – though it is always the token that is beautiful.242 Judging an object to be ugly or beautiful assigns it to a category, so that the Iago who is repulsive as a moral agent can also be seductive as a dramatic character. But the ideas that Shakespeare made manifest in his

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alluring Iagos and Calibans, according to Croce, are not natural kinds, whose members would be natural individuals with particular contents. ‘The ideal … – the content that we want to see represented – is simply reality in general … [giving rise to] the distinction which, though not at all abstruse, is not easy to express,’ though at this point Croce does not try to express any distinction at all. Instead, having introduced the notion of representation in the framework of aesthetic idealism, he makes a crucial point about history: if art is ‘a representation of reality … most of the reasons … [for] denying that history is a product of art disappear.’243 Having located the link between history and art in representation, Croce still needs to answer the critics who would weaken that bond by confining it to the trivial task of writing good prose, which is possible for prose of any kind, not just the historical. History is no more an art than any other scientific study expressed in artful words. Written well or written badly, history is a science, the historians insist, forcing Croce to ask what a science is.244 Science is not just data or information. Science generalizes data to form concepts. But if history is a science, what are its distinctively historical concepts? Croce excludes the concept of development because it belongs to the philosophy of history, not to history. He then turns to Schopenhauer’s famous distinction between coordination and subordination, echoed by Burckhardt and others. Science, whose proper object is the type rather than the token, subordinates individuals under concepts. History, whose proper object is the token, coordinates individuals in narratives without subordinating them, which shows that history is not science.245 Croce preferred the psychological variant of Schopenhauer’s point proposed by Moritz Lazarus (1824−1903), who had also learned from Herbart. Science wants its general laws to cover all the facts, valuing each fact only insofar as it instantiates a law. Hence, science abstracts general concepts from particular facts, while history condenses facts into concrete representations, searching the facts not for laws but for coherent ensembles (narratives, for example) of particulars. History wants to tell the whole story, but that story is nothing general. ‘I agree entirely with these observations,’ Croce declares; ‘history has only one aim: to narrate the facts … History narrates.’246 To accept the arguments of Schopenhauer and Lazarus and still call history a science, but a science unlike other sciences, a descriptive science, is an evasion, Croce charges, noting that the best novels are full of such descriptive science. But he does not want to surrender to Schopenhauer’s pessimism or end with other counsels of despair or folly: such as that

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the history that cannot be science is therefore useless.247 Is poetry useless because it is not science? Surely not. Croce also takes hope from what he calls a ‘philosophy of history,’ hastening then to distinguish it from the enterprise – ‘that alleged rhythm of ideas’ – that had made Hegel famous before he became infamous. The original version of Croce’s essay is clearer on what the hoped-for philosophy isn’t than on what it is. Later expansions give only a little help: it is a study ‘of problems suggested by the critical examination of history and historical writing, such as those related to the cognitive development of the historical fact, to the real elements of history and to the meaning and value of the course of history.’ In any case, even if such an undertaking could become science, history cannot.248 ‘Now if history is not a science … what is it?’ Having put this question to himself, Croce tries to answer by naming the only two operations of which he deems the human mind capable: scientific understanding of what a thing is and artistic imagining of how it appears. The same item can be an object of both operations: the playwright’s Macbeth, for example, stands before an audience, but the criminologist’s Macbeth stands before a court. The scientist explains the murderer’s crimes by bringing them under the abstract concepts of her science; the playwright represents the same crimes in his concrete art.249 Understood psychologically, representation is the double process of condensation (less distilled from more) and substitution (one standing for many), a process well known to historians: think only of Gibbon and his very long story of decline and fall. Think also of a David painting a Marat or of a Rodin turning the Burghers of Calais into bronze, evidences of history’s kinship to more arts than the literary ones. Although these modes of expression – prose, painting, sculpture – are not distinctive to it, history has a distinctive content, though discovering it is not a task for aesthetics.250 Since science is better known than history or art, perhaps we should look to science first for the sort of thing that a content might be. The content of science is everything that exists, brought under concepts. As for art that includes history, the failures of sensualism, rationalism, and formalism tell us not to look for its content in pleasure or in truth and goodness or in form. What remains is idealism and the idea, as studied in Hegel’s aesthetics, where content is said to be prior to any aesthetic process and also ‘not irrelevant.’ But surely content is, in some sense, irrelevant to the aesthetic process since the artist can apply her procedures to many contents. Croce therefore asks, ‘What is it to which it [content] is not irrelevant?’251

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After this crescendo of questioning, the answer falls flat. We learn (from yet another German professor) that ‘aesthetic content is what is of interest … the whole world of human interest,’ so that the wider the interest, the greater the aesthetic value of the content, revealing the sense – a very broad sense – in which content is not irrelevant to aesthetic value. Indeed, content can be graded aesthetically on a scale descending from the whole human race through classes, nations, and religions (no mention of genders or ethnicities) down to individuals. Hence, ‘the content of art is reality in general,’ but differing interests in various sectors of reality will vary by time, place, perspective, and circumstance, which may rescue Croce from the bathos of his conclusion. Despite the ultimate generality – analogous to but distinct from the universality of scientific concepts – of its content, art as actually expressed is tragedy or comedy, landscape or portrait, temple or forum, which are names not of forms, according to Croce, but of different contents.252 After Croce shows how various works of art – including works of history – are distinguished by various contents responding to various interests, we can see at last how ‘the product of history is distinguished from other products of art,’ and, as an unspoken corollary, how works of history are members of that same family of artistic productions. What is of distinctly historical interest is not the possible content of poems, paintings, novels, or plays, but the real or actual content of the past. In the way that the actual belongs to the possible – as the part of the possible that gets realized – so does history belong to art. But the boundary between the actual and the merely possible also separates the content of history from the contents of other arts.253 Croce can now propose a definition of history: ‘the type of artistic production that takes what has really happened as the object of its representation.’ This definition establishes the historian’s obligation to exclude the merely imaginary, which for the historian is a species of the false that all art must abjure. Just as every good artist carefully observes the world in order to produce honest art, so the historian undertakes her labours of research, criticism, and understanding for a cognate reason. The written record of her labours, often self-addressed or addressed only to other historians, is immense, unlike the much smaller mass of finished narratives. The historian’s research is not history, Croce maintains, ostensibly for the same reasons why the artist’s notebook is not art. The only real history is narrative, and fully finished narratives are very few.254 Like the ideal of all art, this ideal of history is hard to achieve – very hard, in fact, seeing that non-historical art is less vulnerable to accidents of survival

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and other external circumstances. Facing their special obstacles, historians are right to condemn the misuse of non-historical art in history – the substitution of the possible for the real – but there are no grounds for supposing that history practised as art must sacrifice rigor or accuracy. ‘The corporation of historians’ has nothing to fear, according to Croce, from his project of ‘bringing history under the general concept of art.’255

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What Is Distinct? (Croce III)

Nonetheless, if Croce really means to bring history under art, and if aesthetics is the philosophy of art, then historians might well ask how Croce expects distinctive philosophizing about their craft to be possible. A full answer can come only from the higher-order inquiry that Croce called the Philosophy of the Spirit, the first of whose four parts would appear in the Aesthetics of 1902. The whole colossal project is barely visible in the earlier essay, where Croce mentions ‘the highest idealities of the human spirit’ or forms of the Spirit. After finishing the Aesthetics, Croce moved on to the Logic that he needed to clarify the character and relations of those forms, the logic that explicates the Concept as the Spirit’s activity. Croce’s logic, in other words, like Hegel’s logic, is more metaphysical than what anglophone philosophers now call ‘logic.’ And Croce found that he needed such a logic by thinking about history as a type of art.256 In Logic as a Science of the Pure Concept (1908), the second part of the Philosophy of the Spirit, Croce examines the Spirit’s two most general forms: the theoretical and the practical. He divides the theoretical form into intuition and concept, a division parallel to individual and universal. But this is where dividing stops: the forms of intuition and concept are each indivisible into further forms. The form of intuition, based as it is on the concept of individuality, divides into no further types or concepts, but rather into tokens or particulars. The form of concept, based on the concept of the universal, also divides into no further concepts, but into the various token objects thought by way of concepts.257 Croce then describes a problem that any theory of concepts – what he calls ‘logic’ – must face: the problem of the manifold or multiplicity of concepts. ‘Why will there not be as many concepts as representations,’ he asks, ‘an

Part I: Introduction

infinity of them?’ To see why this is a problem, we must understand the difference between the concepts and representations on which he insists.258 Consider a particular tiger. We can represent it with any number of representations: a photograph, a charcoal sketch, an image recalled from memory, and so on. Each such representation is itself a particular. Now consider the class of all tigers. On a standard empiricist account, we can use any particular representation to represent the tiger class. The empiricist thereby avoids universals and reduces concepts to particular representations that are used to refer universally, an account that also explains the sharing of concepts. That you use one representation for all tigers while I use another causes no trouble; what we share is the use to which each of us puts our different representations. The empiricist lets a multiplicity of particular representations stand in for a small set of shared concepts denoting universals. But a problem arises. Particular representations are both too indeterminate and too determinate to do the job. The sketch, for example, omits many features that an individual tiger must have to qualify as a member of its class: being warm-blooded, viviparous, and so on. And yet the same sketch shows a definite number of stripes, a number that will not help us put a tiger in its class. The sketch is also at best uninformative and at worst misleading about the colours of normal members of the tiger class. In short, particular representations fail at what the empiricist account asks of them because their particularity ill suits them to that task: only concepts will do. Concepts, unlike particular representations, speak to features that particular representations cannot capture – essential properties and relations of synonymy, for example – and they are silent on idiosyncratic features that particular representations cannot exclude.259 It is partly the simplicity of concepts that equips them to do what representations, which are always complex, cannot do. The simplest concepts are atomic; they are not themselves complexes of concepts. And complex concepts are composed either of atomic concepts; of complex concepts themselves composed of atomic concepts; or of both. A theory that admits both the atomic and the complex kinds can account for the number, variety, and novelty of concepts by reference to a small number of atomic concepts under rules of combination. Croce’s objection applies to conceptual atomists, those who regard all concepts as atomic and deny that any are complex. The atomist needs enough atomic concepts to cover the number, variety, and novelty of all our experiences – ad infinitum. Croce therefore asks, ‘Who could ever say that the concepts dis-

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covered and listed were all the concepts? If there are ten of them, why could there not be twenty, a hundred, or a hundred thousand, if we took a closer look?’260 Another response to the manifold of experience is the type of atomism (or monism) that simply denies any multiplicity of concepts and deploys just one – a single, simple, unified concept. But this solution has its own fatal flaw, according to Croce. Regarding reality as organic and unified, he agrees that what we think about reality will be prey to scepticism unless it too has an organic unity. But if this unity is absolute simplicity, he argues, ‘the unity obtained thereby is an empty unity.’ In fact, the very notion of unity is incompatible with absolute simplicity: unity is just the unification of distinct elements, something not simple but composite.261 Unity cannot not be absolutely simple, then, because it needs what Croce calls distinti – ‘distincts.’ This technical term, for which there is no good English word, is at the heart of Croce’s logic, where it will be defined (see below) by contrast with the term oppositi − ‘opposites.’262 Just as an organism depends metaphysically on the physical and functional operations of the organs that compose it, so too any real and organic unity will depend metaphysically on the parts that articulate (compose) it. The concept by which we can think about a unified reality is also a unity, and as such is itself articulated by distinctions on which the concept depends metaphysically in order to be the concept that it is. Because Croce recognizes that his notion of distinction and his use of ‘distincts’ is non-standard, he warns us not to take his words in the standard way. His point is not that the components of a unity, were there nothing unifying them, would be logically or metaphysically distinct – in the usual sense of ‘distinct.’ What Croce has in mind is a unity exhausted by logical and metaphysical entailments among its components, which, while they are ‘distincts’ in his sense of the word, are not distinct from one another, or from the unity that they constitute, in the standard sense of ‘distinct.’263 Distincts (like opposites) are plural in number, but that does not mean that we can classify them as numerically finite or infinite. When we speak of a numerical series as finite or infinite, according to Croce, we do not have in mind that its members stand to one another as distincts. In particular, they are not related by the mutual entailments that unify distincts. Concepts that are distincts constitute a unity or a whole just because they are not distinct in the standard way. To regard concepts both as distincts and as numerically finite or infinite would be a categorymistake about relations. Relations among distinct concepts belong to a

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category of relation not well characterized by number. Speaking of such concepts, Croce explains that ‘their arrangement is necessary because they imply one another reciprocally, meaning that we definitely do not apply the determination of finite number to them because number is entirely incapable of expressing such a relation.’264 Croce’s theory is a concept holism.265 Distinct concepts are individuated, in part, by the positions that they occupy in a logical space – positions relative to positions occupied by other distinct concepts that, jointly with them, entail the unity composed of all distinct concepts. Whether a distinct concept is singular, universal, or particular depends on the level of analysis of the relations that it enters into. As the sole occupant of the place it occupies in logical space, a distinct concept is regarded as a universal concept. As having a determinate relation with some one other concept, it is regarded as particular. And as exhausted by its position in logical space – such that nothing over and above that position makes it the concept that it is – it is regarded as singular. Universality, particularity, and singularity thus arise at different levels of analysis rather than as differences among distinct concepts themselves.266 These three levels of analysis give Croce’s logic its account of definition. To define a concept completely is to make it explicit at all three levels of analysis: we must analyse a distinct concept in terms of (i) its unique relation to the whole unity of distinct concepts (universality); (ii) its individual relations to other distinct concepts (particularity); and (iii) the position in logical space that exhausts it (singularity). A complete definition of a concept, one that analyses the concept at all three levels, would give a full account of the nature of the concept.267 From the claim that distinct concepts are universal, particular, and singular all at once, Croce derives his key distinction between universal and abstract concepts. Abstract concepts, he claims, are not pure logical concepts; they are a species of what he calls pseudo-concepts – artifacts of treating distinct concepts in a way inconsistent with conceptual holism, as though they were individuated by something other than their positions and relations in logical space. Tha ‘something other’ might be an internal structure, or a method of verification, or necessary and sufficient conditions, and so on.268 Nonetheless, Croce recognizes that viewing concepts in terms of such features can be useful, so long as we do not confuse that utility with genuine logical analysis. We can treat concepts as identical, for example, by ignoring their holistic environment and seeing them as individuated by their extensions. On such a treatment, triangle and trilateral will be

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the same concept. So too, by ignoring the holism of distinct concepts, we can speak of concepts as simple and complex, primitive and derivative, abstract and empirical, and so on – useful fictions, perhaps. Although a non-holistic treatment of concepts is not real logical analysis, it might produce a useful taxonomy, for example, by placing concepts in a classification for heuristic purposes. Abstract concepts make up such classifications: taxonomically, we can regard the concepts of scalene, isosceles, and equilateral triangles as three species of the genus triangle, taken abstractly. But such a taxonomy can only ever describe, for heuristic purposes; it cannot analyse concepts logically or fully explain their nature.269 As already mentioned, the complement of distincts in Croce’s logic is opposites, which can never be identified with or reduced to distincts. Recall, for example, that two forms of the Spirit are the theoretical and the practical, whose concepts are indeed distinct, in Croce’s sense.270 The Spirit depends metaphysically on each and on both together for its organic unity. But the concepts of the theoretical and practical are not opposites. The opposite of practical activity is practical inactivity, not theoretical activity. If we were deceived by pseudo-concepts, we might be tempted to regard opposites or contraries of concepts as genuine concepts that form a unity of their own, mirroring the unity of distinct concepts. On such a view, beauty, truth, and utility would be distinct concepts in a unity organically dependent upon them, while ugliness, falsity, and uselessness would be opposite or contrary but also distinct concepts in a mirroring unity dependent upon them, in just the same way that the mirrored unity depends upon beauty, truth, and utility.271 But treating opposites as distincts forming their own mirroring unities is heuristically fruitless at the level of pseudo-logic and incorrect at the level of genuine logic. At the level of pseudo-logic, to use Croce’s example, no useful taxonomy would deploy the opposites living and dead to divide the genus dog into two species, living dogs and dead dogs, or (so Croce thinks) the opposites moral and immoral to divide the genus moral person into two species, moral and immoral persons. Even at the level of pseudo-concepts, opposites are not usefully treated as real items requiring inclusion in a classificatory system.272 For the purpose of genuine logical analysis, however, beauty, truth, and utility are authentically distinct concepts individuated by their positions and relations in the organic unity of logical space. But ugliness, falsity, and uselessness do not belong to this or any other unity: they are not real. Indeed, because they are not real, ugliness, falsity,

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and uselessness cannot be members of this unity. For example, if we specify individuation conditions for beauty and truth, we find that two such conditions are that beauty negates or rules out ugliness and that good likewise negates evil. Strictly (logically) speaking, there are no evil deeds or false thoughts. When we speak in this looser way, we use abstract pseudo-concepts. If you act and your act is not good, it does not follow that you have done evil; there is no distinct concept, evil, that characterizes your deed logically; rather, your act was useful, or differently characterizable by a real, distinct concept like utility. In other words, the deed that we loosely call ‘evil’ is characterized logically by distinct concepts that are part of the same unity in which good also plays an irreducible logical role.273 ‘The person who commits an evil action,’ Croce explains, ‘if he really is doing something, surely does not commit an evil action but performs an act useful to him. The person who thinks a false thought, if he is accomplishing anything real, does not think the false thought – indeed does not think at all – but rather goes on living and looking after his own convenience, or generally some benefit that he cares about at that instant. Thus we see that opposites, when taken as distinct moments, are no longer opposed, but now distinct.’274 Croce’s doctrine that the opposites of distinct concepts are not themselves distinct concepts will play a crucial role in his criticism of Hegelian logic, which he regards as violating this rule. Hegel’s dialectic is committed, he argues, to opposition-in-unity – a single unity including distinct concepts which are also opposites. Croce regards this as a straightforward logical contradiction. He claims, for example, that beauty negates –rules out – ugliness. Now recall that what makes a distinct concept distinct is its location and its relations in a logical space unified by beauty along with all other distinct concepts, like truth and utility. In that case, a unity that includes the concept beauty cannot include any concept which, like ugliness, is ruled out by beauty. Nonetheless, and in Croce’s view, there is a sense in which opposites of distinct concepts are themselves distinct concepts, in addition to the sense, just described, in which they are not. If the opposite of good is evil, then that abstract pseudo-concept, evil, is not a distinct concept. But if, with Croce, we regard useful – or another concept within the unity where good necessarily occupies its logical place – as the opposite of good, then the opposite of good is a distinct concept. Recall that complete logical analysis of a concept requires making it explicit at all three levels of analysis: (i) the position in logical space that exhausts it conceptually; (ii) its unique relation to the whole unity of dis-

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tinct concepts; and (iii) its individual relations to other distinct concepts. Thinking is just making concepts explicit in this way. But for purely heuristic purposes, says Croce, we can capture the notion of thinking by appealing to a law that he calls the ‘principle of identity and contradiction,’ which is that ‘A is A (unity) and A is not B (distinction).’275 Since Croce wants this law (Lc) to capture his theory of unity in distinction, we should read its central connective (‘and’) not as a conjunction but as a logical conditional. ‘A is not B’ is a necessary condition of ‘A is A’ in that A’s identity with A requires A and B to be distinct in Croce’s sense of ‘distinct.’ But Croce warns that his law is just heuristic; it does not really govern thinking. At best, it helps us find a description of thinking. Croce contrasts his own law of identity and contradiction (Lc), which is fine as far as it goes, with a different law (Ld) that expresses the doctrine of opposition in unity that he rejects. One might think that Croce’s law (Lc), ‘A is A entails that A is not B,’ is equivalent to Lo, ‘A is A alone and definitely not not-A, its opposite, as well.’ Yet, Croce insists, it is not just that the two laws are not equivalent: Lo is actually ‘a perversion of the principle of identity and contradiction.’276 Resisting that perversion, some thinkers – Croce is thinking of Hegel – have proposed their own dialectical principle (Ld): ‘A is at the same time not-A.’ While Croce agrees that Lo must be resisted, resistance by way of Ld, by the dialectical claim that everything is contradicted in itself, only obscures the theory of unity in distinction and nullifies the key doctrine that opposites of distinct concepts are not themselves distinct. Because the unity of distincts is holistic, the infinity of relations among distincts is a closed system of mutual logical and metaphysical entailments. By contrast, if we adopt Ld, ‘the eternal law of opposition,’ we are committed to Hegel’s ‘bad infinity,’ an open infinite series: ‘it would be necessary for the thinking that negates the intuition to be negated in turn, and for the negation to be negated again and so on to infinity.’277 Finally, although the dialectical principle (Ld) is more destructive of Croce’s aims than the principle of identity and contradiction (Lc), he regards even the latter as a mere device for expressing an activity – thinking – whose nature just cannot be adequately expressed by principles. Thinking is not governed by rules or laws; it does not represent truths or facts; it is not representation. Rather, thinking is making truths explicit by conceiving of them in their singularity, universality, and particularity.278

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What Is Living? (Croce IV)

While taking his Logic through several drafts, Croce was also doing the work that led to his most memorable statement about philosophy, What Is Living and What Is Dead in Hegel’s Philosophy? Published in 1907 (the preface is dated March 1906), it was the first of many books by Croce to be produced by Giovanni Laterza, head of the new, and soon to be distinguished, publishing house that still bears his name. Laterza had just taken over the new journal, La Critica, that Croce launched with Giovanni Gentile in 1903. The initial plan for this enormously productive partnership was for Croce to handle the history of modern Italian literature, leaving the philosophy of that era to Gentile.279 Croce’s early friendship with Gentile was shaped in part by the deep interest in Marxism that they shared, starting in the mid-1890s when Gentile was doing research not only on Rosmini, Gioberti, and other Italian philosophers but also on historical materialism, a topic much studied by Labriola. In 1895 Croce had published Labriola’s In Memory of the Communist Manifesto at his own expense, while more and more of his reading was about economics and Marx. Another journal on which he collaborated during these years was Devenir social, also begun in 1895 by Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist. Although Croce, as a relative of Spaventa, had a Hegelian in his family tree, this new curiosity about Marx made Hegel even more important. In fact, Croce’s early encounter with Hegel soon turned into an immense project of translation, working with Gentile to put Hegel’s Encyclopedia into Italian.280 It was Hegel’s metaphysical logic, however, rather than his aesthetics, ethics, or politics that most interested Croce at the turn of the century. His 1907 critique of Hegel grew out of his own Outlines of Logic, first presented to the Accademia Pontaniana in 1904 and published the next

What Is Living? (Croce IV)

year. Since the finished Logic as Science of the Pure Concept was to become the second part of the Philosophy as Science of the Spirit – the three other parts being the Aesthetics, the Philosophy of Practice, and the Theory and History of Historiography – Croce’s work on the Hegel essay of 1907 came at a crucial moment in his long intellectual voyage.281 After he had finished his huge job of translating, Croce described an irresistible consequence of the experience, his ‘desire to put into writing the critical-philosophical introduction to Hegel’s work that has taken shape in my mind – my views on the merits and demerits of Hegel’s philosophy.’ He hoped that ‘the translation of the Encyclopedia, along with these critical inquiries of mine, might help reawaken in Italy the study of a philosophical giant like Hegel.’ But the giant was not just asleep: according to Croce, only part of Hegel’s philosophy was alive; another part he pronounced dead.282 The living part of Hegel’s philosophy, as Croce saw it, sprang from a great insight: that philosophy must have a method all its own, apart from the methods of the other disciplines – art, science, history, and ethics – to which it contributes a distinctively philosophical understanding. Hegel’s insight was that philosophy uses a special form of thought: the concept.283 Accordingly, the language that Croce himself uses to describe the thinking that is distinctively philosophical is peculiarly Hegelian and technical. In normal anglophone usage, a concept is what a term, especially a predicate, refers to; it is what we understand by such a term. Having a concept enables us to do certain things, like making judgments, or picking out what a term applies to. Kant, who was an architect of this view of concepts, had described them as universals and as representations of what several objects have in common. One sign of the distance between those notions and Hegel’s is that he does not put any clear boundary between concepts, on the one hand, and the ‘I’ and objects on the other. Moreover, Hegel sometimes speaks of the Concept as if it were an immanent God, suggesting that everything is just the realization of a divine concept of all that there is and can be. But Hegel’s concepts are neither the objects that come under concepts nor the ideas that unite concepts with objects. Hegelian concepts constitute objects; they do not represent objects; nor do they indicate something that some objects have in common. They may be, but need not be universal. Croce, a severe critic of Hegel as well as a disciple, comes closest to him in treating concepts as systematically interdependent, in an extravagant version of what Sellars called a ‘conceptual framework’ and Davidson called a ‘conceptual scheme.’284 According to Croce, it is distinctive of philosophical thinking to proceed by concepts rather than by

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intuitions, feelings, or other modifications of the mind passively received and independent of rational activity. This is how philosophy differs from direct perception, revelation, and mysticism.285 Philosophy’s concepts are universal, Croce tells us, in that they grasp their objects by way of what is essential to them rather than by way of representations, marks, symbols, or other features that imply distinctions of greater and lesser generality – distinctions like those that separate an isosceles triangle from just any trilateral, for example. The universal character of its concept sets philosophy apart from the empirical and natural sciences that deal with the general rather than the universal, with taxonomy rather than understanding. Finally, although philosophical concepts are universal, they are not abstract but concrete. Like Hegel, Croce makes two points by insisting that concepts are concrete: first, concepts cannot abstract from the essences of the particulars that they grasp; second, they cannot abstract from the relations of mutual entailment that all concepts have with one another. This last property of philosophical thinking also distinguishes it from the mathematical and other purely formal systems that idealize away from reality and require axioms that prevent such systems from being organic and unitary.286 Philosophical concepts are distinct from one another in Croce’s technical sense of ‘distinct’: they depend metaphysically and logically on the different concepts with which they form a unity. To illustrate this dependence, Croce discusses imagination and understanding: imagining is the basis of understanding, and in order to play that role, imagining must be distinct from understanding. Yet because it is essential to imagination that it is the basis of understanding, imagination could not be what it is except in relation to understanding. The totality of such distinct concepts forms what Croce calls the philosophical concept, which is a concrete unity because of what makes it possible: the mutual relations among distinct concepts that cannot be abstracted-from without undermining the unity and the essence of the distinct concepts that are mutually related.287 But some concepts are opposed rather than distinct. Unlike distinct concepts, they exclude one another. Croce lists the following pairs as opposites rather than distincts: true/false, good/evil, beautiful/ ugly, valued/unvalued, positive/negative, joy/sorrow, activity/ passivity, life/death, and being/nothing. Unlike distinctions, these oppositions are problematic, seeming to preclude the concrete, universal and organic unity that Croce posits. True/false, good/evil, being/ nothing, and the others cannot form an organic unity because true,

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good, being, and so on rule out – or negate – false, evil, nothing, and so on.288 The metaphor of logical space, and recalling that the concept is something logical, may help: a distinct concept like true just is its location in such a space of entailments unified by all the other distinct concepts, like good and being. What makes a concept the concept that it is are the entailments entered into with all the other distinct concepts that form a unity with it. Logical space is a map of all the entailments in such a unity. But a unity that includes true cannot include any concept negated by true. Instead of distinct concepts embedded in an organic unity, such oppositions of negation generate dualisms: as Croce puts it, ‘two universals everywhere, one confronting the other, one threatening the other.’ Opposites are a problem because, wrongly handled, they will undermine a unified, coherent, and systematic understanding of reality.289 According to Croce, familiar philosophical mistakes arise as proposals for solving the problem of opposites. Proposals of one type – Croce lists sensism, empiricism, materialism, and mechanism – deny the existence of one side of each opposed pair. In contemporary terms, eliminative materialism would be such an approach. A different possibility is to let both members of a grand ontological pair exist in complete contrast to one another. There have been many such dualisms, like the Cartesian version famously described by Gilbert Ryle as reifying the mental contrastively as just like the physical – lawlike, causally efficacious, structured, and so on – in all ways except for being physical.290 Croce views all such strategies as unstable. While declaring the mental to be mythical, for example, materialism actually reintroduces the mental part of dualism by insisting upon the distinction between the illusory and the real. By declaring the mental and the physical to be two incomplete yet incompatible presentations or explanations of a single reality, dualism likewise reintroduces monism.291 Hegel’s solution to the problem of opposites is the dialectic, in which unity and opposition are not mutually exclusive and each is retained. In the dialectic, as interpreted by Croce, opposites stay opposed to one another, and yet opposites taken together are not opposed to the unity that depends upon them for its coming-to-be. Resolved by the dialectic, the problem of opposites no longer threatens the philosophical concept. The concrete and universal unity of the philosophical concept is safe because the dialectic comprehends reality both as united and as divided, all at once, and because the concept depends upon the persistence of oppositions for its unity.292

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But in Croce’s account of Hegel’s dialectic, each term of an opposition is abstract (not concrete, in the Hegelian sense) when taken in isolation. It is by analogy with the statics of the lever, Croce explains that Hegel calls these opposed terms ‘moments,’ as when rising and falling around a fulcrum merely seem to be opposed because they are abstracted from the lever’s whole motion. In isolation, two abstract moments rule each other out; the second negates the first. But a third moment preserves each of the first two if, in relation to it, they are no longer isolated and abstract. Their opposition is thereby resolved or overcome or superseded or sublated (aufgehoben, superato). The third moment negates negation by an absolute negating, which is preservative and productive: the two opposed moments are sublated in the third and conserved in its dynamic unity. Absolute negation is absolute affirmation.293 The dialectic is first and foremost an activity, a thinking rather than a thought, in no way a passive receptivity or a static solution. The understanding first posits opposition and treats opposites as abstract. Reason then resolves the opposition by preserving it as internal to the unity that overcomes it. And the opposition, far from being opposed to that unity, makes it possible. To choose one troublesome case, if we treat truth/falsity abstractly, we may conclude that everything is equally true; but this will violate the very essence of truth, which requires a background of error. Reason recognizes that neither truth nor falsity exists abstractly in isolation; each depends on the other for its possibility – each depends especially on its opposition to the other. This recognition that truth needs a background of error and that error needs a background of truth preserves both truth and falsity; also their opposition to one another as truth/ falsity; as well as their status as conditions of the possibility of one another. Thus, while truth and falsity stay opposed to one another, neither is opposed to their interdependence and mutuality: each is a condition of the possibility of that interdependence.294 Croce considers a number of familiar objections to Hegel’s dialectic. The first is that the dialectic requires opposites to be identical because they form a synthetic unity. But if they really are identical, they cannot be opposites. Croce’s answer is that opposites are identical, in a sense, when taken abstractly and in isolation. I can hold that everything is equally true by assimilating the false to the true, for example, and claiming that what is false is somehow ‘true for me.’ But when I think it philosophically – concretely, that is – the opposition of the first two moments is preserved by the reason that recognizes their mutual interdependence. A related objection charges Hegel with violating the principle of identity

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and contradiction (or the rule of non-contradiction), with making such claims as that everything both is, and is not, what it is. Croce’s response is the same: reason triumphs by preserving each of the opposed moments in its integrity and by recognizing the necessary role that each plays in making the other possible.295 Croce’s view, then, is that the dialectic is what is living in Hegel’s philosophy. The dialectic is a revolutionary solution to a perennial philosophical problem – the problem of opposites.296 But Croce takes himself to have solved an equally important problem that Hegel mishandled by applying the dialectical method to it: the problem of distincts.297 As we shall see, this bungled job is what Croce diagnoses as dead in the philosophy of Hegel. However, Hegel had also diagnosed a third set of problems – those arising from the separation of appearance and essence – as ‘pseudoproblems.’ Which of the separated items is real? Materialism saves the appearances, but only by positing things as bearers of appearances. Supernaturalism preserves the essential, but not without acknowledging that essence appears to finite minds as appearance. Dividing appearance from essence gives rise to more divisions: external and internal, accidental and substantial, finite and infinite, many and one, sensible and suprasensible, matter and spirit. According to Croce, the problems that emerge from these divisions are not properly philosophical. They can be treated neither by the dialectical method nor by his own theory of distincts. They are pseudo-problems because the separated terms are figments of abstraction, neither opposites nor distincts.298 True opposites are opposed not as essence and appearance but as being and not-being. The question ‘Which is real?’ simply does not arise for them: the false, evil, ugly, irrational, and dead are as real as the true, good, beautiful, rational, and living when considered from the dialectical point of view. Nothing in either series is related to the other terms as species or genera of the real. Instead, the false, evil, ugly, irrational, and dead are the reality of not-being that makes real being possible.299 Although they are real, the opposites are not facts; in particular, they are not facts about being. As Croce points out, an irrational thought is not a thought at all; there are no thoughts about which ‘they are irrational’ is a fact. An ugly work of art is no work of art at all, and it is not as though, for some work of art, one fact about it is ‘that it is ugly.’ From the dialectical point of view, the reality of not-being – of the illogical, stupid, ugly, shameful, and so on – is the absence of fact. By contrast, the fact, or real being, ‘is always rational and ideal, always truth, always wisdom and moral goodness.’300

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What Is Dead? (Croce V)

Croce thinks that Hegel was right to locate the synthesis of opposites in the philosophical concept but wrong not to see that the concept also requires the unity of distincts. The concept is more than the synthesis of opposites; it is also those mutually interdependent domains which, just because they are distinct, cannot oppose one another. Logic, ethics, aesthetics, and history, for example, are distinct domains whose relations cannot be captured empirically by classification or dialectically by opposition. It makes no sense to think of them as fitting together into a single classificatory scheme like that of family, genus, and species. Nor does it make sense to treat any of them as the opposite of another, logically or metaphysically: logic is not the opposite of ethics; aesthetics is not the opposite of history.301 Croce diagnoses Hegel’s confusion about distincts as what anglophone philosophers since Ryle have called a ‘category mistake.’ To think of a piece of art as evil, an intellectual achievement as useful, or a properly functioning object as beautiful is like thinking of the university as an additional building on campus, team-spirit as an another player on the team, or the Average Tax Payer as a fellow-citizen. But it is also a category mistake to think of a work of art as the opposite of evil, an intellectual achievement as the opposite of useful, or a broken machine as the opposite of beautiful. Because knowledge, morality, beauty, and utility belong to distinct domains – ‘categories’ in Ryle’s language – judging any of them by criteria appropriate to another is a mistake in logic.302 The generalizing method of the natural sciences, which classify individuals into species and other types and sub-types, creates distortion if it is used to universalize, which is the philosophical task of the concept. In the case of opposites, Croce concedes, Hegel’s dialectic eliminates the

What Is Dead? (Croce V)

distortions produced by misdirected classifying. But the dialectic cannot deal with the problem of distincts. Like opposites, distincts make up a unitary system that cannot be captured by any classification. But unlike opposites, distincts are not amenable to synthesis and so are not candidates for dialectical treatment. To replace Hegel’s dialectic in the case of distincts, Croce substitutes his theory of levels, which he derived from Hegel’s criticisms of Schelling’s philosophy of nature.303 Two concepts, a and b, are distinct in Croce’s theory when a can be posited without b, but b cannot be posited without a; b therefore occupies a ‘higher level’ than a. The relationship between a and b is asymmetrical: a is a necessary condition of b, while b is merely sufficient for a. Presumably, b is higher than a, not in any normative sense but in the sense that a is a ground of b and that b requires a. Croce’s examples of art and philosophy illustrate these relations. Art (a) and philosophy (b) are not to be classified as species of a single mental genus, like cognition, nor treated dialectically as opposites (Į against ȕ) that negate one another. Philosophy is at a higher level than art, because, while art need not include philosophy yet does not exclude it, philosophy requires art and thus must include it. That philosophy is expressed artistically is necessary, Croce claims, because (i) there is no unexpressed philosophy, and (ii) all expression, by ‘words, images, metaphors, figures of speech and symbols’ or other means, is artistic. The asymmetry between philosophy and art as distincts entails that philosophy, being higher than art, incorporates or involves the art that is its necessary ground.304 Croce moves his analysis along by highlighting the differences between Hegel’s dialectical synthesis of opposites (ȕ negated by Į) and his own theory of levels (b at a higher level than a). First, taken in isolation and outside the synthesis, the two mutually negating moments of the dialectic are abstract. Isolated opposites, until they are resolved and preserved, are merely abstract and not full-blooded concepts, which would also be true of distincts were they subject to dialectical treatment. In the theory of levels, however, the two moments are concrete; the second moment, b, would be abstract without a, but both a and b, just by being distinct – that is, in being thought as distinct from one another – are concrete, fully-fledged concepts that are never without one another. Second, in the synthesis of opposites, both Į and ȕ are preserved, but not as distinct. In the theory of levels, however, b preserves a by incorporating it in such a way that a is no longer independent of b, even though they remain distinct – as, in Croce’s example, when the Spirit passes

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from art to philosophy, it does so by preserving art as the form in which philosophy expresses itself. Finally, in the theory of levels, the passage from a to b or from b to a (when, inversely, a will be higher than b and will incorporate b) is not the result of contradiction, as it is in the dialectic. Neither a nor b contains internal contradictions, nor does either conflict with the other. When the Spirit passes from art to philosophy, or from philosophy to art, it is not because art or philosophy are opposed qua art or qua philosophy. Rather, if the Spirit is not content with artistic contemplation, it is because it has already passed into philosophy; and if the Spirit is not content with philosophical inquiry, it is because it has already passed into aesthetics.305 In dealing with such problems, Hegel compounded his errors, in Croce’s view. He not only failed to recognize the special nature of distincts and to formulate a theory of levels that could do for them what the dialectic could not do; he also – and this was Hegel’s original sin – treated distincts as if they were opposites in order to apply the dialectic to them.306 The implausible triadic machinery that covers this mistake is an easy mark for Croce’s lampooning: Thus, there is natural soul (thesis), sensitive soul (antithesis) and real soul (synthesis) in his anthropology; theoretical spirit (thesis), practical spirit (antithesis) and free spirit (synthesis) in his psychology, and also intuition (thesis), representation (antithesis) and ethics (synthesis); or likewise, in this last area, family (thesis), civil society (antithesis) and state (synthesis); in the sphere of absolute Spirit, art (thesis), religion (antithesis) and philosophy (synthesis) … And so on … This is the first case of that abuse of the triadic form in Hegel’s system that has so greatly offended and still offends … For who will ever be persuaded that religion is the non-being of art and that art and religion are two abstractions that possess truth only in philosophy, the synthesis of both?307

Applying the dialectic to distincts has two other unfortunate results, beyond the multiplication of triads. First, abstract moments of the philosophical concept – genuine opposites – come to be treated as distincts ought to be treated, as if they were related by levels. Just because they are abstract, however, the moments mishandled in this way are pseudo-concepts, which Croce calls ‘philosophical mistakes.’ Such mistakes were made when the Eleatics made Being into the Absolute, whereas for the Buddhists Nothing was the Absolute.

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Each philosophical sect in turn isolated its own abstract moment and then committed the besetting philosophical sin of that moment. Likewise, by perversely turning opposed concepts into distincts, the Hegelian dialectic treats abstract pseudo-concepts – philosophical mistakes – as if they were concrete concepts in a unity of distinct, yet interdependent and therefore genuine philosophical concepts.308 Second, distincts come to be treated as opposites ought to be treated, as abstractions that when taken in isolation are engines of philosophical error. Applying the dialectic to distincts mistreats autonomous domains – such as aesthetics, history, and ethics – as abstract, partial, and provisional in relation to the philosophical concept. Accordingly, Hegel treats them as imperfect forms of philosophy – in effect, as philosophical mistakes. One case, according to Croce, is Hegel’s view of art as a failed attempt to grasp the Absolute: art’s purchase on that sublime item seems sordid and incomplete because its apprehension is merely and necessarily sensible; once philosophy has grasped the Absolute in the purity of its thinking, art as a distinct domain is reduced to a philosophical mistake, making philosophy the true art.309 History’s fate is similar by Hegel’s account – as Croce understands Hegel. Philosophical thinking produces historical knowledge, when, for example, we better understand Dante’s having written the Divine Comedy (a fact of history) by deploying the (philosophical) concepts of poetry and artistic creation. Conversely, historical knowing produces philosophical thought when, for example, we move from historical accounts of the past to the theorizing that makes those accounts intelligible. Although both these transactions occur all the time and do no harm, Hegel’s misconceived philosophy of history subordinates history to philosophy and thereby violates the autonomy of both history and philosophy as distinct domains. History becomes just another philosophical mistake, a mere pseudo-philosophy that annihilates history.310 The authentically distinct domains of science and mathematics go the same ruinous way in Hegel’s system, becoming no more than flawed attempts at philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy of nature is as unjust to philosophy and to nature as his philosophy of history is unfair to history. By viewing the empirical sciences in the warped mirror of his logic, Croce writes, ‘Hegel completely rejected them and absorbed them into philosophy, which thus took on all their rights and all their duties.’311 As each distinct domain is absorbed into the misbegotten philosophy that treats it dialectically, the erroneous scope of that philosophy grows ever wider. Having misappropriated the sciences, philosophy acquires

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the false burden of discovering and explaining all natural phenomena, ‘stars, physical forces, chemical structures, physiological elements and unknown species of animals and plants.’ Having invaded history’s territory, philosophy also extends its regime to individual facts. And just as Hegel was forced to treat distincts as opposed moments needing synthesis, so too was he obliged to treat empirical phenomena and particular facts as if they too were philosophical concepts. According to Croce, ‘this is the second great abuse of his dialectical discovery that Hegel committed’ – and another opportunity for ridicule.312 ‘Hegelian dialectic has been caricatured many times,’ writes Croce. ‘But no caricature could equal what the author himself did unconsciously when he tried to think of Africa, Asia and Europe or the hand, nose and ear or family patrimony, paternal power and testament in the same rhythm of thought that he used for being, nothing and becoming.’313

This long Hegelian train of error, from misunderstanding opposites as distincts and treating distincts as opposites to mistreating phenomena and facts as philosophical concepts, is what Croce, in an early use of the term, calls panlogicism: ‘the substitution of philosophical thought for all other processes of the Spirit, which must all take on logical (philosophical) form and vanish.’ By segregating opposites from distincts and separating the methods appropriate to each – the dialectic and the theory of levels – Croce aims to stop what he accused Hegel of starting, the engulfing of everything by a metaphysical logic and the surrender of all reality to a cold intellectualism.314 In the last chapter of his essay, describing his task as the resurrection of Hegel’s spirit from the corpse that it had become, Croce summarizes his results: to preserve the living part of the philosophy, meaning the new concept of the concept, the concrete universal, along with the dialectic of opposites and the theory of levels of reality; to reject, on the basis of that new concept and its development, all panlogicism and any speculative construction of the individual and empirical, of history and nature; to recognize the autonomy of the various forms of the Spirit, even in their necessary connection and unity; and finally, to reduce all philosophy to a pure philosophy of the Spirit (or a metaphysical logic, if one preferred to give it that name).315

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The ‘pure philosophy of the Spirit’ that Croce sought would have left natural science beyond the reach of philosophical discourse. Insofar as idealism was a corrective for positivism, this antagonism to natural science spoke to the last moments of the old century, when an enfeebled positivism had invited the proto-Fascist activism, pragmatism, and irrationalism of young iconoclasts like Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini. At first Croce himself saw their cultural journalism in the fashionable pages of La Voce and Leonardo as a Florentine accessory to his own aims in La Critica, whose accent was southern and Neapolitan. But the real prophets of the dawning century would be Planck and Einstein, not Peirce or Bergson, and Croce was all but deaf to those voices of a new and powerful world view.316 Led by Ernst Cassirer, the neo-Kantian heirs of transcendental idealism kept themselves at the centre of debate about the new science until Hitler shut down the discussion in the 1930s. Italian idealism, as Croce and Gentile expressed it, let most of those conversations pass by. Of the two, the professorial Gentile was the less fastidious on this point. He did not share Croce’s aesthetic disdain for the unlovely speech of scientists. More important, his own new philosophy was to be an immanent idealism which, more or less like Spinoza with his Deus sive Natura, aimed to naturalize the divine while divinizing nature.317

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Materialism (Gentile I)

Croce’s superb essay on Hegel is his clearest public statement of the philosophical issue that did most to put him at odds with Giovanni Gentile: his theory of distinction and opposition. Much more than philosophy, of course, was involved in their famous controversy, which took decades to ripen and grew out of a relationship of patronage, partnership, and friendship. Croce, the older of the two, had made his name as a public intellectual while Gentile was still just another university student, and Croce was one of the first to spot Gentile’s stunning talent.318 Gentile was born in 1875 – nine years after Croce – in Castelvetrano, in a middle- class Sicilian family. He started school in 1881 and would later describe his early education as positivist in spirit. He won admission in 1893 to the Scuola Normale and went north to Pisa, where he studied Italian literature with Alessandro d’Ancona, history with Amedeo Crivelluci, and philosophy with Donato Jaja. He was closest to Jaja, his personal link to Fiorentino, Spaventa, and, ultimately, Hegel. But erudition was as prominent in his education as philosophy, and many ideologies were also on offer: positivism, pragmatism, secularism, anticlericalism, socialism, liberalism, and, above all, the nationalism of a new nation. The thesis that he started in 1894 – a study of Rosmini and Gioberti – is a chapter in the longer story that would become the grand narrative of modern Italian philosophy. Another of his lifelong interests, education and pedagogy, is visible in his earliest publications at Pisa, which awarded him its degree in 1897.319 At that time, Villari was still teaching in Florence at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where Gentile went next to prepare his thesis for publication and extend his education. He taught a course on historical materialism and studied with Felice Tocco, an eminent Neo-Kantian, a

Materialism (Gentile I)

student of Spaventa, and the editor of the Latin Bruno. Gentile finished his thesis with Tocco in 1898: this account of Italian philosophy, From Genovesi to Galluppi, provides the background to his study of Rosmini and Gioberti. With his formal education complete, he returned to Sicily, but not before meeting the person who would take Jaja’s place at the centre of his intellectual life: Benedetto Croce. The two young intellectuals began to correspond in 1896 and met a year later in Naples to discuss their mutual interest in history, art, and Labriola’s Marxism.320 Gentile’s political instincts in his student years were, roughly speaking, the ideals of the Historical Right (Destra storica) – the generation that came to power in 1860 – blended with a cultural populism, and such attitudes were unfriendly to socialism and Marxism. Croce too was a critic of socialist theory by the time he met Gentile: both doubted (though in different ways) Labriola’s claim that historical materialism is a coherent philosophy. Gentile joined the public debate on this topic in 1898 with a ‘Critique of Historical Materialism,’ which had also been his secondary thesis at the Normale.321 Labriola, Gentile, and Croce were all anti-positivist, but the conception of history that the younger thinkers shared was broader and deeper than Labriola’s committed Marxism. Gentile charged that Marx misunderstood Hegel: Marx accused Hegel of detaching ideas from reality, when, in fact, Hegel had insisted on the strongest possible union of the ideal with the real. Gentile also disagreed with Croce, who regarded socialism as a practical possibility even though its theoretical basis was flawed – even though it was no historical necessity in the Hegelian sense. In that case, Gentile objected, the socialism that is not necessary is also not possible. In 1899 he combined his essay on historical materialism with a companion piece on ‘The Philosophy of Praxis,’ publishing them together as The Philosophy of Marx and dedicating the book to Croce.322 Gentile’s account of praxis starts with the writings of 1845 in which Marx and Engels sketched their critique of the Hegelian Left, especially Ludwig Feuerbach’s account of religion. In this framework, Gentile asks whether Marx’s materialism qualifies as a genuine philosophy. While acknowledging Labriola’s authority on such questions, he wants to get back to Marx himself as the author of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ and thus as the critic of a ‘degenerate Hegelianism of the Left.’ He sees Feuerbach as having denied the harmony that Hegel had posited between philosophy and religion, as finding them opposed in the way that thought is opposed to feeling or imagination. Philosophy seeks to understand; religion aims to satisfy needs, and those needs are essentially physical

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and bodily. It is because the essence of the human is corporeal, in fact, that the body’s needs give rise to religion. The history of human agency, then, will be the story of embodied individuals acting in society – an economic history grounded in historical materialism.323 Having summarized Feuerbach’s argument, Gentile then translates the eleven theses that Marx wrote in 1845 to refute Feuerbach and sketch his own notion of praxis. In the end, says Marx, even though Feuerbach is a materialist, he is still stuck in the abstract theorizing that prevented Hegel and other idealists from achieving any correct sense of praxis. As a result, neither Hegel nor Feuerbach could get full value from their most important achievement, which was to put human activity at the centre of philosophy, since they could only conceive of that activity abstractly, never objectively. Their perspective therefore remained bourgeois, not comprehensively human, and they failed to interpret the world properly, much less change it.324 Although praxis was the keystone of Marx’s critique of idealism, Gentile recalls that the notion itself was an old idealist invention, long familiar from the Socrates who required his students to make their knowledge out of themselves. In his ‘implacable criticism of Descartes,’ Vico took this venerable theme farther: all distinctively human knowledge is knowledge made by humans. Hence, ‘if what can be known is one’s own work … the natural world must be entrusted to the knowledge possessed by God, who is its only maker. But the historical world, a product of human activity, is the object of which humans can gain knowledge because they have made it.’ For Vico, however, this human activity is an activity of the human mind.

History for Vico is about artifacts of human minds, whereas for Marx it is about the needs of embodied humans in society. Marx wants to replace Vico’s mental praxis with a material praxis.325 Labriola confirms Vico’s insight: ‘we understand well only what we ourselves are capable of producing – by thinking, working, trying and trying again, always in virtue of powers that are our own in the social context.’ But Gentile observes that ‘this making or re-making is not always … material … more often … it is simply making … by thinking,’ as reflected, for example, in Friedrich Froebel’s pedagogy of learning by doing, which is idealist rather than materialist. Froebel was inspired by Fichte’s effort ‘to derive all our science from the primitive making of the I,’ but Marx’s goal was to keep praxis embedded in bodily agency and

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then ‘to move this principle over from abstract idealism into concrete materialism.’326 Marx also objected to the subject/object relation as understood in the empiricist philosophies of his day, wherein the object of sensation or intuition is not made but given. If, per impossibile, subject and object were uncorrelated, if the subject did not make the object, the two would be isolated, abstract, and dead. But in fact – according to Marx as explicated by Gentile – not only is the object made by the subject but also without the object there is no subject, and the subject itself makes itself by making the object. ‘The moments of the subject’s progressive formation correspond to various moments in the progressive formation of the object … The root, the enduring cause of this development lies in the activity, in the making of the subject that shapes itself by shaping the object.’

Here, in one of Gentile’s earliest works, we find other roots as well, those of his later philosophy of actual idealism, with its intense – not to say obsessive – focus on thinking as unmediated activity.327 As Gentile speaks on Marx’s behalf, what he means by the false ‘abstract position of materialism’ is a kind of empiricism, the illusion of a mental tabula rasa passively written on by its objects. Although he finds such a relation between a pure subject and pure objects unintelligible, he allows that the desire for objective knowledge – for knowledge unsullied by anything subjective – suggests that the empiricist delusion is not altogether unhealthy. But Marx’s response was to derive a contrary and far healthier subjectivity from his concept of praxis. His reality is not a remote array of windowless objects that somehow pass through the shutters of the mind: ‘reality is a subjective product of mankind, but a product of sensory activity … not of thinking, as Hegel and other idealists believed.’328 Nonetheless, it was Hegel’s virtue to have understood our knowledge of reality as ‘a continuous producing, a making that never stops, a praxis that originates,’ leaving it to Marx to ‘transfer this principle … from an abstract, idealist notion of the Spirit to real, concrete, sensory human activity.’ Although Feuerbach’s analysis of religion in The Essence of Christianity had inspired Marx, what the great revolutionary found in that book was inconsistency: religious praxis turns up only in the ‘filthy Jewish forms’ of Christianity, while theory and theology – the materially grounded ideology of Christian faith, in Marx’s view – remain entirely idealized.329

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Labriola sympathized with Feuerbach’s failure: it is hard to find anything material in the otherworldly impulses of religion, though Labriola (from his Western perspective) believed that familiarity made the motives of Christian religion easier to grasp than those of religion in general. It takes no great insight to see the massive cathedrals that dominate Europe’s cities as expressing material needs, though only Marx understood religious theorizing as a response to those same needs: When the making is united with the knowing, the objects that belong to knowing are also the objects of making, and vice-versa, so that finally there is just a single class of objects related to praxis (which is making and knowing together) and produced just by it. And if materialism is good enough to explain objects that are made, it must also be good enough to explain objects that are known … Instead, Feuerbach explains his doctrinal constructions by the abstract activity of the Spirit – for him, the real human activity – and so he leaps back into the idealism that he wished so firmly to deny.330

As Gentile sees it, ‘inconsistency is Feuerbach’s leading error.’ His goal was a materialist philosophy; materialism needs to be monist; but Feuerbach’s analysis of religion is dualist, positing an idealist theory incoherently related to a material praxis. By contrast, ‘we may define the philosophy of praxis sketched by Marx … as a materialist monism that differs from any system like it in its concept of praxis applied to matter.’331 Gentile renders this verdict at the start of the ninth and last section of his long essay on praxis, after testing that notion against norms of realism and dialectical coherence, tracing it through the work of German, French, and Italian critics and evaluating it both as theory and as practical politics. Since Marx’s praxis is a materialist monism, Gentile will try to clarify it by asking what matter means to Marx. Rejecting the traditional view that matter is inert and fixed, Marx thinks of it as active and always in process, though it is human agency that gives matter its activity. Equipped with this new concept, Marx wants to reform Hegel’s system, in which the Spirit makes the Idea – an ideal reality. His reform is a substitution or inversion: embodied humans (not Spirit) make things that they need (not the Idea), a sensory and material reality. And then, taking the step that Feuerbach did not take, Marx accounts for the theoretical items in Hegel’s system as ideologies, distillates of the same praxis that produces economic goods.332

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Marx’s root mistake, according to Gentile, is an incomplete phenomenology that stops short with sensible consciousness, which is really only a first level. When we see colour, for example, it is our sensory activity that produces our sensory reality as, among other things, coloured, while our agency – like Plato’s Demiurge – still needs something to work on. Whatever this raw material for our sensory production may be (Gentile mentions vibrations in the ether), it is nothing like the sensations that we produce. What more to say? From the point of view of psychology, maybe nothing: the brute fact of physical data, primitives simply given to the senses, may suffice. And for the thoroughgoing materialist, no deity needs to pluck a cosmic string to set the ether vibrating: matter just does what it does.333 This materialist account of sensation may work for psychology but not for philosophy, Gentile insists, which needs an a priori answer – one not derived a posteriori from the sensing that needs to be explained – and the answer also needs to be more persuasive than the God of the spiritualists. At this point, Gentile turns to Kant, to ‘synthetic a priori judgments,’ which, unlike the blind data of sensation, equip us with universal concepts, the reasons and laws immanent in matter and govern nature. Without such concepts, our effort to understand matter is futile because it is trapped in matter, the very thing that Marx needs to explain if his materialism is to be a philosophy worthy of the name.334 Because it is a philosophy; the idealism advocated by Gentile wants to achieve what Marx could not achieve: an a priori philosophical account of praxis. The only alternative would be a materialism more rigorous than Marx’s, but any such thing will be a metaphysics and hence just a defective idealism, and Marx’s criticisms of other types of materialism will be undermined in the same way as long as the Ideal is excluded. Consider his views on individuals and society, for example: if human individuals are irreducibly social – never just atomic persons apart from society – then social mutuality is essential to the human person. But that essential mutuality – as distinct from one person’s experience of another – is not accessible a posteriori: it is ‘nowhere to be touched, seen or heard.’ Once again, Marx needs the a priori that he rejects.335 Marx could not leave the human person in isolation, because for him agency is the heart of the human. An agent needs something to act on, or, at a minimum, something to do or to think, apart from just being there. In Gentile’s words: ‘Praxis means a relation between subject and object – thus neither the individual subject nor the individual object as such and simpliciter, but the one

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Part I: Introduction as necessarily related to the other, and vice versa: thus, to put it another way, the identity of opposites. Not teachers on one side … and on the other side those who are taught, but teachers who are taught and, as teachers, those who are taught.’336

The essential mutuality of praxis also required Marx to reject what Gentile calls ‘naturalism,’ including any of the purely biological accounts of mankind that proliferated in the century of Darwin. The human animal is unlike the others in a number of ways – in being by nature political, for example, and thus developing along paths outside the borders of biological evolution. Like Darwin’s theory of biological life, however, Marx’s theory of human praxis needs to be dynamic – a materialist theory of change. In the human domain, where such things as politics are on the table, a materialist theory of change will be a historical materialism. ‘But here,’ Gentile claims, ‘we have a materialism which, if it is to be historical, is forced to deny its own basis – that there is no other reality beyond the sensible – in order to construct its theory. It thus rejects the essential features of every materialist position, of the atomist conception of society, for example, and naturalism itself. In short, this is a materialism that to be historical can no longer be materialism. A deep, internal and incurable contradiction afflicts it.’337

Gentile’s view is that a consistent materialism can never account for the dynamic character of reality, especially as manifest in human history, because the matter of materialism can only be static: ‘matter as such is always self-identical: it never changes.’338 The most persuasive materialism is the historical kind that Marx promoted, decreeing that ‘history is the only true mistress of all us humans and that we are as history lives us.’ But in the end all materialism – and any allied account of praxis – is defective, according to Gentile, and any attempt to solve its problems will end in ‘a more or less Platonic dualism, not a materialist monism.’ At this early stage of his career, before he had developed a more robust notion of immanence – one that might sustain a naturalist monism that is not physicalist – Gentile still looked back to Plato for the answer that Marx could not find, the answer to the most persistent question about matter: ‘What is the source of the energy that makes it come to be incessantly? One might say there is a force immanent in it, but this force that transforms mat-

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Materialism (Gentile I) ter step by step in a dialectical and determinate development is a rational force, and reason is the Spirit.’339

Marx ought to have found this answer, Gentile charged, in ‘Hegel’s stunning critique of the abstract intellect. Yes to matter, then, but matter along with praxis (the subjective object). Yes to matter, but matter in continuous becoming … Yes to materialism, but historical materialism. Except that the irony of logic answered the best intentions of his realism with a gross contradiction as the result.’

So Marx failed the test that opens Gentile’s essay. At best, his is a flawed philosophy, ‘an eclecticism with contradictory ingredients.’340

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As Gentile laboured to reject one system, Marxism, while making it clear that he valued Marx’s account of praxis, he was also at work on another system – actualism or actual idealism – that would move him closer to Hegel, Fichte, and Kant and away from Marx, that relentlessly ungrateful child of idealism. After the publication of Rosmini e Gioberti in 1898, Gentile’s work on the metaphysics and epistemology of earlier and later Italian thinkers educated him about their targets and sources: Condillac and the French sensists; Thomas Reid and the Scots Enlightenment; and, above all, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy in Germany. Spaventa had already located Kant in his ‘circulation of European thought,’ thereby linking him with Italian philosophy. It was while studying Marx and thinking about praxis that Gentile started his large project of editing and interpreting Spaventa.341 The young and ambitious Gentile was then teaching in a Sicilian liceo while dealing with the frustrations – and the dishonesty – that many have experienced in the Italian educational bureaucracy. This experience was especially bitter for him because no small part of his early success was as a theorist and critic of education – in his Teaching Philosophy in High Schools of 1900, for example. By the end of 1902, however, he had found a job as a docent in the University of Naples, teaching a course on the ‘Rebirth of Idealism.’ Gentile’s inaugural lecture for the course can be read in several ways: as an oratorical self-advertisement; as a statement of long-range philosophical goals; and as a prospectus for La Critica, the journal that he and Croce launched together in January of 1903. Cultural polemic in the high Italian style was the journal’s purpose, Croce focusing on modern Italian literature, Gentile on Italian philosophy, and in the journal’s first phase its two creators were fellow-soldiers assaulting positivism under the banner of idealism.342

Idealism (Gentile II)

Like other examples of its genre, Gentile’s prolusione on idealism is programmatic and polemical. He opens piously, however, with compliments for Spaventa, ‘the founder of true academic philosophy in contemporary Italy,’ and for Jaja, ‘my valiant Pisan teacher.’343 Throughout the speech, allusions to Bruno, Campanella, Dante, Galileo, Pomponazzi, and Vico confirm that Gentile means to grow his philosophy in the old soil of the new Italian nation. Although the title of the address tells us that its topic is rebirth, the author declares that idealism is alive and well, not superseded by any of its opponents. An idealist will understand best, he implies, that antagonism to idealism is necessary to its development. And on a broader front, in the story of philosophy as a whole, we should expect no stability. In that context, the conflicts that have shaped idealism had to be as they were, since ‘it was inevitable that the Spirit again began to be alienated from itself and to turn toward the nature that stands eternally before it.’344 The opposition to idealism has been manifest in various materialisms – those of Marx and Darwin most prominently – but these systems get things upside down, not ‘raising nature to the Spirit but … bringing the Spirit down to nature.’ Gentile also names historical positivism (meaning Villari and others) and philosophical positivism (meaning Ardigò and others) as enemies of idealism that ‘reduce history to an intricate puppet-show, directed not by the Providence that Vico taught to us … but by the ineluctable influence of … physical nature.’ In the end, what the positivists have to show is just a confused collection of phenomena, and, if the empirical sciences persist in ignoring philosophy, all that they will manage to do is to compile and organize their data.345 Unaware that mere experimentalism is empty, sociology and other studies of mankind have been anxious ‘to take a seat at the banquet of the sciences,’ thus starving themselves on a diet of hollow particulars. Even the artists who write manifestos about naturalism, realism, and verism are complicit in the positivist confusion of natural appearances with spiritual reality. Most shameful of all, philosophy itself, in its Neo-Kantian avatar, has become the ‘deferential – indeed, obsequious – devout and passive admirer of the experimental sciences.’346 This was the situation, Gentile reports, until ‘a few years ago, when a bizarre and peevish spirit came forth to shout at science’s failure.’ This Zarathustra was Ferdinand Brunetière, a conservative Catholic and a critic of naturalism who had great influence as the editor of the Revue des deux mondes; his Renaissance de l’idéalisme, from which Gentile took his title, had appeared in 1896. When Brunetière claimed that science could never keep its promises or replace religion, the promoters of sci-

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ence were scandalized, but resistance was futile. Others took up the cry, complaining that materialism is naïve, that naturalism gives no account of mind, that experimentalism has few uses, and that positivism erodes morality. In response, philosophers in England and America have begun ‘a sort of neo-Hegelianism.’347 ‘What people are looking for and what they want,’ Gentile explains, ‘is unity, the animating idea of nature and history. They are looking for the fullness of life and knowledge … They want to put God back into the deserted and desolate temple … Eyes turn naturally to the past, to times when the present torment was not felt, and … [to claims] that fundamental problems of thinking are neutral for reason, turning away from it toward what is called “feeling” or the “inspiration of feeling” – which is then supposed to be religion’s theoretical content. But this is a critical moment that contains the seed of its own destruction.’348

Although blind faith, irrationalism, and mysticism are predictable responses to naturalism, they are also worse than useless. In the ensuing confusion, a resurgent idealism will do best on its own, taking its own path of resistance to materialist naturalism and forswearing alliance not only with the irrationalists but also with the Neo-Kantians: ‘Our idealism never denies the rights of the Spirit asserted by Neo-Kantianism and by … mysticism, though when they offer an agnostic justification of those rights, our idealism rejects this as irrational. It also departs from naturalism by asserting the reality of ideas. But it differs from Neo-Kantianism and mysticism by aiming to clarify the intrinsic and unbreakable connection between ideas and nature…. Since both nature and Spirit derive from the real, nature gains the same intelligibility and transparency that belongs to the Spirit.’349

Gentile expresses confidence in his quest for ideas because ‘mistrust of the ideas that Plato called divine is an anachronism in today’s philosophy.’ He decrees that ‘ideal reality is beyond any possible dispute because philosophizing entails asserting just such a reality.’ Idealism is built into the project of philosophy as an a priori science. While the special sciences may use concepts as kinds, categories, laws, and principles for their various purposes, philosophy’s domain is the concept itself as both real and ideal. Losing sight of this objective is easy, however, because the human mind is naturally inclined to take the sensible as its norm – hence the illusions of naturalism.350 In Gentile’s view, then,

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Idealism (Gentile II) ‘the real question … is not the legitimacy of idealism, which is assumed by philosophy … The real problem is to understand idealism. A person who shrinks from idealism when he wants to philosophize makes himself look crazy, like someone who wanted to walk without moving … We can say we are theorizing without ideas, but we are not theorizing at all … We need to understand idealism, and understanding idealism means understanding the value of ideas. Here we encounter the supreme difficulty: that ideas appear as directly contrary to nature and irreconcilable with it.’

Those who wish to escape the trap of materialist naturalism need a way out, but ‘either [this is] idealist monism, which solves the problem by denying its existence, or else dualism, which acknowledges the problem but declares itself powerless to solve it. In neither case is there any real understanding of idealism … Real idealism is missing in both cases,’

and a real idealism is now Gentile’s goal.351 But how to proceed? Since the idea grows out of sense, to negate the natural is to sever the roots of the idea, which is why Kant had to refute Plato’s innatism and show that without sensory intuition concepts are empty, thereby establishing ‘the necessary connection between idea and sense’ that both idealist philosophers and empirical psychologists now assume.352 Unlike Kant, however, Gentile wants to dispense altogether with the transcendent, at least in any traditional sense, and also to accept a non-physical determinism, but again of no ordinary kind. ‘This is the problem,’ he declares, ‘to reconcile transcendence with immanence, mechanical determinism with teleology, idea with sense, and once again to find the unity of the contraries. Only on this condition can we … save Abel without causing the death of his brother and turning him into Cain.’353

It will not be enough for the young idealists whom Gentile wants to educate simply to pledge allegiance to the Ideal; they must also ‘account for the value of the ideas that they use to understand reality … such idealists establish the point where contraries coincide, and the unity thereby established is not … of nature alone nor … of the Spirit alone but the complete unity of the duality of nature and the Spirit. Spinoza’s substance … is the expression of this basic problem of philosophy. But it is the expression, not the solution.’354

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The problem as Spinoza left it is exceedingly difficult, he admits, but simply declaring it unsolvable is the very refusal to account for ideas that philosophy must repudiate: in effect, that refusal makes scepticism into a dogma and turns its back on philosophy. The alternatives are stark: ‘either understand the unity of the Spirit and nature or give up philosophy.’ And it was that unforgiving task on which Gentile laboured for decades, ‘looking for the Spirit deep in Nature’s belly.’355

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Actualism (Gentile III)

After several years of teaching liceo and university students in Naples, though never on a secure basis, Gentile moved back to Sicily in 1906 as professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Palermo, where he stayed until 1914, participating in highly charged debates on pedagogy, public education, and religious education. Because Palermo was not a happy place for him, however, he tried for the history of philosophy chair at Naples when it came open in 1908, only to be blocked again by patrons of a competitor. Croce responded in 1909 with an open letter on ‘The Gentile Case and Dishonesty in Italian University Life.’ Gentile’s fifth child, born in the previous summer, was given the name Benedetto.356 During these years, two of Croce’s projects were a book on Vico and another on aesthetics, which appeared in 1910 and 1911. His public engagement with his Neapolitan predecessor was another step in the Italian rehabilitation of Italy’s greatest Enlightenment thinker. The Croce of this period was already a pezzo grosso, a presence large enough on the cultural scene that by himself he could enlarge or diminish a reputation as considerable as Vico’s – not to speak of a career like Gentile’s, still in its early stages. And Vico’s contribution to Croce’s aesthetics, pushing him towards intuition and the concrete, away from the abstract and rationality, also worked to separate him from Gentile. The most original part of Gentile’s thought, his actual idealism, is also its most formidably abstract part – and the heart of his philosophy.357 Gentile’s growing distance from Croce, both physical and intellectual, allowed Gentile to work out his ideas without the mixed blessing of an extremely persuasive collaborator. To this period we can trace the ever sharper tensions between the two great thinkers that would end their

Part I: Introduction

friendship within a decade. But the immediate result of Gentile’s isolation was the first full statement of a philosophy that is distinctly his, ‘The Act of Thinking as Pure Act,’ first delivered as a conference paper in 1911 to the Philosophical Library of Palermo, of which he was the founding director.358 Like all of Gentile’s writing about actualism, the ‘Act of Thinking’ is intense and abstract – though not in the technical sense of that word as he used it. It is also quite short – both an advantage and a disadvantage in comparison to the much longer, and more mature, books on actualism: A General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act (1916) and A System of Logic as a Theory of Knowledge (1917−23).359 In later years, after he had become a celebrity, both as an intellectual and as a senior official of the Fascist regime, he wrote a number of summaries of his philosophy, which, given his access to Mussolini, inevitably came to be seen as philosophical justifications of Fascism. One of those later pieces, ‘The Foundations of Actual Idealism,’ was first published in 1931 in a German volume, Der aktuale Idealismus, and then in Italian in the Nuova Antologia of the same year.360 The much earlier ‘Act of Thinking’ begins, characteristically, with a strong assertion: ‘There is no philosophical or scientific inquiry, there is no thinking of any kind unless the thinking has faith in itself or in its own value, unless there is spontaneous and unyielding conviction of thinking the truth.’

We are told that when a subject thinks some thought, P, she is indefeasibly convinced that P is true. To put it another way, no subject can think a thought of whose truth she is not entirely convinced: S thinks P → S is indefeasibly convinced that P is true.

The subject’s conviction of the truth of P is epistemically basic: it is not inherited from her convictions about anything else that she may think. It is an internal feature of thinking itself. Gentile’s label for this built-in feature of thinking is ‘faith in truth.’ Even the sceptic has this faith, he claims, since the sceptic takes her thought that she ought to suspend judgment as unshakably true.361 But is it not possible for a subject to entertain a thought of whose truth she is not convinced? That possibility applies to abstract rather than concrete thinking, according to Gentile, who wants to restrict genuine thinking to the concrete kind. Two examples of abstract thinking distinguish

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it as inauthentic. First, if I entertain some thought of whose truth you – but not I – are convinced, then, strictly speaking, I will not be thinking my thought. Your thought will be the object of my thinking, but not anything that I am actually thinking. Second, if I merely recall one of my own previous thoughts, that thought too will be the object of my thinking, not my thinking as such. In both cases, the thought that becomes the object of my thinking – as distinct from my own actual thinking – is an abstract thought.362 Abstract thoughts, according to Gentile, have abstract objectivity as opposed to concrete objectivity. If, instead of just thinking, I make a thought the object of my thinking, that thought will have objectivity of an abstract kind: some objectivity, after all, is what we should expect any object of thought to have. But if I actually think, rather than taking some thought of yours or a past thought of mine as my abstract object, my thinking will have concrete objectivity. In the latter, concrete case, thinking entails affirming – my having an unshakeable conviction that what I am thinking is true. The only way I can think another’s thought, or one of my own past thoughts, concretely rather than abstractly is, as Gentile writes, ‘by meaning it, or by discerning or recognizing its value and, in other, perhaps provisional, terms, by agreeing to it and making it [mine]’: by somehow thinking it, that is to say, rather than thinking about it.363 According to Gentile, when I do not just think about a thought but actually think it – whether it is someone else’s thought or a past thought of my own – I negate the thought in its abstract objectivity by affirming it in concrete objectivity. And because the abstract thought that I started with is negated, the concrete thinking that negates it is a new act: it is neither a thought collected from someone else nor a thought recollected from myself. Such thinking is my thinking, not someone else’s, and it is wholly actual in that it is present as my own. Thinking that is not my own or no longer my own is not actual thinking. By contrast, claims Gentile, concrete thinking is absolutely actual, and the philosophy that Gentile derived from this notion is often called ‘absolute actualism.’364 Again, negating a thought in its abstract objectivity by making it one’s own concrete and absolutely actual thinking entails affirming it in its concrete objectivity. This tells us why the material conditional, S thinks P → S is indefeasibly convinced that P is true,

holds for the actual concrete thought that is one’s own. As Gentile puts

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it, ‘what we think actually, if we think it, we think as truth.’ Error, on the other hand, has no rights: error is what I cannot think; it may be what I once thought, or what someone else thought or thinks, but I simply cannot think it.365 In Gentile’s system, error just is abstract thought, always opposed to actual concrete thinking. Though I may make a thought that I regard as erroneous the object of my thinking, I cannot actually think it. In order to think the thought rather than just think about it, I must negate its abstract objectivity, and to do that I must affirm the thought, which requires that I regard the thought as unshakably true – in no way an error. Finally, if errors are thoughts that I can no longer think, or just cannot think, then truths are thoughts that I must think, thoughts that I cannot not think. Just as thinking that P is a sufficient condition for thinking that P is true, thinking that P is true is also necessary for thinking that P. When I make a thought my own concrete and absolutely actual thinking, I both affirm it in its concrete objectivity and negate it in its abstract objectivity. And when I become aware that a thought is mistaken, I can no longer think it: as my own thinking it is negated. Once an error is negated in this way, my own thinking is again affirmed as my own, actual and concrete. Gentile calls this process the ‘dialectic … thinking as activity that posits itself by negating itself,’ and he argues that it should replace the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason.366 When I become aware of an error, I do so by thinking about some thought that is no longer my own; I am thinking about the mistaken thought, not thinking it. But when I negate that thought, I affirm my own thinking. Hence, the applicable principle of thought is dialectical, A = ¬A,

because, in Gentile’s view, ‘every act of thinking is a negation of an act of thinking, a present in which the past dies, and thus a unity of these two moments.’ Thinking is freeing oneself from error by knowing a truth.367 Here is a problem: common sense tells us that our beliefs may be erroneous – that believing that P is compatible with P’s being false. So how can Gentile hold that I cannot, on his view, think an error? Gentile is not committed to the position that I cannot be mistaken, only to a weaker claim: that if I regard P as false, then, even though I may entertain the proposition P, I may not think P. In other words, Gentile draws a distinction between entertaining a proposition – making P an object of thought – and believing it, which happens only if one assents to it. This weaker

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position is uncontroversial. Common sense and philosophy both recognize a distinction between thinking about a proposition and believing it. In fact, in order to recognize that I do not believe P, I must entertain P. Gentile’s claim that I cannot think an error is not that I cannot be mistaken, only that, if I regard P as false, I cannot, at the same time, assent to P – unless I am irrational. Gentile’s advocacy of this uncontroversial commitment is obscured by his highly tensed and indexed presentation.368 Here is a simple description of events involving some person S who recognizes that her belief that P is false, and so disclaims P: S first believes that P, which is equivalent to believing that P is true; upon believing Q, S now believes that P is false, which is equivalent to believing that P is not true (though not to not believing that P).

Here is how Gentile might describe the same events, where the ‘thinkstrue’ relation captures believing some proposition, and the ‘thinksabout’ relation captures merely entertaining it: S thinks-true P at t1; S thinks-true Q at t2; S’s thinking-true Q at t2 is equivalent to its not being the case that S thinkstrue P at t2, though S may think-about P at t2.

Notice that neither account concerns the truth of P; rather, each is concerned just to make it clear that a subject S cannot both (explicitly) believe that P and also (explicitly) disclaim P as her belief and as a belief to the effect that P is true. With this clarification of the possibility of error, recall that Gentile contrasts his dialectical principle, A = ¬A,

with those of identity and contradiction, A=A

and A ∨ ¬A,

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which are abstractions that cannot be rules of thought. Such false principles abstract away from the unity of the actual, depicting the world as consisting of particulars that oppose one another and rule one another out, thus giving birth to life’s conflicts – ‘between man and nature, life and death, idea and reality, pleasure and pain, science and mystery, good and evil and so on.’ If these principles are applied to thinking itself, philosophers may be tempted to regard the associated oppositions as conceptual or metaphysical, which may produce such results as Kant’s antinomies.369 Since the ‘logic of identity,’ to use Gentile’s phrase, requires opposites to exclude one another, we must choose either being or non-being and must therefore profess either dualism or monism, both of them leading to unsolvable antinomies. The logic of dialectic, by contrast, tells us that ‘truth is not of the being that is but of the being that annuls itself and, by annulling itself, really is’: the dialectical principle expresses the activity of actual thinking as thought that posits itself by negating itself. Hence, when we see how affirming thought as concrete negates it as abstract, we understand how the dialectical affirmation of any opposite, which, in the logic of identity, excludes a corresponding opposite, is, dialectically, just the negation of that other opposite, and vice versa. Accordingly, to affirm happiness, goodness, and understanding in actual concrete thinking is to negate pain, evil, and error.370 Such negations are made possible by transforming the thinking of pain, evil, error, and so on into thoughts – thoughts that are no longer one’s own, thoughts which, qua thoughts, are not thinking and thus are not real. In Gentile’s system, knowing a truth is getting rid of an error; doing actual good is moving beyond evil; and pleasure is leaving pain behind. Once pain, evil, and error have become mere thoughts, they are no longer one’s own thinking and have ceased to be real. They are the dead past that we can no longer think because the past is not actual, because it is not where being is not already but comes to be … where to know is to learn and, even if we already know, to learn anew; where the good is not what has been done and already exists but what has not been done… where joy is not what we have but what blossoms from its contrary… where, in a word, the Spirit burns eternal, flashing and gleaming in the blaze as it consumes all the heavy slag, dead and inert … Wisdom is ignorance there, good is evil, joy is pain, conquest is toil, peace is war, and the Spirit is nature that makes itself spirit.371

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This nonsense is too bombastic to be as frightening as ‘the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth: War Is Peace Freedom Is Slavery Ignorance Is Strength.’

But its author surely had some responsibility for what others in Fascist Italy may have extracted from his rhapsodies on actualism.372 Absolutely actual concrete thinking just is thinking and must necessarily be thinking – a necessity, Gentile argues, that also makes actual thinking universal. He is careful to distinguish this universal character of thinking from the universals that are mere elements of abstract thought, and, as such, are not actual. Obviously, actual thinking affirms itself as universal not by thinking about particulars, even particular thoughts, but by thinking thoughts simpliciter. And the subject that actually thinks cannot be the empirical I, the I formed abstractly as against the not-I, against the other things and other subjects that must be thought about just in order to conceive of an empirical I. That I negates itself in opposition to the not-I that Gentile calls Nature. By contrast, the absolute I, the One I or the Spirit, negates itself as thinking about either the empirical self or the manifold instances of the not-I against which the empirical I negates itself. Because the absolute I is not the empirical I – indeed, because it negates itself as thinking about the empirical I – true idealism as Gentile conceives it cannot be charged with solipsism: it is only the empirical I – the one that is not actual because it is abstract – that is abstractable from others and thus conceivable as a singular I. The empirical I is also part of Gentile’s Nature, the abstract reality that is thinking in abstract rather than concrete objectivity. This Nature is thought, but under principles of individuation that destroy the unity of actual concrete thinking. Because Nature is what is governed by the principles of identity and contradiction, these cannot be rules of thinking, which Nature negates. Being governed by such principles makes Nature manifold and not a unity, and since Nature is subject to causal laws, we think about the natural manifold deterministically, as a mechanism. Actual concrete thinking, on the other hand, is free. The only possible limit on thinking is Nature itself, but since Nature is a mere abstraction, its natural determinism is just an accident of an abstraction. By contrast, thinking itself is necessary and necessarily free – never bound by the

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determinations introduced into Nature by abstraction from actual thinking towards a manifold of particular thoughts.373 Gentile’s distinction between thinking, or the absolute I, and Nature, or the empirical I, echoes Kant’s distinction in the Third Antinomy between the intelligible and empirical characters. Kant recognizes that from the standpoint of empirical psychology, human action is explained exhaustively in causal terms. Actions thus explained belong to the empirical character, located in space and time and subject to nature’s causal determinism: ‘If we could explore all appearances of his power of choice down to the bottom,’ says Kant, ‘there would not be a single human action that we could not with certainty predict and cognize as necessary from its preceding conditions.’ From the standpoint of transcendental psychology, however, human action is explained by reasons, not causes. Such actions are attributed to the intelligible character, not located in space or time, and they exhibit a negative freedom of spontaneity – freedom from the determinations of natural causality.374 The spontaneity of the intelligible character mirrors the spontaneity of the understanding; just as representations formed by the understanding are underdetermined by what is presented in mere receptivity, so too are the effects of the intelligible character underdetermined by the series of events preceding these effects. Gentile clearly draws upon the Kantian conception of the activity of the understanding and reason as creative and spontaneous. He also draws upon the equally Kantian contrast between the active, creative force of reasons and the passive sequence of events determined in space and time according to natural causality. Gentile’s actual thinking is a pure act not located in space or time. In particular, thinking does not happen as events happen in Nature – in keeping with the abstraction that treats thinking as a manifold of thoughts, as empirical particulars temporally sequenced. Rather, the act of thinking is eternal in that it is not in time – in that no instants of time precede or follow thinking. While we may treat thinking abstractly (and mistakenly) as a temporal sequence of thoughts, actual thinking is eternally in the present. To illustrate the difference between thoughts and actual concrete thinking, Gentile uses an analogy: temporal thought is like reading a series of facts in a book; actual thinking is like understanding the book as a whole.375 Gentile maintains that his distinction between Nature and thinking resolves Kant’s antinomies. Nature is finite and complex because abstraction treats it as a manifold of particulars. The principles that govern Nature’s manifold relations – including the principles of causality and

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non-contradiction – are deterministic and individuating, but the determinism and individuation are themselves accidental features introduced by abstraction. The distinction between Nature and thinking is the distinction between facts and the pure act of thinking. All activity belongs to the Spirit, and the Spirit’s eternal act just is thinking. The will itself, whose activity is merely practical, is part of the world of facts. In order for the will to determine Nature, some thinking must precede Nature; but once that that thinking precedes Nature, then what determines Nature is not thinking but what has already been thought. The empirical I may entertain that thought by thinking about it, but the absolute I thinks only by actual thinking – only by negating the abstract objectivity of the thought that it affirms. Such thinking is a pure, unified, and eternal act, distinct from the practical activity whereby the will determines Nature. From the standpoint of Nature, activity is the mere behaviour of individuals in space and time, and those behaviours are mere events determined by the causal-mechanical laws that rule all natural events. From the standpoint of Nature, free action is not just impossible, it is unintelligible: ‘Man is not free insofar as he is treated and pictured as part of nature, a being who occupies a certain space for a certain time, who was born and will die, limited in every direction … Insofar as he moves in this structure … he comes to suspect that his own freedom is just an illusion, that he can really do nothing to master the world nor even understand it.’376

Far from promoting the pessimism thus suggested by the standpoint of Nature, Gentile holds that the despair itself leads the Spirit once again to the actual thinking that is its freedom. Because the standpoint of Nature enforces the dismal verdict that freedom is impossible, the I is forced to think this judgment actually, and not just think about it: in doing so, the I treats its own thinking as having the authority than can only be had by a being whose thinking is actually free – a being with liberty. According to Gentile, the Spirit’s eternal act of thinking has an object, but its object is not a thought: the eternal act of Spirit takes the Spirit itself as its object. In other words, the pure eternal act of the absolute I is, in contemporary terms, intentional or representational: it is an act in virtue of which the absolute I is conscious of something. It is also reflexive: that of which the absolute I is conscious in the act of thinking is the absolute I. Thinking thus consists in the absolute I’s consciousness of itself. But this self-consciousness is active rather than passive: the act of

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self-consciousness is a self-creation – an autoctisi, in Gentile’s terminology. By making a thought its own, by affirming it as concrete and negating it as abstract, the absolute I asserts its own thinking as its own, and thus it asserts itself by making its thinking actual. The negated thoughts are no longer its own, which explains why the absolute I endures: its enduring is tied to its actual thinking rather than to particular thoughts, which, when not affirmed as concrete and actual by the I, are not its own.377 Individuality itself is as much a part of Nature as the principles that govern the events into which individuals enter; just as practical activity must be distinguished from purely actual activity, and just as the empirical I must be distinguished from the absolute I, so too, says Gentile, must empirical humanity be distinguished from what (in later versions) he calls ‘deep humanity.’ Deep humanity is that in us by which we recognize that our individuality is a mere abstraction and not actual – that by which we are able to recognize ourselves in and through the world, and in and through others, by an act of self-consciousness.378 Just as we must distinguish empirical humanity from deep humanity, so must we also distinguish empirical Nature from ‘real primordial nature … before it becomes what we schematize in space and time.’ This real primordial nature is grounded in our bodies. It is in a body that we first make self-consciousness itself an object of self-conscious thought. Exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive bodily sensations are the immediate and direct objects of the sensing by which I form a mediated, indirect, and irreducibly first-person sensory consciousness of properties of external things as distal, sensed parts of a larger body of which I am the centre. Just as, in thinking, the Spirit is actual in an eternal present, so also, in experiencing, is it actual in an omnipresent centre: ‘my body … is a centre with infinite circumference. It is a living component of a living organism, which is present and active and comes to have sensation in each of its components.’ My understanding primordial nature is my becoming ever more conscious of myself by becoming sensitive, in conscious thought, of myself as the centre of a whole, sensing, self-conscious bodily universe.379 Because the I makes itself actual by thinking itself, Gentile calls his philosophy ‘actualism,’ and he achieves it by a ‘method of absolute immanence’ that recognizes the ‘irreducible subjectivity of reality.’ Individuals are creatures of Nature – abstract, non-actual, transcendent products of abstraction. By contrast, the absolute I – the Spirit or Being – is a pure, experiential, and creative act of thinking in which the object and subject of experience are ‘indissolubly conjoined.’ Only this immanent act of

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thinking is real and actual. If Nature is intelligible at all, it is intelligible only derivatively from the concrete self-understanding that is the act of the absolute I, from which Nature is abstracted. For this reason, Gentile regards the Aristotelian act (energeia), the Platonic Idea, and other metaphysically transcendent notions as capturing only the abstract logos rather than the concrete logos that the Spirit actually is. As actual thinking, the I cannot be identified, analysed, or understood otherwise than in terms of its self-understanding. ‘The I is not a soul-substance. It is not a thing, not the noblest of things. It is everything because it is not nothing.’380 Finally, Gentile uses the dialectic of thinking to draw conclusions about history and philosophy. In historical and philosophical thinking he discerns two unified moments: the actuality of thinking; and the reflexive consciousness of thinking. The reflexive moment overcomes the actual moment, however, because the Spirit (or Being or thinking) is actual only insofar as it is conscious of the Spirit (or Being or thinking). True history, then, is present history – a history that makes itself present by reflecting on itself. But this present history is philosophy, and so philosophy overcomes history. The past as past, on the other hand, is to be understood merely as ‘empirical determinations of history shattered in space and time.’ Gentile identifies actual history as consciousness itself: real history reflects present problems, concerns, and interests by representing the past. Actual history is of present intellectual life because it is actual – thinking rather than a record of thoughts. Unlike the dead past, actual history – the history that is present – is progressive, because, as thinking, it is self-creating and thus is always coming to be. The progress made in the actual and historical present is ‘an ever more acute and careful consciousness of self.’381

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Manifestos (Croce and Gentile)

In 1914 the idealist Gentile succeeded the idealist Jaja at the Faculty of Letters in Pisa. Gentile was still doing the work that produced his major statements on actualism, and four years later he was called to a chair in Rome when Barzellotti died. There he made two crucial decisions: first, to start his own journal as the official organ of actualism – and competition for Critica – the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana; second, to accept appointment as the Director of Public Education for the Commune of Rome. During this period he wrote extensively on the most contentious issue in Italian politics: the recent war and its effects on Italy. Unsurprisingly, he and Croce often disagreed about the war, as by then they disagreed about many things.382 Croce himself had long been involved in politics and government, sometimes in the same debates on education that helped make Gentile famous, though increasingly not on Gentile’s side. Croce’s political experience, and his great distinction as a voice of high culture, led to his appointment as Minister of Public Instruction in 1920 in the last Giolitti government. He made proposals for national educational reform, only to resign in 1921 when Giolitti lost his majority.383 Shortly afterward, when Mussolini came to power in 1922, Gentile had remarkable success in the same office that Croce vacated. He was Minister of Public Instruction under Mussolini for nearly two years, and the result was the famous ‘Gentile Reform’ whose effects are still felt in Italy today. Although he held this post only for a short time, other top appointments followed: the national Senate, the Fascist Grand Council, the presidency of the Fascist Institute of Culture, commissions on constitutional reform, the academic directorship of the Enciclopedia Italiana, the directorship of the Scuola Normale, and so on. Until the early 30s, Gentile was intensely

Manifestos (Croce and Gentile)

and effectively involved in party and governmental affairs, and even later he never stopped overseeing cultural projects. As late as 1943, the year before his assassination, he accepted the presidency of the Italian Academy when Mussolini offered it.384 Croce’s fortunes during the same period were very different. At first he thought of the Fascists as disorganized, ineffective, but well-meaning patriots. While declining any appointment by the regime and declaring himself a liberal, he defended Gentile’s educational reform. Even after a notorious political murder in 1924, he voted for Mussolini in the Senate. His full public breach with the Fascists – and with Gentile – came in 1925, as author of the ‘Reply by Italian Authors, Professors and Journalists,’ written in response to the ‘Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals’ published on 21 April of that year – the birthday of the city of Rome, capital of Mussolini’s new Empire.385 Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ was the product of a Conference for Fascist Culture held in Bologna a few weeks earlier to show that the Party was not just a club for ignorant criminals: a few hundred pliable intellectuals, journalists, and artists were assembled in Bologna to acclaim this thesis. Then Gentile produced the keynote document, which gathered signatures from figures as respected as Filippo Marinetti, Luigi Pirandello, and Gioacchino Volpe. Giovanni Amendola, the liberal editor of Il Mondo, persuaded Croce to write a counter-manifesto, signed by Rodolfo Mondolfo, Luigi Einaudi, Guido De Ruggiero, and other leading intellectuals, which appeared on the following May Day.386 Gentile was bitter about Croce’s response for years, but the consequences for Croce were very much harsher, starting with vicious attacks in the Fascist press, intrusive police surveillance, exclusion from official academic organizations, and suppression of his writings. In 1926, when Croce’s house in Naples was vandalized at night, the international outcry was loud. Amendola, whose idea it was to put out a counter-manifesto, died as a victim of Fascist brutality in the same year; what saved Croce’s life may have been his international fame and the worldwide support that came with it. Despite the danger, he continued to fight the regime in the pages of Critica, while also producing his most celebrated works of history and thus making the case for liberalism.387 Croce’s ‘Reply’ of 1925 is also a defense of liberalism; it assails the Fascist violence that Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ glorifies. Hegelians, as Bertrand Russell remarked, ‘love a synthesis,’ so it is no surprise that Gentile starts by giving himself a contradiction to resolve: as a ‘movement of the Italian spirit,’ Fascism is both novel and ancient, we are told, although the rest

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of the document sticks mainly to current affairs. Since the Fascist Party was a young organization with a brief but troubled record to defend, Gentile had no choice but to focus on the present.388 Undoubtedly, the greatest cataclysm of the recent past was the First World War, and Gentile explains Fascism as a response to mistakes made by other parties and politicians in assessing the war’s consequences. Because the catastrophe of the war and its aftermath was essentially moral, not material, Italy’s leaders were wrong to see it from ‘a petty individualist and utilitarian point of view,’ behaving as if there were some ‘tally of sacrifices’ by which to calculate the compensation due to each single person. Corrupt and selfish individualism of this kind falsely pits the citizen against the state.389 As a moral movement, Fascism makes no such concessions to individualism. It has been ‘a gymnasium of selfdenial, as it campaigned for the sacrifice of the individual to an idea.’ Indeed, Fascism is a religion, and, in Gentile’s view, the religious character of the new party explains the intransigence of its struggle against the old liberal state, its main opponent. Unlike the heroic ideology of the Risorgimento, the liberalism of the most recent Italian government is agnostic, acquiescent, mechanical, and merely external. Such liberalism is no match for a Fascism which, in the tradition of Mazzini’s Young Italy, is a ‘party of the young’ representing ‘the faith of all Italians.’ This faith ripened in the trenches and in a deep rethinking of the sacrifice offered on the battlefields … a faith of energy and violence, disinclined to respect anything that opposed the life and greatness of the fatherland. Thus arose the movement of squadrons – young people, resolute, armed, wearing the black shirt and organized militarily, opposing the law in order to set up a new law.390

At first, people were amazed by the new party; then they came to admire it; finally their acclaim was unanimous. And popular support now grows stronger and stronger, Gentile declares, because moral, social, and financial order have been restored. The lawbreaking has stopped because Fascism has given the state the discipline needed to make the laws that the people really need. This work goes on in a ‘perfect public order’ which is the envy of foreign nations. Meanwhile, for all Italians the fatherland of the Fascist is … a school for the subordination of the particular and inferior to the universal and immortal. It is respect for law and discipline. It is liberty … won

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Manifestos (Croce and Gentile) through law, liberty established by renouncing all petty willfulness and wasteful, irrational ambition. It is an austere conception of life and a religious gravity.391

Despite the false charges against it, however, Fascism is not reactionary, certainly no enemy of the workers, and not even of genuine liberals. Its real opponent is the old political machinery whose lies about democracy and universal suffrage sold the people out to professional office-seekers. Far from giving up on constitutional government, Fascism makes it stronger. Then why the complaints about eliminating civil liberties, especially freedom of the press? There is really no question of principle here, says the ‘Manifesto.’ One need only examine the hard facts that forced the state to silence the seditious literature that disrupted public order, thus depriving citizens of the ‘guarantee of a law that truly expresses their real, organic, concrete will.’392 The duplicity of false liberals shows that word ‘liberty’ itself is ‘entirely elastic.’ Since most ordinary Italians know this, they simply ignore the opposition groups: the ‘Manifesto’ transmutes this political quietism into a paradoxical endorsement of an activist politics intent on ‘driving forward.’ As their old silent majority withers away, the democrats, radicals, and Masons will go the way of all political flesh, macerated in the jaws of the dialectic. Since they have no real ideal of their own with which to oppose Fascism, only a lower ideal, history’s unforgiving law will liquidate them. Were there any principled opposition to Fascism, a genuine opponent armed with it would be an antithesis to the party’s thesis, and in a higher synthesis both would be overcome. As things stand in 1925, however, ‘when one of two principles is lower and the other higher … the first must necessarily succumb,’ and Fascism will triumph alone until the cunning of history produces a real opposite for it. Although Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ lacks the clockwork rationalism of his philosophical writing, the theory at the core of the special pleading is dialectical and hence philosophical, obviously not meant for the ordinary citizens whom the document writes off as passive. Gentile’s elitist message was for Italian intellectuals who lived in a world of books, ideas, and culture, but there is really not much in it to appeal to them, and a good deal to put them off: sentimentalism, religiosity, romantic violence, and not a little dishonesty. Even in 1925, and especially among intellectuals, the nearly unanimous support for Fascism claimed by Gentile was less than that, as he certainly understood. He also knew that the thuggery had not stopped and that public order was far from perfect. But did

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he realize how frightening his rigid idealism must be to the individuals in his audience, to intellectuals who could read his ‘Manifesto’ only one at a time? ‘The point,’ Gentile concluded, ‘is no longer to count and weigh each single person but to look … to the idea.’393 Croce, who had matured as an idealist in Gentile’s company, did not yet object to that chilling abstraction. The main grievance of his countermanifesto is that the Fascists, with Gentile as their spokesman, have set themselves up as a religion. And most of Croce’s case against that fakery is just eloquent name-calling, though in a good cause – a barrage of hard words that would leave pebbles in Gentile’s shoes for many years: ‘half-baked schoolwork … ill-spun arguments … facile and fevered rhetoric … manipulations of history … wordy … bizarre and incoherent … demagoguery.’394 Like Gentile, Croce starts on a familiar note by insisting on a distinction: although politics is a right and a duty for intellectuals, their only distinctive calling, as intellectuals, is ‘research and criticism.’ If, as Gentile’s program would require, they breach the boundaries between their proper work and other fields of human action, the result will be contamination, and the infection will be fatal if they themselves become agents of the violence and oppression which it is their duty to criticize. What the Fascists have given Italy is chaos, which, in an outrageous violation of the principle of distinction, Gentile calls a religion. But ‘this chaotic and incomprehensible religion,’ Croce argues, can never replace the older faith that inspired the Risorgimento, the faith that still stirs liberals to extend the founding ideals of the Italian nation to more and more people in a vigorous civil society.395

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Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I)

In 1926, the year when Amendola died of his injuries and Croce’s house was attacked, the Fascists arrested another prominent member of the Italian legislature, Antonio Gramsci, who had been general secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) since 1924. By the time Gramsci was ‘conditionally’ released in 1934, his health was so bad that he could not leave the hospital, where he died in 1937 at the age of 46. He was born in Sardinia in 1891 in a middle-class family, but he had to go to work in his teens because his father got into political trouble and ended up in prison. After school in Sardinia and early contacts through his brother with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), he won a scholarship to the University of Torino in 1911, where he studied philosophy and linguistics but did not finish a degree. Instead, he became a professional journalist, writing for the socialist press, supporting the Russian Revolution of 1917, rising through the ranks of the PSI hierarchy in Torino and eventually splitting with the Socialists to help form the PCI. When Mussolini came to power in 1922, Gramsci was in Moscow, where he made contacts with the Soviet leadership and also met his wife, Giulia Schucht. Giulia moved to Rome after her husband’s arrest there, but he never saw her again after she returned to Russia in the same year. He grew very close to her sister Tania, however, who followed Gramsci around Italy as he was taken by his jailers from city to city, facing a sentence of more than twenty years. The only concession was that he was allowed to read, though not at first to take notes. Eventually he wrote abundantly, the main product being the Prison Notebooks, which in the Italian edition fill nearly 2,400 pages. After Gramsci died, Tania had the twenty-nine notebooks sent to Moscow. Once they were published in Italy after the Second World War, in six installments between 1948 and 1951, their influence on Italian politics and culture was immense.396

Part I: Introduction

Gramsci’s ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ comes from the eleventh notebook compiled in 1932−3. It is a series of notes, part of a huge corpus of unfinished texts that Gramsci had no chance to put into final form. Its purpose is clear, however: to teach intellectuals on the left how to talk to uneducated people about moral reasons for making political choices. If we describe it with words from Gramsci’s own lexicon, the ‘Introduction’ is about achieving the unity of theory and practice, which, in his view, had always eluded professional philosophers as well as the workers.397 All philosophies, by the nature of the enterprise, will aim at a monopoly of truth: Gramsci extends that aim to his own philosophy of praxis, with the proviso that its method of finding the truth must be critical and self-critical. Criticism reveals that traditional speculative thought is a phase of philosophy, not its essence; that the philosophy of praxis is as close as humans can get to the truth; and that the origins of that philosophy are Hegelian. By ‘philosophy’ Gramsci means a coherent and formally expressed framework of thought, not just an attitude or a vague world view. And philosophy is ‘good sense,’ not just ‘common sense.’ In fact, Gramsci’s prime directive for philosophical progress is that it must begin with a critique of common sense – meaning not basic wisdom or ordinary prudence but the understanding, more or less defective, that any group of people has in common. Good sense will be the product of a philosophical critique of common sense.398 Gramsci offers several typologies of philosophy. His main distinction is between the philosophy of praxis, which is the philosophy that can accomplish a critique of common sense, and all others, which cannot. Another difference is between everyman’s spontaneous philosophizing and the expensive, delicate ships of reason assembled by the experts. But the division of philosophy that is most productive for his ‘Introduction’ has three parts: receptive, regulative, and creative. Receptive philosophy is entirely passive and simply takes the world as given. Regulative philosophy is much the same, except that it permits thought to become active and thus changes the world to some extent. It is only in creative philosophy, however, that thinking really makes the world. And solipsism is the great risk of absolute creativity. Until the age of ‘classical German philosophy,’ all the traditional systems were receptive or regulative. Creative thought arrived only with Kant and Hegel, and it is Hegel whom Gramsci names as the ancestor of his philosophy of praxis, which he means to be not only creative but also an improvement on other such systems since Marx’s time.399 Gramsci defines his system both positively and negatively. On the neg-

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ative side his main opponents are Gentile, Croce, and Nikolai Bukharin. In the new Soviet Union of 1921, Bukharin had published The Theory of Historical Materialism: A People’s Manual of Sociology. Gramsci charged that this guidebook for revolutionaries, despite its impeccable communist pedigree, gave the masses bad guidance. As he was criticizing the Manual, Josef Stalin was on his way to power in the international communist movement, so it is no surprise that Gramsci’s inclination to speak truth to power, even on the left, later got him into trouble with his jailed comrades: his offense was to reject their prophecy that Fascism was about to fall in 1930 and usher in the revolutionary millennium. In and out of jail, his disagreements with Croce and Gentile were less personal, and also more predictable.400 Gentile and Labriola, who had both written about praxis, were disappointments to Gramsci, especially as followers of Spaventa, who had not been guilty of the ‘vulgar evolutionism’ of the two later thinkers – their extraction of an ontogeny of culture from its phylogeny: since all of us have ancestors who were slaves, the story goes, slavery is a stage through which all peoples must pass. Gramsci detects political interests behind such theorizing. A concession that had to be made in order to secure Gentile’s educational policy, for instance, was the teaching of religion in state primary schools. Accordingly, Gentile’s declaration that religion is good for the people is less than high-minded, just another cynical excuse to keep them away from real education. In broader terms, ‘the historicism of Labriola and Gentile is … the historicism of lawyers who say that the knout is not a knout when the knout is “historical’’’ – when arbitrary violence is justified on the grounds of custom and tradition.401 Taken as a whole, Gramsci’s view of Labriola is less harsh than these words suggest: his own ideas about praxis owed a great deal to Labriola as a reader of Marx and Engels. But Gramsci is never impressed by Gentile’s austere abstractions, where ‘wit and polished phrases substitute for thinking’ and ambiguous language is a cover for ‘ideological opportunism.’ He even prefers the shopworn syllogisms of the neo-scholastics to ‘the banal sophisms of … actual idealism,’ a system that he describes as ‘completely contrary to common sense,’ despite Gentile’s claims to speak straightforwardly to the man on the street. Understanding Gentile’s enormous power as commissar of Fascist culture, Gramsci holds him responsible for ‘an environment of louche culture in which all cats are grey, religion embraces atheism, [and] immanence flirts with transcendence … If Gentile’s words meant what they say … actual idealism would have become ‘the manservant of theology.’’402

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Gramsci diagnoses Gentile’s errors as naïve extrapolations from Croce, for whom he has more respect, although Croce’s treatment of common sense is no more satisfactory to him than Gentile’s. Croce’s account of knowing as doing, taken from Vico, seems promising as an approach to praxis, but it is just a tautology since he identifies all doing with knowing. Gramsci is particularly struck by an exclamatory passage of the ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ where Croce describes Engels as a character in the ‘sad story of the dialectical method among Hegel’s students’ who had ‘liquidated philosophy by reducing it to the positive sciences, salvaging only its “doctrine of thought and some of its laws, formal logic (!) and the dialectic.”’ Croce’s surprise is hypocritical, says Gramsci, because his own theory of opposition and distinction is just another abstract formalism.403 Although Croce’s brand of idealism may be an advance on scholastic logic, Gramsci asks whether it is not just a technique – not a philosophy at all, just a propaedeutic to philosophy. In the latter case, ‘the technique of thinking … will surely not create great philosophers, but it will provide criteria of judgment and verification and will correct deformities in the way that common sense thinks.’ There was something to be said for Croce’s distinctions, in other words, as ways to detect the ‘deformities’ imposed on common sense by positivism, determinism, crude historicism, and abstract formalism.404 Having read Russell’s Problems of Philosophy in Italian translation, Gramsci associates that famous book with the last of these mistakes: the attempt to levitate thinking out of its historical matrix. Reading Gramsci on Russell, one senses ships passing in the night, and if Russell could have read Gramsci during this period, the encounter would probably have been no different. The general case of Russell’s error is what Gramsci calls ‘philosophical esperantism,’ a primitive instinct that ends up concocting artificial languages: like primitives, we moderns still regard ourselves as ‘the humans,’ thinking of all others as ‘babblers’ or barbarians because everything about them, even their speech, is deranged; the absurd esperantist remedy is to devise an über-language that will permit everyone else to parse one’s own enlightened sentences.405 Contrary instincts and contrary mistakes impair Bukharin’s Manual, which Gramsci read in French and whose author he had met in Russia. Bukharin goes wrong by enshrining common sense as a special preserve of working people, whom he sees as having no truck at all with highfalutin intellectuals. To sell the people short in this way only ties them to their superstitions, says Gramsci, and the so-called ‘sociology’ that Bukharin offers them is neither historical nor dialectical nor reflectively

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philosophical, just a crude materialism unconscious of its own metaphysics. When Bukharin claims that a society is more than the sum of its parts, for example, he is thinking about the way that a hundred cows make a herd, ignoring the deeper collective relation that arises in a workforce or a whole society. By thus missing Hegel’s point about quantity and quality, the People’s Manual ends up hypostasizing matter as quantity, just as the idealists hypostasize quality as the Spirit and the actualists do the same with the State – another case of history repeating itself as farce, according to Gramsci.406 The way out of all such blind alleys starts with a critique of common sense, which must be conceived more carefully than it was by Gentile or Croce. The ingredients for criticism are to be found not only in a reformed Marxist doctrine but also in a careful study of language, where the elements of common sense are made manifest. Such a study will be concrete and historical, however, not a reduction of language to logical form – an Esperanto for the clerisy. As criticism progresses, its pedagogic method will be constant repetition of the critical thinking that can raise the uneducated to higher intellectual levels and thereby spread a sound philosophy of praxis to the masses.407 In faith and religion the people already have access to uncritical popular philosophizing, and the systematic philosophies of intellectuals also influence them indirectly as instruments of control by the ruling class. The task of criticism is to see these raw materials for what they are and convert them into a philosophy of praxis. Common sense, where the change must start, is not yet the good sense that will come out of this transformation: it is chaotic, fragmented, primitive, superstitious, anachronistic, and conservative. Because it is mistaken and confused, common sense submits itself uncritically to the experts who serve the rulers. Perhaps its worst confusion – evident in the People’s Manual – is to insist that theory is always accessory to practice, which precludes an effective unity of theory and practice.408 The makings of that unity are already there in common sense. But because popular common sense is passive, the people accept theories invented by priests and intellectuals to keep them subordinate, though such theories never make a coherent whole even when some of them are correct. Critical consciousness of this predicament becomes possible for workers only when they form a ‘national-popular’ grouping no longer limited to narrower ‘economic-corporate’ interests. That step towards a richer culture gives the people access to the critical, consensual, and ‘hegemonic’ class-consciousness that turns common sense into good

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sense, puts the proletariat in a position of leadership, and unifies theory with practice in a genuine philosophy of praxis.409 Without that unity, Gramsci argues, the philosophy of praxis will always be incomplete, and an effective dialectic of theory and practice can develop only in parallel and productive relations between the masses and the intellectuals. Leadership must come from the industrial working class, but the workers can lead through an effective hegemony only if they actually assimilate – through mutual understanding and criticism – the culture of those whom they lead: the peasants and the intellectuals. Hence, the role of intellectuals is a major topic of the ‘Introduction,’ where Gramsci’s reflections on the issue are obviously as much autobiographical as analytic.410 Traditional intellectuals, aloof from the human world and abstracted in their thinking, must be replaced by fully integrated intellectuals who work at practical politics. Nonetheless, Gramsci’s views about intellectuals – given the hard facts of unregenerate capitalism – seem oddly elitist at moments, despite his aggressively democratic politics: uneducated people need to be educated and organized by intellectuals who are specialist experts made socially effective and legitimated by political parties. There is even a role for a ‘great man’ whom Carlyle would have recognized: Working to stimulate intellectual élites of a new kind that emerge directly from the masses … is what really changes the ideological panorama of an era, [but] … these élites cannot be constructed and developed unless inside them there arises a hierarchy of authority and intellectual competence that can culminate in a great individual philosopher … capable … of reliving the needs of the mass ideological community [and] … of understanding that it cannot have the agility of movement possessed by an individual mind.411

If Gramsci dreamed that he might be a great person of that kind, his dreams were not mistakes.

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The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI)

Croce began to study the past professionally around the time when Gramsci was born, starting at home with research on theatre in Naples. Eventually he made monumental contributions in many genres of historical writing, mainly literary, cultural, and political history, as well as autobiography. He also theorized about history in works on aesthetics, historiography, and what must be called – despite Croce’s reservations and for want of a better term – philosophy of history. The quarter-century after the First World War, when Fascism triumphed and declined in Italy, was the time of his greatest achievement in history and its theory, which was where he found his voice as Italy’s liberal conscience. These are the words of an eyewitness, Federico Chabod, speaking of the continued publication of La Critica after its editor had publicly defied the regime in the late twenties: ‘the cultural form (meaning a journal of philosophy, history, and literature) will mask the political content, and in that way Croce becomes the living banner of the ideals of liberty and antifascism. The rest is silence.’412 Croce’s most memorable reflections on the past are recorded in Theory and History of Historiography (1915−17) Contribution to the Critique of Myself (1918) History of Italian Historiography (1921) History of the Kingdom of Naples (1925) History of Italy from 1871 to 1915 (1928) History of the Age of the Baroque in Italy (1929) New Essays on Italian Literature in the Seventeenth Century (1931) History as Thought and Action (1938)

Part I: Introduction

and, most famously, in the great History of Europe from 1815 to 1915 (1932).413 Croce dedicated this History to Thomas Mann, the author by that time of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain, and also of an allegorical novella, Mario and the Magician, which attacks Fascism. Before Mann left Germany in 1933, he had received Croce’s dedication – lines taken from Dante in the passage where he and Vergil are chased by demons on their way down to the pit of the hypocrites: Your thoughts still entered into mine, ours who act and look alike: a single choice I’ve made with both our minds.414

Croce had long since made his choice to resist Mussolini while preserving a position of cultural leadership in Italy. The History of Europe, especially its opening and closing chapters, is a profession of the liberal faith for which he risked everything. The History of Italy that preceded it by four years was even more audacious, from an Italian perspective, because it confronted Mussolini on the native ground of recent politics. In 1927, the year before Croce’s book appeared, Gioacchino Volpe, an eminent historian who had signed the Fascist Manifesto of 1925, published Italy on the Road, a nationalist celebration of Italian power and progress. Although it was not Croce’s intent to reply to Volpe, what the Italian public witnessed was a debate in print between Liberalism and Fascism: Volpe’s book sold 10,000 copies in several printings, but Croce’s sold four times as many, frustrating the regime’s efforts at a boycott. While Croce was working on his History of Europe in 1931, Volpe prefaced a new edition of Italy on the Road with hostile remarks about him. By the time Croce’s new book was ready early in 1932, Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany was bringing Fascism onto the international stage.415 The History of Europe begins after the collapse of another failed empire, Napoleon’s, when some Europeans who still honoured the ideals of the Revolution that created the Emperor also remembered its promise of liberty, though others feared that promise and tried to stifle it. Opponents of reaction responded with lists of demands: equality before the law and the rule of law; a written, public constitution; representative government; freedom of speech and association; self-determination; and,

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on a broad front, modernization and rationalization. Different parts of this sweeping program came to the fore in various places at various times, but the ideal of liberty was a common property of liberals, and it was nothing new. ‘Liberty, equality and fraternity’ had been a noble battle cry of the Revolution until the screams of the Terror and the boots of Napoleon’s armies drowned out those liberating words. Still, after 1815 and in the face of repression, many still championed the cause of liberty. Liberals planted their hopes in new concepts of mankind’s place in history and the universe and in new notions of reality itself. That the world was the lower creation of a higher God seemed less and less plausible, as science narrowed the ancient divide between matter below and mind on high. If mind was immanent in the world and not transcendent, why posit an opposition between reason and history? Indeed, given a new dialectical idea of history, reason itself could be discovered in history. ‘History no longer seemed to be deprived of spirituality and given over to blind forces … but showed itself to be the Spirit’s work and actualization. And since the Spirit is liberty, history is liberty at work.’ The philosophical master of those insights was Hegel, who, though some of his views were quite illiberal, defined ‘the Spirit through liberty and liberty through the Spirit.’ According to Croce, there was a theoretical and a practical side to Hegel’s idealist historicism: ‘the conception of history as a history of liberty had its necessary and practical complement in liberty itself as a moral ideal.’ Armed with such thoughts, Hegel and his followers made idealism the philosophical basis of liberal politics and morality.416 The cultural changes born of liberalism were profound, as Croce explained: The grandeur of the modern concept was precisely in its having transformed the meaning of life from the idyllic … or elegiac to the dramatic, from hedonism … and pessimism to activity and creativity, and this turned liberty itself into a … continual battle in which a final and defining victory is impossible.417

Once spirituality was embodied and the body spiritualized, the only ultimate meaning lay in the ever-expanding freedom at which all life aims. Despite widespread and bitter resistance, liberals kept working towards that goal, which had to keep changing. In political terms, this meant that governmental and institutional gains made by liberalism could never be permanent. ‘Liberal institutions, in the final course of their history,

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would die as the conditions of their existence went under,’ according to Croce, and they would need to be modified or else completely discarded and replaced. But that is the fate of all human things, which live and die, transforming themselves and acquiring new life or else turning mechanical and needing to be thrown out. In any event, the agent of those modifications, adaptations and extinctions will always have been liberty itself.418

Although Croce admired Hegel as the philosopher of this process, in the end he thought of liberty as a religion, defining religion as having two components, a ‘concept of reality’ and ‘an ethics that conforms to this concept.’ The conceptual component that he took from Hegel was ‘historical and dialectical,’ derived mainly from the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of History. The ethical component, human freedom or liberty, was what Croce himself discovered as a student of history. The result was what he called the ‘religion of liberty,’ which is the title of the first chapter of his History of Europe.419 The second chapter describes the four rival faiths that opposed the religion of liberty: Catholicism, absolutism, democracy, and communism. The democracy that Croce thought antagonistic to liberalism in its early days was the Jacobinism that lost its conscience in the Reign of Terror. Like communism, however, democracy was not yet as much a threat to liberty as the tyranny of popes and princes. In any case, ‘once the liberal order was established, each of the ideals – Catholic, absolutist, democratic, and communist – would have the freedom to speak and produce propaganda, prohibited only from destroying the liberal order.’420 Were the romantics liberals? When Croce described romanticism not as opposed to liberalism but as a basis for it, what he had in mind was the theoretical romanticism that he attributed to Hegel and other thinkers. Their rejection of academic intellectualism and abstract scientism, along with their zeal for poetry, emotion, imagination, spontaneity, and concrete organic life were all romantic instincts on the side of the liberal ideal. But romanticism as a practice rather than a theory was another matter – and troublesome. Croce held practical romanticism responsible for racism, nationalism, aestheticism, sentimentalism, and the cult of evil and disease as mal du siècle – none of this at all liberal in his view.421 Having described the resistance to the new liberal ideal, Croce tells the story of its development in three phases. Faith in liberty first gained credit as absolute monarchy disintegrated in the years leading up to

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1830; then it added strength in a succession of struggles culminating in the crisis of 1870; and a genuine Age of Liberalism finally emerged after 1870, only to face the much greater cataclysm of 1914. The Europe that survived the war demanded new forms of government, new states, and new boundaries, all on the shaky foundations of a depleted culture.422 But the discontinuities between the post-war and pre-war eras were more apparent than real, as Croce explains in the ‘Epilogue’ to the History of Europe. The ‘spiritual conflicts’ that compelled liberty to thrive in the nineteenth century persisted in the twentieth, he observes, although nationalism, imperialism, and dictatorship had grown cruder and had acquired new instruments of violence. The ‘disordered movements and … showy, barren projects’ of intemperate activists gave openings to the new dictators. The new communism was just as clumsy as the old, now more fragmented than ever, and still wedded to the ‘cockeyed, shop-worn sophisms of … historical materialism.’ An irrationalist and mystical Catholicism was another refuge for ‘muddled and misbegotten buccaneers of the Spirit.’423 Those were the facts as Croce saw them in the early thirties, when Mussolini was at the peak of his power in Italy and Hitler was on the rise on Germany. Since those were the facts, they had to have a role in the progress of the Spirit. But what role? Having reflected deeply on the past, Croce had no illusions about a prophetic ‘history of the future.’ Instead, as a basis for action, he looked to a ‘history of the past recapitulated in the present.’ In that framework, moving towards a future that we cannot know through a present in which we must act – a present formed by its past – Croce chose liberty over its familiar enemies. He could find no evidence for the dogmas of transcendence promulgated by the Catholic Church, whose constant habit was to institutionalize its fear of criticism. (As if to confirm the diagnosis, the Church that had become official in Italy with the Lateran Accords of 1929 quickly put Croce’s new book on the Index). In Russian communism he saw just one autocracy replacing another, not abolishing the state but aggrandizing it and destroying culture in the process. The new ‘materialist mysticism’ of the revolutionaries gave them the courage to tread underfoot …. religion, thought and poetry, everything that we revere as sacred, everything that we love as noble … With words, acts of violence and repressive methods, they have arbitrarily denied but have not solved … the basic problem of human community, which is that

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Part I: Introduction of liberty, the only condition in which human society flourishes and bears fruit, the only reason for humans to live on earth.

Even though the October Revolution was a necessity of history, its ideological residue was a pseudo-communism that could only degenerate and was therefore doomed to fail when exported.424 ‘Those who get drunk on action for the sake of action’ worried Croce more than the communists – a predictable view for an Italian victim of Italian Fascism. The reflexive violence of thugs like the squadristi was ‘a fever, and not an ideal,’ and the same verdict applies, by implication, to the sublimated violence of actualist philosophy. If the worst were full of passionate intensity in Mussolini’s Italy, those of them who read books could find cover in a philosophy that put spontaneous, self-constituting action at the core of reality.425 Croce understands the virtues of the activist and the revolutionary, who, in the ideal case, ‘always faces up to the future.’ But he also acknowledges the strength of Catholicism, admiring the constancy which, in its decadent state, becomes rigidity and reaction. ‘Liberty is the only ideal,’ he concludes, that has the solidity that Catholicism once had and the flexibility that it could not have; it is the only ideal that … stands up to criticism and … constitutes the point where equilibrium always reasserts itself amid society’s continuing oscillations … Hence, when we hear people asking whether liberty can achieve what they call the future, we must answer that it has something better – it has eternity.426

Although liberty is secure only sub specie aeternitatis, Croce nonetheless speculates on its contingent future in a post-nationalist Europe. He imagines a Europe liberated from her constituent nation-states and moving on from the political battles of the nineteenth century to long-delayed debates about society and economics. Since Croce’s roots grew deep in his native Italian soil, these hopes for a transnational order make an odd ending for his most important book. But he is a writer who often surprises his readers.427

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Philosophy in Prison (Gramsci II)

By 1931, when some of Croce’s History was already in print, Gramsci had been in custody for five years and his health, always precarious, had collapsed. But he had constant support from Tania Schucht, his sister-inlaw, and help from others, including Piero Sraffa, a friend and a Cambridge economist. Early in 1932, Sraffa convinced Tania to ask Gramsci to write about Croce’s History: Sraffa’s purpose was to improve Gramsci’s health by stimulating his thinking. Gramsci first replied to Tania with two preliminary questions: from what interests of Croce’s did his History emerge; and how could his international celebrity be explained?428 For the motives behind the book, Gramsci looked to Croce’s writings during and after the First World War, his polemics against the ‘French and Masonic propaganda’ that treated the great conflict as a crusade to save civilization. Although short-term political gains might be made by such appeals to popular passions, Croce thought it wrong to universalize ‘religious fanaticism’ and thus impede the cooperation that would be needed when peace returned. ‘Croce always sees the moment of war in the moment of peace and the moment of peace in that of war,’ Gramsci explained, ‘always doing his best to prevent the destruction of … compromise.’ The practical consequence of his refusal to cooperate with the demagogues was that after the war Italian and German intellectuals were able to communicate again, which in Gramsci’s opinion was a great boon to Italy and also helped Croce’s political career – though it did not stop the hatred that caused the war.429 Gramsci’s judgments about Croce are acute and forceful when he takes up his second question about the older man’s fame, his ‘élite world audience’ and his sense of himself as an intellectual leader: he is ‘the greatest writer of Italian … since Manzoni … in the domain of learned

Part I: Introduction

prose.’ The simple and powerful language of his brief essays on pressing public issues is never pedantic, which makes his ideas accessible to an enormous audience – as Galileo’s had been. Like Goethe’s style as well, Croce’s matches his personality in its serenity, order and unshakable confidence. As so many people lose their heads, wavering among apocalyptic feelings of intellectual panic, Croce, with his steadfast certainty that evil cannot prevail metaphysically and that history is rationality, becomes a point of reference for acquiring inner strength.

As a result, Croce’s views circulate without his name attached to them: they are ‘absorbed as good sense and common sense’ into the general stock of ideas. Uneducated people who know nothing about Croce thus become his followers.430 Despite his admiration for Croce’s writing and his character, Gramsci finds a flaw in his thinking: revisionism. By this he means Croce’s support for such attacks on orthodox Marxism and Hegelian philosophy as those by Eduard Bernstein and Georges Sorel just before the turn of the century. Croce still identifies himself with this early position, says Gramsci, who links it with Croce’s current views on the ‘theory of history as ethical-political’ and with the History of Europe as the expression of that theory.431 When Croce claims a ‘liquidating effect’ for his theory, his point (according to Gramsci) is that it simply eliminates the philosophy of praxis. Gramsci denied this, of course, while locating the core of Croce’s position in ‘the moment of hegemony, consensus and cultural direction [as distinct from] … the moment of force, compulsion and intervention by the legislature and the state or the police.’ This is the essence of Croce’s concept of liberty. Far from being the antithesis of the philosophy of praxis, this liberalism runs on a parallel course. Liberal antagonism to state tyranny is the same historical-political hegemony that recent (and defective) philosophies of praxis have expressed by rejecting ‘mechanist and fatalist conceptions of economism’ but carrying their criticism no farther.432 If Croce’s history of liberalism were genuinely ethical-political, it would, like any such account, be compatible with ‘historical materialism inasmuch as it is the history of the hegemonic moment, while speculative history, like all speculative philosophy, is excluded.’ The trouble is that Croce’s history is nothing more than speculative: ‘it fully sustains transcendence and theology while using historicist language’ and fails to

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achieve the liquidation at which it aims. Unlike David Ricardo on wages and markets, for example, Croce never comes to grips with concrete economics, a failure that prevents him from developing a realist (anti-idealist) notion of immanence. In the end, he mistakes speculative liberty for ideological liberty, when it is only the latter that achieves the practical, moral unity required for effective hegemony.433 Gramsci calls Croce a ‘“priest” of the modern historicist religion,’ explaining that he lives the thesis and the antithesis of the historical process and insists on “practical reasons” in the one and in the other because he sees the future in the present … Priests are the custodians of tomorrow. At bottom, there’s a good dose of moral cynicism in this ethical-political notion. It’s the current form of Machiavellianism.434

Those are harsh words, and yet Gramsci never underestimates Croce: he objects, in fact, to Tania’s remark that Croce has become isolated in Mussolini’s Italy. On the contrary, Croce has given Gramsci reason to hope that in the Fascist Fatherland a new ‘transformism’ is at work. What Gramsci has in mind is not Giolitti’s dreary cycle of fatuous compromises but a much older practice, going back to the decades of Restoration and Revolution, when a small leadership group managed … to absorb into its circle all the political personnel produced by originally subversive mass movements … Indeed, even after 1876, the process continues … Absorbing them is difficult and burdensome, but … Croce’s energy seems to be the most powerful machine for ‘conforming’ the new forces to the vital interests … of the group dominant today.435

Summing up Croce’s career, Gramsci locates the pivotal moment in 1912 and in his break from Gentile – after Gentile had begun to declare his philosophical independence. After that time, Croce made his views clearer but did not change them in any deep way, which means that ‘the so-called “religion of liberty” is not a discovery of the present years.’ Although Croce’s liberal religion is anti-mystical or even anti-religious – a secular faith in civilization itself as the vehicle of its own rationality – it is nonetheless a response to traditional religion, a result of the decision he had made long before to leave the Catholic Church. Nonetheless, ‘for Croce … every philosophy, insofar as it becomes a … morality, is

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religion … The origins of this doctrine are already there in Hegel and Vico … the common heritage of all Italian idealist philosophy.’ Gramsci’s verdict, then, is that idealism made this amazingly effective thinker less effective than he might have been.436

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Still a Strange History (Bobbio II)

Croce lived to the age of 86. By the time he died in 1952, the Fascist regime had been gone for nearly a decade, Italy was still recovering from another calamitous war, and Gramsci’s works had been published. Gentile was assassinated in 1944, and Mussolini met the same fate in 1945. Three years after Croce’s death, Norberto Bobbio wrote his article on the cultural politics of idealism, more than half a century after Gentile had declared idealism reborn. The ‘strange history of European thought,’ the autobiography of Italian idealism during that half-century, had been a self-deception, according to Bobbio.437 What was the real story? If one’s perspective is the canonical history of Western philosophy in the anglophone world, the real story was also a strange one. Between 1687, when Newton published his Principia, and 1781, when Kant brought out his first Critique, great changes in Western philosophy mirrored the larger cultural transformations of the European Enlightenment. The pre-eminent heroes of the philosophical Enlightenment – Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant – were British, French, and German. The only Italian of the period who ranks with them is Vico, but even in Italy Vico found few readers until Jules Michelet translated the New Science into French in 1827. In Vico’s Italy and later in the eighteenth century, there had been no philosophical Enlightenment to equal events north of the Alps. Among native Italians, the most eminent Enlightenment philosopher after Vico was Antonio Genovesi. But when Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti looked back from their own century for philosophical motivation, they found little in Genovesi or other Italians: the thinkers who most provoked or inspired them were Locke, Reid, Condillac, and Kant. Not until the very end of the nineteenth century could Gentile begin

Part I: Introduction

to construct a distinctly Italian history of modern philosophy for his new nation. The philosophers described in this book needed that much time to ingest and digest the Enlightenment – and its Romantic sequel – that came to them from beyond the peninsula. But this book has barely mentioned the Italian philosopher who, at the level of common sense (as Gramsci used that term), had most influence on modern Italian thought: Saint Thomas Aquinas. When Gramsci wrote that ‘formal scholastic logic can be useful for criticizing the banal sophisms of actual idealism,’ he was thinking of learned Jesuits defending the Church’s cultural interests against Fascism in the pages of a papally authorized periodical, Catholic Civilization.438 But the reach of scholastic philosophy was far greater than the ten or twenty thousand readers of that magazine for Catholic literati. Every day of every week, in schools, churches, private homes, and public places, in prayers and sermons, when babies were baptized, when confessions were heard, when priests visited the poor and the sick and the dying, in those ubiquitous and unceasing moments, the Church’s ministrations to its Italian faithful were laden with theories about birth, marriage, death, sex, sin, redemption, law, justice, wealth, property, poverty, government, war, peace, heaven, hell, and the meaning of life, and those theories were informed by a philosophy – the scholastic philosophy that culminated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and, in Italy, flourished again in the nineteenth century. Thomas Aquinas, a leading scholastic in his own time, became the Church’s most authoritative thinker only after the Council of Trent and the rise of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century. The next large step in the apotheosis of Thomism was the work of Pope Leo XIII (1878−1903), who died in the year when Croce and Gentile launched their journal, La Critica. Aeterni Patris, Leo’s encyclical of 1879, commanded teachers ‘to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others. Let the universities … illustrate and defend this doctrine, and use it for the refutation of prevailing errors.’ Insofar as Leo’s orders were followed, the Roman Catholicism that became Italy’s official religion in 1929 would bring with it an official philosophy.439 The Croce who denounced the Lateran Pacts of 1929, and the Gentile who tried to outmanoeuvre their neo-scholastic backers, were religious people: religiosity was a trait that the two philosophers shared.440 Gentile, whose educational reform of 1923 required religion to be taught in elementary schools, presented his actualist philosophy as a bulwark to

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the Catholic faith. Croce described his liberalism as a kind of religion – and thereby fit to replace Catholicism. But neither Croce nor Gentile could embrace traditional religion consistently. Both were sons of a new Italian nation whose most implacable opponent, since before its foundation, had been the Church of Rome – Italy’s ancient enemy just because it was the Church of Rome. The Eternal City, once the capital of pagan Caesars and then the citadel of popes, was the most contested site in Italy’s struggle for national identity. As long as the popes of Rome were Italy’s adversaries, secularism and anticlericalism would go hand in hand with Italian nationalism – and so with Italian philosophy in this era of nation-building.441 In the struggle for the loyalties of Italian intellectuals, the popes repeatedly gave hostages to fortune. Gregory XVI, a friend of Rosmini and the last monk to become a pope, inaugurated his reign with the encyclical Mirari Vos (1832), assuring the faithful that ‘the Church has always taken action to destroy the plague of bad books.’442 Gregory was also the pope who looked beyond the transient advantages of material progress to its perils, the demonic dangers that lurked in railway cars, for example: the newly invented railroads were paths to hell, surely. Gregory’s successor, Pius IX, flirted with the cause of Italian independence before 1848 but then betrayed it: in the memory of patriots like Croce and Gentile, his was the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit of Italian identity. Pio Nono went on compounding the offense throughout his long reign. In 1864 he hurled eight of the eighty anathemas in his Syllabus of Errors at modern philosophy. As late as 1907, when Pius X needed to label an anti-scholastic heresy about ecclesiastical authority and theological dogma, ‘Modernism’ was his choice – as if modernity itself were a crime at the dawn of a new century.443 The updated catalogue of errors that condemned Modernism in 1907 declared progress to be illusory in the sphere of dogma: what might seem progressive for the faith actually corrupts it. ‘Scientific progress’ therefore gives the Church no reason to alter its teachings on such fundamentals as the creation of the world.444 Decades after Darwin’s Origin of Species, nonetheless, what gave the Church cause to worry was the positivism of Comte and Spencer, which in Italy had become the positivism of Villari and Ardigò. A likely ally for religion against positivism was the essentially conservative idealism promoted by Croce and Gentile at the turn of the century: the two critics took the Church’s side, in fact, in the heat of the modernist controversy. But the dogmatic intransigence of the popes, aggravated by their reactionary and anti-nationalist politics,

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made that alliance unsustainable. The new idealism would be religious, in some sense, but it could not be Roman Catholic or even Christian.445 Thus, although Catholic common sense was grounded in a philosophical system, Thomist neo-scholasticism, which had the respect of critics as harsh as Gramsci, Catholic dominance of Italian culture could never become an effective hegemony – again using Gramsci’s term. The popes, incapable of self-criticism, could never actually appropriate the culture of those whom they needed to lead: lay intellectuals like Croce and Gentile, for example, whom Gramsci described as priests of a philosophical religion. Thomas Aquinas was a great philosopher, but his modern ecclesiastical patrons were not disposed to use his (or any other) philosophy critically and so make it a lasting force in Italian culture. Thomas, called the Angelic Doctor, was first and foremost a theologian, whose philosophy was resolutely supernaturalist. It was Thomas, for example, who supplied the Church with a philosophical theory – ‘transubstantiation’ – to demystify its most implausible sacramental miracle: the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, every time a priest says a mass. Thomas had to explain how ordinary physical objects change in this extraordinary way – supernaturally, violating the laws of nature. But the metaphysics behind his explanation is Aristotelian, grounded in a rational account of natural change. The story is long, but the point can be briefly put: on the way to constructing a philosophical theology, Thomas’s supernaturalism starts with, and sustains, respect for nature. Likewise, the new Italian idealism, especially as Gentile expressed it, was a naturalist idealism (an immanent, as opposed to a transcendental idealism) that never abandoned religion on the way to formulating a philosophy of the Spirit. For most professional philosophers and public intellectuals in Italy, it was idealism – not scholasticism – that prevailed. But in both cases, and indeed in all cases of modern Italian philosophy, there was nothing more distinctive about the context in which the philosophy emerged than Italy’s abiding and agonized immersion in religion.446 Galluppi’s Philosophy of Experience, Rosmini’s Mother Idea, and Gioberti’s Ideal Formula inaugurated philosophical modernity in Italy with pious nativist intentions, by repudiating the British and French empiricism that Italians called ‘sensism’ and deplored as heathen and foreign. Although the debate was professedly and plainly philosophical, its motivations were also explicitly religious, especially as Rosmini and Gioberti expressed them. A century later, when Croce and Gentile took charge of the conversation, its structure was similar. Positivism had

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replaced sensism as the enemy. Post-Kantian idealism rather than Catholic dogma was the faith that had to be defended. And the very same idealism was to be the Spirit’s strongest shield against an alien materialism When the debate started, Italy was a province of Napoleon’s Empire, but it was an independent Italian nation that appointed Croce and Gentile to ministries and sent Gramsci to die in prison. The constant struggle that won national unity and independence was a school of experience for Italian philosophers. As the nineteenth century neared its end, the young Croce was not unusual in having living relatives who had seen the failed turmoil of 1848, not to speak of happier days in 1861 and 1870, nor of the earlier generation of Spaventa and De Sanctis. Like the ageold habit of Catholic belief, the recency and immediacy of nation-making politics defined the culture in which modern Italian philosophy evolved. In the anglophone world, no analogy applies to the British case, though a question about North America comes to mind: what might have followed for philosophy had thinkers like William James and Charles Peirce had direct experience not just of the Civil War that unified their nation but also of the American Revolution that created it? By 1837, when Emerson gave his address on ‘The American Scholar’ to declare the intellectual independence of the United States, the country’s political sovereignty had been secure for nearly three decades. Despite the revolution and the ocean that separated Emerson’s nation from England, the two were still united by a common language, with its many cultural appendages. In fact, the cultural coherence that every anglophone American could take for granted was Emerson’s problem: how to own the language of Shakespeare without being owned by it? Alessandro Manzoni faced a different problem in 1822, when the first installment of The Betrothed appeared. Despite the enormous influence of Dante’s archaic Tuscan on a well-educated minority, there was still no national Italian language for a growing middle class. It took this popular historical novel to bring modern Italian into being and make it a public good – just as Verdi’s operas of the 1840s would admit ordinary Italians to the temples of art and high culture.447 In these circumstances, it is easier to understand the intense – perhaps obsessive – hope of Italian philosophers that their discipline might become another vehicle of national identity. After Gioberti and Mamiani, this impulse was pervasive in Italian philosophy, with various consequences for better or worse. Among the former was the effort to recover the Italian past for present philosophical uses. Sometimes the attempt was crude and a strain on credulity: a concocted race of ancient

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Pelasgians as a seminary of ancient wisdom, for example. Sometimes history sold out to politics, as when that mercurial genius, Giordano Bruno, turned up in monumental Roman statuary as a mystic brooding in corroded bronze. In this and other cases, the present engulfed the past in order to transform it: the post-medieval period customarily called the Resurgence (Risorgimento) was reborn as the Rebirth (Rinascita, Rinascimento, Rinascenza) when ‘Risorgimento’ found more urgent use as a modern political battle cry.448 But sometimes the results of cultural archeology were productive and enduring: the modern Italian reception of Vico was such a case. Not many great books (Moby Dick, perhaps) begin as ineptly as Vico’s New Science: interminably, with dozens of pages explicating an ugly frontispiece that only Rube Goldberg’s mother could have loved.449 Vico’s aim was to show his whole system to the reader all at once, but pity the poor reader! A kinder author would have put less Piranesi and more Palladio in the architecture of the book, and yet Vico was merciless in his pursuit of layered complexity. Nonetheless, tracking through this labyrinth of baroque prose, mapped in a syntax that was strange to most Italians, Mamiani, Gioberti, Spaventa, Villari, Fiorentino, and others tracked down the epistemic insights that made it credible to talk about Vico and Kant in the same breath. Since some of Vico’s champions – Spaventa and Villari, for example – opposed each other’s philosophies, perhaps their admiration for Vico was not purely philosophical. Had Vico not been an Italian, would all these Italian philosophers have been as anxious to promote him? It seems unlikely, in which case our understanding of this eccentric genius would be diminished. Nationalism and patriotism, attended by colonialism, imperialism, and racism, were mighty forces in nineteenth-century Italy, as they were all over the world, and in Italy the effects of nationalism on philosophy were everywhere: from the Italian ‘primacy’ asserted by Gioberti to a rediscovery of Vico that non-Italians could also applaud.450 In the decade before Croce finished his stirring History of Europe, that herald of transnational liberalism had published histories of Italian historiography; the kingdom of Naples; Italy from 1871 to 1915; the baroque in Italy; and Italian literature in the seventeenth century. Although no Italian humanist of the twentieth century had influence more global than Croce’s, his experience of the world was surely Italocentric. From a very different but still Italian point of view, Gramsci admired Croce’s ‘steadfast certainty,’ his ‘clarity, order and unshakable confidence’ – as who would not, thinking of Croce’s courage in the face of tyranny? But we also have Bobbio’s

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assessment of the same trait hardened into a reflex: ‘Anything written outside of Italy was most often treated as … nonsense and foolishness … Anything new in the air, and ten pages of summary condemnation in La Critica would make the air fit to breathe again.’451 Firmness of character and decisive judgment on one day became rigidity and arrogance on the next. Those diseases are deadly in philosophy. Inasmuch as nationalism bred them in modern Italy, nationalism was destructive for philosophy. Mussolini’s Fascism was a caricature of nationalism, as it was also a caricature of activism, patriotism, populism, and other attitudes that might in themselves have been cultural goods. Gentile, one of the best minds of his era in Italy, let his philosophy be used to frame this bizarre Fascist cartoon of a political ideal. Sometimes the transaction was explicit, as when ‘good is evil, joy is pain, victory is labor, peace is war,’ and the Spirit flames in service to the State.452 But mainly the devil’s bargain was implicit, and perhaps more effective because it was indirect. Gentile produced reams of the most abstract philosophy ever put on paper. Usually his claims about actuality have no cultural locus at all. The actual might just as well act on the moons of Jupiter as in the streets of Rome, assuming that the outer planets come within the reach of thinking and history. But this torrent of abstraction flowed from the pen of Giovanni Gentile, whose power throughout the ventennio was all too concrete. Because Gentile the philosopher was Gentile the cultural impresario, he had the kind of power dreamt of by Plato in Karl Popper’s nightmares.453 The thoroughly abstracted Gentile would have been familiar – in terms of style and method – to other philosophers on the continent, in Britain and in North America after 1870. But a different Gentile, the one who filled two-dozen volumes with historical writing of a very high standard, looked less like his philosophical contemporaries. Among anglophone philosophers a notable exception was R.G. Collingwood, an accomplished historian who liked Italian idealism well enough to put Croce’s autobiography into English.454 Bertrand Russell might seem to be another eminent exception. He wrote an immensely successful book (still in print in several different editions) called a History of Western Philosophy, but it is less a history than a collage – brilliantly written and decorated with philosophical aperçus – of Russell’s prejudices about the past.455 For the most part, during the professional lifetimes of Croce, Gentile, and Russell, anglophone philosophy became more and more ahistorical, and at times aggressively so. During the same period, philosophers in Britain and North America gradually ceased to care about the Hegelian or neo-Kantian end-game

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of what Kant had started in 1781. Quite the reverse in Italy. Although Croce, Gentile, and their acolytes quarrelled about what was alive and what was dead in Hegel, each remained committed to a form or a version or a derivative of Hegelian idealism – rival philosophies of the Spirit. Both also wrote a great deal of history, while thinking deeply about its making and its meaning, and this kept the Italian intellectual environment hospitable to Hegelian historicism, which found the English-speaking world less and less welcoming. The two foremost Italian philosophers of pre-war Italy were prolific historians, and all their nineteenth-century predecessors had helped write the new history of Italian philosophy that evolved in this period. The whole post-Kantian enterprise in Italy was strikingly different from its anglophone counterpart, especially after 1870, just in its deep regard for the past. A related difference was Italian philosophy’s greater cultural breadth, of which Croce was the prime exemplar – a thinker who spoke with grace and authority about as many issues outside the boundaries of philosophy as within them. And Croce was no isolated exception: think of De Sanctis on literature, Labriola on economics; think of Gioberti, Spaventa, and Gramsci as journalists, and Villari or Fiorentino as historians. Because they were expected to write professionally for large and mixed audiences, some of these philosophers became brilliant writers: Croce comes first again, and then Spaventa, Villari, and Fiorentino. Literary achievement of their kind has been less common among anglophone philosophers: few have written as well as Mill, James, or Santayana. Yet it must be said that graceful writing and grandiloquent speaking sometimes occluded philosophy in the texts that modern Italy produced: cultural imperatives and institutional habits sometimes put rhetoric ahead of its ancient rival. Cicero was an Italian, after all, and so was Girolamo Savonarola. Thunderous speechmaking and passionate sermonizing lay deep in the strata of Italian cultural memory. The philosophical prolusione – Fiorentino’s Pisa inaugural of 1876 is a splendid example – was a residue of those venerable effusions of learned language, and in the anglophone world there has been nothing quite like it.456 Near the start of Fiorentino’s speech come some lines that suggest a conclusion: Every era is made of an aggregate of traditions, principles and doctrines with which it stays content until it occurs to someone to suspect that they are unstable. Until that moment, there is no hint of suspicion, which for

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Still a Strange History (Bobbio II) most people is not an issue. But then – as with a building whose walls tumble down all at once, and no stone is left upon a stone – not one principle or doctrine in this whole mental world any longer has any value or authority at all. It must be completely rebuilt, completely redone from the start, and reconstruction begins with a preconceived dislike for anything from the past.

In order to dislike the past enough to bother rejecting it, one should first learn something about it: this is a minimal motivation for exploring an unfamiliar region of philosophy’s history. A better reason lies in the ‘aggregate of traditions, principles, and doctrines’ that Fiorentino mentions.457 For us, these will be our own cultural property. If we inspect this real estate again, but look at it now in a fresh way, set against the alien landscape that Fiorentino has in mind, perhaps we too can provoke the instability that philosophy thrives on. Strangers in the strange land of modern Italian philosophy, we anglosassoni will notice its distinctive externalities: the Catholic spirituality that suffused it; the nationalist exultation that inspired it; the historicism that gave it direction; the cultural breadth that enriched it; and the political isolation that shackled it. More important, we will notice and honour its core philosophical achievements in the work of the remarkable thinkers described in this book, among many others in an embattled age that would not cease from mental fight.

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Notes to Part I

1 Bellamy (2004). 2 Bobbio’s autobiography, with a chronology by the editor of the English edition, has been translated: Bobbio (2002); for the complexities of Bobbio’s politics during the Fascist period and afterward, see also Zolo (2008). 3 Bellamy (2004). 4 For an earlier statement of the same theme, see Spaventa (1972a), I, 331: ‘Italy abounds in genius for theorizing; what is missing is agreement of theory with experience’; see section 10 of this Introduction. 5 Bobbio (1955). 6 Below, section 7. 7 Bobbio (1955). 8 Bobbio (1955); Garin (1966b), II, 532−40; (1996): 105−7. 9 Below, section 19. 10 Garin (1966b), II, 3859; De Felice (1985): 11−61; Turi (1995): 202−7; Santucci (1996); Rossi (2002), (2009); Bassi (2005); and below, sections 11 and 20. 11 Parts of this section, and of sections 3−9, are based on Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2006). 12 Gentile’s extensive writings about the history of philosophy fill 25 volumes out of 59 in his collected works. His vast historical project started with a thesis, Rosmini e Gioberti, in Gentile (1899a). The other historical works by Gentile which are most relevant here are Gentile (1917), (1930), (1957), (2001), and (2003). 13 For Galluppi, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Mamiani, see below, sections 3 to 9; for accounts in English of the history of Italy in the period covered by this book, see Beales and Biagini (1981), Clark (1996), Duggan (1994), Hearder (1983); and for a recent Italian survey of the Risorgimento, its origins, and its aftermath, see Banti (2004); also Turi (1998): 925.

Part I: Introduction 14 Below, section 10 on Spaventa. 15 Rosmini (1830) is the text followed here for historical reasons rather than Rosmini (1934), the Edizione nazionale, which is based on the fifth revised edition of 1851−2. Rosmini was introduced to the anglophone world by Lockhart (1856), which contains a short preface on Rosmini’s philosophy by the author, who was also responsible for the first English translation, Rosmini (1883), based on the fifth edition; the second English translation, Rosmini (2001), follows a posthumous Italian text of 1875−6. 16 Rosmini (1830), I, 8.111, 113, 333; (1881): 313−23, 393−401; for other Italian editions of the Schizzo sulla filosofia moderna, see Rosmini (1913) and (1950), and for an earlier English translation, Rosmini (1882). Condillac and his followers are sensisti in Rosmini’s terminology; their doctrine is il sistema della sensazione or sensismo. 17 Rosmini (1830), I, 8; Garin (1966a), III, 1112−15. 18 Rosmini (1830), I, 64−7; Condillac (1746), and for an English version, Condillac (2001). 19 Rosmini (1830), I, 8−11. 20 Rosmini (1830), I, xii−xiii; Cousin (1829), I, 120−7; Reid (1836), I, cxxv− cxxvii; Jouffroy’s introduction to Dugald Stewart was translated into Italian in 1841, ten years after Galluppi translated Cousin’s Fragments because of his ‘deep knowledge of Reid’s philosophy and German philosophy, which have important connections with one another’: Jouffroy (1841); Galluppi (1831): v−vi, xi, xviii, 113−59, 183−92; Garin (1966a), III, 1117. 21 Rosmini (1830), I, 330−1; Reid’s importance for Rosmini and Galluppi was recognized by Sciacca (1935), which is still very useful, especially pp. 83−6, 94−9, 209−37. 22 Rosmini (1840): 3, but this attack on Gioia had been written in 1824 and published in Rosmini (1827−8); Garin (1966a), III, 1037−63, 1105−6; Restaino (1999), I, 125−30, 135−6. 23 Kant (1796) is Born’s Latin translation; Kant (1820−2) is the defective Italian version of Vincenzo Mantovani; Kant (1835) is Tissot’s French: before the vernacular versions in French and Italian were published, important expositions by Villers (1801), Kinker (1801), De Gérando (1802), and Destutt de Tracy (1992) were available in French; Soave (1803) is an early account in Italian: see also Garin (1966a), III, 1070−1, 1078-80; Leetham (1957); Prini (1999): 155−61; De Giorgi (2003). 24 Lo Cane (2001); Amerio (1965). 25 Galluppi (1935); Garin (1966a), III, 1073−7, 1080−2; Genovesi (1962); Zambelli (1972); Tortora (1989). 26 Galluppi (1819−32); (1846a), II, 221−4; (1846b); Ottonello (1997).

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Notes to Part I 27 Galluppi (1843): 225−70; (1965): xxxi−xxxii, 114−27; Rosmini (1830), I, 31−2, 54−6; Gentile (1930), II, 33. 28 Rosmini (1830), I, 31−2, 54−6, 147−9; III, 380−6, 723−5; cf. I, 260−1; II, 242−3; III, 50−1, 373−7, 438−40, 476−7, 725−6, 744−7, 754−7, 760−3, 824−5; Gentile (1930), II, 51; (1899a): 82−3. 29 Galluppi (1831); Cousin (1826); Rosmini (1968): 617; Lo Cane (2001): xviii; Garin (1966a), III, 1073−4. 30 Galluppi (1846a), I, 5; II, 196, 221: see our Translations, II.1. 31 Galluppi (1846a), I, 279; Locke (1975): 105, 115 (2.1.4, 19). 32 Galluppi (1846a), I, 280−1. 33 Galluppi (1846a), I, 282. 34 Galluppi (1846a), I, 282−4. 35 Galluppi (1846a), I, 285−7. 36 Galluppi (1846a), I, 419−20. 37 Galluppi (1846a), II, 220−2. 38 Galluppi (1846a), I, 420−2. 39 Galluppi (1846a), I, 422−7. 40 Galluppi (1846a), I, 427−8. 41 Galluppi (1846a), I, 428−9. 42 Galluppi (1846a), II, 225. 43 Galluppi (1846a), II, 226. 44 Galluppi (1846a), II, 227−30. 45 For the approach to Kant taken here, see Kitcher (1999). 46 Jacobi (1787): 209−30: in the Preface to the 1815 edition of the same work, Jacobi said of Kant’s Ding an sich, that ‘Without that assumption, I was unable to get into his system, but with it I could not remain in it.’ 47 Galluppi (1846a), II, 210−11. 48 Galluppi (1846a), II, 223−4. 49 Galluppi (1846a), II, 196; Garin (1966a), III, 1082−9. 50 Kitcher (1999): 416−17. 51 Kant, KrV, A89-90/B122. 52 Galluppi (1846a), II, 197−8. 53 Galluppi (1846a), II, 198. 54 Galluppi (1846a), II, 196−7, 219−21. 55 Kant (1796); Rosmini (1881): 316; see also n23 above. 56 For the biographical information that follows, see Garin (1966a), III, 1103−12; Leetham (1957); Prini (1999): 155−61; De Giorgi (2003). 57 Rosmini (2001), the latest English version of the New Essay, is just one part of the large project undertaken by his followers; Cleary (1992) is a brief introduction to Rosmini from this perspective.

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64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87

Above, section 3, n23. Rosmini (1996). Garin (1966a), III, 1106−12, 1137−41. Rosmini (1830), II, 332−9. Rosmini (1830), II, 329−30; Gentile (1899a): 69; Sciacca (1935): 229−31. Rosmini (1881); see II.2 of our Translations; and Prini (1999): 57−67, 131−54. The final form of Rosmini’s metaphysics and philosophy of mind appears in the eight volumes of the posthumous Teosofia, published in 1938−41 in the Edizione nazionale supervised by Enrico Castelli; a new Edizione critica was begun by Sciacca in 1979. Rosmini (1881): 393. Rosmini (1830), I, 162−3; (1881): 313−23. Rosmini (1881): 393. Rosmini (1881): 393−4; Garin (1966a), III, 1123−5. Rosmini (1830), I, 124−6; (1881): 394. Rosmini (1830), III, 751−3. Rosmini (1881): 394; Garin (1966a), III, 1112−15. Rosmini (1881): 394−5. Rosmini (1881): 395−6; Garin (1966a), III, 1117−25. Rosmini (1881): 396−7. Rosmini (1881): 397−8. Rosmini (1881): 398. Rosmini (1881): 398−9. Rosmini (1881): 400. Rosmini (1881): 315. Rosmini (1881): 399−400; Garin (1966a), III, 1119−25. Rosmini (1881): 400−1. Rosmini (1881): 313. Rosmini (1881): 315−16. Rosmini (1830), I, 170; Sciacca (1935): 83−5. Rosmini (1830), III, 720, 742−3, 750−3, 775, where Reid is cited. Rosmini (1830), III, 76−82, 749−50. Rosmini (1830), I, 144−50, is an explication of Galluppi’s critique of De Gérando’s account of Reid’s theory of judgment; unsurprisingly the argument that precedes Rosmini’s summary of his own views on simple apprehension, intuition, and judgment is, as Rosmini himself says, a labyrinth. Rosmini (1830), I, 141−52, 164−70; Rosmini objects to other aspects of Reid’s theory as well – nominalism, for example (ibid., pp. 269−72). Since his own system revolves around ideas as universals, Rosmini opposes Dugald Stewart’s nominalism and blames it on Reid. Because Reid rejects ideas,

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88 89 90

91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114 115

Rosmini claims, he thereby rejects universal ideas, and the result is nominalism; see also Sciacca (1935): 83−6, 95−6, 230−1, 236. Rosmini (1830), II, 253−4. Rosmini (1881): 316, 319−21; Garin (1966a), III, 1115−19. For the biographical information that follows, see Garin (1966a), III, 1149−54, 1176−8; Giusso (1948); Intini (2002); Palhoriès (1929); Rumi (1999); Stefanini (1947). For an analysis of the Theory of the Supernatural, see Garin (1966a), III, 1159−62. Gioberti (1843) is the first edition of the Primato; (1938−9) is the Edizione nazionale; see II.3 of our Translations; also Garin (1966a), III, 1152−4; Casini (1998): 272−93; Bagnoli (2007): 176−208; Irace (2003). Gioberti (1938−9): 37−44. Gioberti (1938−9): 42−5; Garin (1966a), III, 1162−3. Gioberti (1938−9): 44−5. Gioberti (1846−7); (1841−3); Curci (1845); Garin (1966a), III, 1153−4; Intini (2002): 7−14. Gioberti (1938−9): 44, 49; (1840): 9, 28, 58, 61. Gioberti (1840): 9−143; see II.4 of our Translations; also Garin (1966a), III, 1162−76. Gioberti (1840): 14−23. Gioberti (1840): 16−20. Gioberti (1840): 19. Gioberti (1840): 34−5, 38−9. Gioberti (1840): 39−40. Gioberti (1840): 40−2. Gioberti (1840): 41−2, 64. Gioberti (1840): 42−5; Garin (1966a), III, 1168−9. Gioberti (1840): 48−54. Gioberti (1840): 56−7. Gioberti (1840): 52−3, 57−60; Garin (1966a), III, 1169. Gioberti (1840): 60−3. Gentile (1917): 87−109: Pincherle (1973); the first edition of the Renewal is Mamiani (1834), but the edition cited here is Mamiani (1836); see II.5 of our Translations. Hearder (1983): 104−8. Cuoco (1804−6); Casini (1998): 238−62. Mamiani (1836): 11−12; Malusa (1977): 46−9. Dante, Purgatorio, 18.55; Gioberti (1938−9): 42−5; Mamiani (1836): 320; Rosmini (1836); above, section 7.

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Part I: Introduction 116 Gentile (1917): 109−37; Garin (1966a), III, 1197−9; Hearder (1983): 113−19. 117 Mamiani (1836): 5, 7, 14, 18−21, 28, 37, 42, 47, 53, 56−7, 159−60; section 3 of this Introduction. 118 Gentile (2001): 14−21; (2003), I, 222−9; Garin (1966a), III, 1091−3; Raschini (2001): 82−92. 119 Spaventa (1972a), III, 19−20; Gentile (2003), I, 187−269; Garin (1966a), III, 1225−6; (1966b), I, 14−19; Raschini (2001): 84−6. 120 Gentile (2001): 9−19. 121 Gentile (2001): 19−28, with Palmieri’s speech on pp. 20−1; Garin (1966a), III, 1229−30. 122 Gentile (2001): 29−100, with the passage from ‘Jesuit Saturdays’ on p. 58; ‘Introduction’ by Rascaglia and Savorelli in Spaventa (2000): 9−54; Malusa (1977): 50−4; Grilli (1941). 123 Spaventa (1972a), I, 293−5; see II.6 of our Translations; also Gentile (2001): 100−7; Savorelli, ‘Introduction,’ in Spaventa (2003): v−xxxviii; Malusa (1977): 73−80; Garin (1966a), III, 1233−8. 124 Gentile (2001): 108−16, with the passage quoted on p. 108; Savorelli, ‘Introduction,’ in Spaventa (2003): xxiii−iv, 7−8. 125 Gentile (2001): 116−44. 126 Gentile (2001): 145−74. 127 Spaventa (1972a), I, 295−332. 128 Villari (1859−61); (1877−82); (1888); (1892), I, 1−230; Martirano, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999a): 11−32; Martirano and Cacciatore, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999b): 25−33; Gentile (1957): 53−61; Garin (1966a), III, 1246−7; Malusa (1977): 461−7; Buckle (1857); Breisach (1994): 268−75. 129 Villari (1868); see II.7 of our translations; also Malusa (1977): 461−2; Martirano and Cacciatore, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999b): 25−33. 130 Garin (1966a), III, 1273−6. 131 Gentile (1957); Martirano, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999a): 11−32; Poggi (1999): 144−8, 185−205; Santucci (1996): 7−8, 29−39; Cacciatore (1997); for Ardigò and the other positivists mentioned here, see also Garin (1966a), III, 1244−59, 1265−73; (1966b), I, 1−14. 132 Villari (1999a); below, section 17 on Croce. 133 Garin (1980): 12; Martirano, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999a): 17−18; also p. 148. 134 Villari (1868): 2−5, 18−21, 27−9. 135 Villari (1868): 3−5. 136 Villari (1868): 4−6. 137 Villari (1868): 6−7.

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Notes to Part I 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

169

170 171 172

Villari (1868): 1−3, 6−8; see below, section 13 on Vico. Villari (1868): 7−11. Villari (1868): 8−11. Villari (1868): 10−15. Villari (1868): 14−18. Villari (1868): 18−19. Villari (1868): 18−21. Villari (1868): 20−2. Villari (1868): 28−30. Villari (1868): 22−4. Villari (1868): 23-6. Villari (1868): 27−9, 31−3. De Sanctis (2002); Jachia (1996): 5−45. De Sanctis (1990): 91−120; Jachia (1996): 45−155. De Sanctis (1952), III, 335−7; (1990): 150, 226; Jachia (1996): 141−5, 155−8; Garin (1966a), III, 1240−1, 1264. De Sanctis (1990): 121−4; Kirchmann (1875); see II.8 of our Translations. De Sanctis (1990): 124−5. De Sanctis (1990): 125−6. De Sanctis (1990): 127−9, De Sanctis (1990): 129−30. De Sanctis (1990): 130−2. De Sanctis (1990): 131−3. De Sanctis (1990): 132−4. De Sanctis (1990): 134. De Sanctis (1990): 135−7. De Sanctis (1990): 139−41, 146; see II.9 of our Translations. De Sanctis (1990): 141−2. De Sanctis (1990): 143−4. De Sanctis (1990): 144−5. De Sanctis (1990): 145−6. Fiorentino (1861), (1868), (1872−4); Gentile (2003), I, 3−45; Malusa (1977: 97−107; Garin, ‘Preface,’ in Fiorentino (1994): 7−14; Garin (1966a), III, 1216−17. Fiorentino (1994), with the introductory ‘Essay’ by Fabiana Cacciapuoti, pp. 15−19; Scazzola (2002): 229−34; Burckhardt (1876) is the Italian translation by Domenico Valbusa of Burckhardt (1989). Fiorentino (1935); see II.13 in our Translations. Fiorentino (1876); see II.12 in our Translations. Fiorentino (1876): 161−2; Vico (1827); (1975): 61−80; Berlin (2000).

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Part I: Introduction 173 Aruta Stampacchia (1990); Cacciaglia and Capaccioni (2000); Degl’Innocenti Venturini (1980), (1981); Degli Oddi (2001); Gentile (2003), II, 36−49; Antonio Pieretti and Carlo Vinti, ‘Introduzione,’ in Florenzi Waddington (2000): vii−lix; Garin (1966a), III, 1216−17, 1225, 1239−43. 174 Florenzi Waddington (1864a). 175 Florenzi Waddington (1978): 23−35, 99−112: the editor (pp. 24, 32, n4) says that Mamiani had persuaded the Marchesa to renounce her earlier support for pantheism; Degl’Innocenti Venturini (1980): 326−7. See II.1011 of our Translations. 176 Claudio Cesa, ‘Introduzione,’ in Florenzi Waddington (1978): 10−14; Rascaglia and Savorelli, ‘Introduzione,’ in Spaventa (2000): 17; above, section 10 on Spaventa. 177 Florenzi Waddington (1843); Degli Oddi (2001): 52−3, 82−5. 178 Florenzi Waddington (1978): 25−35; Degl’Innocenti Venturini (1980): 311−29; Degli Oddi (2001): 23−107; Garin, ‘Preface,’ in Fiorentino (1994): 7−8. 179 Fiorentino (1876): 164−6. 180 Fiorentino (1876): 166−8. 181 Fiorentino (1876): 167−73. 182 Fiorentino (1876: 173−5. 183 Fiorentino (1876): 177−9. 184 Fiorentino (1876): 178−80. 185 Fiorentino (1876): 180−2. 186 Fiorentino (1876): 182−3. 187 Fiorentino (1876): 183−4; (1935): 9; above, section 11 on Villari. 188 Fiorentino (1935): 9−10. 189 Fiorentino (1935): 10−11. 190 Fiorentino (1935): 11−13. 191 Fiorentino (1935): 13−15. 192 Fiorentino (1935): 15−16. 193 Fiorentino (1935): 16−17. 194 Fiorentino (1935): 17−18. 195 Fiorentino (1935): 18. 196 Fiorentino (1935): 18−20. 197 Fiorentino (1935): 20−1. 198 Fiorentino (1935): 21−3. 199 Badaloni and Muscetta (1990): 3−14; Poggi (1981): 3−28; Jacobitti (1975); Agazzi (1962): 104−9: see also the brief chronologies prepared by Sbarberi in Labriola (1976): cv−cix, and Poggi (1981): 99−100.

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Notes to Part I 200 201 202 203 204 205

206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223

224

225 226 227 228 229

Herbart (1825); (1828−9); Pettoello (1988). Labriola (1887); Poggi (1981): 64−8. On Bruno’s statue, see Berggren (2002); Rowland (2008): 3−7. Labriola (1902), (1949); Badaloni and Muscetta (1990): 3−14; Poggi (1981): 99−100. Poggi (1981): 64−100. Labriola (1976a); see II.14 in our Translations; also Garin (1966b), I, 195−210; Agazzi (1962): 95−125; and below, section 17 of this Introduction, on Croce. Labriola (1976a): 794−5: the notation (history1, history2) is ours, not Labriola’s. Labriola (1976a): 795−6. Labriola (1976a): 797−8. Labriola (1976a): 798−800. Labriola (1976a): 800−1. Labriola (1976a): 801−2. Labriola (1976a): 803−4. Labriola (1976a): 804−7. Labriola (1976a): 807−8. Labriola (1976a): 808−9. Labriola (1976a): 809−11. Labriola (1976a): 811−12. Labriola (1976a): 812−13. Labriola (1976a): 813−14. Labriola (1976a): 814−16. Labriola (1976a): 816−17. Labriola (1976a): 817−19. Staley (2009); Pattison (1876); Spencer (1876); Venn (1876); Barzellotti (1878): 505, 537; Gentile (1917): 333−53, dismisses Barzellotti as a NeoKantian manqué whose views amounted to ‘aestheticism or aestheticizing mysticism.’ Barzellotti (1878): 506−18, 526; Ferri (1869); on Ferri, who collaborated with Mamiani and founded the Rivista italiana di filosofia, see Garin (1966a), III, 1199−1200. Barzellotti (1878): 518−29. Barzellotti (1878): 529−31. Barzellotti (1878): 531−4; Garin (1966a), III, 1126−9; Raschini (2001): 85−9. Barzellotti (1878): 534−6. Barzellotti (1878): 537−8.

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Part I: Introduction 230 This section and the next two are derived from Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008). Croce (2000a) is an autobiography, circulated privately after 1918 and translated into English by R.G. Collingwood in the year after it was published commercially: Croce (1927). For biographical and historical accounts, see Bonetti (2000); Galasso (2002); Cingari (2003); Garin (1966a), III, 1282−7. 231 Croce (2000a): 26−7; above, section 14, on Labriola and Herbart. 232 Above, section 11, on Villari; Garin (1966a), III, 1290−1; (1966b), I, 179−95; Cingari (2003), I, 19−31. 233 Croce (2000a): 15−32; the original version of the essay is Croce (1893), followed here and in II.15 of our Translations; the final revision appears in Croce (1951a). See also Garin (1966a), III, 1288−90, 1297−8; Galasso (2002): 114−26; Bonetti (2000): 3−7, 145−6; Cingari (2003): 15−37. 234 Croce (1893): 1−2; Bernheim (1889); Droysen (1977); Ullmann (1885). 235 Croce (1893): 2−4, 18; Cingari (2003), I, 15−24. 236 Croce (1893): 4−5. 237 Croce (1893): 5−6; below, section 18, on Croce’s notion of distinction. 238 Croce (2005). 24. 239 Garin (1966a), III, 1311−16; Galasso (2002): 150−7. 240 Croce (1900), (1902), (1956), (1992); Garin (1966b), I, 222−44. 241 Croce (1893): 6−7; Zimmermann (1858), (1862−4); Nahlowsky (1863). 242 Croce (1893): 7−8; Hartmann (1878), (1886). 243 Croce (1893): 9−10. 244 Croce (1893): 11. 245 Croce (1893): 11−12; Schopenhauer (1859), II, 500−1 (3.38); Burckhardt (1979): 32. 246 Croce (1893): 12−13; Lazarus (1865). 247 Croce (1893): 13−15, criticizing the scientism and pessimism in Buckle (1857), Delfico (1814), Wundt (1888), and Gumplovicz (1883), while siding with Simmel (1892). 248 Croce (1893):15; cf. (1951a): 21−2. 249 Croce (1893): 16. 250 Croce (1893): 17−21, citing Lazarus (1865) on condensation and substitution and then criticizing Droysen (1977), Schopenhauer (1859), and Lecky (1865). 251 Croce (1893): 21−3. 252 Croce (1893): 23−4; Köstlin (1869): 53−62 (1.2.2). 253 Croce (1893): 24−5. 254 Croce (1893): 26−7. 255 Croce (1893): 27−9.

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Notes to Part I 256 Above, section 17. 257 Croce (1920): 46−7; see II.16 in our Translations; (1996) is the new Edizione nazionale; (1917b) is an English translation of the original edition of 1908. 258 Croce (1920): 48. 259 The example of the tiger is adapted from Dennett (1969). The problem arises most clearly in the case of images, but, as Dennett notes, it arises equally well for cases in which the representation has propositional form. For example, both the classical theory of concepts and the prototype and exemplar theories of concepts face this problem. For an overview of theories of concepts, see Laurence and Margolis (1999). 260 Croce (1920): 48. 261 Croce (1920): 48−9. 262 Below, in this section, on distincts and opposites; see also Garin (1966a), III, 1287−90, on Croce’s compulsion to analyse by negating. 263 Croce (1920): 48−9. 264 Croce (1920): 49. 265 For contemporary versions of concept holism, see Quine (1951) and Davidson (1984), and for a discussion and criticism, Fodor and Lepore (1992). 266 Croce (1920): 50−2. 267 Croce (1920): 52−3. 268 Croce (1920): 51−3. 269 Croce (1920): 54−7. 270 Above, section 17. 271 Croce (1920): 58. 272 Croce (1920): 59. 273 Croce (1920): 59−60. 274 Croce (1920): 59−60. 275 Croce (1920): 62−3. 276 Croce (1920): 63. 277 Croce (1920): 63−6. 278 Croce (1920): 67. 279 Croce (1907) is the original version, cited here, and used for II.17 in our Translations; Croce (2006) is in the new Edizione nazionale, which is very valuable for its notes on sources; see also the recent text by Giuseppe Gembillo in Croce (1995): 27−128, which reflects the many stylistic and some substantive changes that Croce made in later editions. See also Garin (1962): 155−73; Bonetti (2001): 147−8; Rizi (2003): 22−3, 174−5, 196−9; Cesa (2006): 447, 455−6, 467.

183

Part I: Introduction 280 Hegel (1907); Bonetti (2001): 3−14, 146−7; Galasso (2002): 127−40; Turi (1995): 54−68. 281 Croce (1905); (1907): 105, 131, 149; (1909a); (1909b); (1917a); above, section 17. 282 Croce (1907): v−vi. 283 Croce (1907): 1−5. 284 Davidson (2001); Sellars (1965): 172−3. 285 Croce (1907): 5−6. 286 Croce (1907): 6−8. 287 Croce (1907): 9; above, section 18. 288 Croce (1907): 9−11; Raschini (2001): 107−9. 289 Croce (1907): 10−11; on ‘logical space,’ see especially Wittgenstein (1974), 1.13, 3.4, 42; Sellars (1997): 57−68. 290 Croce (1907): 11−12; Ryle (2000a); also Broad (1925); Rorty (1965); Lycan and Pappas (1972); Churchland (1981). 291 Croce (1907): 13−18. 292 Croce (1907): 18−20. 293 Croce (1907): 20−1. 294 Croce (1907): 21−4. 295 Croce (1907): 24−30. 296 Croce (1907): 30−1. 297 Above, section 18. 298 Croce (1907): 32−5, 51−4. 299 Croce (1907): 54−6. 300 Croce (1907): 56−8. 301 Croce (1907): 81−4; Pardo (1972): 73−84. 302 Ryle (2000b): 16−17. 303 Croce (1907): 81−4; see also the notes in chapter 4 of our translation of Croce’s ‘Philosophy of Hegel.’ 304 Croce (1907): 85−8. 305 Croce (1907): 88−93; Sasso (1994−2000), I, 35−47. 306 Croce (1907): 93−4. 307 Croce (1907): 94−6. 308 Croce (1907): 97−114. 309 Croce (1907): 115−27. 310 Croce (1907): 129−43. 311 Croce (1907): 145−64. 312 Croce (1907): 164−70. 313 Croce (1907): 184. 314 Croce (1907): 185−7.

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Notes to Part I 315 Croce (1907): 196. 316 Garin (1966a), III, 1297−1307, 1312−13, 1316−18; (1966b), I, 21−44, 86−90, 137−49, 157−66, II, 292−310; (1977): 40−2, 66−8; De Felice (1985): 62−127; Cingari (2003), I, 9−15, 145−83. 317 Garin (1966b), I, 175−9; (1997b): 19−26; Friedman (2000). 318 The standard biography is Turi (1995), but the intense debate among Italians on Gentile is still producing a fast-growing literature: among general accounts of Gentile’s life and thought; see, for example, Negri (1975); Brianese (1996); Gregor (2001); Lo Schiavo (2001); Coli (2004); Moss (2004); Romano (2004); for more specialized accounts of the philosophy and other issues, see Alderisio (1959); Pardo (1972); Del Noce (1990); Negri (1992); Sasso (1998); Sasso (1994−2000), II; Raschini (2001). 319 Garin (1966a), III, 1318−21; Turi (1995): 7−50; Lo Schiavo (2001): 163−4; Sasso (1994−2000), IV, 489−90; Scazzola (2002): 1−46. 320 Garin (1966b), I, 211−21; Turi (1995): 50−8; Lo Schiavo (2001): 163−4; Scazzola (2002): 47−81; Cingari (2003), I, 37−58. 321 Turi (1995): 58−65; Lo Schiavo (2001): 13−20; Garin (1966a), III, 1276−9. 322 Gentile (1899b), the version followed here and in II.18 of our Translations, is the first edition; Gentile (1991): 95−224, is based on the 1937 text, the last one revised by Gentile, see also Turi (1995): 58−68; (1998): 924; Coli (2004): 75−89; Brianese (1996): 42−52; Del Noce (1990): 53−81; Agazzi (1962): 234−43, 268−84; and Garin, ‘Nota introduttiva,’ in Gentile (1991): 85−93. 323 Gentile (1899b): 51−8. 324 Gentile (1899b): 58−62. 325 Gentile (1899b): 62−3. 326 Gentile (1899b): 64−6, citing Labriola (1898): 43. 327 Gentile (1899b): 66−7; below, section 23, on actualism. 328 Gentile (1899b): 67−8. 329 Gentile (1899b): 68−9. 330 Gentile (1899b): 69−71, citing Labriola (1898): 123−5. 331 Gentile (1899b): 71, 147. 332 Gentile (1899b): 147−8. 333 Gentile (1899b): 148−9. 334 Gentile (1899b): 149−51. 335 Gentile, (1899b): 150−1. 336 Gentile (1899b): 151. 337 Gentile (1899b): 151−3. 338 Gentile (1899b): 153.

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Part I: Introduction 339 340 341 342

343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358

359

360

361

Gentile (1899b): 153−5. Gentile (1899b): 155−7. Turi (1995): 68−81; above, section 10. Gentile (1903a) is the first edition, used here and in II.19 of our Translations; Gentile (1991): 247−65, follows the version in Gentile (1921), the last one with changes by the author; see also Alderisio (1959): 34−43; Garin (1966b), I, 171−4, 179; Turi (1995): 81−121; Sasso (1994−2000), IV, 494−6. Gentile (1903a): 5−6. Gentile (1903a): 6−9, 13−14, 16−17, 19. Gentile (1903a): 8−9. Gentile (1903a): 9−11. Gentile (1903a): 10−12; Brunetière (1896); Garin (1966a), III, 1298−9; Turi (1995): 113−14. Gentile (1903a): 12−14. Gentile (1903a): 14−15. Gentile (1903a): 15−16. Gentile (1903a): 17−19. Gentile (1903a): 18−19. Gentile (1903a): 19−20. Gentile (1903a): 19−20. Gentile (1903a): 20−3. Croce (1909c); Turi (1995): 148−212. Croce (1910), (1911a); De Gennaro (1963). Gentile (1913): 245−58, the version used here and in II.20 of our Translations, appeared two years after this paper was first delivered: see also Garin (1966a), III, 1321−5; (1966b), I, 44−53; Sasso (1994−2000), IV, 496−502; Galasso (2002): 169−82. Gentile (1913); (1916); (1922−3); (1998); Garin (1966a), III, 1320−22; Brianese (1996): 65−70, 87−100, 109−35; Raschini (2001): 96−104; Moss (2004): 43−56. Holmes (1937) provides an unusual perspective on Gentile’s actualism: it was written by a Harvard philosophy student who heard Gentile lecturing in Rome, while also studying with C.I. Lewis and E.A. Burtt; Moss (2004) has a similar genesis since its American author studied in Rome with Ugo Spirito and Guido Caligero, who were students of Gentile. Gentile (1931a) is the version used here and in II.21 of our Translations; (1931b); Garin, ‘Nota introduttiva,’ in Gentile (1991): 685−7; Moss (2004): 57−78. Gentile (1913): 245.

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Notes to Part I 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395

Gentile (1913): 245−6. Gentile (1913): 246. Gentile (1913): 246−7. Gentile (1913): 247−8. Gentile (1913): 249−50, 255−7. Gentile (1913): 248−50. For the temporal character of one of the key terms involved, attuale, see the second note to our translation of Gentile’s ‘Act of Thinking.’ Gentile (1913): 254−5; (1931a): 305−6. Gentile (1913): 249; (1931a): 304−6. Gentile (1931a): 306. Orwell (1983): 23; Garin (1966b), II, 362−81; Brianese (1996): 30−1; Del Noce (1990): 189; cf. Sasso (1998): 7−8; Turi (1998). Gentile (1913): 247−52. Kant, KrV, A550/B578. Gentile (1913): 251−5; see also Sasso (1996−2000), II, 453−87. Gentile (1931a): 302−3. Gentile (1913): 255−7: the ctisi in autoctisi is ‘creation’ (ktisis) in Greek. Gentile (1913): 251−2; (1931a): 303−4. Gentile (1931a): 306−7. Gentile (1931a): 301, 304. Gentile (1913): 257−8; (1931a): 308−9. Garin (1966a), III, 1129−30; (1966b), I, 256−73; Turi (1995): 212−87; Lo Schiavo (2001): 164−5; above, section 15. Bonetti (2001): 149−50; Rizi (2003): 35−41. Turi (1995): 304−526; (1998): 929−30; Sasso (1994−2000), IV, 511−29; Lo Schiavo (2001): 165−7; Belardelli (2005): 3−48. Bonetti (2001): 150−1; Galasso (2002): 305−29, 346−59; Rizi (2003): 41−89: both manifestos are reproduced in Papa (1974): 187−94, 212−14. Turi (1995): 345−59; Lo Schiavo (2001): 119−26. Rizi (2003): 89−122, 208−12; Bonetti (2001): 150−1; Garin (1966b), II, 405−9. Papa (1974): 387; Russell (1905): 485; Turi (1998): 930. Papa (1974): 387. Papa (1974): 187−9. Papa (1974): 189−90. Papa (1974): 191−3. Papa (1974): 190−1; Turi (1998): 928. Papa (1974): 212−13. Papa (1974): 212−14.

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Part I: Introduction 396 For the biography and chronology, see Fiori (2008); Romano (1965); Garin (1997a): 3−40; Jones (2006): 14−26; Gramsci (1975), I, xliii−lxviii; (1985): 1−15; (1996a), I, xxix−xli; (1996b): 1−28; (2000): 17−25. 397 Gramsci (1975), II, 1363−1509. 398 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8. 399 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−6, 1383−94, 1485−90. 400 Gramsci (1975), I, lxiv−lxv, II, 1396−7; (1996a): xxxvi−vii; (2000): 22; Bukharin (1925). 401 Gramsci (1975), II, 1366−8; Garin (1966a), III, 1286−7. 402 Gramsci (1975), II, 1370−1, 1399−1401. 403 Gramsci (1975), II, 1398−9, 1462−6; see chapter 11 of Croce’s ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ and on Gramsci and Croce in an earlier period, see Garin (1996): 343−60; also (1997a): 41−4, 59−61. 404 Gramsci (1975), II, 1462−6. 405 Gramsci (1975), II, 1418−20, 1466−7; Russell (1922): 113−14. 406 Gramsci (1975), II, 1446−7; Bukharin (1927). 407 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8, 1380−1, 1465−7. 408 Gramsci (1975), II, 1378−94. 409 Gramsci (1975), II, 1384−6, 1396−8, 1481−2. 410 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8, 1380−97; Garin (1996): 289−342; Belardelli (2005): 174−91. 411 Gramsci (1975), II, 1392. 412 Chabod (2002): 81−2, 105−7. 413 Croce, (1917a), (1918), (1921), (1925), (1928), (1929), (1931), (1932), (1938); Croce (1991), followed here, is Galasso’s edition of Croce (1932); Garin (1966a), III, 1335−7; (1966b), I, 252−6, II, 275−87; Galasso (2002): 183−249, 371−89; Bonetti (2001): 73−101; Rizi (2003): 196−204. 414 Croce (1991): 9, and the ‘Nota del curatore’ by Galasso, pp. 453−7; Dante, Inferno, 23.28−30. 415 Croce (1928); Volpe (1991); Sasso (1979); De Felice (1985): 205−8; Rizi (2003): 146−54; Cingari (2003), II, 357−64; Di Rienzo (2004): 112−53; Belardelli (2005): 97−140. 416 Croce (1991): 11−20. 417 Croce (1991): 20. 418 Croce (1991): 20−5. 419 Croce (1991): 25−30: the notion of a religion of liberty itself is Hegelian (Religion der Freiheit); see Hegel (1986), 17.203−4, where the full achievement of truth and freedom comes with the arrival of the ‘consummate’ or ‘absolute’ Christian religion – which, of course, is not what Croce has in mind. See chapter 9 of Croce’s ‘Philosophy of Hegel.’

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Notes to Part I 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440

441 442 443 444 445

446 447 448

Croce (1991): 31−56. Croce (1991): 57−75; Cingari (2003), II, 364−8. Croce (1991): 77−424. Croce (1991): 425−8. Croce (1991): 428−33, and the ‘Nota del curatore’ by Galasso (2002): 460−1; Verucci (2006): 140−201. Croce (1991): 431; Cingari (2003), II, 364−8. Croce (1991): 433−4. Croce (1991): 434−8. Gramsci (1996a), I, xxxii−xli, II, 563−5, with Santucci’s notes, as throughout this section. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 18 April 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 563−5. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 18, 25 April 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 564−8. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 18 April 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 564−5. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 2 May 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 568−72. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 9, 30 May 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 572−5, 581−3. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 23 May 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 577−8. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 6 June 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 584−7. Gramsci to Tania Schucht, 6 June 1932, in Gramsci (1996a), II, 584−5. Bobbio (1955), and in section 1 above. Gramsci, ‘Introduction to Philosophy,’ section 6. Lora and Simionati (1994−8), III, 88−90; for neo-scholastic philosophers in the Italy of Leo’s day, see Garin (1966a), III, 1218−22. Garin (1966a), III, 1311, 1319, 1330−7; Del Noce (1990): 164−89; Turi (1995): 393−407; Raschini (2001): 104; Rizi (2003): 155−79; E. Gentile (2005): 7−25, 101−4, 128−9. For the historical roots of the struggle for an autonomous lay culture in Italy, see Ciliberto (2008), especially the introductory essay, pp. 5−79. Lora and Simionati (1994-8), II, 42−4. Lora and Simionati (1994-8), II, 500−45; IV, 190−246; Garin (1966b), I, 62−80. Lora and Simionati (1994-8), IV, 248−56. Gentile, ‘La Filosofia scolastica in Italia e i suoi problemi,’ in Gentile (1963): 3−36; Garin (1966b), II, 493−9; Turi (1995): 394; Verucci (2006): 1−10. Garin (2000): 38−45, 53−61. Emerson (1983): 53−71; Manzoni (2003); Duggan (1994): 27−30. Casini (1998): 197−297; Berggren (2002); Rowland (2008): 3−7.

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Part I: Introduction 449 The reproduction in Vico (1975): 2−26 is one of the clearer ones in standard editions. 450 Sections 7 and 13 above. 451 Gramsci, ‘Letters,’ #302; Bobbio (1955). 452 Gentile, ‘Actual Idealism,’ section 4. 453 Popper (2006); Belardelli (2005): 3−48; E. Gentile (2005): 101−4. 454 Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008). 455 Russell (2004). 456 Above, section 14. 457 Fiorentino, ‘Positivism.’

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PART II Translations

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1 Baron Pasquale Galluppi of Tropea

Elements of Philosophy1

To the Young, Lovers of True Wisdom Young People, In the last century, remarkable changes have occurred in philosophy; new elements must therefore replace the old. Despite the wonderful books that keep appearing to shed their light on the world of philosophy, to me it appears that we still have no good elements. To create them, one must follow the whole history of philosophy in an analytic spirit, paying special attention to the period of the current philosophical revolution, looking deeply at the causes that made it happen, and then reading and analysing all the classic works of the various philosophical schools which between Descartes and our own time have been established in educated Europe. Only such study can put the author in a position to write good elements. I can assure you that I have diligently pursued this most laborious task, which justifies, I believe, my presenting to the public the Elements of Philosophy. They include: 1. Pure Logic, the logic of ideas; 2. Psychology; 3. Ideology; 4. Mixed Logic, the logic of facts; 5. Philosophy of Natural Obligations; 6. Philosophy of Religion, or natural theology. The Pure Logic, though small in size, is meant to educate thinkers. I have tried to see that each of the seven chapters that make it up contains, in combination with the others, some major point closely connected to the differences among particular opinions evident today in the field of philosophy. In the first chapter, I define philosophy in the sense that people now commonly take this term. In the second, I establish the distinction between pure cognitions and empirical cognitions.2 Because Destutt-Tracy did not attend to this important distinction, he accepted

Part II: Translations

empiricism, and the transcendental philosophy that dominates Germany today is based on an abuse of the distinction.3 The third chapter examines the very famous question of synthetic a priori judgments, the source of the revolution that Kant produced in philosophy. The fourth chapter solves one of the major problems of modern logic, which is how speculative reasoning is instructive even though it depends on identity.4 The fifth chapter defends the rules of the syllogism from some objections of modern critics. The sixth establishes the distinction between the order of deduction of our ideas and that of deducing our cognitions.5 The seventh and last chapter specifies the laws of the two methods, analytic and synthetic, which are not very widely understood. The other parts of the elementary course, to be published without delay, are written in the same spirit. The fifth edition is notably improved. At the end of each part of these elements is a summary dialogue, as in the third and fourth editions, in which I have followed the synthetic method for the topics treated, as a companion to the analytic method of the body of the work. In this way, I hope that you will be well instructed. Good luck! Summary of the PSYCHOLOGY by Question and Answer Q A Q A Q A

What is psychology? Psychology is the science of the soul. Psyche means soul in Greek. Can we know the soul, and how can we know it? Certainly we can know the soul since it shows itself to us. Please explain this to me more clearly. The soul is the subject of all our sensations, of all our affections, and of whatever thoughts we may have. But each of these modifications of ours is constantly accompanied by a sensation of it. The soul not only thinks and has modifications, then, but also becomes aware of whatever particular thoughts and particular modifications there may be. This awareness of what goes on in the soul is called consciousness or inner sense – internal sense. Q From what you say, it seems that the soul has a sensation of what goes on in it, but not of itself. A No. The soul also has a sensation of itself since it senses its modifications as its modifications, as things inhering in it, which amounts to saying that it senses itself modified. Q But does the soul distinguish itself from its modifications, regarding itself as the subject of these modifications?

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A The soul distinguishes itself from its modifications. But it does not make this distinction in the first moments of its consciousness of itself, only later on. Q Since the various modifications of which the soul has consciousness must have a cause, can you tell me what sort of cause this is? A There are two kinds of modifications in us: some are actions; others are passions. Accordingly, willing, judging, and reasoning are actions. Passions are sensations of pain following a blow or of pleasure following a different movement – eating tasty food, for example. The efficient principle of actions is the soul itself; for passions the action of an object outside the soul is necessary. The soul’s susceptibility to being affected in such a way is also necessary. Q What are faculties of the soul? A Faculties of the soul are potencies that the soul has either to produce certain actions or to accept certain modifications. The first are active potencies of the soul. The second are passive potencies. Q Might these faculties be something other than the soul itself? A The faculties of the soul are the soul itself considered in relation to its various modifications. Q What sorts of faculties does the soul have? A The primary faculties of mind are those that give it the objects of its thoughts, since the objects of our thoughts are an indispensable condition of thinking and since these objects must be given to the mind and are not created by it, Q What are these faculties that give the mind the objects of its thoughts? A They are sensibility and consciousness. The first gives the mind external objects; the second gives it its own I and the modifications that occur in the I. We cannot get back beyond this fact. The I that senses objects outside it is the first object shown to the mind. Q How can objects outside the mind be shown or made present to the mind itself? A By acting – by modifying the mind, in other words, which is to say by producing various sensations in it. Q Sensations are internal modifications of the mind, then? A Exactly. Q From this it seems one can infer that our sensations cannot reveal to us anything external. A Such an inference would be false. Since our sensations, in acting to modify our soul, must at the same time be perceptions of some external thing, they reveal an external world to us.

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Q Is there any similarity between our sensations and the qualities of bodies? A There is none. In our bodies we perceive only movements, and none of our sensations is a movement. This response is developed in the second chapter of the Psychology.6 Q In a good philosophy, what do our sensations authorize us to admit outside ourselves? A Various aggregates of substances, which, by constantly varying their mode of being, produce various sensations in our mind. Q Besides sensibility and consciousness, what other faculties must one recognize in the mind? A One must recognize two active faculties with which the mind works on the objects given to it by sensibility and consciousness. Q What are these faculties? A They are the faculty of analysis and the faculty of synthesis.7 With the first, the mind divides and distinguishes the objects that sensibility and consciousness together make present to the mind. With the second, the mind unites the objects by recognizing their relations. Q Give me a clear explanation of the different functions of analysis and synthesis. A Analysis can be divided into two kinds, which can be called attention and abstraction. From among the many sensible objects that operate on the senses at any moment and are really separate in nature, the mind uses attention to separate one of them and make the perception of it clearer than that of the others. By using attention, the mind also separates a sensible object from others with which it is naturally united but from which it can be separated naturally, thus making the perception of this object clearer than that of the other objects united with that object. Q Please give me examples of these two actions. A At the moment when a person and a tree are present to my senses, I can attend to the person whom I see and make the perception of this person clearer than that of the tree, so that the perception of the person to whom I attend becomes nearly exclusive. In the same way, while seeing a person, I can attend to his head and thus make my perception of the head clearer than that of other parts of the body. Q What is abstraction? A Abstraction is an act of the mind by which it treats as separate from

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other things what cannot have existence apart from these things. In this way, modes are treated as separate from the subject, and the subject as separate from the modes that determine it, without which determinations the subject cannot exist. Physicists treat motion as separate from the body; moralists treat virtues and vices as separate from the mind of which they are modes; the universal idea of man, tree, body, and so on separates from these objects the determinations without which they cannot exist. The first type of abstraction is called modal abstraction; the second can be called abstraction of the subject. Explain the different kinds of synthesis. Three kinds of synthesis can be distinguished: real synthesis, ideal synthesis, and imaginative synthesis. The first is what unifies any real objects whose unity is real; accordingly, this is the kind that determines the real relations of things. The second is what unites things ideally when they are not really united; accordingly, it determines the logical relations of things. The third is what forms imaginary objects by uniting several things in thought. Give me examples of these three kinds of synthesis. All judgments in which a real subject affirms in itself a real mode of itself are examples of real synthesis. ‘The ivory ball that I hold in my hand is heavy’: given the weight combined with the ivory ball that I hold in my hand, this is a judgment that contains a real synthesis. If news of my friend’s death makes me sad, I will be right to say ‘I am saddened by news of my friend’s death.’ This judgment unites the real mode of sadness with the I as real subject, and it achieves this unity in reality because the sadness mentioned is a mode that really inheres in the I. ‘God is the cause of the existence of the universe’ expresses the synthesis of effect with cause, and this synthesis is real. ‘Tizio is equal in height to Sempronio’: this proposition expresses an ideal synthesis because the relation of equality in height between Tizio and Sempronio is not a real relation at all but a logical relation. ‘Two triangles erected on equal bases between the same parallel lines are equal to each other’ is also a proposition that expresses an ideal synthesis. The first can be called objective ideal synthesis and the second subjective ideal synthesis because the terms of the logical relation are real in the first proposition but ideal in the second. It is correct, therefore, to divide ideal synthesis into objective ideal synthesis and subjective ideal synthesis. The idea of a building to be built is the product of an imaginative

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synthesis. The idea of a winged horse is also the product of an imaginative synthesis. The first can be called practical imaginative synthesis since the object produced by thinking can be made real outside of thinking.8 The second can be called poetic imaginative synthesis since the object of the idea always remains imaginary and cannot acquire any reality outside of thought. Synthesis is of three kinds, then: real, ideal, and imaginative. Each divides in two: the real into (a) synthesis of the mode with the subject in which it inheres, and (b) synthesis of the effect with the cause. The ideal divides into objective ideal synthesis and subjective ideal synthesis, the imaginative into practical imaginative and poetic imaginative synthesis. Why are the operations of analysis and synthesis called voluntary operations? Because they depend on the will, which is moved by desire and directs them. From what has been said up to now, it seems that all the faculties of the soul reduce to the following: sensibility, consciousness, analysis, synthesis, desire, and will. The establishment of our cognitions also requires another faculty, one that preserves the cognitions we have acquired. Without this faculty, a person could live a very long life and be no different, as far as knowledge is concerned, than in the first instant of his intellectual life. Give me an idea of this faculty. Usually this faculty is called memory, but we call it imagination. As soon as an object is manifest to the mind – by means of our external senses or by means of consciousness – and we have given it our attention, the mind has the faculty of perceiving the object again, of reproducing the perception of it, when the object is absent. To this faculty we give the name imagination. Is imagination the same faculty commonly called memory? All memory is imagination, but not all imagination is memory. Explain this clearly, please. Memory contains two things: the reproduction of a past perception; and the recognition of having had such a perception. But some past perceptions can be reproduced without the recognition of having had them. How is this intellectual fact explained? Constant experience teaches us that, if one of the perceptions of objects to which one attends together is reproduced in any way,

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the other is reproduced by means of imagination. This amounts to saying that all of a past perception comes back by means of imagination when part of it comes back either by means of the senses or by means of imagination. This law is called the law of association of ideas. When imagination reproduces a perception by reproducing it according to this law, the perception reproduced by the imagination is located in two or more series of perceptions, in which case recognition takes place and imagination becomes memory. A Please use an example to explain this to me. Q Suppose I have seen a preacher speaking in a church. If I then see this same preacher at someone’s house, partial perception of him will awaken a total perception – perception of the church along with the preacher, in other words. Thus, the perception of the preacher that I am talking about occurs duplicated in my mind, one part belonging to the total perception of the church, the other part to the total perception of the house. My mind has the sensation of these two complex perceptions, into each of which, and as a part of it, comes perception of the same person, and this is precisely the sensation that constitutes recognition. When I see this person, if the sight of him awakens no idea in me, even though I may have seen him thousands of times, I would not notice that he had been in my presence at some other time. On the other hand, it sometimes happens that imagination awakens various ideas without the sensation of having had them. In this way, a thought that I recall having read in a book can be awakened in my mind without the sensation of having read it. This happens when the idea reproduced is awakened alone, not together with associated ideas that accompanied the idea of the thought. Something I have read in a book is associated with idea A, for example. When idea A is recalled, the idea of the thought in question is awakened, but it can be awakened in two ways. It can be awakened either together with the idea of the book or by itself. In the first case, the idea of the thought that I am talking about occurs duplicated: one version is simultaneous with present ideas; the other makes up part of the complex idea of the book, and recognition takes place thereby. The idea of the thought is not duplicated in the second case, and so it is not recognized. Q It seems to me that the fact we are discussing can also be expressed and explained by looking at it from a different point of view.

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A That is true. But the substance of this other explanation comes down to the one that we have already given. We have the sensation of the present I and of the ideas presently in it. We can also imagine the past I with all the ideas that would have occurred in it, and in that past state as we imagine it. Thus, we will have recognition of those ideas that take part both in the complex sensation of the present I and in the complex phantasm of the I in the past state as we imagine it. Q Is recollection distinct from memory, in the strict sense? A When the recognition found in phantasms of the imagination is direct, this function of the imagination is memory. When the recognition is indirect, this function of the imagination is recollection. Q Please give an example to explain it to me. A I have seen Tizio in church, sitting somewhere with other people. I see Tizio again, but I do not recognize him. He says to me, ‘Remember, you saw me in church.’ Then the idea of the church is awakened, united to those of the people who were with Tizio. And the idea is duplicated because it is united both with the sensation of the current I and with phantasms of the I affected by past modifications. I direct my attention to the ideas of the people who were with Tizio, and these awaken the idea of Tizio, thereby duplicated and recognized. Recognition of Tizio is therefore an effect produced not by simple reproduction of the idea of Tizio, but by reproduction of the ideas of the people who were in his company. This indirect recognition constitutes recollection or remembrance. Q So then, the faculties of the soul are sensibility, consciousness, analysis, synthesis, imagination, desire, and will. Together these faculties constitute what is called the nature of the soul. What constitutes habit, which philosophers regard as a second nature? A Nature gives us the faculties. Frequent exercise of these faculties gives us aptitudes for exercising them. Habits are these aptitudes. Q They say that frequent exercise perfects our intellectual faculties. What does this perfecting consist of? A It consists of the aptitudes that I have mentioned. Q Can habit give us faculties that we have not received from nature? A Habit cannot give any faculty, only aptitudes, and these assume the faculties. End of the PSYCHOLOGY

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Summary of the IDEOLOGY by Question and Answer Q What is an idea? A The idea is the result of thinking about objects present to the mind from sensibility and consciousness. Q Is there no difference between the first operation of the intellect, called simple apprehension or perception, and the idea in the proper sense? A The idea can be regarded as the terminus of the act called perception or simple apprehension, or else as an internal modification of the soul deriving from the act of perceiving. Q What is ideology? A Ideology is the science of the origin of our ideas, and thus of their nature. Q Ideology deals with what sorts of ideas? A With ideas essential to human understanding. Q Please explain this more clearly. A There are ideas essential to human understanding and some that are not, and thus they can be called accidental to understanding. The first are found universally in all people, which cannot be said of the second. No person can be without the idea of his own body and of something outside it, whatever it may be, nor of his own thinking I. But a person can do without the idea of a crocodile or an elephant, and, if he is born blind, even of the starry sky.9 The ideas essential to human understanding are those that thinking, which is the use of the faculties of analysis and synthesis, develops naturally out of the I that senses something outside the I. Q Since the idea of one’s own body is an idea essential to human understanding, tell me how people distinguish their own bodies from external bodies. A Our own body is the one in which we seem to sense and to be, in which movements can be produced directly just by our willing them. It is also the one that is present without interruption. Q What is the soul, which seems to rule its own body? A The soul is what has sensations and thoughts of some kind. Q From that it seems we must regard the soul as something distinct from sensations and from thoughts of any kind. This conclusion seems to follow from the idea of the soul that we have formed for ourselves. Is that right? A It is right and indisputable.

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Q But this thing that constitutes the soul and is usually also called the substance of the soul or essence of the soul – what might that be? A We have no determinate or particular notion of it, but we understand that it is a subsistent thing, and to a subsistent thing we give the name substance, as we give the names quality, accident, mode, modification, and so on to something that inheres in substance. Q We have a general notion of substance, then? A Certainly. If we had no notion of substance, we would have none of quality, which is the correlate of substance. The distinction between substantive and adjectival names, which is found in all languages, shows that all people have the idea of substance and of quality. Q But where do we get the idea of substance and its correlate of quality? A From experience, or rather from analysis of sensations or perceptions of the I or of something outside it. It is an objective notion with respect to both origin and meaning. Q The human soul is a substance, but since a body also appears to us as a substance, might the human soul be a body? A It is not possible that the human soul is a body. When one analyses the consciousness of the thinking I, it is plainly seen that the human soul, the I, shows its itself to be rigorously one in all functions of thinking – to be absolutely simple and indivisible, in other words. Q What did we call this absolute simplicity of the thinking I? A We called it the metaphysical unity of the I.10 Q Give me a clearer picture of this metaphysical unity of the thinking subject. A In reasoning the thinking subject deduces a judgment from other judgments. But this deductive act belongs necessarily to a simple and indivisible subject because there is no dividing the deduction. The deduction belongs to and inheres in the same subject to which each element of the conclusion and each element of the premises belong.11 Thus in reasoning there is no plurality of subjects, but rather absolute identity and unity of the same subject. Q Are there different kinds of unity? A Two kinds can be distinguished: metaphysical unity and synthetic unity. This second kind can be divided into the synthetic unity of thought and physical unity. Metaphysical unity is absolute. Synthetic unity is conditional (Ideology, sections 15−16, 20−24).12 Q We have already recognized (1) the substantiality of the soul; (2) its metaphysical unity, also called spirituality; and (3) its various modi-

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fications or modes of being. Now from this it seems not only that the soul is a substance, but also that it is an efficient cause of any modifications that it has – even though Hume denies the existence of the notion of efficient cause. What should one think of this theory of Hume’s? Hume’s theory of causality is false. Consciousness attests that the soul is the principle or efficient cause of its own willing. In all languages, there are expressions that point to causality, such as dunque, percio, in conseguenza, perchè, and so on in Italian.13 It seems that the notions of action and passion, which are linked to that of causality, are also notions essential to human understanding. So they are. The distinction between active and passive verbs, found in all languages, derives precisely from these notions. From what you have said about substance and cause, it seems that the relation between quality and substance and that between effect and cause are both objective relations and therefore real. What you say is true. There are two real relations between items that exist: one is of the modification or quality to the subject; the other is of the effect to the cause. A modification has two real relations with the substance: one is of the modification to the subject; the other is of the effect to the cause. The cause of the modification can be the subject itself of the modification or a different subject. These two truths – (1) there can be no quality without a substance in which the quality inheres; (2) there can be no effect without a cause – are they contingent truths or, rather, necessary? They are necessary truths and therefore identical. Please help me understand this clearly. Quality is an existence that inheres. A quality without substance, therefore, would be at the same time an inhering and a non-inhering existence. Moreover, quality is a mode of being, and without the being a mode of being would be both a mode of being and not a mode of being. Thus, it is an identical and necessary truth that there can be no quality without a substance. Demonstrate with the same clarity that there can be no effect without a cause that makes it exist. The effect is what comes to be. Everything that exists either exists independently of any assumption, or it may depend on some assumption. In the first case, it exists absolutely, does not come to be, and hence is not an effect, which is contrary to the hypothesis. In the second case, the existence that is assumed and on which the

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effect depends is an efficient cause. Thus, the proposition that there is no effect without a cause is a truth demonstrated by means of the principle of contradiction. Help me understand more clearly that what comes to be does not exist absolutely. What comes to be must be preceded by something, either being or empty duration, since what is not preceded by anything does not come to be but is itself the first being, before which there is nothing. What is preceded by something exists only on the assumption of the thing that precedes it. Therefore, it does not exist absolutely. But in the case where a being was preceded only by empty duration, would it not exist without an efficient cause? A being that comes to be cannot have a relation of dependence with empty duration because the empty duration that supposedly precedes it no longer exists when it comes to be. Its relation of dependence would then be a non-dependent dependence, which is a contradiction. The two real relations that we have discussed, are they the only ones that the mind conceives among things? Besides the real relations, the mind posits among its ideas – and also among various things – various logical relations that exist only in it and have no real archetype outside it. The terms of these logical relations are real, and their basis, which is the positive nature of the terms, is also real. But the relations are only in thought, and completely subjective. What kinds of logical relations are there? There are relations of identity and difference, from which those of equality, inequality, and so on derive. What do we call the operation of the mind that perceives these logical relations? It is called ideal synthesis, which is divided into objective ideal synthesis and subjective ideal synthesis. The distinction between the two kinds of relation, the real and the logical, is it important in philosophy? This distinction is of the highest importance. It teaches us how to solve a leading problem of philosophy, which is what is objective in cognitions, and what is subjective. It makes us distinguish two kinds of experience: primitive experience, which is composed only of objective elements; and comparative experience, which is composed of objective and subjective elements together.

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Q Might the perception of logical relations be regarded as a mistake and a mental illusion on our part? A By no means. The perception of logical relations is a truth that has its objective basis in the real terms of the relations themselves and in the nature of our mind. Since these relations are modes of thinking about objects, these modes therefore derive from the nature of our mind. A person born in America, for example, looks like another born in Italy. The two people are independent; there is no real relation between them. The mind conceives and thinks about the first along with the second, and the two people are together in the mind of the one who thinks about them. But this bringing together of the two people in the same mind, and their existence in a single act of the understanding, is and can only be ideal. It is nothing more than the mode in which the mind thinks about each of these two people, each of whom is isolated from and independent of the other. The mind makes them a unity and joins one to the other. This is clear to anyone who understands how to withdraw into the solitude of the understanding. From this one sees that logical relations, in the final analysis, are an effect existing in our mind, an effect that derives from real causes. Q You said that real relations among things come down to two: the relation of quality to subject; and that of effect to cause. But is there not also the relation of time, perhaps, which is different from that of causality? By way of example: one person is fifty years old, while another is ten, and there is no other relation of kinship between these people. Might one not claim that there is an anteriority of time between the first and the second, meaning that the first existed at a time preceding the time in which the second existed? A Even though many philosophers accept a relation of time distinct from the relation of causality, still, if one reasons precisely and without deluding oneself with fantasy, this theory is false. Q Please give me a clear explanation of these views about time, and show me which is true. A Some philosophers think that there is a duration distinct from things that endure, and that this duration is composed of an infinite number of tiny durations that succeed one another. Imagine that all things are annihilated, they say, and you cannot conceive of the annihilation of time, the duration in which things exist. This proves that duration exists independently of all things and that it is a necessary condition of their existence.

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What should one think of this opinion? It is absurd. Prove its absurdity for me, please. Here are some absurd notions that this theory contains. First, each of the tiny durations that make up infinite duration is contingent and conditional. Each comes to be and passes away again into nothing. But an infinite series of conditionals cannot constitute the Absolute. Infinite duration regarded as an absolute cannot be composed of these tiny durations, then, so it cannot exist. Second, if things are existent in this duration, duration is the subject in which all things inhere. Consequently, it is the only subject, and all beings are only modifications of it. But this unique substance is something that cannot be. Past duration is nothing, and future duration is nothing, but two zeros do not add up to any real and subsistent thing, such as substance. (See also Ideology, section 51.)14 But if duration distinct from things that exist is impossible, how do we form the idea of this duration for ourselves? Experience shows us the existence of generative acts, or rather their effects, and for this reason causality is real in nature. Cause is regarded as by nature anterior to effect. The mind has a concept of the measure of effects or products, and the idea of this measure constitutes for us the continuing phenomenon of time. So there is nothing objective about time? The objective aspect of time is causality, or, to express it in different terms, production or generation. Time is nothing more than the measure of generative acts. But since the measure is an idea of the mind and nothing outside the mind, it follows from the proposed view of time that time is nothing outside the mind. Measure is nothing outside the mind, but things measured are real even outside the mind; likewise, the measure of generative acts is only in the mind, but measurable generative acts are real and objective. Just as the idea of duration distinct from existing things – a duration in which all things seem to us to exist – cannot be separated from the mind, likewise inseparable from the mind itself is the idea of an immense space in which all things seem to exist. But we have regarded duration distinct from existing things as merely imaginary. Should we perhaps say the same of the immense space in which everything seems to us to exist?

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A The idea of an immense void in which all things seem to exist is a constant phenomenon for us and is the condition of other phenomena, as it is of motion. But we have no legitimate reason to believe in the existence of this void. When we establish the true nature of the components of bodies, the non-existence of the void will be seen clearly. Q You said before that an infinite series of conditionals with no absolute is impossible; please prove this proposition for me. A A finite series of conditionals, by themselves, is a series of effects without a cause and thus impossible. But with respect to causality, an infinite series of conditionals by themselves does not differ from a finite series. An infinite series of conditionals by themselves is impossible, then. Q Please explain this clearly. A Let a finite series of conditionals by themselves be represented by these five terms – A, B, C, D, E – such that E cannot exist unless D exists, D cannot exist unless C exists, C cannot exist unless B exists and B cannot exist unless A exists. Since the condition or cause of A is not there, and since A is by hypothesis an effect, if by positing the existence of the series you posit the existence of A, you posit an effect without a cause, which we have shown to be impossible. But the number of terms in the series of conditionals has no influence at all on the nature of the series. In a five-term series of conditionals by themselves, the cause of the first term is missing. In the same way, the cause of the first term is missing in a ten-term series. Obviously, the same must be said of a series of a thousand terms or of any other number. Therefore, what is proved for a series of five terms is also proved for all possible series, whatever the number of terms that make it up. Q It follows from what you have said that there must exist an absolute Being – consequently, that God exists. Please give me a clear account of the foundations of the proof of God’s existence. A These are the foundations: (1) there is no effect without a cause; (2) an infinite series of effects in which each term is an effect of the one before it and the cause of the one after it is intrinsically impossible; (3) if anything exists, the Absolute exists; (4) the I exists; (5) the I is not the Absolute; (6) a conditional and contingent existence has an intelligent cause for its cause. Q You have already proved the first proposition, that there is no effect without a cause. Can you prove it in a different way?

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A An effect is something that comes to be. The idea of something that comes to be is identical to the idea of something preceded by something else. The idea of something preceded is identical to the idea of something produced. Q But might a thing not be preceded by a duration devoid of things? A We have shown that such a duration cannot exist. Therefore our theory of time supplies a proof of the principle of causality. Q Please review the other five propositions that support the crucial proof of God’s existence. A The second proposition, as we have shown, is a conclusion evident from the principle of causality. The third is a conclusion evident from the first two. The fourth is a primitive truth of fact. The fifth proposition needs proof, which comes from the incompatibility of the nature of the I, as shown to consciousness, with the nature of the Absolute. The Absolute is immutable. If change occurred in it, there would be some effect in it of which it would be the cause. Before the change, it would then be in some state, and this state would be accidental to it and hence conditional, thus needing another antecedent state which would also be conditional, thereby admitting a series of conditionals without an Absolute, which we have shown to be impossible. Therefore, in absolute being one must accept an absolute state, which is the same as saying that the Absolute is immutable. The Absolute can lose nothing and gain nothing; it is all that it can be. The Absolute is infinite, therefore. The I is not immutable; the I is not infinite; therefore, the I is not the Absolute. The sixth proposition can be proved in the following way. When the I is posited, the Absolute is posited, but when the Absolute is posited, the I is not posited since the I in this case would be immutable, like the Absolute. Therefore, the I is not a necessary consequence of the Absolute. It is, not because the Absolute is, but because the Absolute makes it be. This causality, which is not a consequence of the nature of the Absolute, is will. Therefore, the Absolute is intelligent. Q But God is regarded also as creator. What is the basis of this notion? A The I is a substance. The I comes to be by action of the Absolute. The action of the Absolute, therefore, makes substances exist. Such an action is called creation. Therefore, God is the Creator. End of the IDEOLOGY and of the First Volume

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Summary of the MIXED LOGIC by Question and Answer Q What subject does mixed logic deal with? A The aim of mixed logic is to explain the theory of reality, of certainty, and of the limits of our knowledge, and thereby to determine the legitimate grounds of our cognitions and the causes of our errors.15 Q Of what does the reality of our knowledge consist? A Knowledge joined with the existence of the known object is real knowledge. Q Please prove to me that the human mind is capable of real cognitions and possesses them. A The reality of knowledge or the existence of various real cognitions is a primitive truth and thus not provable. Q What is the nature of this primitive truth? A It is a primitive truth of fact or of internal experience. Q Tell me what this primitive truth is. A Expressed in general terms, it is this: ‘I am existent in the state of thinking.’ This truth is posited by denying it, since, if you deny that you are existent in the state of thinking, you yourself posit that you deny it. But for you to posit that you deny your thinking I is the same as positing yourself as thinking. If you say that you are deceived, you still posit the same you that deceives you – that thinks, in other words. Q What do you mean by legitimate grounds of our judgments? A What determines the mind to form some judgment is called a ground of that judgment; this ground is legitimate when the judgment grounded by it is true. If the judgment so grounded is false, the ground is a cause of error. Q How many legitimate grounds do we have for our judgments? A There are three legitimate grounds of primitive truths of fact: consciousness, external senses, and the authority of other persons. But there is only one legitimate ground of primitive truths that are rational or metaphysical: this is direct evidence – direct perception of the relation of identity or of incompatibility among our ideas. Q Might memory not be a legitimate ground of our cognitions? A Memory is certainly a legitimate ground of our cognitions, since without memory knowledge would be impossible. But memory is not an originating ground productive of cognitions that we do not already have. It is a ground auxiliary to all other grounds, whatever they may be. Q Can memory’s legitimacy as a ground be proved?

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A Memory’s legitimacy as a ground can be proved only by assuming the unprovable legitimacy of consciousness as a ground, since this is what testifies to the existence of memory in us. Q So it seems that consciousness can be regarded as a legitimate ground of the legitimacy of all our other judgments? A Exactly so. Consciousness must be seen in two ways, as a direct legitimate ground of all those judgments regarding our I, and as an ultimate and indirect ground of all our judgments, since the existence of all the other grounds is based on consciousness. Q The testimony of other people as a ground is also based on the testimony of consciousness? A By analogy this ground is based on the testimony of our senses, and the testimony of our senses, no less than the existence of memory as an auxiliary ground, rests on the testimony of consciousness as its ultimate basis. Q What are the legitimate grounds, then, that give us primitive truths of fact? A They are consciousness, the testimony of the external senses, the authority of other people, and memory as an auxiliary ground. Q What are the legitimate grounds that give us rational or metaphysical primitive truths? A There is only one: it is direct evidence – the clear and direct perception of the relation of identity or of incompatibility among our ideas. Q Is there perhaps some general expression that covers all primitive metaphysical truths? A There is, and it is the famous principle of contradiction: ‘A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time.’ Q What are the legitimate grounds of inferred truths? A There is only one: it is deduction or reasoning. Q But are there not two kinds of inferred truths: rational or metaphysical inferred truths; and truths from existence? A Of course there are these two kinds of inferred truths, which is why we have divided reasoning into pure and mixed. Beginning with certain experiential existences, this last leads us to other existences, which, even if they do not fall under experience, are nonetheless capable of doing so, or else they are absolutely and exclusively within the domain of reason. Q You said that all legitimate grounds of our cognitions rest ultimately on the authority of consciousness. I long to learn if the existence of the material universe is also indirectly attested by consciousness.

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A My answer to the question you ask must be affirmative. Consciousness assures us, beyond any doubt, of the existence of the perception of bodies. It shows us that this perception is referred by us to bodies through a twofold relation: the general relation of some thought to an object; and the special relation of causality. We regard bodies not only as objects of our sensible perceptions but also as causes of these perceptions. This identity of the object of perception, in the very thing that is the body, constitutes the reality of empirical perception. Q What stands out from our conversation is that the human mind is capable of knowing various truths. It knows its own existence by the consciousness that it has of itself; the existence of the bodies that surround it by means of sensations; that of God by means of reasoning; and the existence of the many natural causes of visible effects by means of the same reasoning. And yet some philosophers, usually called sceptics, deny that the human mind can know anything. What should one think of this scepticism, and what are the grounds that the sceptics claim for doubting everything? A The existence and reality of some human cognitions is a primitive truth and not provable. From this follows the falsity of scepticism. Scepticism wants proof of the existence and reality of any human cognitions, but this proof is impossible because it would assume as proven what must be proved. Therefore, the falsity of scepticism cannot be proven rigorously, but must be recognized. Nonetheless, once the existence of some true cognitions is admitted, it can be proved that scepticism involves contradictions. Q What are the philosophers called who teach that we can understand some truths? A They are called dogmatists. Q Does sound philosophy not reject dogmatism? A One must not confuse the dogmatic method with dogmatism. The dogmatic method consists of judging when there are legitimate grounds for judgment. But dogmatism consists of proclaiming judgments without any legitimate ground. Q But have philosophers not taught many errors, believing them to be based on the grounds that they have stated? And are the sceptics not right to conclude from such errors and from disagreement between philosophical and popular opinions that the truth is entirely hidden to the human mind? A The sceptics reason badly. From some faulty judgments that people

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Q A

Q A

make, they reach a universal conclusion that all human judgments are false and that no person can know the truth. From the disagreement of popular and learned opinion on some topics, they infer universal disagreement in all human opinion. They therefore reach a conclusion more universal than their premises. But in the end, the existence of error in this world is beyond question. What means do we have to distinguish error from truth? Error exists in this world because the human mind is limited. This limitation brings with it the possibility of error, but not its necessity. Logic gives us rules for recognizing the truth, and by explaining the causes of our errors it shows us the way to avoid them. But consciousness, external senses, memory, authority, evidence, reasoning – in the end, do they not deceive us, and often necessarily so? These grounds never deceive us necessarily. We always have ways to avoid error. Thus, with regard to consciousness, one should note that the elements of a judgment based on consciousness must all be attentively observed, and that not everything which is in consciousness comes to our attention. With regard to the senses, it suffices to note that they cannot inform us about absolute properties of bodies, only about relative properties, and that the apparent mode of bodies must not be confused with the absolute mode. With regard to evidence, one should take care not to confuse the mechanical association of our ideas with the clear perception of their relation. We have made analogous observations in the appropriate places in dealing with the causes of our errors.16 End of the MIXED LOGIC Explanation and Examination of the Transcendental Philosophy

Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 at Königsberg in Prussia and died on 22 February 1804. He is the author of a new philosophy called transcendental philosophy and also the critical philosophy. Since this author boasts that he has discovered a new method for philosophy, neither dogmatic nor sceptical, called the critical method, you should not be strangers in the land of this philosophy. Here I can give you only a brief account of it by explaining its basic principles. My work titled Philosophical Essay on the Critique of Consciousness, especially books three, four, and five, includes a full treatment.17

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I call that philosophy transcendental which determines a priori the subjective content of our cognitions. Subjective means what comes from the mind, from the cognizing subject, and not at all from the object cognized. The latter, the component of cognition that comes from the object, is called objective.18 That there is something subjective in our cognitions was recognized before the birth of the transcendental philosophy. If you look at an oar immersed in water, it will seem to be broken, but the break in the oar is not objective: the oar is not broken. This breaking of the oar is our mode of seeing it, which is therefore subjective. If you happen to be in the middle of two parallel lines of trees or columns, these lines will seem to converge in the distance, and, at a great distance, to meet in a point. But this convergence and this coming together are not at all in the object. They are our ways of seeing, and thus they are subjective, not objective. A square tower seen in the distance will seem round: this roundness is subjective, our way of seeing the shape of this tower. No need for me to multiply examples that you can multiply for yourselves. I only remind you that in the second chapter of the Psychology I showed you that smells, colours, cold, and heat are our ways of being, and the various modes by which we perceive external objects are certainly not the modes in which these objects exist.19 Not only are we aware from our sense-perceptions that our mode of seeing objects does not correspond to objects themselves; this subjective element is also manifest in the products of thinking. Thus we have seen that relations of equality, similarity, and so on are simply mental viewpoints and certainly not physical and absolute properties of things. We have likewise noted that the mind, by turning the possible into the real, by making duration distinct from things in succession, has thereby produced some illusions that can be called transcendent. All these elements that arise from our mental activity can be regarded as subjective elements of our cognitions and of our errors.20 I have warned many times that logical relations must not be confused with real relations.21 But the transcendental philosophy differs from theories that preceded it by proclaiming itself a fully a priori science and seeking to determine a priori – independently of any experience whatever – the subjective elements of our cognitions. It treats many objective elements as subjective, and it treats them as inherent in our cognitive faculty, antecedently to any datum of experience whatever.22 Moreover, it treats these subjective elements as in themselves empty of reality and as lasting phenomena. It

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seeks to make all objects arise from the synthetic combination of these subjective elements together with objective elements. But Kant’s ‘objective’ is not the ‘objective’ of other philosophers; his is not real in itself, but rather an appearance, a phenomenon. And humans can cognize nothing outside of appearances.23 The transcendental philosophy therefore supposes (1) that some elements of our cognitions are in us a priori, independently of any experience whatsoever; (2) that the philosophy that tries to discover them must be wholly established a priori. These elements of our cognitions, which the mind possesses independently of experience, are called pure, meaning primitive and somehow purified of any impression at all foreign to us. Calling the complex of all these principles pure reason, the philosophy that discovers them a priori also calls itself a critique of pure reason.24 But what means shall we use to help us uncover the pure elements of our cognitions? By what sign shall we recognize them? The philosophy that I am investigating declares the following basic principle: what is necessary, invariable, and universal in our cognitions is subjective, pure, and a priori; by contrast, the accidental, contingent, and variable will belong to the object, will be an objective element.25 The first fact that strikes us from outside is extension; the second is motion. In these perceptions we see what is necessary and universal, and, in keeping with the principle declared above, we will succeed in uncovering the pure elements of these perceptions. If I abstract from all bodies, if I make every trace of them disappear, space still stays with me – infinite, indeterminate, absolute space. If we abstract from space, we annihilate all bodies and the possibility of any external perception. If extension were a thing that experience makes us recognize in bodies, we would be able to conclude only that all objects that we have perceived until now by means of the external senses are extended and in space. Nothing would assure us that we would not perceive some object outside of us that was not extended. But to make such a judgment is beyond our power. All objects that we can perceive by means of the external senses must be extended and in space. Therefore, space is a representation that rigorously carries with it the features of absolute necessity and universality; hence, it is a subjective element of our cognitions. Motion represents body to us successively in various parts of space; therefore, a succession of ideas must be produced in us in order for us to be able to perceive motion. But is this succession objective or subjective? Suppose all the things that follow one another in succession are annihilated; the idea of duration or time remains with us, as we have seen.

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We cannot perceive anything unless it exists in time. Therefore, time is a representation (perception, idea, notion) that rigorously carries with it the features of necessity and absolute universality; hence, it is a subjective element of our cognitions. But if the representation of space is in the mind antecedently to experience, a priori, how does it happen that space or extension seems to us to be in objects? Kantians usually explain this with comparisons. Suppose that a seal which you usually use to seal your letters has a certain figure or image carved in it. As soon as you press the seal in the sealing wax, the figure that was in the seal is also imprinted in the wax. Now suppose that the seal were equipped with the ability to sense the impression while making it: the seal would perceive in the wax the figure that we are discussing, and this figure would seem objective to it. Yet the shape in the wax comes from the seal, not from the wax – from the perceiving subject, that is, not from the object perceived: it will really be subjective, not objective. Likewise, if you look at objects through green eyeglasses, the colours of the objects will seem darker. In this way, the green that was the form of the glasses – of the means by which you see the objects – will appear to you in the objects themselves. In the same way, space, which is a form of our external sensibility, appears to be in external objects, as a consequence of the sensation that we experience, but in reality space is a subjective element of our sensible perceptions, a pure form of our external sensibility. Sensible perceptions, those that arise from our sensations, Kant calls empirical intuitions or seeings; the subjective elements of these intuitions he calls pure intuitions or seeings. Hence, according to Kant, every empirical intuition consists of two elements: matter and form. The matter is sensation; the form is space. Sensation is the empirical part of empirical intuition; space or extension is the pure or subjective part of it. With regard to internal sense – perceptions of consciousness – the matter is the internal modifications that seem to us to be affections; the form is time. We perceive external objects one after another only because with the internal sense we sense the perceptions referred to these objects one after another.26 Time is the immediate form of internal sense, mediated by the external senses. The succession that consciousness perceives in our internal affections comes from consciousness itself. It is not in these affections at all. The result is that extension in external objects is our mode of seeing them, not at all a real and objective quality. Objects are not extended,

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just as they are not fragrant, sweet, bitter, and so on. Likewise, in things taken by themselves there is no succession, which is a mode of sensing our internal affections. At a certain moment a cannon fires a shot, then fires another shot at another moment. We judge that one shot was fired before, the other afterward, but the judgment arises from a subjective element. In the things themselves there is neither before nor after. If you object to Kant that it follows from this that inner sense deceives us by making us see within us a succession of modifications that do not exist, he answers that both internal sense and the external senses give us only appearances; that just as space is apparent outside, so time is apparent inside and thereby also apparent outside; that consequently internal sense has no privilege over the external senses, and both proceed in the same way. Kant calls his theory of sensibility the transcendental aesthetic.27 Kant’s school recognizes, as do we, a passive state and an active state in the cognizing being, a passivity and an activity.28 The first consists of external and internal sensibility, each of which sensibilities has its form a priori, independently of experience. These forms are also called laws of sensibility, its primitive conditions; they are space for external sensibility, time for internal sensibility. The products of sensibility are called intuitions or seeings. But these intuitions are not yet the notions that are the elements of judgment. For them to become so, the action of understanding is needed to elevate intuitions into concepts. The products of passivity are intuitions; the products of activity are concepts.29 The activity of the understanding consists of analysis or synthesis. This is the first question that presents itself, then: ‘Is analysis or synthesis the first act of the cognizing being?’ To answer the question posed, let us examine the state in which sensibility leaves us as we form our concepts. Our sensations, which are the empirical part or the matter of our sensible intuitions, are distinct and separate from one another. Thus, even though sight and touch often excite different sensations at the same time – as when one sees colours with the eyes, feels hardness or softness, weight or heat with the hand, or sound with the ears – sensations are nonetheless distinct from one another and not blended in the sensing being. Sensibility thus gives us distinct sensations but does not bind them together. It also gives us two indeterminate subjective elements, an infinite space and an infinite time. But what will bring these sensations together and surround them in a determinate space and a determinate time? What must produce this union is the activity of the mind. Therefore, the first operation of the activity of understanding is to unify the

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various sensations that sensibility gives to it. Its first operation, then, is synthesis. Sensations of yellow given by vision; of sound given by hearing; of hardness, weight, and ductility given by touch − sensations isolated in themselves − are taken by the activity of the mind and joined together with the form of a determinate space and a determinate time into the single representation that we call ‘gold.’ Therefore, the first operation of the understanding is synthesis. Suppose you object that the qualities corresponding to the sensations united in the representation of gold are found united in the gold itself, which is the object of your representation, and that this is because you perform an analysis, revealing them one by one – no synthesis at all. The philosophy that we are explaining will reply that things taken absolutely by themselves and independently of our representations can never be cognized by us, and that they are outside the sphere of activity of our knowledge. Consequently, the objects of our cognitions are formed by us, and these objects are our representations themselves. The data, the elements with which we form these representations, are our sensations – external impressions and internal impressions; therefore, sensible objects are formed by the synthesis of these sensations. The sensible tree or the sensible animal is nothing more than a batch of sensations joined together by the activity of the understanding. According to the transcendental philosophy, then, synthesis is the first operation of mental activity. The concepts that are the elements of judgment are formed by it. The transcendental philosophy must determine a priori the subjective elements of our cognitions. The result of the transcendental aesthetic was that space and time are subjective elements of the products of sensibility. What will these subjective elements of the products of synthesis be? We said that judgment is a product of synthesis. Hence, by discovering a priori the subjective elements of our judgments, we will find the subjective elements of the synthetic products, and hence of our concepts, which are the first products of synthesis. There are four forms needed for all our judgments, and they are quantity, quality, relation, and modality. With regard to quantity, all our judgments must be singular, particular, or universal: ‘the moon is opaque’; ‘some bodies are transparent’; ‘all bodies are heavy.’30 But in saying that the moon is opaque, we must regard various qualities of the moon – the various sensations and representations by which we are affected in representing the moon to ourselves – as constituting just one whole. We regard this body called ‘moon’ as one. This concept of unity is therefore necessary for the mind to be able to form a singular

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judgment, since it must treat the subject of this judgment as one. This concept of unity is therefore a subjective element of these singular judgments. In the batch of sensations by which you are affected in regard to the moon, you will not be able to find any sensation of which you can say, ‘this sensation is exactly the concept of unity.’ This necessary element of all singular judgments is therefore a subjective element. Likewise in this judgment, ‘some bodies are transparent,’ you will find no sensation that corresponds to the word ‘some,’ the concept denoted by this word being plurality. Such a concept is in us a priori, then, a subjective element of particular judgments. In the judgment ‘all bodies are heavy,’ there is no sensation corresponding to the word ‘all.’ The concept denoted by this word, which is the concept of totality, is therefore in us a priori and is a subjective element of all universal judgments. Hence, the concepts of unity, plurality, and totality are pure concepts.31 They are in the understanding independently of any experience. They are subjective elements of all judgments of quantity, and these judgments are not possible without these concepts. With regard to quality, all our judgments are either affirmative, negative, or infinite: ‘all bodies are heavy’; ‘the rock is not sensitive’; ‘the soul is not-mortal.’32 Infinite judgments combine the two ways of judging, according to Kant, the affirmative and negative. This is because we treat the object as being in a certain mode whereby it lacks some quality, and we judge that it is in a mode different from that in which certain others are; in the universe of objects this sets a limit, a divide, on one side of which objects have such a quality, while on the other side they do not have this quality. To say ‘the soul is not-mortal’ is a judgment whose meaning equates to this other negation, ‘the soul is not mortal,’ because the complex notion that corresponds to the first is the same as the one that corresponds to the second; the one and the other both represent the soul as not mortal. Nonetheless, the first sets up a class of mortal things from which the soul is separate, but the second does not set up this class. In the first it is affirmed that the soul is in a state different from that in which many other things are, which is not said in the second. In judgments viewed according to quality, then, the mind either affirms or denies or limits. According to Kant, the mind can neither affirm nor negate nor limit unless it has antecedently in it the concepts of affirmation or reality, of negation or privation, and of limitation.33 When the mind says ‘all bodies are heavy,’ what corresponds to the word ‘are’ is the concept of reality. The mind regards bodies as having the reality of weight. Therefore, the

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concept of reality is a subjective element of this cognition that ‘bodies are heavy.’ Without it, the mind could not say ‘are,’ just as it could not say ‘is’ in this other judgment, that ‘gold is malleable.’ Likewise, without the concept of negation or privation, it could not say ‘is not’ in the judgment that ‘the rock is not sensitive.’ In that other judgment, that ‘the soul is not-mortal,’ it could not say ‘not-‘ without the concept of limitation. The proposition expresses various elements of the synthesis of judgment, but what corresponds to the words ‘is,’ ‘is not,’ and ‘is not-‘ is nothing objective and not a sensation. Only certain concepts are involved, those of reality, privation, and limitation. These concepts are therefore subjective elements of judgments of quality. They are pure a priori concepts. Without them judgments would not be possible. With regard to relation, our judgments are either categorical or conditional or disjunctive.34 The first are those in which the predicate is referred to the subject absolutely, without any condition, as in: ‘a body is heavy.’ The second are those in which, when the truth of one thing is posited, it is asserted that another must also be true, as in: ‘if a body is heavy, it falls when not supported.’ In these judgments, neither of the two predicates is affirmed. What is affirmed is only a necessary connection between the one and the other.35 Disjunctive judgments are those in which one among a certain number of features is attributed to the subject but without determining which one, as in ‘the soul is either mortal or immortal.’ When you say ‘a body is heavy,’ in this categorical judgment you treat weight as a mode or accident of body and body as a substance to which this accident belongs. Hence it is necessary, according to Kant, for the understanding to have in itself the concepts of substance and accident. Without this pure concept, categorical judgments would not be possible. In conditional judgment, the mind has the concept of a necessary connection between the condition and the conditioned.36 But the concept of a necessary connection between two things, according to Kant, cannot come from sensations. Therefore, it is in the understanding a priori. This concept, which is the relation of causality or of cause and effect, is therefore a pure concept, a subjective element in the synthesis of conditional judgments. In disjunctive judgments, the various predicates are treated as parts of a whole, with a reciprocity between them. In fact, when one is posited, the other is denied, and denying one posits the other. But this concept of reciprocity or commerce is a subjective concept to which no sensation corresponds.37 With regard to modality, judgments are either problematic or assertoric or necessary. In the following argument – ‘if a body is heavy, an

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unsupported body necessarily falls; but the body is heavy; therefore, the unsupported body necessarily falls’ – the first judgment is problematic because the heavy body is still treated as something merely possible. The second judgment – ‘the body is heavy’ – is simply assertoric or contingent because weight is treated simply as real in the body, clearly not as necessary. The third judgment – ‘the unsupported body necessarily falls’ – is necessary, or, as they usually say, apodictic, because falling is attributed necessarily to the unsupported body. The mode of regarding the suitability or unsuitability of the predicate to the subject of the judgment is nothing more than a mere mental outlook, a mere mode of our thought. Nothing objective corresponds to it. The terms possible, actual, necessary, and contingent merely express concepts to which nothing physical corresponds. Yet these concepts are necessary to form judgments of modality. Therefore, they are in the understanding a priori. They are subjective elements of our cognitions.38 The pure concepts of unity, plurality, and totality; reality, privation, and limitation; substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, and commerce; possibility-and-impossibility, existence-and-non-existence, necessity-andcontingency, Kant calls categories. And these twelve categories are the subjective elements of all our judgments.39 We said that the signs for discovering what is subjective in our cognitions are necessity and universality. Let us apply this principle to judgment. I do not know what I will think tomorrow nor at all the later moments of my life because I do not know what objects will be given to me by my senses. But if I am ignorant of the objects of my thinking, I am not ignorant of the how of my thinking. I cannot foresee the material, which is given to me from outside, but I do foresee the form, which resides in me a priori. Everything that I will think must necessarily be clothed in the four forms of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. For me it is absolutely necessary that I conceive what I think (1) as one, many, or all; (2) as real, negative, or limited; (3) as substance or accident, cause or effect, action or reaction; and finally (4) as possible or impossible, existent or non-existent, necessary or contingent. No object conceived by me can take any other form. These four forms, therefore, are found universally and necessarily and in all our judgments. The twelve categories that correspond to them, then, are subjective elements of all our judgments. Every judgment, in order to be determined, must belong necessarily to one of the three modes of the four forms. Thus, the judgment that ‘all bodies are heavy’ is universal in quantity, affirmative in quality, categorical in relation, and assertoric in modality.

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We have now discovered the subjective elements of the synthesis of understanding. To learn how synthesis produces concepts composed of subjective and objective elements, it is necessary to determine two things: first, the centre of unity of the synthesis; second, the order of the synthesis itself.40 Synthesis means unity, but unity assumes what is united and that to which it is united.41 Without that to which it is united, synthesis is not possible. But synthesis, according to Kant, consists in uniting representations. Representations are our only endowment; hence, a representation to which other representations are united is necessary. This first representation, to which the others are united, is the centre of synthesis. Without this centre of unity, synthesis would not be possible. This first representation must be in us a priori because what is given by sensibility is a manifold – a multitude of sensations and also indefinite intuitions of a space and a time.42 But this first representation must be unique, since, if it were a complex of representations, it would assume unity in the act still to be produced. Since sensible objects are nothing other than a complex of representations produced by the synthesis of the understanding (according to the philosophy that we are explaining), it follows that this first a priori representation, which is the basis of all synthesis, must also be regarded as the basis of forming objects and as the primitive source of all objectivity. This will become clearer as we go on, and I ask you to pay attention to what follows. In the Ideology I showed you that synthetic unity of thinking would not be possible without the metaphysical unity of the I, and without synthetic unity of thought no knowledge would be possible for mankind. The transcendental philosophy accepts cognition of the synthetic unity of perception and of thought. It calls this consciousness empirical consciousness, or, if you will, empirical unity of consciousness, which would be consciousness of the idea of a man, a tree, and so on.43 Nonetheless, it does not make the synthetic unity of thought arise from the metaphysical unity of the I. Although in my philosophy this unity is real and independent of our mode of perception, the transcendental philosophy, which forbids any kind of relation with the absolute realities called noumena, can certainly not accept this. But it still needs a unity to explain the synthetic unity of thought that it does accept. Truly, how can one explain this fact, that I am conscious of seeing a person’s foot and head together, without assuming a simple centre of unity in which the perceptions of the foot and the head are united? If one person in a crowd feels hot, another cold, one happy, and another

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sad, could there ever be a single feeling of heat and cold together with happiness and sadness? Empirical unity of consciousness assumes synthetic unity of thinking, but synthetic unity of thinking assumes a centre of unity in which the various elements of thinking are united. This simple centre of unity I have found in the real I. Where does Kant put it? In an a priori representation. But how does he manage to determine this representation, which is the basis of his synthesis? Since this representation is a priori, it must necessarily be found in every synthesis. As soon as we have a representation, we can say ‘I think of this representation.’ Thus, when I have the representation of a person’s foot, I can say ‘I have the representation of a person’s foot,’ or rather, ‘I think of the person’s foot.’ The representation ‘I think’ is therefore necessary so that it can be united with any other possible representation.44 Hence, this representation is found necessarily and universally in every synthesis of the understanding, making it the centre of unity of all other representations. Accordingly, this representation is a priori. It is not given to us but is the first act of the spontaneity of the understanding.45 It is independent of experience, since all representation, being my representation, necessarily assumes the representation ‘I think.’ Kant calls this representation the transcendental unity of consciousness, or rather the transcendental unity of apperception. The synthesis of understanding starts from the unity between each particular representation and the representation ‘I think.’ One must not confuse the transcendental unity of consciousness with the category of unity: the second serves to produce the synthetic unity of representations, but it cannot do this without the first. The cognizing being unites each representation – of each part of a person, for example, or of a tree, and so on – with the representation ‘I think,’ and applies the category of unity to the entirety of these representations, thus constituting the synthetic unity of the representation of a person, a tree, and so on.46 From this synthetic unity arises the empirical unity of consciousness, or the single act of consciousness that embraces all the representations united in the synthetic unity that we are describing. By means of the categories, therefore, the transcendental unity of consciousness establishes the synthetic unity of our representations, from which arises the empirical unity of consciousness of these same representations. It is by dint of this consciousness that we can say, ‘I am conscious of the representation of a person, a tree,’ and so on. In the Ideology I also discussed the physical unity of bodily objects, say-

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ing that if it arises from the synthetic unity of thinking, it still assumes in objects something that determines the synthetic unity of thinking and supplies us a legitimate ground for qualifying it with the metaphysical adjective ‘one.’47 The transcendental philosophy absolutely rejects this view. It forbids any communication whatever with objects taken by themselves. For this reason, objects are products of the synthesis of the understanding, according to the canons of this philosophy. Hence, it must believe synthetic unity of thought to be the same as physical unity. But synthetic unity of thought depends, as we have said, on the transcendental unity of consciousness, which therefore is the origin and basis of the formation of objects – an object being nothing more than the synthetic unity of certain representations, according to the transcendental philosophy. And for this reason the transcendental unity of consciousness is also called objective unity.48 According to the transcendental philosophy, just what is a tree or an animal? It is the entirety of certain representations embraced by consciousness. But this entirety is formed by the synthesis of the understanding with the help of the categories, and this synthesis assumes the representation ‘I think.’ This representation is therefore the basis and source of all objects, and no object would be possible without it. A difficulty will surely emerge as you think about this. The transcendental philosophy, you will be entitled to say, allows some objective elements in our cognitions. Sensations, which are the material of empirical intuitions, come to us from outside. How, then, can any connection with objects taken by themselves be banned? At present I am only explaining to you the basic principles of the transcendental philosophy. But this philosophy has two canons: that sensation comes to us from objects; and that we have no informative communication with objects taken by themselves, called noumena. I do not understand how these two canons agree with one another – nor how they can be made to agree. However that may be, the question that the transcendental philosophy proposes to answer by examining the understanding is this: ‘How does the understanding form objects of experience by the synthesis of sensations?’49 And here, despite any difficulty you might encounter, I ask you to note that the question is a general one and certainly involves the object of internal sense, the I perceived by empirical consciousness and called the empirical I to distinguish it from what is real in itself or the noumenal I. This will be made clearer to you as we go on. The results of our inquiries have been: (1) the first operation of the mind is synthesis; (2) the centre of unity of the elements of synthesis is

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the transcendental unity of consciousness; (3) this unity, aided by the categories, constitutes the synthetic unity of representations and thus all objects of experience. A question now arises: What order does this synthesis preserve in uniting the elements of our cognitions? Since we already know that to which synthesis unites the various representations provided by sensibility, it is natural to ask what are the first representations that synthesis unites to the representation ‘I think.’ What order does understanding preserve in combining various elements to form objects of experience? The philosophy that we are explaining states the following canon: ‘The categories must first be combined with the pure intuitions of space and time; time in particular, as form of internal sense, serves as a means and a bond between the categories and the material of sensible intuitions – sensations.’ A category applied to the pure form of sensibility constitutes a schema – or a crude silhouette. Thus, the first products of the synthesis of the understanding are the schemata.50 Let me clarify what I am saying to you. Pure space is in us independently of experience, but this space is indeterminate and represents to us no determinate figure. Yet the objects of external experience represent determinate spaces to us – not indeterminate extension, in other words, but an ascent through figures. They present to us, for example, a cube, a sphere, a cylinder, or some such figure. Any tree or animal whatever has a determinate figure.51 To form objects of external experience, then, one must first form the determinate space in which we bound all the qualities attributed to them.52 Sensibility gives us only an indeterminate space as an a priori form of our empirical intuitions. Determinate space is therefore a product of the synthesis of the understanding, which acts on the indeterminate space given to it a priori as a subjective element by sensibility. But the categories enter into the products of the synthesis of the understanding as subjective elements. The combination of the categories with space therefore constitutes the schemata – or the figures of bodies. But this needs more explanation. Suppose that a body accessible to our senses had the figure of a cube. The first thing that synthesis would have to do to form this body is to construct the figure of a cube in indeterminate space. The mind must construct this cube a priori in the same way that geometers construct it. The notion of number is more general than that of space or extension, and from this it emerges that it is representative as much of continuous as of discrete magnitude.53 Synthesis begins with the simple, and its first

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products are simpler than those that come after. But the more general the ideas are, the simpler they are, as we said in the third chapter of the Logic.54 Synthesis of the understanding must therefore form the concept of number in general before that of a determinate space in general. Let us see how this forming proceeds. Imagine a moment, an instant in the pure seeing of time. To this instant, united with the representation ‘I think’ by the understanding, apply the category of unity, and you will say ‘one.’ Imagine a second instant, joined like the first with the representation ‘I think,’ and applying the same category of unity will again cause you to say ‘one.’ Apply the category of plurality to the two moments formed in this way, and you will say ‘two,’ and then ‘three,’ ‘four,’ and so on in succession.55 In this way arise sensible concepts of the various numbers. But note that the understanding, according to Kant, must form the primitive concept of any number – which is to say the universal concept – before forming concepts of particular numbers. Such a concept is formed by applying the categories of unity and plurality to the series of moments, and thus arises the general notion of number, which is adding one to one in succession. Before thinking of two people, according to Kant, one must first think of two, and before thinking of two, one must think of number in general – one must form the universal concept of number, in other words. This concept is called the schema of the categories of quantity, and it arises from the application of the categories of quantity to the pure intuition of time. Time is therefore the means by which the categories are joined to the other elements of our cognitions, and in synthesis the first products of the understanding are the schemata – that is, the combination of subjective elements of the understanding, either thinking combined with subjective elements of sensibility, or these elements combined directly with the element of time in the first instance. Once the understanding thinks of two, it makes the universal concept of number more determinate and stable. In the philosophy that we are explaining, this is called forming an image, so that two, three, and so on are images of number, as when you put five points • • • • • on a piece of paper and get the image of the number five.56 The image is to the schema what species is to genus. But just as the five points printed on paper are a species in relation to five, they are an individual in relation to number in general, and in Kant’s philosophy they are called an object when regarded as an individual. In this way the synthesis of the understanding forms schemata first, images next, and then objects. Thus, when it needs to form the figure of a tree, synthesis first forms the genus

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of this figure, next the species, and then it forms the object or individual by uniting with this species something empirical – colours, for example – that we discern in the tree. But let us turn back and take another look at how the understanding constructs the figure of sensible objects, referring to the example of the cube that I mentioned. Geometers take lines to be formed from the flow of a point, while surfaces come from the lateral movement of lines, and solids come from moving surfaces up or down. On that assumption, a point is conceived to flow and to produce a bounded line; if the line is then conceived to flow laterally and to produce at its two extremes two other lines equal to itself and perpendicular to it, we will have the schema of a square. Assuming that this square rises along a line perpendicular to it and equal to the generating line, you will have the schema of the cube. But let us see what elements enter into the construction of the cube constructed a priori by the understanding. This construction posits a manifold or rather a number, and the number arises from applying the categories of quantity to time, as we said above. But the construction occurs in pure space, the space assumed in all geometrical constructions. Pure space is an element of this construction, then, and the categories are therefore also applied to pure space, but they are applied to it because they are applied to time. Hence they are combined directly with time and indirectly with space.57 Note here also that the mind, after constructing the cube, treats its various elements as parts and the entire cube as a whole. The category of totality therefore also enters into this synthesis of the understanding. Now here are the elements of this synthetic product: (1) the pure form of time and that of space; (2) the categories of unity, plurality, and totality. The centre of unity of the synthesis is the representation ‘I think,’ or the transcendental unity of consciousness. The order of synthesis is the application of the categories directly to time and indirectly to space. Up to this point synthesis combines only subjective elements; its products are not yet objects of experience. It is necessary to add an objective element to these a priori combinations, and this element is sensation. Unite sensations with the cube that the mind has formed a priori, and you will have a die, a cube of ice, or a cube of wood – which is to say an object of experience. This, then, is how the synthesis of the understanding forms all the objects of sensible nature, all the empirical and individual concepts – concepts of a dog, for example, a horse, a cherry, the sun, the moon, and so on. But this needs still more clarification.

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Previously I noted that the synthesis of judgment, in order to be complete and determinate, requires the combining of categories that belong to all four modes to which judgment can be reduced – the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality. But according to our description, the categories must be combined directly with time. Thus, for an object of experience to be formed, it is necessary for an individual empirical concept to do its job before the needed application of the categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality to the pure intuition of time. Let us return to the earlier example of what goes into the empirical concept of a cube of marble, ice, wood, and so on. We have seen that it is necessary, in the first stage of representing the figure of the cube, to apply the categories of quantity to time in order to form the figure. After the cube has been formed, we unite a batch of sensations – of colour, solidity, hardness, weight, smoothness, cold or heat, and so on – to this representation. But every sensation has a degree.58 Look around a landscape covered with green plants, and in each plant you will find a different green – a green deeper in one, less deep in another. When you pick things up in your hand, the sensation of weight will be stronger in one than in another. The heat can also be more intense or less intense. Every sensation has a degree, then, and has it necessarily. If every sensation has a degree necessarily, then the degree is also a subjective element of sensation. Nonetheless, it is not a simple subjective element, so what are its components? Kant finds them in the category of reality and in the pure form of time. The category of reality, applied to time, constitutes the schema of this category – which is to say the degree of the sensation. Assume time to be empty, and you will have the schema of privation. Assume that the next instant is filled with a reality – of a certain heat, for example. Assume that this heat remains and that the next instant is also filled with the same heat, and you will conceive the degree of heat as starting from zero and going to two. The degree, then, is the schema of the category of reality; in this way, objects are limited in the empirical part of sensations. We regard cold and solidity in the cube of ice as qualities or modes of the ice; therefore, the category of substance also enters our synthesis as a subjective element. But we regard the cold and solidity of the ice as modes only because we think that these things cease to be while the substance of the ice remains. Indeed, if you bring ice near fire, it loses cold and solidity and takes the form of fluid. Hence, we regard substance as a subject that lasts through time while modes cease.59 Therefore, the category of substance is also combined here with the pure intuition of time.

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In the experience described above, you likewise regard fire as the cause of fluidity in the ice, so the category of causality comes into this experience as a subjective element. But this category also applies to time because the fire is assumed to exist before the fluidity of the ice, and in general – according to Kant – the cause is conceived as antecedent in time to the effect. Finally, the cube of ice of which we are speaking is regarded as existing at a given time; this comes about through the synthesis of the category of existence, which is one of the categories of modality with respect to time.60 Thus, to form an object of experience and thereby an individual empirical concept, it is necessary first for the understanding to form schemata of the various categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, and subsequently to unite the matter or objective element of sensation with these schemata. If sensible nature is a product of the synthesis of the understanding, then the laws of this synthesis are the laws of nature. Thus, according to the philosophy that we are explaining, nature’s supreme legislation resides in our understanding. If an architect constructs a building and forms its design, the laws of this building – namely, its form as a whole, in its parts, in the relations among these parts as in the blueprint – which were the laws of the architect’s practical imaginative synthesis, then become the objective laws of the building just by the fact that the design is executed.61 The architect that creates sensible nature is our understanding. It constructs the schemata of the categories a priori, independently of experience. The laws of the schematism must therefore become the laws of sensible nature, and these laws are in the understanding itself a priori. Thus, for example, the law that substance persists through all of nature’s changes is the law of the schematism of the category of substance, and this law of nature is a priori in the understanding, which with the synthesis of sensations makes the law objective. The same with another law, that every natural event assumes a cause from which it derives and which precedes it. This is the law of the schematism of the category of causality that the understanding executes with the synthesis of sensations, thus constructing sensible nature. Human knowing, says Kant, does not extend beyond experience.62 But experience has two sources in relation to our faculties and is composed of two types of elements. It arises from sensibility and from understanding, from passivity and from activity. It is composed of two types of elements, subjective elements and objective elements. The subjective elements do

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not have objective value except as forms of the objective and thus in combination with them. In themselves they have no reality. Hence, Kantian thought is defined as a transcendental idealism and an empirical realism since it admits no reality a priori, only in experience. So space, time, cause, substance, and so on have no reality when these things are considered a priori and in themselves. But they get a reality in experience or in phenomena because they constitute the forms of experience. Subjective elements found in our empirical concepts are of two types: some are in objects inasmuch as objects are sensed; others are in them inasmuch as they are thought. Thus, if you say ‘the sun is extended,’ the word ‘extended’ expresses a subjective element of the sun inasmuch as the sun is sensed; if you say ‘the sun is one,’ the word ‘one’ expresses a subjective element of the sun inasmuch as the sun is thought. The first elements are the pure intuitions of space and time; the second are the categories. The activity of the understanding consists of synthesis and analysis. Analysis assumes the object that is to be taken apart, and this object must be formed by synthesis. Synthesis therefore comes before analysis. Furthermore, when analysis takes the object apart, no elements can be found in it except those that synthesis has put there in forming it. Therefore, when philosophers of Locke’s school take the idea of a body apart and find there the idea of space or of extension, plurality, number, substantiality, and so on, if these philosophers decide on that account that these notions come to us a posteriori and from experience, they draw a false conclusion. All these elements are found in the complex idea of a body, but one must first examine how the object taken apart is formed or – which strictly amounts to the same thing – the representation of the body that is analysed. Thus, synthesis forms objects, and analysis takes them apart. And this analysis is necessary to form human knowledge and comes about as a consequence of synthesis. With the alphabet of sensation synthesis composes the great book of nature; analysis reads and studies it; and there you have all of human knowledge.63 All objects of nature subject to experience are formed by the synthesis of the understanding. This synthesis produces and can produce only our representations – meaning phenomena, appearances. Beyond these appearances our knowledge cannot reach. Thus, if there is some reality beyond the phenomena that affect us and independent of them, it is inaccessible to human knowledge. The canons of transcendentalism are general. Having said that all objects of experience are formed by the synthesis of the understanding,

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one must not exclude the object of internal experience – the I of consciousness. What might the I of consciousness be? It is a substance that endures, and many internal sensations and affections come into it one after another. But the notion of enduring substance is the schema of the category of substance, combining two subjective elements – a category and the pure intuition of time. Furthermore, sensations have a degree, and this degree is also a synthetic product of subjective elements – time and the category of quality. Like all natural objects, then, the I is a phenomenon, an appearance, a representation and nothing more. We have seen how reason succeeds in discovering the existence of the Absolute, but we have also shown that this notion of the Absolute is a product of the synthesis of reasoning, by no means a product of the analysis of sensations.64 In this the transcendental philosophy agrees with us. But there is disagreement on a point of the greatest importance, which is that the transcendental philosophy removes from the notion of the Absolute the reality that we grant to it. If the subjective elements of our cognitions acquire objective value only in the synthesis by which objects of experience are formed, how, according to the philosophy that we are explaining, can objective value ever be given to the Absolute, which does not enter into the synthesis of any sensible object? Elements that enter into the formation of an object through synthesis can be taken out through analysis. Try to analyse any sensible object at all, and you will never get the Absolute as a result. According to the transcendental philosophy, then, the Absolute remains a simple idea of reason, deprived of any reality. Kant nonetheless admits God’s existence, but on other grounds that I lack the space to describe. I have explained to you the theory of the transcendental philosophy on the origin of ideas; it is directly opposed to the theory that I have adopted and have previously explained to you. In the latter theory no notion is posited a priori in the understanding, independently of experience. The ideas of space, time, and the categories are derived a posteriori from thinking about sensations. They all arise from the sensation of the I that senses something outside the I. Thinking derives them all from this primitive fact. We admit that the notion of the Absolute is a product of the synthesis of reasoning, but we grant reality to this notion just as we grant it to the perception of the I. This reality rests on the following principles: (1) the data of experience give us some real cognitions, meaning cognitions that reveal to us the existence of some thing real in itself – a noumenon, speaking Kant’s language – as, for example, the sensation of one’s own being, of the I;

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(2) the reasoning that leads us to the Absolute is composed of analytic judgments. Hence, since the datum of experience that a variable being exists is a real cognition, the reasoning that reveals to us the identity of this judgment with another one, that the Absolute exists, also leads us to a real cognition. The question is, which doctrine should be accepted, the one presented to us by the transcendental philosophy, or the one presented by the philosophy of experience. What we call the philosophy of experience is the doctrine that (1) claims that the data of experience reveal to us some existences that are real in themselves and locate these data among our primitive cognitions; and (2) regards the connection between existences – between cause and effect, that is – and between modifications and the subject as real and not subjective, and therefore admits in the mind that faculty of synthesis that we called real synthesis in the Psychology.65 If our examination means that one must accept either the transcendental philosophy or the philosophy of experience, I reduce the problem to this simple question: ‘Is the connection among perceptions that constitute an empirical concept subjective or objective?’ If it is subjective, one must decide for the transcendental philosophy; if it is objective, for the philosophy of experience. To settle the question, I make use of the same feature used by the transcendental philosophy to distinguish subjective from objective. This is the feature previously mentioned: what comes from the subject is necessary. If the connection among perceptions that constitute an empirical concept is subjective, it must be necessary. As a matter of fact, Kant says that experience is possible only through the representation of the necessary conjunction of perceptions. He calls this principle the leading principle of the analogies of experience.66 Thus, we have an easy way to discover whether the connection among perceptions that constitute an empirical object is subjective. But the analysis of each empirical concept makes us see that there is no necessary connection among the various perceptions that constitute an empirical object. The connection is not subjective, then, but objective, and for want of a foundation the transcendental philosophy is ruined beyond repair. It is evident, and I have made this clear in the second chapter of the Logic, that all empirical judgments are contingent, which amounts to saying that the conjunction between perceptions of the subject and of the predicate is not necessary.67 But if the conjunction among perceptions that constitute an empirical concept were necessary, then, if this concept were resolved into an empirical judgment, the judgment would be neces-

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sary. Of what might the empirical concept of a peach be composed? Of the concept of a certain figure, of a given colour, a given weight, a given hardness, and so on. The union of all these perceptions constitutes the empirical concept of the peach. But among all these perceptions there is no necessary conjunction at all. What relation is there between the shape of a peach and its colour, between this shape coloured with a given colour and its taste? What is the connection between these perceptions and that of a given weight or a given hardness? In this complex of perceptions, analysis does not find the element of necessary connection. If analysis does not find it there, synthesis has not put it there, and if synthesis has not put it there, the conjunction found is not at all subjective, but objective. Thus, it is not the mind that forms it; it is a datum of experience. However little one follows the transcendental philosophy as it forms schemata of objects, plainly it will be recognized that it can never establish that necessary conjunction among the various representations that constitute a schema which it would need to reason out the consequences of its basic principle. If the schemata are constructed a priori by the understanding, the synthesis that produces them must be necessary because, according to transcendentalism, what comes from the subject is necessary. But this synthesis is entirely arbitrary, as Kant himself agrees. He actually says that every conjunction consists either of composition or of connection; that composition is the synthesis of various things that do not belong to one another necessarily, as two triangles that come from a square divided in half by a diagonal do not belong together necessarily; and that this type of conjunction is the synthesis of the homogenous in all things that can be treated mathematically.68 But if the synthesis of the schemata from which synthesis begins, which gives us the objects of experience, is entirely arbitrary, where is that necessary conjunction among perceptions that Kant requires for the possibility of experience? How could this philosopher not have been aware of this palpable contradiction found in his philosophy? Had he thought carefully about the origin of his transcendentalism, the philosopher of Königsberg would have been aware of this contradiction. As he admits, it emerged from Hume’s thoughts about causality, as we have noted elsewhere. The English philosopher said: I find no necessary connection among the occurrences of nature; therefore, I have no notion of this connection.69 Kant accepted Hume’s principle but drew different conclusions. Causality, he said, is not in the things that we observe; therefore it is in the observer. It is not objective, but subjective. But he did not look thoughtfully at the whole of his system.

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Consequently, he allowed the categories of the understanding to acquire an objective value in experience; he allowed the subjective laws of our understanding to become the laws of nature itself; he acknowledged that if it is through synthesis that the categories enter as elements into the formation of experience, they can be taken out through analysis. But from all that he should have recognized the contradiction in his system. Either causality can be had from the objects of sensible nature through analysis, and Hume is wrong to deny it; or Hume is right, as Kant says, and causality cannot be derived analytically from objects. But if analysis cannot derive it, synthesis has not put it there, and transcendentalism collapses. Kant says that the conjunction posited between the motion of the striking body and that of the body struck does not come from experience at all but is subjective. But if it is subjective, it must be necessary. Yet the mind does not recognize this necessity there. This conjunction is not subjective, then, but objective. I find this argument unanswerable. If the conjunction among the perceptions that make up an empirical concept is not at all subjective, it must be a datum of experience. Analysis consequent on this concept is the first operation of the mind. The great conflict between the transcendental philosophy and the philosophy of experience can thus be reduced to its simplest form in the following question: ‘is the first operation of the activity of the understanding synthesis or analysis?’ If it is synthesis, the conjunction among the various perceptions that constitute an empirical object is necessary. But it is not necessary. Therefore, the first operation of the activity of the understanding is analysis. If the first operation of the understanding is analysis, one must admit a real synthesis; for that reason, one must admit that the connection among the existences that constitute a complete object of experience is a datum of experience. These observations justify our concluding that one must reject the transcendental philosophy and accept the philosophy of experience.

NOTES 1 Galluppi (1846a), the version used here, is the fifth edition of the Elements, whose first edition was finished in 1827: see the Introduction, section 3; the text is erratic in typography and orthography, and our translation aims at consistency rather than mirroring its variations. 2 Galluppi (1846a), I, 24: ‘Prior to experience, if snow became present to your eyes for the first time, you could not have known whether it was hot or

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Part II: Translations cold. What happens with the following judgment is different: “of two quantities equal to a third, one is not greater than the other.” I deny that the predicate belongs to the subject because I notice an absolute incompatibility between them. Judgments of the first kind are called empirical, experimental, physical, a posteriori, and contingent. The second are named pure, rational, metaphysical, a priori, and necessary. The feature that distinguishes one from the other is this: an affirmative judgment is contingent when denying the predicate does not destroy the idea of the subject; a negative judgment is contingent when affirming the predicate does not destroy the idea of the subject; if it is destroyed, the judgment is necessary.’ 3 Influenced by Locke and Condillac, Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754−1836) attracted followers who came to be called Idéologues from the name that he gave to his radically empiricist psychology. Active in French revolutionary politics and educational reform, he published his Eléments d’idéologie between 1801 and 1815. For the Idéologues in Italy, see the Introduction, sections 2 and 3. 4 Galluppi (1846a), I, 68−70, 132: ‘the principle of identity is “what is is” or “what is not is what is not’’; The mind cannot know all the relations of its ideas directly; it makes use of reasoning to compare two ideas with a third and thus to extend the sphere of its cognitions. In this task, the mind does not move beyond identity. Idea A as compared with idea B, and the idea of the relation of A to B, are identical. The problem that we posed is already solved. If someone asks how reasoning can be instructive without moving beyond identity, this is our answer: because it discovers those relations of our ideas that we cannot know directly, and knowing a relation that was not known is surely progress on the road of knowledge.’ 5 Galluppi (1846a): 105−7: ‘The idea of man is more universal than that of Peter; the idea of animal is more universal than that of man; that of a thing that has an organic body is more universal than the idea of animal; and the idea of a mortal thing is more universal than the idea of a thing that has an organic body … [But] the order of deduction of our ideas is not the same as that of the deduction of our cognitions … Reasoning consists in deducing one judgment from other judgments … [But] in pure reasoning one cannot conclude from the particular to the universal, only from the latter to the former. On the other hand … universal ideas are parts of particular ideas. And the mind, starting with the latter, moves up from abstraction through abstraction to the former, and thus it arrives at the most universal and the simplest ideas. From all that, you may conclude that the order of deduction of our ideas is different from the order of deduction of our cognitions, and that the logical doctrine of Destutt-Tracy, which confuses these two orders

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6 7 8 9

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of deduction, is false … [If so,] you should be on your guard against the two following false arguments: you should not say with other philosophers that since all ideas come from experience, all cognitions derive from experience; you should not say with certain others that because we have some cognitions a priori, we also have some ideas a priori.’ Galluppi (1846a), I, 156−69. For Galluppi on analysis and synthesis, see the Introduction, sections 3 and 4. See n61 below. Alluding perhaps to Kant, KpV, A289: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’ Galluppi (1846a), I, 312−13, 324−5: ‘Consciousness of the synthetic unity of thinking includes … consciousness of the unity of the thinking subject … which I call the metaphysical unity of the I…. Without the metaphysical unity of the I, the synthetic unity of thinking would not be possible, and without the synthetic unity of thinking, no knowledge would be possible for mankind. Get this basic truth of ideology well planted in your intellect and memory. To the one, simple thinking subject I give the name mind [spirito]. Thus we have explained the origin of the notion of mind … The metaphysical unity of the I … is an absolute unity … and synthetic unity assumes the indefinable metaphysical unity of the I.’ The thinking or psychological subject, not the logical subject of a proposition. Galluppi (1846a), I, 308−13, 319−29. Therefore, for that reason, consequently, because. Galluppi (1846a), I, 362−3. Throughout this section, ‘ground’ corresponds to Galluppi’s motivo and motivare; see below, n46, in Galluppi’s discussion of Kant. Galluppi (1846a), II, 102−4. The first parts of the Essay appeared in 1819, for which see Galluppi (1819−32), but we have used Galluppi (1846b): for Kant, see especially III, 202−325; V, 45−376; see also Galluppi (1843): 208−70. Kant’s texts are cited here, following the translation by Guyer and Wood in Kant (1997), only to illuminate Galluppi’s terminology, not to indicate passages that may have been his sources: KrV, A571−2: ‘Every thing … stands under the principle of thoroughgoing determination [Bestimmung]; according to which, among all possible predicates of things, insofar as they are compared with their opposites, one must apply to it’; A50: ‘Our cogni-

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19 20

21 22

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tion arises from two fundamental sources in the mind [Gemüts] …’; A484: ‘Your object is merely in your brain … hence all you have to worry about is … avoiding the amphiboly that would make your idea into a putative representation of something given empirically, and thus of an object to be cognized [erkennenden Objeckts] in accordance with the laws of experience [Erfahrungsgesetzen]’; A46: ‘raindrops … as appearances [Erscheinungen], are already empirical objects [empirische Objekte]’; A239−40: ‘One need only take as an example the concepts of mathematics … Although all these principles, and the representation of the object [Vorstellung des Gegenstandes] with which this science occupies itself, are generated in the mind completely a priori, they would still not signify anything at all if we could not always exhibit their significance in appearances (empirical objects) [Erscheinungen (empirischen Gegenständen)].’ Here, both conoscenza and conoscenze are taken to stand for Erkenntnis (cognition), as distinct from Wissen (knowledge), Wissenschaft (science), or Denken (thinking). Although spirito in philosophical Italian often corresponds to the German Geist, Galluppi is thinking of Gemüt, meaning ‘mind,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘mental state,’ which Kant preferred in the first Critique. Galluppi’s oggetto had to cover both Objekt and Gegenstand. In general, the latter object of experience becomes the former object of knowledge through the transcendental unity of apperception – a distinction both elusive and important. Galluppi (1846a), I, 280−1. Galluppi (1846a), I, 423−8; Kant, KrV, B67-8: ‘… the form of intuition … since it does not represent anything except insofar as something is posited in the mind [Gemüte], can be nothing other than the way in which the mind [Gemüt] is affected by its own activity [eigene Tätigkeit].’ Galluppi (1846a), I, 29−31, 424−5. Kant, KrV, A832: ‘Since systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary cognition [Erkenntnis] into science [Wissenschaft] … architectonic is the doctrine of that which is scientific [Scientifischen] in our cognition [Erkenntnis] in general;’ B2: ‘We will understand by a priori cognitions … those that occur absolutely independently of all experience [schlechterdings von aller Erfahrung unabhängig];’ A267: ‘But if it is only sensible intuitions in which we determine all objects merely as appearances, then the form of intuition … precedes all matter (the sensations), thus space and time precede all appearances [Erscheinungen] and all data of experience [datis der Erfahrung; cf. Guyer and Wood, ‘data of appearances’], and instead first make the latter possible.’ If Galluppi is implying that ‘appearance’ and ‘phenomenon’ are synonymous, he ignored Kant’s distinction; KrV, A19: ‘The undetermined object

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24 25

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[Gegenstand] of an empirical intuition is called appearance [Erscheinung]’; cf. A248: ‘Appearances [Erscheinungen], to the extent that as objects [Gegenstände] they are thought in accordance with the unity of the categories, are called phaenomena [Phaenomena].’ Kant, KrV, A11/B24: ‘Every cognition is called pure [rein] … that is not mixed with anything foreign [Fremdartigen] to it.’ The distinction between subjective and objective on which Galluppi bases his refutation of Kant is too simple to be faithful to the first Critique; KrV, B4 seems to support Galluppi: ‘Necessity and strict universality are therefore secure indications of an a priori cognition, and also belong together inseparably …’; but compare A156: ‘The possibility of experience [Die Möglichkeit der Erfahrung] … gives all of our cognitions a priori objective (objektive) reality,’ where much hangs on the difference between ‘experience’ and ‘possibility of experience.’ Kant, KrV, B147: ‘Things in space and time … are only given insofar as they are perceptions (representation accompanied with sensation) [Wahrnehmungen (mit Empfindung begleitete Vorstellungen)], hence through empirical representation. The pure concepts of the understanding … provide cognition only insofar as … a priori intuitions [Anschauungen a priori] … can be applied to empirical intuitions [empirische Anschauungen]. Consequently, the categories do not afford us cognition of things by means of intuition [Anschauung] except through their possible application to empirical intuition [empirische Anschauung], i.e., they serve only for the possibility of empirical cognition. This, however, is called experience [Erfahrung]’; A20−2: ‘I call that in the appearance [Erscheinung] which corresponds to sensation [Empfindung] its matter [Materie], but that which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited [angeschauet] as ordered in certain relations I call the form [Form] of appearance … There are two pure forms [Formen] of sensible intuition as principles of a priori cognition [Erkenntnis], namely space and time [Raum und Zeit].’ A494: ‘The sensible faculty of intuition is really only a receptivity for being affected [affiziert] in a certain way with representations …’ Kant, KrV, A21: ‘I call a science of all principles of a priori sensibility [Sinnlichkeit] the transcendental aesthetic [transzendentale Ästhetik]’; ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ is also the title of the first section (A20−49/B34−73) of the Critique of Pure Reason following the ‘Introduction,’ where Kant deals with space and time; he explains that his aesthetic is not ‘the critique of taste’ – what we now call ‘aesthetics.’ Kant, KrV, A348: ‘Thus I, as thinking being [denkend Wesen] (Soul), am substance’; B153−4: ‘That which determines the inner sense is the under-

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standing … Under the designation of a transcendental synthesis of the imagination, it therefore exercises that action [Handlung] on the passive [passive] subject, whose faculty it is, about which we rightly say that the inner sense is thereby affected [affiziert].’ Kant, KrV, A320: ‘A concept is either an empirical or a pure concept, and the pure concept, insofar as it has its origin solely in the understanding … is called notio. A concept made up of notions [Notionen], which goes beyond the possibility of experience, is an idea or a concept of reason.’; A64: ‘The Transcendental Analytic … is concerned with the following points: 1. That the concepts [Begriffe] be pure and not empirical concepts. 2. That they belong not to intuition and to sensibility, but rather to thinking and understanding [Denken und Verstande].’ Kant, KrV, A70: ‘Quantity of Judgments Universal Particular [Besondere] Singular’; Verhältnis is the normal usage in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ for a relation among objects, as distinct from a subject/object relation, indicated by Beziehung: Guyer and Wood (Kant, 1997): 156, 172, 206. Kant, KrV, B113−14: ‘The transcendental philosophy of the ancients … contains pure concepts of the understanding … expounded in the proposition … quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum…. These supposedly transcendental predicates of things are nothing other than logical requisites and criteria of all cognition of things in general, and ground it in the categories of quantity, namely … of unity, plurality, and totality [Einheit, Vielheit, und Allheit] … Perfection [Vollkommenheit] … consists in this plurality [Vielheit] … being traced back to the unity [Einheit] of the concept, and agreeing completely [völlig] with this one and no other one, which one can call qualitative completeness (totality) [qualitative Vollständigkeit (Totalität)].’ Kant, KrV, A72−3, maintains that while ordinary logic needs only affirmative and negative judgments in the category of quality, transcendental logic adds infinite judgments, where the logical form of the proposition is affirmative but the meaning of its predicate term is negative. Ordinary logic does not need to distinguish between affirmative and negative qualities (mortal/ immortal) of the predicate since it recognizes qualities only of the whole judgment or proposition (affirmative: X is mortal; negative: Y is not mortal). Thus, the judgment that ‘die Seele ist nicht sterblich’ would be logically affirmative if understood as asserting the soul’s membership in the class of immortal (nichtsterbliche) beings, a class defined negatively by excluding mortals. Kant says that the distinction belongs to cognition and may therefore be relevant to a transcendental logic. Aristotle (PrAn 51b5-2b35) had recognized the difference between not being mortal and being not-mortal. Kant, KrV, B111: ‘Thus allness (totality) [Allheit (Totalität)] is nothing other

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than a plurality considered as a unity, limitation [Einschränkung] is nothing other than reality combined with negation, community [Gemeinschaft] is the causality of a substance in the reciprocal determinations of others.’ Galluppi is following Kant’s tables of judgments and categories at the beginning of the ‘Transcendental Logic,’ where the German is Relation instead of Verhältnis or Beziehung; KrV, A70: ‘Relation Categorical Hypothetical Disjunctive [Relation Kategorische Hypothetische Disjunktive].’ Kant, KrV, B5: ‘… in the proposition that every alteration must have a cause … the very concept of a cause … obviously contains the concept of a necessity of connection [Notwendigkeit der Verknüpfung] with an effect and a strict universality of rule [Allgemeinheit der Regel] …’ Kant, KrV, A322: ‘… a pure concept of reason in general can be explained through the concept of the unconditioned [Unbedingten], insofar as it contains a ground of synthesis for what is conditioned [Bedingten].’ Kant, KrV, A144: ‘The schema of community (reciprocity) [Gemeinschaft (Wechselwirkung)], or of the reciprocal causality of substances with regard to their accidents, is the simultaneity of the determinations of the one with those of the other’; A213: ‘The word “community” [Gemeinschaft] is ambiguous … and can mean either communio or commercium. We use it here in the latter sense, as a dynamical community [dynamische Gemeinschaft], without which even the local [lokale] community (communio spatii) could never be empirically cognized.’ Kant, KrV, A681−2, speaking of the systematic unity of reason: ‘one … posits an idea only as a unique standpoint [Gesichtspunkte] from which alone one can extend the unity that is so essential to reason and so salutary to the understanding’; A415: ‘The concepts of the possible, actual, and necessary [Möglichen, Wirklichen, und Notwendigen] lead to no series, except only insofar as the contingent [Zufällige] in existence always has to be seen as conditioned and refers … to a condition under which it is necessary to refer this to a higher condition.’ Kant, KrV, A80: ‘Reality Negation Limitation [Realität Negation Limitation]’; A80: ‘Possibility–Impossibility Existence–Non-Existence Necessity–Contingency [Möglichkeit –Unmöglichkeit Dasein–Nichtsein Notwendigkeit–Zufälligkeit].’ Kant, KrV, A201: ‘But if this synthesis is a synthesis of apprehension (of the manifold of a given appearance), then the order [Ordnung] in the object is determined, or, to speak more precisely, there is therein an order of the successive synthesis [eine Ordnung der sukzessiven Synthesis] that determines an object …’ Kant, KrV, B134: ‘The thought that these representations given in intui-

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tion all together belong to me means, accordingly, the same as that I unite [vereinige] them in a self-consciousness.’ Kant, KrV, B130: ‘The manifold of representations [Mannigfaltige der Vorstellungen] can be given in an intuition that is merely sensible … Yet the combination [Verbindung] (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to us through the senses … All combination [Verbindung] … is an action of the understanding, which we would designate with the general title synthesis in order … to draw attention to the fact that … among all representations [Vorstellungen] combination [Verbindung] is the only one that is not given through objects but … only by the subject’ Kant, KrV, B140: ‘The empirical unity of consciousness [empirische Einheit des Bewußtseins], through association of the representations, itself concerns an appearance, and is entirely contingent … The original [ursprünglichen] unity of consciousness … through the pure synthesis of the understanding … grounds a priori the empirical synthesis. That unity alone is objectively valid; the empirical unity of apperception … has merely subjective validity.’ Kant, KrV, B132: ‘The I think must be able to accompany all my representations.’ Kant, KrV, A51: ‘If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive representations … sensibility, then on the contrary the faculty for bringing forth representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition [die Spontaneität des Erkenntnisses], is the understanding [Verstand].’ Kant, KrV, B112: ‘… in all disjunctive judgments the sphere (the multitude of everything that is contained under it) is represented as a whole [Ganzes] divided into parts … coordinated with one another, not subordinated, so that they do not determine each other unilaterally, as in a series, but reciprocally, as in an aggregate [Aggregat] … Now a similar connection is thought of in an entirety [Ganzen] of things, since one is not subordinated, as effect, under another, as the cause of its existence, but is rather coordinated with the other simultaneously and reciprocally [zugleich und wechselseitig] as cause with regard to its determination.’ Kant, KrV, A699: ‘The greatest systematic and purposive unity, which your reason demands as a regulative principle to ground [zum Grunde] all investigation of nature, was precisely what justified [berechtigte] you in making the idea of a highest intelligence the ground [Grunde] as a schema of the regulative principle; and however much purposiveness you encounter in the world in accordance with that principle, so much confirmation do you have for the rightness [Rechtmässigkeit] of your idea.’ Elsewhere (A85) Kant treats deduction as a technical legal concept, confirming the sense of Rechtmäs-

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sigkeit as ‘legitimacy’ or ‘lawfulness’; see above, the first part of the ‘Mixed Logic,’ for ‘ground,’ motivo and motivare. Kant, KrV, B141−2: ‘A judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity [objektiven Einheit] of apperception. That is the aim of the copula is in them: to distinguish the objective unity [objektive Einheit] of given representations from the subjective.’ Kant, KrV, B161: ‘All synthesis, through which even perception [Wahrnehmung] itself becomes possible, stands under the categories, and since experience [Erfahrung] is cognition through connected perceptions [Wahrnehmungen], the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience [Erfahrung], and are thus also valid a priori of all objects of experience [Gegenständen der Erfahrung].’ Kant, KrV, A140−1, B179−81: ‘Pure concepts a priori … must contain a priori conditions of sensibility … that contain the general condition under which alone the category can be applied to any object. We will call this formal and pure condition of the sensibility, to which the use of the concept of the understanding is restricted, the schema [Schema] of this concept of the understanding, and we will call the procedure [Verfahren] of the understanding with these schemata [Schematen] the schematism [Schematismus] of the pure understanding … It is not images of objects but schemata that ground [liegen … nicht Bilder der Gegenstände, sondern Schemata zum Grunde] our pure sensible concepts … The concept [Begriff] of a dog signifies a rule [Regel] in accordance with which my imagination [Einbildungskraft] can specify the shape [die Gestalt verzeichnen kann] of a four-footed animal in general …. This schematism [Schematismus] … is a hidden art in the depths of the human soul … We can only say this much: the image [Bild] is a product of the empirical faculty of productive imagination [produktiven Einbildungskraft], the schema [Schema] of sensible concepts (such as figures in space [Figuren im Raume]) is a product and as it were a monogram [Monogramm] of pure a priori imagination [Einbildungskraft].’ The ‘monogram’ to which Kant compares a schema is not, of course, an initial sewn on a garment; it is a bare figural outline, a ‘schematic’ image without colour or shading. Galluppi, perhaps unsure what Kant had in mind, would certainly have known the Greek etymology of ‘mono-gram’ – ‘one’ + ‘line’ or ‘letter’ – and he probably used tipo (‘silhouette’ unfortunately inverts the image) not abstractly, to mean ‘type’ or ‘model,’ but in some concrete sense. Kant, KrV, A426: ‘We can intuit an indeterminate [unbestimmtes] quantum as a whole [Ganzes], if it is enclosed within boundaries, without needing to construct its totality [Totalität] through measurement, i.e., through the

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successive [sukzessive] synthesis of its parts’; A220: ‘In the concept of a figure (Figur) that is enclosed between two straight lines there is no contradiction’; B154: ‘We cannot think of a line without drawing it in thought … and we cannot even represent time without, in drawing a straight line (which is to be the external figurative [figürliche] representation of time), attending merely to the action of the synthesis of the manifold through which we successively determine [sukzessiv bestimmen] the inner sense, and thereby attending to the succession [Sukzession] of this determination in inner sense’; A308−9: ‘Whether the principle that the series [Reihe] of conditions (in the synthesis of appearances …) reaches to the unconditioned, has objective correctness or not … or whether it … is only a logical prescription in the ascent [im Aufsteigen] to ever higher conditions to approach completeness in them …’ Kant, KrV, A520−1: ‘The world has no first beginning in time and no outermost boundary [Grenze] in space. For in the opposite case … a perception of boundedness [Begrenzung] through absolutely empty time or empty space would have to be possible.’ Kant, KrV, B203: ‘The consciousness of the homogenous manifold … is the concept of a magnitude [Größe] (Quanti) … The appearances are all magnitudes [Größen], and indeed extensive magnitudes [extensive Größen] … as intuitions in time and space’; A527: ‘The infinite division [of an appearance in space] indicates only the appearance as quantum continuum, and is inseparable from the filling of space [Raumes] … But as soon as something is assumed as a quantum discretum, the multiplicity of units in it is determined; hence it is always equal to a number [Zahl].’ Galluppi (1846a), I, 48−9. Kant, KrV, A201: ‘The principle of sufficient reason is the ground of possible experience, namely the objective cognition of appearances with regard to their relation in the successive series [Reihenfolge] of time.’ Kant, KrV, A140−1: ‘Now this representation of a general procedure of the imagination [Einbildungskraft] for providing a concept with its image [Bild] is what I call the schema for this concept. In fact it is not images of objects [Bilder der Gegenstände] but schemata that ground [liegen … zum Grunde] our pure sensible concepts.’ Kant, KrV, A732−3: ‘A synthetic principle … can never be immediately [unmittelbar] certain from mere concepts because I must always look around for some third thing, namely the condition of time-determination in an experience, and could never directly [direkt] cognize such a principle immediately [unmittelbar] from concepts alone.’ Kant, KrV, B207: ‘In all appearances the real [das Reale], which is an object

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of the sensation [Empfindung], has intensive magnitude, i.e., a degree [intensive Größe, d.i. einen Grad]’; cf. A143. Kant, KrV, A183−7: ‘… all change [Wechsel] in time can only be regarded as a modus of the existence [Modus der Existenz] of that which lasts and persists [bleibt und beharrt] … The philosopher expresses himself somewhat more determinately in saying that in all alterations [Veränderungen] in the world the substance remains [bleibt die Substanz] and only the accidents change [Akzidenzen wechseln] … Many misinterpretations arise from this … [but] it is still unavoidable for us to abstract out … that which can change in the existence of a substance [was im Dasein einer Substanz wechseln kann] while the substance remains [Substanz bleibt].’ Kant, KrV, A 145: ‘The schema of actuality [Wirklichkeit] is existence [Dasein] at a determinate time.’ Compare Kant’s different distinction between types of imaginative synthesis, KrV, A118: ‘Only the productive synthesis of the imagination [produktive Synthesis der Einbildungskraft] can take place a priori; for the reproductive [reproduktive] synthesis rests on conditions of experience’; see also nn8, 49 above. Kant, KrV, A471: ‘… real speculative knowledge [eigentliche spekulative Wissen] can encounter no object anywhere except that of experience [Erfahrung].’ Galluppi would have remembered Galileo’s description of the universe as ‘this greatest book of all … [that] cannot be understood unless one first learns to understand the language and read the characters (caratteri) in which it is written’: Galileo (1964), I, 573, 631−2; cf. Kant, KrV, A314. Galluppi (1846a), I, 427−9, applies ‘Absolute’ to God in the substantive sense that Kant avoided; cf. KrV, A335−6: ‘reason [Vernunft] … in the categorical syllogism, must necessarily come to the concept of the absolute unity [absoluten Einheit] of the thinking subject, [and] … hypothetical syllogisms [lead to] the ideas of the absolutely unconditioned [Schlechthinunbedingten] in a series of given conditions, and finally … the disjunctive syllogism necessarily carries with it the highest rational concept of a being of all beings [einem Wesen aller Wesen] … No objective deduction of these transcendental ideas [Ideen] is really possible …’; also A324−7. Galluppi (1846a), I, 282−3. Kant, KrV, B218: ‘Analogies of Experience. Their principle is: Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection [notwendigen Verknüpfung] of perceptions;’ ‘Analogies of Experience’ is the title of a section of the first Critique. Galluppi (1846a), I, 24−7.

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Part II: Translations 68 Kant, KrV, A162−5, B201−5: ‘All combination [Verbindung] (conjunctio) is either composition [Zusammensetzung] (compositio) or connection [Verknüpfung] (nexus). The former is the synthesis of a manifold of what does not necessarily [nicht notwendig] belong to each other … The second combination [Verbindung] (nexus) is the synthesis of that which is manifold insofar as they necessarily [notwendig] belong to one another … All appearances contain, as regards their form, an intuition in space and time, which grounds [zum Grunde liegt] all of them a priori. They cannot be apprehended, therefore … except through the synthesis of the manifold [Mannigfaltigen] … i.e., through the composition of that which is homogenous [die Zusammensetzung des Gleichartigen] and the consciousness of the synthetic unity of this manifold [Mannigfaltigen] (of the homogeneus [Gleichartigen]) … That 7 + 5 = 12 is not an analytic proposition … Although it is synthetic, however, it is still only a singular proposition … It is only the synthesis of that which is homogenous (of units) that is at issue here [hier bloß auf die Synthesis des Gleichartigen (die Einheiten) gesehen wird]’; see nn98, 158 above. 69 Galluppi (1846a): I, 422; Lettere (1965): 208−24; Hume (2006): section 7, ‘Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion.’

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2 Antonio Rosmini

A Sketch of Modern Philosophy1

[I. Recent Philosophical Systems] 1. Locke. Locke took it upon himself to solve the problem of the origin of ideas. He said that all ideas come from sensation and from reflection. By reflection he meant the operation of the faculty of the human mind on sensations. Consequently, he denied that there are innate ideas in the mind. By innate ideas are meant cognitions that a person has in himself naturally. 2. Condillac. Locke’s philosophy was spread in France by Condillac, who modified it.2 Condillac set aside Locke’s reflection and claimed that it is nothing but sensation. In this way he boasted of having simplified philosophy, reducing all human cognitions to sensation alone. As a result he claimed that a human being has only one faculty, the faculty of sensing, and that the faculties of memory, imagination, understanding, and reason are nothing more than various modes of sensing. This system was extremely destructive for morality and religion, because, if humans had no faculty other than sensing, the result would be that good and evil are just pleasant and painful sensations, which would turn morality into procuring more of the pleasant sensations for ourselves while avoiding the painful ones. In France this immoral system was developed by Helvétius, and in England it was applied to public welfare by Bentham, the leader of the utilitarians.3 3. Berkeley. Berkeley was a well-meaning Anglican bishop educated in the school of Locke. While others deduced materialism from Locke’s sensationalist system, he undertook to deduce spiritualism from it, which

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he did as follows. He accepted that all human knowing is reduced to a complex of sensations, taking this to be something already proved and universally acknowledged in his time. He then made the observation that sensations can exist only in a being capable of sensing, of which they are modifications. Sensations therefore are not outside a person but are found only within – inside the human soul. Hence, if a person knows nothing other than sensations, the objects of his knowing are not outside him but in his own soul as modifications of the mind. Therefore, the whole external world exists only in appearance, being composed only of sensations that manifest themselves in the soul as modifications of it. This system, which denies what is bodily and external and permits only spirits to exist, was called idealism. Berkeley applied his system to the analysis of bodies: he lists all the bodily qualities and shows for each one that it is nothing more than a sensation. Then he concludes that everything we know about bodies reduces to a complex of sensations, and so what we call qualities are in ourselves – not outside of us, as commonly believed. In his famous Dialogues between Philonous and Hylas, when an objection arises about the source of sensations, Berkeley answers that they come from the direct action that God exercises on our minds.4 Using the example of dreams, he shows that bodily objects do not need to be present in order for us to become convinced of their presence – in order to have a sensation of them. In Berkeley’s system, then, human life is just a continuing dream, and between life and dreaming there is this difference only: that in life sensations from the various senses are linked to one another in a stable and harmonious way, while in dreaming they become unstable and unharmonious, so that visual sensations or images, for example, do not correspond to those of touch. 4. Hume. Hume was also educated in Locke’s philosophy, accepting as a certainty and without examination the principle that all human cognitions reduce to sensation. But while Berkeley had derived idealism from this principle, Hume derived scepticism, which is the system of those who deny all certainty to human cognitions. Hume’s reasoning was as follows: people base their arguments on the principle of cause, he said, expressing it in this way – here is an effect, so here is a cause. This principle is false and illusory, however, because a sensation can never be a cause: wherever there is a cause, there must be an active entity. Now, sensation is not something but the modification of something, not active but passive; therefore, a sensation can never be a cause. But humans know only sensations, and thus they never know any

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cause. They know sensations before and after, but they reason falsely if they believe that what comes before must be the cause of what comes after, which is the fallacy of hoc post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Therefore, whenever people talk about things that they take to be causes of the sensible world, they presume to do what they cannot do since it is impossible to start from sensations and arrive at knowledge of any cause. This system is plainly wicked because by denying causes or putting them in question it also denies or puts in question the existence of the first cause, which is God himself. 5. Reid. The Scotsman Reid was horrified by the frightful conclusions that the two powerful minds of Berkeley and Hume had derived from Locke’s system.5 These conclusions, which eliminated the external world and the certainty of human cognitions, were derived with such logical rigour that once the premises were granted they could no longer be denied. On the other hand, the conclusions conflicted with everyone’s common sense and destroyed morality and religion; they could not be true, then. From this Reid determined that the fault must lie with the premises, and that Locke’s system must not be blindly accepted but had to be submitted anew to a thorough examination to find the hidden flaw. Reid set to work on this task with all his powers of mind, and in the end he believed he had found the error. He saw that the fact of human perception does not stop with mere sensation. If it were true that humans know only sensations, we could assert only those sensations. But experience says that we assert real things that are by no means sensations. We do not believe that we know only modifications of our own minds; in addition, we believe that we also know substances apart from ourselves that have effects on us. Hence, it must be said not only that we have the faculty of sensing but also that we possess another mysterious faculty, which, on the occasion of sensations, drives and compels us to assert the existence of something beyond these sensations. But how can one explain a faculty that asserts what is not found in sensation? If the object of this faculty is not given by the senses, where does it reside? What presents it to the mind for perception? These are the questions that Reid asked, those that define the knotty problem of ideology.6 The Scottish philosopher answered them in this way. The point is not to go beyond the fact. The fact tells us that the human mind perceives substance and being, things that do not fall under the senses and are altogether different from sensations. Yet the mind perceives them on the occasion of sensations. The point, then, is to say that the human mind

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has in its very nature an instinct that leads it this far. This instinct was accepted as a primitive faculty for which no further explanation could be given. Therefore, according to Reid, there is a natural suggestion (as he puts it) that makes it necessary for a person who receives sensations not to stop there but to move on by the act of thinking to the belief that there are real beings, called bodies, which are causes of the same sensations. By means of this primitive faculty that asserts or perceives bodily substance itself, Reid thought that he had refuted Berkeley’s idealism and secured the existence of bodies, as he also thought that he had refuted Hume’s scepticism by relocating the criterion of certainty in the primitive faculty of human nature. He also supposed that he had harmonized philosophy with mankind’s common sense, from which the English philosophers had strayed. The merit of the Scottish school lies in having made the first attempts to lead philosophy out of the sensist system of Locke and Condillac. 6. Kant. While it appeared that the Scottish school had finally established solid foundations for philosophical knowledge, the sophist of Königsberg rose up to overturn them again and compound the damage. Taking the father of Scottish philosophy at his word, Kant reasoned in roughly this way: You are right to say that our conviction of the existence of bodies does not come from sensations but from an entirely different faculty with a nature of its own, so that the very nature of the human mind obliges it to assert that there are bodies whenever its sensory faculty receives sensations. Now if this is the case, the belief we have in the existence of bodies is an effect of the nature of our minds. If our minds were differently constituted, then, it would not be necessary for us to assert that bodies exist. The truth of the existence of bodies is therefore subjective – relative to the mind that states it and not at all objective. We are obliged to acknowledge that there are bodies, in other words, because of how we are built and because we cannot resist the impulse of our nature that leads us to this conclusion. But this does nothing to show that bodies exist in themselves, that they have an objective existence independent of us. Kant generalized this thought to all human cognitions, saying that, since they are all acts and products of a mind that cannot reach beyond itself, they could have no truth or certainty except the subjective kind, and so the mind could never be assured that things are as they appear. He observed that all beings act according to the laws of their own natures

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and that their products bear the stamp of those laws. Thus, if cognitions are products of the human mind, they too must be shaped according to the nature and laws of that mind. And if there were another mind constructed differently than ours, he added, who knows whether it would observe things entirely unlike those that appear to us? He used the example of a mirror that produces an image according to the shape of things as they are reflected in the mirror, so that a convex mirror, on this example, makes all objects elongated, while a concave mirror makes them shortened. Thus, the human mind gives its own forms to the objects of its cognitions; it does not get the forms from the objects themselves. So the philosopher’s task is to discover what these forms are, to list them one by one, and describe each one with its own determinations. For that purpose, the only requirement is to consider all the objects of human knowledge, moving the forms of these objects into the human mind and thus removing the transcendental illusion that makes people believe that forms are of the object when they are of the mind itself. Kant undertook this labour in his work titled The Critique of Pure Reason, and he carried it out in the following way. He said that there are two forms [of sensibility]: one of external sense, called space, the other of internal sense, called time; that there are four forms of the understanding, which are quantity, quality, modality, and relation; finally, that there are three forms of reason, which are absolute matter, absolute whole, and absolute mind – matter, world, and God, in other words. Then he claimed to reconcile all the completely antagonistic systems devised by philosophers. He divided them into two large classes, calling them dogmatists and sceptics. The dogmatists were those who accepted the truth and certainty of human cognitions; the sceptics were those who denied all truth and certainty to human cognitions. He said that both were right. The dogmatists were right because there is a truth and a certainty, but it is subjective or relative to the human subject. The sceptics were right because there is no objective truth and certainty belonging to objects taken in themselves, since no human can know anything as it is in itself. Kant called this system of his critical because it makes a critique of other systems and of human reason itself. He called it transcendental philosophy because it transcends the senses and experience and submits to its critique everything that people think they know about the sensible world outside.

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But Kant’s is really a system that is: i. sceptical, because the subjective truth and certainty that he accepts is neither truth nor certainty, except by an abuse of language. ii. idealistic, because, by accepting the existence of bodies only subjectively as products of instinct and of forms innate in the human mind, it accepts them only in appearance, denying them an existence of their own. Moreover, his system is idealism transferred from the particular to the general – the idealism that Berkeley had applied only to bodies and that Hume applied to all objects of human cognition, be they corporeal or spiritual, concrete, or abstract. iii. atheist, because, if human reason cannot be certain of the absolute and objective truth of the objects presented to it, there is no longer any possibility of knowing God’s existence with certainty, and God too becomes a subjective appearance – as Kant himself openly admits in making his critique of all the arguments offered by philosophers to prove God’s existence, showing them all, so he thinks, to be useless and without effect. iv. pantheist, because in this system there remains nothing but the mind, which, in virtue of its instincts and forms, produces and portrays all things on its own; hence, there exists only one substance, the human subject itself, which contains in itself the universe and even God, and in this system God becomes a modification of man. v. spiritualist and materialist at once, because what is called matter is in the human object as one of its products and what is called spirit or mind is also in the human object as something producing and modifying itself, so that the human spirit comes to be mind and matter at the same time. 7. Fichte. Fichte was a follower of Kant. By publishing the work titled The Science of Knowledge, he believed he had given a scientific explanation of Kant’s system.7 But in this exposition Kant refused to recognize his own system, so then Fichte realized that he had invented a new one. Here is the difference between the critical philosophy and transcendental idealism, as Fichte’s system is still called. Kant certainly said that people cannot know whether objects that appear to them are as they appear, but he did not exclude the possibility that they are as they appear: they might exist independently of the person, but the person cannot be sure of this. Fichte denied this possibility altogether, maintaining that objects can be nothing other than products of the person.

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This is Fichte’s argument: Objects of knowing are all products of the act of knowing; but the act of knowing is a product of the human mind; therefore, the objects are also products of the same mind. But these objects are the world, God, and man. Thus, these three are nothing but products that the mind represents to itself as objects of its knowledge. Fichte then sets about explaining how the human mind produces all other things from itself. He says that with the first utterance, with the first creation, the I posits itself. Before a person says I, the person is not yet under the form of the I. With the second utterance, which is a second creation, the person posits the not-I. The not-I is for Fichte everything that is not I, hence the external world, the divine and every object of human thinking whatsoever. Now these two acts, by which the mind posits the I and the not-I, are correlative, such that the one cannot happen without the other. The I cannot utter itself without positing counter to itself a thing other than itself, and by this counterpositing it negates itself and thereby differentiates itself from everything else. It cannot utter the not-I if it does not posit the I counter to the not-I and thereby apprehend the not-I as different and distinct from itself. Fichte thus establishes a first operation of the mind that he also calls intuition, and this action has two correlates or terms that counterposit and negate themselves reciprocally. With this first mysterious action he intends to explain not only the origin of human cognition but also the existence of all things. Since the designation not-I covers everything that is not I, the not-I includes God as well as the world. Fichte thereby reaches the absurd conclusion not only that the world is man’s creation but also that God himself is a creation of man. This system is called transcendental idealism because it applies Berkeley’s idealistic principle to all things without exception, drawing all the conclusions that lead logically and inexorably into the yawning abyss. Indeed, Fichte proclaims that there is no doubt of the kind that survives in Kant’s critical philosophy about things possibly having an existence of their own. Thus he turned Kant’s critical scepticism into dogmatic scepticism. From this system of Fichte’s there soon emerged in Germany the two systems of Schelling and Hegel: the first, the system of absolute identity; the second, the system of the absolute Idea. Exposition of these systems is omitted here because it seems unnecessary for understanding what we have to describe, the topic of this essay. 8. Critique of the Foregoing Systems. The observation that Reid made about

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the sensism of Locke, Condillac, Berkeley, and Hume was correct because it rested on a more thorough examination of the phenomena of the human mind. The fact is that if a person had only the sensory faculty, he would sense but would not think. Thought goes beyond sensation because we also think things that do not fall under the senses, as we think about substance, cause, and spirits. Therefore, the objects of human thinking are not merely sensations. But what is more difficult to understand well – obvious though it is – is that the way in which sensations are thought is different from the way in which they are sensed. And in fact, the thought asserts the sensation in itself, and therefore asserts it whether it is present, past, or future. I will think of the pleasant smell of the rose that I sniffed yesterday, for example; the sensation is no longer present, but the thought is present; therefore, the sensation and the thought of the sensation are not the same thing. The same applies to a future sensation. I keep thinking about the pleasant sensations that I will enjoy tomorrow while hunting or dining; the sensations do not yet exist, yet the thought already exists. Therefore, the essence of the thought is different from that of the sensation. That being the case, I must conclude that even where the sensation as well as the thought of the sensation are both present to me, the two still differ from one another, and the one is independent of the other. And how often does a person experience sensations without thinking of them, especially if the sensations are not very lively or are habitual and manifold, like those that a person has at every moment of existence? They pass unnoticed: the mind, especially if distracted and busy at something else, pays them no attention. Hence, it is not at all hard to grasp that there are some things that are purely sensory and others that combine thought with sensation. The first are the lower animals and the second are human beings. This suffices to explain why the fundamental principle of Locke and his school is entirely demolished. Locke confused sensation with thought and claimed to be speaking of the latter when everything that he said could apply only to the former. Although Reid easily succeeded in refuting sensism, he then hit a brick wall. While he recognized the need to establish a philosophy of thinking and to offer a specific explanation of this phenomenon that could never be explained by referring to the senses, he also clung to the choice of declaring this phenomenon to be an instinct with its own special character, and that human nature is endowed with it. In this way, he recognized only the subjective part of thought and forgot the objective part. Accordingly, he did not succeed in understanding the true nature of

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thought itself. The reason is that thought occurs precisely where there is an object present to the subject in such a way that the object is never confused with that subject but remains distinct. And since thought depends on this continuing and necessary distinctiveness, if the object could ever be confused with the subject, the thinking would be altogether lost. Kant availed himself of this error of Reid’s by calling into question again not only the existence of bodies but indeed all objects of human cognition, claiming (as mentioned above) that all these objects are just products of the subject arising from an irresistible and natural human instinct. From this came Fichte’s transcendental idealism, which is only the logical development of Kant’s system. Now to comprehend this huge error, this seedbed of other errors and ultimately of German pantheism, we must reason as follows: I know that I am not the objects of my thought. I know that the objects of my thought are not me. I know that I am not the bread that I eat, for example, or the sun that I see, or the person with whom I speak. This is obvious to me because I am known to myself so that, were I not so known, I would not be myself. Therefore, no thing can be me unless I know it to be me. But I do not know that the bread, the sun, and the person with whom I talk are myself, and so I know that they are not me. Kant cannot reply that I am mistaken, that the other things could be myself without my knowing it, precisely because, if I did know it, I would no longer be myself, the reason being that the I includes consciousness of itself. Without this consciousness of itself, the I would not be I but would be something else. Therefore, the objects that stand before thought are essentially distinct from the I. For the same reason, moreover, they cannot be modifications of the I because modifications of the I exist as such in the consciousness that constitutes the very nature of the I. Whatever the objects of thought may be, then – which remains to be seen – it remains beyond doubt that they are neither the I nor a modification of it. Here the idealists raise this question: What is the bridge of communication between the I and its objects? Can the I go out of itself and reach a thing outside it? This is the reply to their question: Can your query, no matter how difficult it is, even if the problem were insoluble, destroy the assertion of fact that we have already proved? Logic demands that when we have a truth of fact, even if we do not know how to explain it, we still must not abandon it. The only conclusion we would have to draw would be the need to confess our own ignorance. But this is not our situation.

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Indeed, on reflection we notice that the question arises from a materialist ontology that applies to the mind what belongs only to bodies. One law of bodies is impenetrability, which requires that one body cannot be in the same place as another. But who said that this law holds for all beings, even those without bodies? Who said that it holds for spirits? Nothing prevents there being an opposite law for spirits; in fact, it befits their different nature. And how can we make a judgment about this nature? Surely not by reasoning from analogy with bodies, but by observing and considering spirits in themselves. Now by observing and considering what our own intelligent spirit is, what it does, and what is done to it, precisely what we come to discover is that it obeys a law different than the one mentioned for bodies, and that, far from being described as impenetrable, its nature is such that objects of thought can be in it without being confused with it, remaining entirely different and distinct from it. (As people commonly use it, the very word ‘object’ – obiectum – suggests this fact by its etymology since it means something ‘set against.’) Since there is nothing absurd about supposing this to be the case, it is correct to accept the result of observation. So there is no need for a bridge of communication between things and the mind because the former can be found directly in the latter, through that mental mode called cognition. Moreover, a similar reflection may emerge from the different perspective of the sensible order. In this order the soul is defined as the sensory principle. Now from the start, the sensory principle has an end or term, which is called sensed. The designation of object (a word to be reserved for the intellectual order) does not properly belong to this sensed term. Yet it is true that the sensed resides in the sentient principle and that it cannot exist outside of it. At the same time, it is true that the sensed is not the sentient. But under the designation of sensed all sensible things are included. Two consequences follow from this: first, that sensible things cannot be confused in any way with the sentient principle, which completely refutes Berkeley’s idealism; second, that Galluppi was not wrong to say that sense directly asserts things themselves and perceives them directly with no need for any bridge of communication. Kant’s system, then, and Fichte’s are based on incomplete observation of nature, for the lack of which those philosophers mixed together things entirely opposed to one another – subject with object and origin with end. But if it were possible to mix them together, there would no longer be any thought nor sensation.

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II. The Final System From what has been said, it appears that the object known is something entirely different from the knowing subject. The knowing subject is a person; the object as such is impersonal. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which one can say that the known object is a subject that knows, without in the least confusing object with subject or mixing up their natures – in fact, by keeping them distinct in such a way that the distinction is one of the essential features of cognition. But there is no cognition where there is not a distinction between subject and object. The question, then, comes down to finding out where the object of knowledge comes from. This is the question of the origin of ideas and of human cognitions. Human cognitions are divided into two groups, called cognitions by intuition and cognitions by assertion. Cognitions by intuition are those that have to do with the nature of things in themselves, things in their possibility. Ideas are just those things considered in themselves as possibly subsisting or not subsisting. Cognitions by way of assertion or judgment are those that we acquire in asserting or judging that a thing subsists or does not subsist. From this definition follow two consequences: i. That we cannot have this second type of cognition unless the first precedes it because we cannot assert that a thing subsists or does not subsist unless we already know the thing itself in its own possible nature; for example, I cannot say that a tree subsists or a person subsists unless I first know what a tree is or what a person is. But knowing what something is amounts to the same thing as knowing it in its possibility, since I can know what a tree is and yet not know that this tree also subsists. ii. That the objects belong only to the first kind of cognition because nothing happens in the second kind but asserting or denying the subsistence of an object known in the first kind. Whence it follows that this second way of cognizing does not supply a new object to the mind but only declares the subsistence of the object that is already known. The first way of cognizing is what presents possible objects to us, then, and these are called ideas. The second way does not present new possible objects, new ideas, but shows us beliefs about known objects. Hence, there are two terms of cognition, ideas and beliefs: with the first we know

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the possible world, with the second we know the real world that subsists. Thus there are two categories of things: possible things and subsistent things – ideas and things, in other words. We have seen that the objects of our cognitions are essentially distinct from ourselves, that we are the subject who knows them. Whether these objects are purely possible or likewise if they subsist, they are distinct from us just the same and independent. This sheds new light for our understanding of the nature of ideas since we are logically obliged to conclude, on the one hand, that ideas are not nothing; on the other, that they are not ourselves nor modifications of ourselves; and, finally, that they have their own way of existing, entirely unlike that of real or subsistent things. This mode of existence of ideal objects, or rather of ideas, is such that it does not fall under our bodily senses. This is why ideal objects entirely escaped the notice of many philosophers, who went about philosophizing with a built-in prejudice that led them to suppose that anything that did not fall under sense is nothing. But it is a fact that possible objects do not fall under sense, and so there is no way to explain cognition of them by referring only to bodily senses – a new and conclusive refutation of sensism. So, then, if ideas – ideal and possible objects, that is – are not supplied by the senses, what is their origin? It helps to state in advance an observation about the special features of ideas. These are chiefly two: universality and necessity. An ideal or merely possible object, in fact, is always universal in the sense that by itself it makes known the nature of all the unspecified individuals in which it is realized. Take the idea of man, for example. The idea of man is, as we have said, the ideal man. Realized human individuals can exist in whatever number one likes, and in all of them there is still the same human nature: the nature is one, the individuals are many. Now what does the idea of man, the ideal man, express and make known to me? The nature. Hence, whoever possesses the idea of man, had he the power to create, could produce as many men as he pleased by the idea alone. In the same way, he would know them all by the idea alone. In this way, a sculptor who had conceived the idea of a statue could reproduce this idea in marble time after time without ever leaving the idea exhausted. The ideal statue would be always one and the same, keeping an exemplary type of this kind always before the mind. Material copies would be many, all shaped and known by the same idea. This is what is called the universality of ideas and what distinguishes them cat-

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egorically from real objects, which are always particular, and from sensations, which are also particular. The feature of necessity is likewise obvious: ideas are possible objects, and it is clear that what is possible cannot be other than possible, and is, therefore, possible necessarily. The possible is what does not involve contradiction: therefore, every object that does not involve contradiction is possible of necessity. Now all finite and real beings are, in their reality, only contingent and not necessary, as opposed to possible beings. This is because we can think of any finite and real object either that it is, or, equally, that it is not, while, for the possible object, we can never think that it is not – that it is not possible, in other words. By way of example, man in his possibility is necessary because nothing can make man not possible; a real man, by contrast, is contingent because he can be and can not be, can happen to be or happen not to be. Universality and necessity, therefore, are the two primitive features of ideas, but from them come two others, which are infinity and eternity. Ideas have in themselves an infinity because they are universal. No real and limited being is universal but is of itself determinate and incommunicable to others. Therefore, ideas do not belong to the class of real limited beings. Ideas are also eternal just because they are necessary, for what is necessary always was necessary and always will be, and what always was and always will be is eternal. Having contemplated these lofty features of ideas, Saint Augustine, followed by Saint Thomas and preceded by Plato, concluded that ideas reside in God, as in their source and foundation. From this opinion Malebranche derived his system: that man, and every finite intelligence, sees everything that he sees in God. And His Eminence Cardinal Gerdil ultimately defended the system against theological charges brought against it. We do not accept this system entirely, and here it would take too long to develop a critique of it.8 But we recognize in it a basis for truth, and the difference between Malebranche’s system and ours involves only various particulars. We take great care to distinguish ideas as they are in God from ideas as they are seen by our intellect. Ideas are in God in a different way than they shine on our minds. In God ideas have a mode of being that does not differ from that of God himself, and this is the mode of the divine Word. This Word is unique, without any real distinction in itself, and it is God himself. But ideas do not shine on our minds in this way. In our minds ideas are manifold, and by themselves they do not constitute the human word because that word, or speech, expresses a judg-

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ment, an assertion, an utterance that always terminates in reality, while possibility is all that ideas make known. Thus, ideas are limited by the human mind that receives them so that they can no longer be called by the name of God or the divine Word because God is the absolute being for whom subsistence is necessary, while ideas are only possibilities intuited by the mind. And yet ideas retain some features of divinity, such as those mentioned above, so that one may appropriately call them adjuncts of divinity. From these considerations it follows, generally speaking, that the origin of ideas is from God, who makes them shine on the human mind. And they cannot come from man or from external things because finite beings do not have such exalted features, and nothing gives what it does not have. Next, however, one must start to investigate the origin of human ideas in a more precise way, and, above all, explain their multiplicity and also show how they contribute to produce that class of cognitions that we have called cognitions by belief. Let us see, then, if we can classify the ideas and find out what order of subordination holds among them. Through this inquiry we discover that there is only one idea that is completely indeterminate and universal in every respect, and this is the idea of being. All other ideas are more or less determinate and make known what is possible in a more restricted sphere. Now between the indeterminate idea of being and all other ideas this relation holds, that the other ideas always contain the indeterminate idea of being, to which various determinations are added. Take the idea of stone, for example, or tree, animal, or human. What makes me know the idea of stone? A being, but not just any being; rather, the one that has the determinations of stone. What makes me know the idea of tree? A being with the determination of tree added. What makes me know the idea of animal? Also a being, but determined by animal features. What makes me know the idea of human? Again a being, but with the features and determinations that belong to the human. Being is found in all the ideas, then, and every determination is no more than the same idea of being clothed with certain determinations and limited by them. All ideas, then, have the same basis; all have a common element, which is ideal or possible being. These determinations are more or less complete since either they determine being fully or determine it only in one respect and leave it indeterminate in another. I can form for myself the idea of a book of a given size, for example, or of a given shape, printed in a particular typeface, and, in short, furnished with all the accidents that occur in

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a given book. This is the determinate idea of a book, and yet this idea is still general because it is a pure idea, not a real book. It is a type, an exemplar that stands before my mind, from which an indefinite number, a real number, of books – all alike – can be formed. By contrast, I can also have the idea of a book which is indeterminate in some respect, as happens when I think of a book with its essential elements but leave out accidents of size, shape, typeface, and so on. Now ideas that are wholly determinate are called concrete ideas, while ideas that are indeterminate in some respect are called abstract ideas. But if I take away all its determinations, both accidental and essential, from the idea of book, the book vanishes from my mind, and all I have left is the idea of a wholly indeterminate being. Ideas, therefore, are distributed in our minds in the form of a pyramid that ends in a point. The first layer of this pyramid is formed by concrete ideas, wholly determinate, which just for that reason form a larger number. The other layers are composed of ideas ever less determinate, which decrease in number as more determinations are removed from them. The point of the pyramid is the idea of being alone, indeterminate in all respects. Wishing to give a satisfactory explanation of the origin of ideas, then, we need to account for two things; first, the origin of the indeterminate idea; second, of its determinations. And in regard to determinations of the idea of being (which is precisely the idea taken as indeterminate), we find their origin easily by way of the following observation. Suppose that a person has the idea of being – that he knows what being is, in other words: it is immediately understood that he can turn sensation into an idea. The reason is that when he experiences sensations, he can say to himself, ‘Here is a being limited and determined by sensation.’ Seeing a star, for example, he can say in his thoughts, ‘This is a being that gives light,’ and so on. Sensations, then, provide him the first determinations of being, so that when he thinks about a luminous being that acts on his visual sense, at that point he no longer thinks only about indeterminate being but about a being with the determination of luminosity, of varying intensity, of magnitude, of shape, and so on. All these qualities make the being determinate, and all are provided by sense. But this does not mean that such determinations of the idea are themselves sensations. We understand this by distinguishing the various operations that the human mind performs in this process. In fact, when a person seeing a star says in his thoughts, ‘Here is a

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being that gives light,’ he makes an assertion, a judgment, and we have already distinguished cognitions of assertion from simple ideas. But we have also said that this way of cognizing assumes those ideas, so that we cannot assert the subsistence of an object of which we have no idea at all. Thus, in the judgment by which we assert the star that is before our eyes – which is called perception of the star – the idea is already contained. Then it remains for us, by another operation of the mind, to isolate the idea from other elements of perception. Now this operation is called universalization, and it occurs in this way: in perceiving the star, my thought is connected with the particular sensible object; but it can disconnect from the object by putting aside any thought of the star’s actual subsistence, preserving its image while treating it as a possible star, as a type and exemplar of all those other stars like it, indefinite in number, that could be made real by the Creator’s power. The possible star is just a pure determinate idea. This possible determination of the star is no longer sensation, which is real and not possible. But sensation has presented me the occasion of discovering it nonetheless, and then the intelligent mind discovers it by treating as possible what sensation presented as real. This the mind can certainly do, given our assumption that it knows what possible being is. But the possible star is universal; hence, we call this operation of the mind universalization. By universalization fully determined ideas are formed; by abstraction are formed those ideas that are determinate only in some respect and remain indeterminate in another. Thus, if my thought, besides setting aside the star’s subsistence, also sets aside magnitude, shape, intensity of light, and other accidents of the star, what is left? Still left is the idea of the star, but it is abstract and generic, and can apply equally to stars of magnitude 1, 2, 3, and so on. This idea is determinate in part because such an idea of the star cannot be confused with ideas of other things; but in some part it also remains indeterminate because it applies no more to one star than to another. Assuming the idea of possible being in the human mind, then, it is not difficult to discover its determinations, which clothe, limit, and transform it into all the other ideas. Such determinations are occasioned and materially provided by sensations which are then formed into ideas by the two operations of the human mind that we have described – namely, by universalization and abstraction. Then it remains to explain where the idea of universal being comes from – the idea which alone is indeterminate. Once this idea has been given to the human mind, no further problem arises in explaining all the other ideas, because, as we have

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seen, these are nothing but this same idea of being that the human mind clothes with determinations on the occasion of sensations and as the mind experiences various feelings. To reach an explanation of such a problem it helps, first of all, to notice the corollaries that derive from this account, which are: i.

The idea of being is universally prior to all others because other ideas are only determinations of it, and determining something assumes that there is already something to be determined. ii. This idea cannot come from sensation or feelings − not only because sensations are real, particular, and contingent, whereas this idea offers the mind knowledge of being that is possible, universal, and necessary in its possibility; but also because sensations and feelings provide the mind nothing but determinations of the idea of being, which they limit and restrict. iii. Nor indeed can this idea come from operations of the human mind, from universalization and abstraction, because these operations do nothing more than add determinations to that idea and take away what has been added on the occasion of sensations and feelings. iv. These operations of the human understanding are possible only if one assumes the idea of being, which is the medium, instrument, and condition of the same understanding. v. Thus, without the idea of being, the human mind would no longer perform any rational operation and would remain devoid of the faculty of thinking and understanding, which is to say that it would cease to be anything intelligent. vi. If removing the idea of being from the soul keeps it devoid of intelligence, and if granting it this idea makes the soul an intelligent being, then it can be said that this idea constitutes the very light of reason, and so we discover what the light of reason is that everyone acknowledges and no one defines. vii. And since philosophers usually say that form is that by which a thing is what it is, we can correctly call the idea of being in general the form of reason or intelligence. viii. On the same basis, this idea deserves to be called the first idea, the Mother Idea, the idea per se, and the light of understanding. It is the first idea because it is prior to all others; it is the Mother Idea because it brings forth all the others by uniting with sensations through the operations of the mind; it is the idea per se because sensations are not ideas, and the mind needs to add them as determinations to that

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first idea in order to get determinate ideas from the idea; finally, it is the light of understanding because it is knowable in itself, whereas sensations are knowable by means of it as they become its determinations and are known as such. Careful consideration of all these items is enormously helpful for solving the great problem of the origin of ideas and human cognition, though in fact this problem has long since been solved just by the common sense that people possess. For common sense acknowledges in the human mind a light of reason or understanding, and regards this light as so natural and proper to humans that it differentiates them from animals. Now once we show that this light of reason is none other than the same idea of being in general, it follows from the testimony of common sense that this idea is natural to humans and belongs to their nature. This is because it is an idea not formed or acquired but innate, planted there by nature, made present to the human mind by the same Creator who formed mankind. In fact, it is necessary for being to be known per se, or else there is nothing to make it known; on the contrary, everything else is made known by it, because, since every thing is a being, unless one knows what being is, one knows nothing. And so we have an answer to the great question of the origin of ideas. This is because all specific and generic ideas are found to be the idea of being itself, variously determined by means of sensations and the operations of the mind. And since it follows that this unique and primitive idea cannot be the product of these operations, whose indispensable condition the idea is, it must be that the idea is given to man by nature, so that a person knows what being is without needing to learn about it, while everything else is learned with the help of this primitive cognition. We cannot reasonably ask for a definition of being since it is what is known of itself and enters into the definition of all other things; one can only describe it; its features can be analysed and nothing more. The idea, as we have seen, contains the pure essence of the thing; therefore, the idea of being contains and makes known the essence of being. Essence is not affected by space; ideal being, then, is incorporeal. But ideal being is the form of the intellectual soul, and the intellectual soul subsists by simple intuition of it. Therefore, the intellectual soul is also incorporeal, and hence spiritual, and hence incorruptible and immortal. Essence is also unaffected by time because being in its essence is always being and can never cease to be, since it would be contradic-

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tory if being ceased to be being. Therefore it is eternal. But in time it was united with the soul. Therefore, there was being before there was a human soul, and being is independent of the soul. But being is the light of understanding, and the light of understanding is contingent on the existence of that whose light it is. Therefore, a mind exists prior to the soul, an eternal mind, and this is God; therefore, God exists. The existence of God and the immortality of the soul are the two foundations of morality. This is because God is the end at which the immortal soul aims, and this is that comprehensive and summary duty to which all others are reduced. Thus, abstract inquiry into the origin of ideas becomes a great and serious matter of human destiny.

NOTES 1 Rosmini (1881), the text followed here, is the first edition and posthumous: see the Introduction, section 2, n15; section 6, n61. 2 For Condillac in Italy, see the Introduction, section 2. 3 In 1758 Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715−71) published his controversial physicalist psychology, De l’Esprit, which influenced Jeremy Bentham (1748−1832) and the utilitarians. 4 Bishop George Berkeley (1685−1753) called his famous work Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, but Rosmini has ‘Filylas’ for ‘Hylas’; see Berkeley (1713). 5 For Reid in Italy, see the Introduction, sections 2 and 6. 6 For ideology, see the Introduction, sections 2, 4, and 6. 7 The only full presentation of the ever-mutating Wissentschaftslehre published in the lifetime of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762−1814) is Fichte (1794). 8 The eminent Savoyard theologian, Cardinal Hyacinthe Gerdil (1718−1802), fervently opposed Enlightenment materialism and became famous as a critic of Rousseau. He defended Father Nicolas Malebranche (1638−1715) not only against Locke but also against Catholic enemies, including Antoine Arnauld. Through Gerdil, who nearly became pope when Rosmini was an infant, Malebranche remained influential for Italian thinkers, especially Gioberti, even though some of his books had been put on the Index of Forbidden Books; see Gerdil (1748).

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The Moral and Political Primacy of the Italians1

II. THE ITALIAN PRIMACY IN REGARD TO THOUGHT: 2. ITALY IS THE LEADER IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES Italy’s supremacy in the practice of theoretical thinking has a number of causes, the result being that she alone possesses and keeps intact the protologic principle of knowledge.2 Besides being common to all the parts of the encyclopedia, this principle belongs in a very special way to the teachings of reason and constitutes the first science – the foundation and entryway of all theory. And since the axiom of creation has been discarded or at least obscured and altered by the non-Catholic schools and by all those who have withdrawn from Italian influences, protology can rightly be considered a privilege of Italic philosophy. And surely it is reasonable that the first science is neither a futile effort nor a sterile desire only where the biblical and encyclopedic Prime is preserved.3 Dissenting thinkers, whether ancient or modern, have only the name and the appearances of that science. Either they do not know the principle of creation or they reject it, and this forces them to introduce a preposterous confusion or an absurd divorce into the foundations of knowledge, and to base the premises of their arguments on dualism or pantheism. Those systems, far from aiding science, are its greatest enemies. By unifying the manifold or multiplying unity, they substitute darkness and disorder for light and scientific order. The only truthful knowledge must put unity and variety together in such a way that the latter obeys the former so that they are neither confused by conjunction nor separated by distinction as when treated like equals or competitors. The pantheist, who strives to assimilate contraries and unify the manifold, is compelled to carve unity up and diversify what is identical, on

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the one hand mixing up what is different, on the other making variable what is the same – exactly the reverse of a thoughtful and scientific approach. The pantheist forces the reflective distinction of cognition so far back into the confusion of intuition, which by itself is powerless to give order to science, that he actually eliminates those first, crude outlines of intuition that provide a guiding thread for later reflection. They are like emplacements or parapets marking an accessible route on which thoughtful people can reach the goal by a direct path without wandering randomly. Pantheism can thus be compared to that ultimate and absolute chaos imagined by certain atheist philosophers. Not only would this reduce the world to primeval disorder, it would also preclude any further cosmogony, killing the seeds of life that float in the primeval night and bring forth from its womb the wonders that we see. The efforts of the dualist are even more futile and paltry. He not only splits the concept of God in half; he also eliminates the essence of knowledge, which lies in the order, the rhythm, and the placement and systematic linkage of principles and conclusions. Just as these things require number and harmony, they also need unity. The problems of pantheism and dualism cannot be solved by combining them and balancing one against the other – as some of the ancients tried to do, especially Pythagoras, and the famous Hegel among the moderns. Hegel’s system, to mention it in passing, is basically a renewal (a worsening, in part) of Pythagoreanism and a return to the infantile philosophy of paganism. In Hegel’s theory, contrariety is eliminated by identity, and dualism is corrected and remedied by pantheism – a cure worse than the disease. The brilliant German was not aware that the reconciling dialectic must operate on the concept of creation, not on that of sameness. Nor did he see that one should look not in absolute thought for the substantial coexistence of contraries but in absolute will for the cause that produces them. The principle of creation is the hinge on which the first science must turn. And this is possible only where the Catholic word resounds in its purity, where pantheistic teachings in every era have been a scandal – even stranger than they were rare. Exactly such a place is Italy, whose philosophy, first-born in the Occident, has renewed itself many times in different forms, following various political events on the peninsula but always keeping itself clean of the infection of pantheism – or less infected than the philosophies of other regions. Before Christ, all dissenting philosophies vacillated between the pantheist system and dualism, producing from these two systems either a

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clever composite or a shapeless one, more or less homogenous or heterogenous. An almost pure pantheism prevailed in the Orient, save for the sects of Confucius and Zoroaster, which aimed more at practice than theory. Being more active and ethical than rationalist, they had to stick with whichever of the two opposed theories did more to preserve human freedom. Nonetheless, the dualities of the I Ching and of the Nask dimly suggest a prior pantheistic unity, and the subtle speculations of their interpreters on the Tai Chi and Zervan Akarana make you suspect the very ancient emanationism of the first Taoists (before Lao Tse and probably the same as the Samaneans of Central Asia and Northern India, who seem to have preceded the last Buddha by a few centuries) and perhaps of U Sheng and Aoma.4 Now of all the ancient schools, one came nearest the truth by skimming the surface, so to speak, of the great doctrine of creation. Its cradle was in the Occident, its glory in large measure Italian, and later it became the ancestress of Greek philosophy. Its three luminaries – Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato – were all but Catholic, given the times in which they lived. Compared to them, the other sects of the day seem almost schismatic and heretical. All three understood the imperfection of that pagan orthodoxy, however, and they actually aspired to reconstruct the primitive faith. All three felt deeply the need for a new light of revelation to dispel the darkness of their age. The first of them – Italian like us as well Greek, and nourished on the old Doric, Etruscan, and Pelasgian wisdom – founded the Italic school. His is the most illuminating portrait of Italy’s ancient wisdom that history provides for us. Pythagoreanism, where one finds our philosophy in its most ancient form as well as the most exotic, has four main features. The first of these is universality in every field. Because the sage of Croton joined the active life with the contemplative and craft with religion, his establishment was a cult, a commonwealth, a monastery, a school, a college, and an academy all at once. The second characteristic is cultural and scientific universality. The Pythagoreans were the living portrait of the encyclopedic intellect of the Italians. They embraced every discipline accessible to their age, not satisfied with separate insights but studying the mutual relations of everything knowable and marrying the delights of myth and the symbolism of numbers with doctrinal rigour. This is how they foresaw many scientific findings of the moderns and a few of their fantasies. Applying music to astronomy, they were Dante’s precursors in poetry and forerunners of Kepler, Galileo, and Copernicus in theorizing about the heavens.

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The tempering of Oriental pantheism, by way of the categorical duality of their ten fundamental opposites, is the third hallmark of the Italic school. What is a step backward in the moderns – in Hegel, for example – was a real improvement in the days of the Samian or Tyrrhenian philosopher. Much more than in Hegelian dualism, the monad clearly dominates the dyad in the Pythagorean system. The principle that unifies opposites and resolves differences by inserting itself between them is harmony and not identity. Finally – their fourth and last distinction – one must attribute to the sages of Magna Graecia the first seed of theoretical and political realism in the West, the claim to recognize in rational concepts and civil laws an objective reality, an absolute value, divine and independent not only of human will but also of the contingency of created things and the vagaries of institutions made in the mold of humanity. The metaphysical realism of the Pythagoreans, written up and ripened by Plato and the Alexandrians with the doctrine of the Logos and Demiurge, passed to the Christian school, where it was transformed and cleansed of any stain of pantheism by the special zeal of Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventura, and Thomas. They are the tetrarchy of Catholic thought that preceded the revived paganism of Luther and Descartes. Political realism – hereditary monarchy, in other words, tempered by natural and elective aristocracy and forming the Doric and Pelasgian ideal of government – was then transmitted by the school of Croton to Etruscan Rome. It was modelled on the Pythagorean cosmos, where the earth and other planets move around a motionless sun in a perpetual and harmonic cycle. The legend that makes Numa a student of Pythagoras, as I have mentioned elsewhere, preserves some of the history. The Roman Republic was really an interregnum that grew out of princely abuses. Caesar’s mighty genius, rather than repeat the work of the Gracchi, resumed that of Romulus and Servius Tullius, bringing the Latin state back to its foundations, making patricians agree with plebeians by means of the tempering harmony of royal power. Having anticipated efforts by Nerva and Trajan that were less durable because they came too late, Caesar would be the saviour of the fatherland, not a parricide. It was not just Pythagorean thought that Etruscan Rome used to improve its form of government. Theoretical teachings also entered later when seeds sown by the son of Mnesarchus in southern Italy and then transported to Greece returned home, crossing into Latium. The three most famous schools of Hellas – the Academy, Stoa, and Peripa-

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tos – were children of the Socratic movement but grandchildren of the Italic cults. From his teacher Anaxagoras, Socrates took the great principle of Nous, which gives order to Hyle and remains apart from it. In substance this concept is Pythagorean. And from the influence of Italic science came those remarkable moderations of pantheism found in all the Greek schools without exception, even those, such as the Eleatic and Alexandrian, that held on to more of the Oriental doctrines. Latin philosophy, the second form of Italian theorizing, is different in character from Greek thought. When Greek ideas returned to our peninsula and settled in Rome, they acquired a more austere and practical nature – not as broad as Pythagoreanism yet no less wise, and in accord with strict civic intelligence. Because of this, the Greek sect that did best in Rome was Stoicism. It became livelier and exuberant and showed a new face – a system in which ethical issues have greater value and significance than other parts of knowledge, a system based on the doctrine of human freedom and intrinsically opposed to pantheism. And even if Roman Stoicism has more depth than breadth, being more practical than theoretical, lacking scope but well endowed with power, it compensates by being more moral and religious than the Greek Porch. The theoretical weakness of Latin wisdom (the reason for its brief career) corresponds to a similar defect that ruined Roman institutions. These were in many ways excellent, but they erred in that the government of the metropolis fed on the nation. This led to the war of the provinces (called Italic with good reason) and ultimately to the total destruction of the Republic. In Roman philosophy, then, science was too narrow and was smothered by craft, by which I mean the practical application of principles. The study of ideas was subordinated to that of facts, doing all the more damage, because, while the periphery yielded to the centre in the political order, the opposite happened in philosophy. Science, like Roman literature, had little vitality, and both became sterile even before the assaults and abuses of the barbarians. Hence it was easy to exchange them for the divine wisdom of Christianity, in which thought and action, idea and fact, theory and practice are in wondrous balance and accord. The philosophy of the Fathers, even though it spread through the whole Catholic world, was ours especially, and we can consider it the third form of Italian thought. Establishing its centre in a Catholic Rome, philosophy drew from the city the breath that gave it life. Tertullian, Augustine, and Bernard may have been born outside Italy, but they thought and wrote like Romans, just as Trajan and Seneca felt and acted like Latins though they were born far from the Tiber and Latium. The

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Fathers restored Pythagorean and Platonic realism, removing it from the fog of pantheism and informing it with the sovereign doctrine of creation. The Scholastics, Italian by origin and allegiance, continued their work and put it in more rigorous form. Scholasticism, the fourth form of our philosophy, split into the two opposed camps of nominalism and realism. The former, subdividing into more sects, represents Aristotelian teaching at various levels of development, from the still Platonic Stagirite through the sensism and atheism of Strato. Between them comes Theophrastus, a wonderful talent, yet more skilled at observing facts than at theorizing philosophically. The most celebrated authors and advocates of the nominalist system were French or English – Roscelin, Abelard, and Ockham – while the leaders of realism came from Italy. In a daring Platonic way, Anselm of Aosta and Bonaventura of Bagnoregio expressed the same teaching to which Thomas Aquinas brought the reserve and methodical stiffness of the Peripatetics. Thus, the intellectual war of the Celtic and Germanic mind against Pelasgian and Italian wisdom started with the Middle Ages and the beginnings of scholasticism. And even though the divine Bernard was French, his standing as a monk and the teachings that he upheld in his fight with Abelard show priestly Roman thought in conflict with Gallic and secular novelties. The waning of realism and scholasticism was contemporary with the demise of papal dictatorship and Italian primacy, and this double decline followed from the intellectual and political influences of the barbarians on the peninsula. Because Italy and the Pontiff represent the Idea manifest as a people and a person, they cannot preserve their rule when the senses take the place of ideas, following the canons of nominalism. This is pagan sensism brought into Italian Christianity by barbarian teachers under the cloak of a false Aristotle. It was the first step in modern dissent, which was reared and nourished by the Saxon monk and the Breton philosopher, just as dissent in the early Church originated with the Gnostics, who were in a sense the nominalists of emanationism and pantheism.5 Renewed studies of classical antiquity in the fifteenth century gave birth to a fifth form of Italian philosophy which in substance was a revival of paganism. Thus, despite the extraordinary merit of Pomponazzi, Patrizi, Cardano, Telesio, Bruno, Campanella, and a good many others, their teachings did not take root among us. The Italian mind, abandoning theory almost entirely, turned its attention for two centuries to politi-

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cal wisdom and to the science of calculation and experiment, guided by two of the greatest, Machiavelli and Galileo. In between came Sarpi, who had the talents of both and greatly resembled them in the breadth of his mind and the nature of his studies.6 He came particularly close to the first, applying the rarest gifts while suffering anxieties that matched the degeneration of the people and the declining times. The instinct for theory stirred again in Italy with Vico. To renew Platonic and Christian realism, he had the stunning idea of going back to their first sources, not Greek but Italic. He would rediscover the elements of ancient Pelasgian wisdom among the remains of the Latin language and reconstitute the body of that wisdom, as modern geologists reconstructed the dimensions and organic features of another world from its scattered bones. But Vico was not understood in his time, and even in our day very few understand him. The problem is not so much the difficulties of expression and partial mistakes that make some of his teachings hazy. To appreciate his deeply Italian thought and sensibility simply demands more strength and subtlety of mind than one can find today. The New Science can be compared to a fertile land that God set in the ocean, keeping it unknown and uninhabited for a long time, saving it for the diligent industry of future sailors and settlers. Thus, a century after it was written, while still buried under the dust of libraries, this astonishing work had the allure of a discovery. Already during Vico’s lifetime, the teachings of Descartes – Protestantism applied to philosophy – had leaked into Italy and flourished there because the learned were more inattentive than selective or insightful. I note that Luther and Descartes, the two chief enemies of Italian wisdom, visited the peninsula and carried back from there a harsh and secret rancour against our ways, giving vent to this in their teachings. And if the philosopher was less violent and fearsome than the friar, at least in appearance, he was also luckier. His teachings won citizenship in our country under the two successive forms of psychological rationalism and sensism. Yet among these aberrations the prudence of our ancestors still shone forth. While embracing the alien heresy, we could at least dispense with its most outrageous conclusions and disagreements. In the past century, for example, Genovesi tempered Locke’s teachings with those of Leibniz and was more eclectic than Cartesian.7 And we remember Romagnosi as a deeper and more moderate sensist than his contemporaries who taught the same system across the mountains. With Romagnosi one can say that the servile habit of Gallic theorizing

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ended among us.8 Still, those who have lived some time among foreigners and have largely forgotten the thought of the fatherland find it hard to take it up again, choosing to return home only after having sampled other regions. In the same way, after the Italian mind has shaken off the French yoke and forsaken the site of servitude, it wishes to try other countries, wandering in the wilderness before returning to rest in the promised land, held by the fathers of old. Italy’s is a strange destiny. Having lost her self-awareness for many centuries, she gropes her way to find it again, looking where it is not nor can be, yet believing that she can have peace without returning, like the prodigal son of the Gospel, to the bosom of her parent. Such is the final form of Italian philosophy as it still persists in the present – a clever imitation of Scottish and German teachings. Our brave and honoured Galluppi is the Reid of Italy, drawing people back to the truth by correct understanding improved by deep analysis, but without breaking through the boundaries of observation and experiments. Armed with these implements, Galluppi gloriously vanquished the sensism of his predecessors, combating it with these weapons of his. He made our thinkers familiar again with that shrewd forbearance, experimental and inductive, that produces useful discoveries in the sphere of internal facts – the application of Galileo’s method to psychology. But direct sensation is not enough for philosophy to be a science. Sensible phenomena cannot be completely explained without rising higher and entering the secret sanctuary of reason. Thus, as the Scottish school was displaced by the Critical school in the previous period, in our time Rosmini succeeded Galluppi. From terminology to incidental themes and beyond, the sect that he founded cleverly revived the errors and pretensions of German Cartesianism – of Kantianism, in other words. Renewed and Italianized by the illustrious Roveretan, in one respect this Kantianism is inferior to the teachings of the Scots and Galluppi because it moves away from the reliable guidance of common sense and experience.9 On the other hand, it provides no remedy for the defects of the aforementioned schools since the reason to which it has recourse is a sham, empty and sterile. Reason for Rosmini and Kant is purely subjective, however they may name or define it, and a subjective faculty cannot be the foundation of science. It neither helps the mind escape the limits of psychology nor provides a firm basis for that same psychology. No wonder, then, that Rosminianism has shown itself up now to be so unproductive in the hands of its author. He has been able to extract nothing more from it than an insubstantial ethics bristling with the spines and

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subtleties of Scotism, while really straining to squeeze an ontology of some sort out of it. If Rosminianism means to be orthodox, it is infertile, reluctant to bring to light the consequences contained in its principles, subordinating a culpable fertility to its scientific impotence. But should the author and his followers become less pious and timorous than they are, one would soon see the pantheism of Fichte and Hegel emerging in Italy. This is where Rosmini’s principles lead, without a doubt. Like the critical philosophy, his thought moves ultimately to absolute scepticism and nihilism. They are the ultimate terminus of psychologism, as shown by the current state of the Hegelian school. The vogue for Rosminianism that existed for a time in some parts of Italy, even though it is gone today, is a sign that German dissent could take the place of Celtic dissent if our native wisdom does not defend against it. Already circulating on the peninsula are certain works that present German pantheism as a discovery. These foreign goods, far from helping science, do it injury. The learned, not much used to fending for themselves and having no sure rule for judging the real worth of those works, eagerly accept them. But to substitute German rationalism for French sensism would be to leap from the frying pan into the fire, which should give pause to those few who still see some good in Rosminianism. If wiser minds today still feel the need to return to the ancient wisdom of the fatherland, why halt in Germany after leaving France? Why drink from the cup of error and drain it to the last drop before tasting the pure waters of truth? Why drag out an apostasy that has become tedious and annoying even to those who profess it? Why postpone reconsecration? You Italians who drink from foreign springs, know that you are exiles even while living in Italy. Your exile is wilful, not a matter of need, not innocent but culpable. Of your own will, you disown your native worship and venerate strange gods from abroad. You are exiles not in body but in soul. While your person remains on the peninsula, your spirit dwells across the mountains, conforming thoughts and feelings to the ancient enemies of your fatherland. Ah, return for once to your senses! Put an end to a long and sorry error. Learn to feel and philosophize like Italians. Turn your ears to the words of your compatriot, harshly separated from our common mother but perhaps more Italian than you. Even while far away, he lives spiritually in that sweet fatherland, feeds on her ancient wisdom, and thinks about her past, while you, breathing her healthy air and enjoying her

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vital light, persist in destroying her reputation by repaying her favours with ingratitude and insulting the Providence that made you her sons. Tapping the vein of wisdom on the other side of the mountains is less reasonable and excusable for us Italians today because it has dried up. Anyone who makes use of it, and, until recently, found plenty of nourishment in it (illusory though it was) is now forced to look elsewhere. And so the time seems ripe to restore the ancient Pelasgian wisdom by perfecting and combining it with the divine illuminations of Christianity, and then to inaugurate it in the rest of Europe. Having squandered her intellectual resources and being now reduced to extreme poverty, Europe can restore herself only by drawing anew from the inexhaustible mine of Italian intellect. One outstanding talent has already undertaken the work of reform by leading his compatriots back to the best sources and renewing the ancient Platonic marriage – which never should have ended – between delightful writing and rigorous teaching. Terenzio Mamiani, taking up Vico’s idea, took up the thread of Italy’s philosophical traditions again and showed by example (as Vico never did, leaving his discoveries largely ineffective) how one can and must put theoretical ideas into an elegant garb that is all our own, removed from barbaric crudities and foreign acquisitions alike. This is of the highest importance not only for literature but also for theory. The conjunction between the idea and its sign is so deep and tight that thinking and reasoning like an Italian becomes difficult, almost impossible, when one’s consciousness, imagination, and expression are barbarian. In fact, what is good taste in writing becomes good sense in thinking when people express themselves with this double endowment of two different forms of the same thing – good judgment – whereby the mind grasps exemplars of things in the intellect and externalizes them correctly. In his latest works, Mamiani comes close to this wise and temperate form of philosophy, in which reason and experience, facts and ideas, synthesis and analysis are in wonderful agreement because each of them is assigned to the level appropriate for the work of science. This form of philosophy is almost a privilege of the Italian genius that excels in forcefulness because it is the most temperate. The same approach to thought and philosophical studies shone in a contemporary of ours whose name is known and beloved in Piedmont. It would be so in the rest of Italy had his fate matched the goodness and greatness of his mind, heart, and teaching. Luigi Ornato, close and heroic friend of Santorre Santarosa, saw the fatherland again after a

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voluntary exile of ten years only to end his days suffering from a long and painful illness.10 He was skilled in many fields of learning and quite expert in Greek, but he directed all this knowledge towards philosophy and religion, the apex of all his thoughts. He lived and died in love with the Idea and found consolation in contemplating it, imitating Galileo and Homer, whose blindness afflicted him in the last years of his life. I thought it not out of place to mention this man, whose modesty and misfortune deprived him of the fame he deserved, because it seems fitting to me that Italy should measure her gratitude not so much by results, which often depend on chance, as by the noble efforts and great-souled intentions of her sons. The reform conceived by Vico and pursued by Mamiani cannot be brought to completion unless the ancient Pelasgian tradition is joined with the Christian and both are reduced to a single principle whose substance is based on reason while the expression that gives meaning to it belongs to revelation. This is the principle of creation, the only act that comprehends and controls all knowledge, infusing it with a new breath of life. The idea of creation is as old among mankind as the truth that corresponds to it. But since it was first obscured and then lost by the dissenting peoples, this idea has not had sovereign power until now in Christian philosophy, nor has it gained the supreme place that it would need to inform every part of the encyclopedic enterprise. There are various causes to which one might attribute the decline of ancient Pelasgian realism and of the realism that flourished in the two Christian periods of the Fathers and the Middle Ages. In any event, philosophical opinions based on truth do not decay or decline except when the method used to develop and establish them does not correspond to their intrinsic truth and goodness. And since imperfection in methods prevents good teachings from taking root, they cannot flourish again unless the old flaw is fixed, and, as the truth unfolds, new supplements and new levels of subtlety and splendour are added to it. The Fathers and the most distinguished masters of the schools served the Pelasgian philosophy very well, to be sure, cleansing it of every stain of pantheism and handling many parts of it with mastery. Their work was incomplete, however: the principle of creation as it actually informs the thoughts and writings of these outstanding figures was not put formally at the head of their science, so the principle was not established and integrated by means of a scientific formula. One cause of this, I believe, was that the Christian schools conferred supreme authority on the names of

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Plato and Aristotle. They repudiated their errors but did not improve their methods. The other cause was the difficulty – almost a moral impossibility – of making a new blueprint for an enterprise as all-encompassing as the totality of human knowledge. When false religions and flawed civilizations die, they leave behind them a clear trail that usually lasts as long as the eras when they prevailed. Hence, since paganism was rooted in Europe’s soil for so long, many traces of it have naturally survived and still remain in the present. With these residues so conspicuous in the arts, literature, and laws, in customs and institutions and even in the names of people and objects, no wonder that the situation has been no different in the philosophical disciplines. Therefore, one can truly state – without insulting even the holiest and most eminent names – that even when European philosophy was orthodox in substance, it preserved some part of pagan heterodoxy in its methods and procedures. Briefly, this heterodox element can be traced to the lack of a genuine ontologism. Even in full flight, pagan philosophy was psychological or cosmological, taking mankind or the world as points of departure, or in any case marrying these two concepts to the supreme and absolute Idea as the start of its theorizing. Thus, the Prime of the most ancient Italic school was the duality of the Doric Theocosm, like the Cronotopos of Iran or Chaldaea among the Orientals.11 The pantheism in the Pythagorean concept was tempered, through its Pelasgian character, by the distinction between Theos and Hyle – a distinction that preserved the decree of religion, up to a certain point, at the loss of scientific unity. With the doctrine of creation, Christianity reduced the Prime of faith to its ontological simplicity and purity. But Christianity professed not to intervene directly in the human disciplines, contenting itself with authoritative instruction about true belief without telling how to explain or demonstrate it by a scientific method. For this reason, the psychological Prime was not rigorously discussed in the Christian schools. Many distinguished it from the ontological Prime. Others, realizing that the two Primes are identical, set the concept of Being apart from that of creation and thereby deprived the protological formula of the most essential condition of its integrity. These scientific mistakes did not prejudice the essence of doctrine as long as theology took precedence over theory and religion played the propaedeutic role – doing duty for intuition, as it were, in relation to reflective cognition and science in general. But when philosophy was detached from its leader and chose to go its own way, the defect in the

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protological principle bore fruit. Within a short span of years, the psychologism of Descartes gave birth to pantheism, biblical rationalism, sensism, fatalism, and immoralism, which were seen combined and unified as a system in the work of Spinoza. Today, therefore, we need to construct the fundamental formula of knowledge. Other philosophical questions are of little moment in comparison to it. This question is the basis and meaning of them all, since the whole structure of science depends on its resolution. Protology is the primary theoretical need of the current era and is well-suited to its character.12 It matches today’s aspiration to restore ancient orthodoxy in the field of reality and knowledge by driving resurrected paganism back to the grave, while at the same time giving new order to the encyclopedia and to Europe, shaken and shattered as they are by three centuries of political and religious schism. For this reason, the establishment of principles and sources is of the greatest consequence in every sphere. Today, this is the unanimous instinct of popular desire, of learned research, and of serious thinking in the various domains of action and inquiry. But the only possible protology is the one that is based on the Ideal Formula, which expresses the first origin of things and produces the first principles from which cognitions emerge.13 The doctrine of the Formula is both old and new. It is old in that its seeds are included in the principle of creation, written by God’s hand on the frontispiece of the book of revelation. It is new because no such principle has been scientifically explained until now. This should cause us no surprise. As I have just noted, Christian philosophy retained part of the procedure of pagan science until the sixteenth century (beyond the damage done by nominalists, even among the ranks of the realists), and from then on it was weakened by Cartesianism, which is a second paganism. This is now throwing off its last sparks, which foretells the coming triumph of Christian ontologism. Burning below the surface and consuming all their tinder, these fires are naturally dying out to leave a firm and fertile soil ready for the human industry that soon produces fruitful fields and populous cities, the nesting-ground of science and civilization.

NOTES 1 Gioberti (1843) is the first edition; Gioberti (1938−9), III, used here, is the Edizione nazionale.

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Gioberti, Primacy 2 Gioberti calls his project ‘protology,’ the study of what comes first – origins and first principles – and he sees this as a kind of ontology or metaphysics, as distinct from an epistemology or psychology. 3 On Gioberti’s use of the term ‘Prime,’ see the beginning of the next selection, from Gioberti (1840). 4 Among the less familiar names in this list, Nasks are volumes or sections of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture; Zervan Akarana is the Zoroastrian Boundless Time; Porphyry mentions Samanaioi as Bactrian priests; the Emperor Huizong (U Sheng) promoted Taoism. 5 Albert of Saxony and Peter Abelard. 6 The Servite theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552−1623), who wrote a critical history of the Council of Trent and supported Galileo, was a critic of the papacy and loyal to his native Venice against papal Rome. 7 For Genovesi, see the Introduction, section 3. 8 For Romagnosi, see the Introduction, section 2. 9 Roveretan: Rosmini was born in Rovereto. 10 Annibale Santorre, the Piedmontese Count of Santarosa (1783−1825), died supporting Greek revolutionaries in 1825, a few years after the failure of his own constitutionalist uprising in 1821; Victor Cousin and Ugo Foscolo supported him in exile. Santarosa’s comrade, Luigi Ornato (1787−1842), was also a philosopher; he studied Plato under the influence of Malebranche, Vico, and Jacobi: see Gentile (1917): 143−65. 11 For ‘Prime’ see n2 above; both Theocosm (Godworld) and Cronotopos (Timeplace) express dualities. 12 For protology, see the first paragraph of Gioberti’s statement. 13 For the Ideal Formula, see section 8 of the Introduction and the following selection from Gioberti (1840).

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Introduction to the Study of Philosophy1

Book I, Chapter 4, ‘The Ideal Formula’ What we call the Ideal Formula is a proposition that expresses the Idea in a clear, simple, and precise way by means of a judgment. Since a person cannot think without judging, he cannot think the Idea without making a judgment whose meaning is the Ideal Formula. This must consist of two terms joined together by a third, in keeping with the nature of every judgment, and it must not go wrong by excess or defect. It would go wrong by defect if it did not contain all the elements that constitute the Idea – if, in other words, each notion that occurs in the human mind could not be reduced synthetically to some one of the elements of that Formula. It would go wrong by excess if there were something more in its explicit content than the constituent elements – if, that is to say, one of the concepts that the Formula expresses were contained in others signified by it. In taking up this topic, I do not intend at this time to proceed with the rigour of method that befits ontology – a pure and strict synthesis that would be out of place in this introductory work. Since the doctrine that I am setting forth (though at its roots it is as ancient as the truth) is completely alien to current practice in philosophy, I thought that I should smooth the way with the type of presentation that would permit me to compare the main points of my approach with customary practice and bring my system as near as possible to today’s science. Now contemporary philosophy is by nature psychological. Ontology, even when it is permitted, is considered only an adjunct to the experimental science of the human mind. My view is just the opposite, and I hold it firmly: in fact, in the appropriate place I hope to be able to show, with evidence that will

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leave nothing wanting, that ontology is wholly independent of ordinary psychology and that the latter is entirely dependent on the former. Nonetheless, since it is quite true that psychology must correspond to ontology and be interwoven with it as facts are linked with ideas, the one can serve to confirm the claims of the other and thus promote the intent of a work, which, like this introduction, is merely preparatory. Therefore, I will make psychological excursions and digressions whenever it serves my purpose, and thus I will proceed as need be, by way of analysis and synthesis. I will try to do this in such a way, however, that the main points of the synthetic process are sufficiently explicit, and that the argument resulting from them is capable either of convincing readers accustomed to theoretical subjects, or else of giving them the means to help and correct me, should I happen to fall into error. Establishing the Ideal Formula goes along with searching for what can be called the philosophical Prime. Up to now philosophers have laboured at two inquiries, which in substance come down to just one. One group went hunting for the first idea, another for the first thing. The first idea and the first thing are those on which all other ideas, in the order of the knowable, and all other things, in the order of the real, in some way depend. I say in some way because philosophers are divided into many factions on the specific nature of this dependence. I call the first idea the psychological Prime and the first thing the ontological Prime. But since the first idea and the first thing are identified with one another, in my view, and because the two Primes become one, I give this absolute principle the name philosophical Prime, and I consider it the foundation and sole basis of all the real and all the knowable. On the problem of the ontological Prime, philosophers can be divided into three classes – theist, naturalist, and pantheist – whose names themselves indicate which Prime each recognizes. The Prime of the pantheists is the synthesis of the other two; either the concept of God or that of nature can dominate it, giving pantheism a particular character. All the oriental philosophers, who alone deserve the name ancients in an absolute sense, are theists or pantheists. Pure naturalism – atheism, in other words – is an analytic, modern, and European commodity. In the system of Capila, as it appears from the account of it given by experts on India, the concept of nature is much the dominant, yet it is not the only concept. Hence, contrary to popular opinion, I cannot bring myself to believe that the followers of the Sanchia that is commonly called atheist are atheists.2 Elsewhere I will set forth the reasons why I believe that the Pracriti of Capila is nature in the pantheist sense and therefore contains

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a divine element.3 Thus, I regard pure atheism as foreign to the Orient, at least if we are talking about schools and teachings that have gained some celebrity. The idea expressed by the ontological Prime, whatever it may be, is not simple but composed of more concepts than could make a single idea without being connected together and organized. Nor could this organic entity subsist unless, among the various concepts from which it comes, there were one dominating as the origin or logical root from which the others merely derive. But this original concept of the ontological Prime, coming before other notions only in the order of logic, becomes of necessity a psychological Prime, and then from this perspective the philosophers of whom we are speaking are forced to leave pure ontology and move on to psychology. But if the search for the ontological Prime leads of necessity to seeking the psychological Prime, this suggests that the two Primes must make only one in substance, and that the first thing must also be the first idea. Nor in truth could it be otherwise, since every thing is a concept and every concept a thing. Hence, if it is certain that the psychological Prime must in some way produce all concepts and the ontological Prime all things, the two Primes must of necessity be identical. Separating the two Primes gave birth to psychology and completely ruined philosophy, as the course of our argument will reveal. Reuniting the two Primes in just one gives us the philosophical Prime, which is absolute – the basis of the real and the knowable. Philosophers (including in their number teachers of religion also, as one should) involved in the search for the psychological Prime, either to formulate the ontological Prime or to solve a problem of psychology, are divided into a large number of factions that are quite different, at least in form if not always in substance. I shall not undertake to make an exact enumeration of all the ideas that have been baptized as Primes because it would require great effort not strictly required by my present purpose. But I think I do not stray far from the truth in reducing the leading ideas among them to seventeen, as follows: the One, the Necessary, the Intelligent, the Intelligible, the Incomprehensible, the Good, the Infinite, the Universal, the Immense, the Eternal, Absolute Potentiality, Pure and Free Act, Cause, Substance, the Absolute, the Identical, and Being. But a quick analysis that anyone can do for himself shows that the first thirteen concepts cannot be psychologically primitive. Spinoza and the modern pantheists of Germany have given greater currency to the ideas of Substance, the Absolute, and Identity. But these are secondary

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because they are relative: the first refers to the qualities or modes that presuppose it; the other two imply the idea of relation in general by declaring it absent. A relative concept resulting from two prior concepts cannot be prime. What remains, then, is the concept of Being, which constitutes the psychological Prime and therefore the philosophical Prime, according to the stipulation that we have made. That Being is the philosophical Prime is a claim dating back to primitive times, as we shall see elsewhere. Among the moderns who professed it outright, the most illustrious, no doubt, is Nicolas Malebranche, neglected by his compatriots; they preferred German fantasies or the frivolities of Descartes to the teachings of the greatest thinker of the age after Leibniz – or the greatest French philosopher of all time. I am not speaking about any of the Germans who have revived that opinion, though only in appearance, altering and bringing it into disrepute with the nonsense of pantheism. In our day, the illustrious Antonio Rosmini, in his New Essay on the Origin of Ideas, partly renewed the ancient opinion and brought it into the debate that gives the main theme of his book a depth and sharpness of insight uncommon today. As psychological analysis, Rosmini’s work is more complete than that of his predecessors, and without doubt it has led science forward. No one before him has made as full and thoughtful an investigation of what I call the psychological Prime – insofar as reflection can deal with it. But for theoretical science this is not enough, not enough for that same analytic understanding of the mind that cannot avoid errors and attain its goal, even within merely experiential limits, unless it is based on the principles and conclusions of a higher discipline. This, in my view, Rosmini has not done. Following the practices of psychologism, he sought new results for science as an analytic observer, but as an ontologist he may have cut his gains short, not taking science back to that height where the best of the ancients had put it. This takes nothing at all away from the just praise due him, since in this case the loss must be attributed to method and the gain to genius, the one being the fault of the time, the other the merit of the philosopher. But if anyone should ask me why the eminent Author followed a defective method, I would answer that it is not given to the best minds to rise completely above the problems of their times. I will describe the reasons that cause me to speak in this way, realizing that I am dealing with one of those people who are not offended when, for love of truth, someone disagrees with their views and explains the grounds for disagreement. I assume that the reader is familiar with the work of the illustrious writer; other-

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wise, it would not be possible to understand what I say since I am forced to hold myself to a strict brevity and to reduce another person’s arguments to short formulas.4 Rosmini’s doctrine, insofar as it has to do with my subject, can be reduced to this basic proposition: that the psychological Prime is not identical to the ontological Prime. This in substance is the whole mistaken component of his system, in my view. But since my way of speaking is different from that of the illustrious Author and outside his system, I must examine some of his conclusions. I shall reduce Rosmini’s theory to the four points that follow: 1. All ideas have originated from the idea of being.5 2. The primitive idea of being represents only possible being.6 3. Perception of the real existence of created things is an action of a judgment by which an equation is made between the idea of possible being and sensory apprehension.7 4. The concept of the reality of absolute Being, of God, is not had directly and by intuition but only in an indirect way and by demonstration.8 Let us examine them. 1. All ideas have originated from the idea of being. I accept this first statement with the qualifications that I will mention shortly but could not express here without making other points first. 2. The primitive idea of being represents only possible being. If this claim were true, it would follow that the idea of the possible precedes that of the real, which in the first place is contrary to the practice of psychology. Given that the abstract follows the concrete and arises from it according to the natural process of the mind, concrete cognition of the real must precede abstract cognition of the possible. But if one asserts that a different practice holds for the first act of the mind and that the beginning of intellectual activity takes place in a particular way, I note that this way, whatever it may be, must conform to the practice of logic. But according to the practice of logic, the possible presupposes the real because something possible could not be conceived without something real. If nothing is in reality, nothing can be. A potency that consisted in a mere potentiality without a prior act would be nothing, not a true potency. This is why God is called pure act and why his power is included in his actuality. Nor can one claim that recognizing this truth is a result of argu-

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ment, moving up by reasoning from the concept of the possible to that of the real, since in fact the mind moves down from the concept of the real to that of the possible. To prove this, assume that we have only the idea of the possible, and tell me whether this possibility, as such, is real or apparent. If you say that it is apparent, the basis of the knowable is destroyed and scepticism is inevitable. If it is real, the first concept clearly represents not a mere possibility but a reality in that a real possible, as possible, is real absolutely unless it refers to a prior reality of which it is the abstract – which is contrary to the present case where we are speaking of the first concept. A mere possibility, if it deserves belief, is entirely real because it is not only real but necessary, and indeed everyone agrees on the necessity of possibles as possibles. But if the possible is represented to a person’s intuition as real, it is clear that the primitive concept must be the real and not the possible since the real is nothing but real and becomes possible by abstraction, whereas by itself the possible cannot become real and is not possible. Therefore, it is against the practice of logic to make the concept of the real arise from that of the possible and assume that the latter can exist without the former. A question will come up: In what way does the concept of the possible arise from that of the real? I answer that the possible is the real only inasmuch as it has been thought, and hence it arises from the mind’s reflecting on the first concept of the real. Since a human is endowed with the faculty of thinking back on his own actions, he can fix his mind upon the intuition of the real once he has had that intuition. In this reflective act, the immediate object of thinking is the thinking itself – the intuition. But since intuition apprehends the real, the reflective act cannot apprehend the intuition without also perceiving the real conjoined with it. It by no means perceives the real in itself, however, since in that case the reflective act would not differ from the direct; it perceives the real in the intuition instead. But the real considered in intuition loses the individuality that makes it real and keeps only the abstract, generic form that makes it possible. The psychological transformation of the real into the possible thus results from uniting reflection with intuition. Relating the object to reflection gives rise to the concept of the possible, as relating the object to intuition produces the notion of the real. Let us then suppose that I have a triangular body before my eyes. By looking at it, I acquire the idea of a real triangle. But if I then reflect on this same idea and regard the triangle not as outside of me but as in my mind, I have the idea of the

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possible triangle because the concept that I have of that triangle applies to an infinite number of real triangles. In short, the concept of the real becomes a concept of the possible by losing its concreteness and becoming abstract, which occurs by means of reflection. With regard to the mind that possesses it, the idea of Being needs to be considered in two different moments: in the first act and in the second act. The first act is a work of intuition, the second is a work of reflection. In the first act, Being is represented as pure reality, completely simple, absolute, necessary, and perfect; in the second act it is represented as possible. But possibility presupposes reality just as reflection presupposes intuition, neither more nor less. The proportion and correspondence that hold between the two psychological acts and the two ontological states is absolutely precise. The notion of possibility implies an intellectual elaboration, an abstraction, that cannot occur in intuition, a completely simple faculty that consists merely of contemplating the object as it is, without adding anything to it or taking anything away. The possible can no more be intuited with the eyes of the mind than seen with those of the body. And truly, if the object of intuition were the possible, it would be correct to assume either that the possible is real, which takes us back to the earlier argument, or that an object can subsist solely in the state of the possible, which is absurd. Indeed, one can ask if the objective referent of the idea of Being is in the mind or outside the mind. Anyone who says that it is in the mind would incur all the sceptical consequences of psychologism, and the objective truth of things would be destroyed. But Rosmini expressly embraces the contrary view and states that the idea of Being is a true entity distinct from the mind, that it is numerically one for all people, immense, eternal, immutable, and absolute.9 If it is outside the mind, then, how could it ever subsist and be shown to the human mind if it were merely possible? How could it communicate to the mind that intellectual light of which Rosmini speaks and without which intuition could not take place? And what would this pure possible be, then? The idea of possible being, perhaps, inasmuch as it is found in the divine mind? But in that case we will have the intuition of the possible being in the real Being – in God, that is – following the teaching of St Augustine, St Bonaventura, and Malebranche, which Rosmini explicitly denies.10 I confess that I cannot really understand what the concept is that the illustrious Author makes for himself of the objective character of ideal being. In some places he seems to treat it as some sort of mean between God and the human mind – a mean that logic cannot permit, however.

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Between Creator and creature no mean is possible, and Rosmini’s ideal being, if it is not God himself – the real Being – is of necessity a created thing. How, then, can it be taken as immense, eternal, absolute, and immutable? How can scepticism be avoided? Whether the idea of being is treated as an internal sensible and a modification of our mind (a hypothesis expressly repudiated by Rosmini), or is held to be some sort of externality, but contingent, relative, and disjunct from God, the ontological consequences are the same. Furthermore, how could this ideal being ever exist outside the mind without constituting a real thing? According to Rosmini himself, subsistence is reality, and saying that possible being subsists is the same as saying that it is real. What led a mind as careful as Rosmini’s into error was proceeding by a merely psychological method that consists of dealing with internal facts by means of reflection alone.11 From what point, really, does the process of reflection start? It is an act of the mind. The mind turns back to its own intuition, and reflection consists of this turning back. But we have just now seen that the concept of the real is transformed into the concept of the possible when it passes from the intuitive act to the reflective act. No wonder, then, if reflection, turning back to intuition and finding the concept of possible being, stops there and deems it the first concept because it is actually first with respect to reflection – the tool that belongs to psychology. But if the psychologist had not stopped at this point and had gone on further, if he had put his own tool down to pick up that of the ontologist, availing himself of the reflection that we call ontological and turning his own thought not just back to intuition, to be sure, but to the object of intuition, to being, then he would see being as it is in itself, in its absolute and simplest reality. But in this final advance the psychologist would be an ontologist, which is contrary to the practices and methods of psychologism. 3. Perception of the real existence of created things is an action of a judgment by which an equation is made between the idea of possible being and sensory apprehension. Since equating assumes identity, I do not believe that there can be an equation between a sensible and an intelligible, which are entirely different elements. What sameness can the sensible, as such, have with the intelligible? If the sensible were identical with the intelligible, the intelligible would be useless, and the sensible would be manifest by itself because it would be intelligible of its own nature, and the sensists would be right. If the intelligible and the sensible are unlike, then, how can there ever be an equation between them?

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The judgment can be an equation between two different elements only insofar as they have something in common, something identical between them. But this identity can consist only of the intelligible. Hence it is necessary for the two terms of the judgment to participate in the intelligible and to be intelligible so that there is identity and thus the equation. But sensible apprehension is not an intelligible element. Therefore, the uniting of mere sensible apprehension with the idea of possible being will never be able to produce a judgment. Someone may reply that judgment, according to Rosmini, occurs insofar as the mind, having the idea of being always before it, sees in the idea the sensibles of which it receives impressions, and by seeing them in being, it knows that they truly are, and forms the judgment. But in this case even phantasms that we form in our thoughts or that arise spontaneously from the power of imagination would have to happen through real things, since we would also see those phantasms in the being of which we have continuous intuition. Why not believe in their reality, then? Obviously, it is not enough to see things through the concept of being in order to be clear about their subsistence, but this makes it necessary to apply that concept to them through explicit and positive judgment. But what is the rule that determines this application, I wonder. Is it perhaps the external and sensible impression, which differs from the internal and imaginary impression? This claim must be circular, since the first of these impressions differs from the second only because the idea of existence applies to one and not the other. Applying the concept is what differentiates the two impressions, which is a very long way from determining the application of the concept by the difference between the impressions. Besides, to apply the concept of being to a sensible impression, one must know the impression since there can be no applying to what is blind and random. But if the sensible is already known, the idea is already applied to it, and applying it anew would be useless and ridiculous. In short, one cannot imagine a comparison between the intelligible and the sensible in general, nor between the real sensible and the imaginary sensible, and then conclude that the intelligible conforms to one and not the other: this comparison is impossible unless one assumes that the sensible, whatever it may be, is a concept, since comparison can take place only between concepts. But one can have no concept of the sensible, as sensible, since what is sensed cannot be thought, as such. The sensible can be thought only in the intelligible. If it is a concept, then, the judgment that unites it with the idea of being is already made. If it

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is not a concept, the comparison and the judgment cannot take place. The first case begs the question again; the second assumes a judgment formed with only one concept – a judgment that is not a judgment, in other words. Furthermore, with this judgment the illustrious Author wishes to explain the concept of existence, which he calls the subsistence of things. But how can this idea arise from the judgment in question, always assuming that the judgment is possible? On one side, we have just a pure sense impression; on the other, the concept of possible being. If the two terms are joined together, what must result from them? The idea of a possible impression, and nothing more. The two terms cannot give what they do not have in them. Between existence and the possibility of existence lies an infinite gap that only creative omnipotence can cross. From what does the concept of existence come, then? From the possible? Surely not. From the impression? But the impression contains nothing intelligible, is not a concept, and cannot produce any unless one grants the rejected and repugnant hypothesis of the sensists, to which Rosmini is most averse. From jumbling the possible together with the sensible? But if each of them separately cannot give what it does not have, neither will they be able to do so if they are put together. In some passages Rosmini hints that the idea of subsistence, as an idea, is the pure concept of possible being, and that inasmuch as it is distinguished from the concept, it is not an idea but a judgment. But he is clear that the term subsistence, or existence, expresses a judgment only inasmuch as it signifies a concept. Hence, one needs to explain the origin of the concept. A judgment can be called a concept inasmuch as it is a composite idea that contains the notions expressed separately by the terms of the proposition. Now what are the terms of Rosmini’s judgment? They are the sensible and the possible, and nothing more. But since we have just now seen that putting these two terms together cannot generate the idea of existence, this cannot be a judgment either. One must also guard against confusing the idea of subsistence with the actual subsistence of something. It seems to me that Rosmini may allow this mistake by making the following claim: that when one conceives of the subsistence of something, the only intelligible element is the idea of possible being. If that were true, it would follow that the concept proper, expressed by the term subsistence, would be the subsistence itself of the object. Yet everyone sees that the terms possible being and subsistence are not synonyms. So they have meanings that differ at least in part. What is the difference? The idea of the real expressed by the second

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term, not by the first. Therefore, if the concept of the real does not make up part of the intelligible element but of the thing, it follows that the real and the concept of the real are the same, which is hard to take seriously. And yet it is this confusion on which the argument of the illustrious Author is based, so it seems to me. The reason is this: by saying that belief in the subsistence of bodies is the effect of a judgment born solely from the idea of possible being and from the sense impression, he assumes that subsistence and the idea of subsistence are one and the same. But since we understand what this term subsistence means, it is clear that the concept, as a concept, and the thing signified are different from one another. But how can they be different if the only intelligible element involved in this transaction is the concept of possible being? This discussion raises a question of the greatest weight and difficulty, though modern philosophy has forgotten even the motive for it. This is the question: The concept of the concreteness and individuality of things arises from what and consists of what? If, as Rosmini believes, every concept is generic, how will one ever be able to conceive of the concrete and the individual? To avoid this difficulty, the illustrious Author was forced to deny that the idea of concreteness and individuality is an idea, and to assert that it is a mere judgment. But this solution cannot be accepted, which is obvious from what has been said. A person has a true concept of individual reality – of existence. But how can it be acquired? By sensation or feeling? These faculties reveal to us only subjective modifications. By the perception of the Scots? By itself this perception is not enough because it does not reveal the forces – the created substances and causes – of which existences truly consist. By the idea of the possible? The possible cannot give the real. By abstractions of some other kind? Abstractions follow and do not precede the notion of the concrete; they presuppose the concrete and cannot create it. Therefore, one must assume that the concrete and the individual are known by means of a special and direct intuition, analogous to the perception of the Scots, from which it differs, however, in that it shows us not only the surface but the substance of things. Here I am to content to mention the solution to the problem that I will shortly clarify; from the argument up to this point, I want no one to infer that by rejecting Rosmini’s teaching, which explains the idea of subsistence by that of possible being, I wish to explain it by the idea of real Being, having substituted one for the other as a direct object of intuition. This explanation would be false, as we will see shortly, and it would lead straight to pantheism. True, we may see all our sense impressions

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in the real Being, present to our mind, but this is not the direct concept from which we deduce the real existence of things. And here is the reason: since the Being intuited is not only real but necessary and absolute, if we asserted the real existence of things in virtue of this simple concept, we should have to infer that all things are modifications of God that exist necessarily, and so we would be pantheists. Therefore, it is not by applying the idea of real Being to things that we know of their existence. 4. The concept of the reality of Being, of God, is not had directly and by intuition but only in an indirect way and by demonstration. This proposition follows necessarily from the two that precede it. Rosmini observes that treating God as a direct object of intuitive cognition is a view held by St Bonaventura, and he expressly rejects it.12 And surely it cannot be accepted if intuition apprehends only possible Being. In that case, the only effective way to achieve cognition of the Supreme Being is demonstration. But for demonstration to be valid, it must be based upon a prior synthesis, seeing that deduction is an intellectual artifice by which what was already known by primitive apprehension is reproduced by the mind in its own mode: this is clarifying the known rather than discovering the unknown. Rational synthesis as well as analysis, deduction as well as induction, must necessarily be based upon a prior and basic cognition, identical in substance to what follows it but different in form. The main difference rests on two issues. First, deductive and inductive reasoning happens in time and sequentially, while what I call primitive synthesis is instantaneous, has no chronological development, and consists of simple intuition. Second, in reasoning and analysis the mind gives truth a subjective form, taking it apart, putting it back together, handling it according to its own procedures, yet without altering its substance, whereas in primitive synthesis the mind blends in nothing of its own but simple intuition; it is the simple spectator of the object before it and sees it as it is in itself, without adding anything or taking anything away. Far from opposing the assumption that God is known in a demonstrative mode, then, my view is actually supportive because there can be no demonstration that does not take its strength from a prior intuition. The proofs of God’s existence are a posteriori or a priori. But since both kinds are based upon a syllogism whose minor premise includes a simple contingent fact, external or internal to the mind, neither could have absolute and apodictic force if the process of demonstration that bases truth on fact were not preceded by an intuition in which fact is based on truth, as will shortly be clear.

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One certainly need not believe that intuition is complete, in contradiction of that opposition established in Scripture between the knowledge to come and what we have in the present – ‘through a glass, darkly.’13 In this life the completion of human intuition is potential; knowing taken as actual is in every way defective. Thus it happens that there are two sides to the Idea: one of its faces is the intelligible, real Being; the other is the superintelligible, the inner essence of being. We may apprehend the superintelligible because by instinct we are conscious of our ability to know it. The dark knowing of which Saint Paul speaks alludes to the incomprehensibility of things, and knowledge through a glass is the analogic knowledge that we can have of one part of the incomprehensible, either by rational deductions or by revelation. Analogy, in fact, is a species of intellectual reflex by which one thing is known incompletely in another, as in a mirage.14 It suffices to mention these things here and return to them elsewhere. The philosophical Prime, therefore, is real Being, which as the Mother Idea and chief cause of all things unites the properties of the other two Primes. In this composite expression, real Being, the second word points specifically to the psychological relation, and the first to the ontological, although the two concepts interpenetrate and make a perfect unity. One might express this by the word being alone, since Being with nothing added to it is not possible being but real being. And we will often take it in this sense, permitting ourselves now and then to add the epithet real since some ambiguity may arise from the imperfection of the language that we use. Having seen of what the philosophical Prime consists, let us stop for a moment to consider intuition, or rather that first act of thinking that apprehends the Prime. At this point, I certainly do not want to lay out the theory of that intuition, which is a whole science by itself, but just to call attention to certain elements of Rosmini’s doctrine in which the illustrious Author appears to stray from the truth. We have just now seen that he considers the first concept of Being abstract and generic, representing the merely possible, and that he also holds the view that bodies subsist – not as an idea, certainly, but as the effect of a judgment. These two claims come from a third that recurs in every passage of his works, confusing the reflective idea with the direct or intuitive idea that some call perception, in the sense given this word by the Scottish School.15 Perception, or the direct idea, is intuition or immediate apprehension of the object; the reflective idea is the intuition of the intuition, percep-

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tion of the perception, the process of thought turning back upon itself. The terminus of intuition or immediate apprehension is the object in itself – the object, finite or infinite, but always real, concrete, positive, and individual. The terminus of reflection is the intuition and with it the idea of the object, not as in itself but abstract, generalized, stripped of all individuality, and reduced to the state of the merely possible. Thus one sees that the direct idea or perception converges with the reflective idea, either because both are one act of thinking or because of the substance of their object. But they differ in the way they apprehend that object, since one takes it as it is in itself, in its concreteness, and as real, while the other apprehends it as it is in the mind, in its abstractness, and as thinkable or possible, inasmuch as the possibility of the thing is its thinkability. Now my opinion is that Rosmini, in the first place, confuses the reflective idea with perception and gives the latter the character of the former, treating it as the mere concept of possible being, abstract and generic. But from what has been said, it seems that this concept is merely reflective and presupposes immediate intuition of the object – of Being in its concrete and individual reality. In the second place, he also confuses the perception of sensibles with sensation and with feeling, and from sense he derives the concept that one has of the individuality of things. The outcome is inevitable if every idea or perception is abstract and generic since the abstract and generic cannot supply the concrete and individual, which is their chief contrary, but fails if a person perceives sensibles by an immediate and direct intuition like that by which he perceives real Being. This immediate cognition of sensibles is the perception of the Scottish philosophers, which I believe to be a fact beyond doubt and well attested by careful observation. True, the perception of the Scots is not enough by itself to give us a complete notion of sensible, spiritual, and material things because it shows us only sensible properties without the intelligible element whereby we conceive of them as substances or causes. The perception of the School of Edinburgh is not enough, then, for a full account of the concept of the existence of bodies, and one must resort to another principle of which we shall soon speak. Reid’s perception is in substance what Rosmini calls bodily sensory perception. He acutely observes that by itself it does not produce cognition of bodies and that we still need an intelligible element, which, according to him, is the idea of possible being. But possible, abstract, generic being – can this produce the concept of individuality? Surely not. Therefore, concludes Rosmini, we get individuality certainly not as the effect of an

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idea but rather of a judgment. To me this seems impossible to sustain for the reasons already stated. Be that as it may, the name individual alone that we use must also express an idea. This can be nothing but an intuition of individuality itself, like the primitive intuition that we have of real Bring. Up to now we have assumed that real Being is concrete, singular, and individual. This statement needs clarification. The concepts of concreteness, singularity, and individuality are composed of two elements, one positive and the other negative. The positive element is what is asserted and thought when others say these words, and I will not try to define it because any definition would be less clear than the thing itself. Briefly, it is what is before the mind when one perceives Being and the real in itself by a direct and immediate act. The negative element is limit, contingency, and imperfection. All concrete, singular, individual creatures are imperfect because they are finite and finite because they are contingent, which is also the source of their plurality. But when we apply the notions of concreteness, singularity, and individuality to real Being, the negative element must be eliminated from them because Being is absolute and infinite. From this it follows that Being can also be called abstract, general, and universal inasmuch as these concepts express the absence of the negative element found in the contrary concepts. Being is therefore abstract and concrete, general and particular, individual and universal all at once but in different respects, and in a way different from creatures because Being has only the positive element contained in each of these notions, not the negative element that goes along with them. Being is concrete and individual because it is real and positive in the highest degree; it is abstract and universal because it is pure (free of any form, that is), infinite, and absolute. Concreteness and individuality are the real without the being; abstractness and generality are the being without the real. The first belong to real existences; the second to possible being. From the former come created things; from the latter reflective ideas. The division between concrete and abstract, individual and general is the analysis of real Being, and real Being is the synthesis of those properties. I have given these warnings to make it clear that our psychological Prime is no mere abstraction but reality itself. There is nothing abstract in it but purity, which far from contradicting reality is needed to constitute it in the highest and absolute degree. No one starts with the abstract, clearly, and this observation alone shows that the concept of possible being cannot be the human mind’s first step – for this reason: that it is

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the concept of real Being made abstract through reflection by the mental separation of objective reality from the cognition of that being. The majority of modern philosophers also treat the notion of pure being or real Being as abstract, it is true: hence the statement repeated in a hundred books that the idea of being is a mere abstraction. Of possible being, this is entirely true. But if real being is what they mean, it is as true as saying that infinite space is round since Being in itself is the beginning of everything, the source of concreteness no less than of abstraction. Modern logic has a great fear of turning abstract things concrete, and rightly so, but does not worry about converting the concrete into the abstract, a different vice and more serious than the first, which it usually precedes. Because primitive truth, though concrete in itself, still contains the seeds of abstractions with regard to the mind, a person must turn the concrete into the abstract in order to be able to convert the abstract into the concrete. Hence, when the second conversion comes after the first, the work already done is undone, and the genuine Middle Ages, with their humanness, treeness, and so on, reconstituted the reality of the being destroyed by the abstractions of the Peripatetics. Transforming the concrete into the abstract is an evil that does no good, then, since it negates the primitive truth, whereas the contrary process is an evil that can become a good, if, at least in part, it restores the truth destroyed a little while before. Human speech is a continuous alternation of synthesis and antithesis, and the labour of reflection is to abstract and concretize continuously. The execution, distribution, and relating of these operations, for better or worse, gives rise to the virtues and vices of the scientific method. Two types of abstraction and composition, one lawful and natural, the other corrupt and contrary to nature, can be distinguished. Corrupt abstraction consists of dissociating elements that are in accord and destroying the natural synthesis of things. Next in line comes the corrupt composition that jumbles elements which are not in accord, forming a mental synthesis contrary to real synthesis and producing an actual illusion of the imagination, like the maya of the Indian schools. Helpful abstraction takes apart illusory and apparent synthesis, disconnecting the discrepant elements united by that synthesis. Finally, helpful composition reunites elements that are in accord and remakes – or, to put it better, re-cognizes – real synthesis. But abstraction that separates Being and the One from existences and the manifold by destroying the imaginative phantasm that completely identifies them, and composition that restores the intelligible to the rule of Being and the sensible to the

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rule of the intelligible – both of these are helpful and legitimate since in this case the abstract falsity is turned into a concrete truth by converting the concrete falsity into an abstract truth. The idea of Being, as we have stated it, contains a judgment. It is impossible for the mind to have the primitive intuition of Being without recognizing that Being is: in the contrary case, to be would be nothing and real Being would not be real, which is contradictory. Nor does the reality of Being present itself to the mind as something contingent and relative, so that possibly it might not-be, but as necessary and absolute, so that the contrary is not thinkable. A person cannot think nothing, in fact. And this incapacity is not merely subjective or dependent on the contradiction involved in thinking without thinking something; it is also objective in that the mind knows that nothing is not only unthinkable for us but also impossible in itself. Hence, the judgment in question can be expressed in these words, ‘Being is necessarily,’ provided one notes that the concept expressed by the last word serves only to clarify a property inherent in Being itself, as Being. But if it seems right to express this latter point by a separate word, saying ‘necessary being,’ it is because the first of these words, as we shall soon see, is abused in ordinary language. The judgment – ‘Being is necessarily’ – contained in the primitive intuition is not rendered by the mind in a free and spontaneous act, like other judgments. The mind is not the judge in this case, but a mere witness and auditor of a verdict that it does not issue. In fact, if the mind were the definer and not simply a spectator, the prime judgment – basis of all certainty and of every other judgment – would be subjective, and scepticism would be inevitable. It is Being itself that pronounces the primitive judgment and causes the mind to hear it in a direct act of intuition. Being posits itself in the presence of our mind and says, ‘I am necessarily.’ In this objective utterance lies the basis of all evidence and all certainty. The vehicle by which it comes to the mind is the Intelligible – Being itself. In fact, Being reveals itself and declares its own reality to a person by means of its own intelligibility, without which the very act of thought could not occur for the person. By means of the Intelligible, in virtue of which intuition occurs, intuition takes notice of Being. And since Being is the Intelligible itself, it follows that Being is understood by us inasmuch as it is posited, and that it is posited inasmuch as it is understood. The two become one and the same. When intuition views Being as its object, it sees the autonomy that belongs to Being but does not assert it in a determinate and volition-

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al act, as happens in other judgments. The mind knows Being by the simple act that constitutes intuition, but the assertion involved in this knowing comes from the object – from Being itself – not from the intuition. True, when thinking turns back upon itself and primordial intuition enters the domain of reflection, the person says (first to himself and then to others) ‘Being is.’ But this is a reflective, not an intuitive judgment. The reflective judgment is voluntary, subjective, and human, and yet it is authoritative, legitimate, and objectively valuable because it simply repeats the intuitive judgment that precedes it and on which it is based. In this sense, a person’s reason truly is the reason of God. Repeating the divine and objective judgment in an act of reflection is the first link in philosophy as human artifice. But this link is joined with a divine judgment and draws all its power from it. It follows, then, that the basis of philosophy lies in revelation; that God is the first philosopher, in the strict sense of the word; and that human philosophy is the continuation and repetition of divine philosophy. Therefore, God is not only the object of science; he is also its first teacher, the teacher of the knowable because He is the Intelligible. The work of philosophy begins not in man but in God. It does not ascend from mind to Being but descends from Being to mind. This is the deep reason in ontology that makes psychologism absurd. Before philosophy is a human activity, it is a divine creation. Psychologists deprive philosophy of its foothold in the divine, detach it from Being, make it mere human artifice, condemn it to scepticism, and assign it nothing as its origin and end. Between the primitive divine judgment and secondary human judgment – between intuition and reflection – lies the medium of speech. It is by means of speech that intuitive truth becomes accessible to reflection, putting man in a position to repeat God’s judgment for himself and others. But the speech that expresses the reality of Being is created by Being itself. Speech is thus a second revelation, or – to put it more precisely – the primordial revelation stated in a certain form by its very revealer. That form is a proposition expressing the judgment. Equipped with this objective proposition, reflection appropriates the corresponding judgment, repeats it, develops it, and, with its help, weaves the work of science. Hence, one sees that the divine judgment is expressed by a proposition equally divine, which, when repeated and reflected upon, marks the beginning of human philosophy, and its development is the continuation of philosophy. To show how the ideas are connected, let me quickly go over what I have explained in part and will soon explain more fully.

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In the judgment under discussion we have the basis of the Ideal Formula. But it was just now noted that this Formula consists of a judgment made from three different concepts. In the aforesaid judgment there is only one concept, however, and the three terms result from its replication. So we must search for another judgment that gives us the three concepts when joined to the first judgment. This inquiry is based on a postulate that the solution itself will show to be reasonable. The new judgment that we are tracking down must be blended with the first to make a single judgment. Otherwise, the Ideal Formula would be composed of two separate judgments, giving us two formulas instead of one. The Ideal Formula is organic, and all its parts must be linked together logically to form a single body. Therefore, we must begin our search with some concept that, on the one hand, differs substantially from the concept of Being and, on the other, has an intrinsic connectedness with it. Language furnishes us with a term whose meaning has a close kinship with the concept of Being, and this is also apparent from its etymology. The term is existence, common to all modern languages that derive from Latin. Taking this as our hypothesis, let us see if we can use it to construct the Formula that we are searching for. The Latin word exsistere means to appear, come out of, emerge, and be shown. It is used to mean the manifestation or rather the unfolding of something previously hidden, wrapped, or folded within something else and then coming out of it and making itself visible externally.16 This is its proper and etymological sense, the source of the metaphorical sense which in our tongue has come to belong to the word existence. However, even though the relation of the Italian expression to the Latin is metaphorical because it expresses for the metaphysical order what the Latin says of the physical order, on a different level the correspondence is still precise since in both concepts there is a reference to the passage from potency to act.17 The Latin exsistere announces the activity by which something that used to be potentially begins to become actual. And existence in our Italian language also expresses an analogous concept, as we shall soon see. The only discrepancy is that in the ancient word the actualization of potency is expressed by way of unfolding, whereas in the modern word the reference is to producing, so that in this respect we make a metaphor of the term used by the Latins. Granted, ordinary people – even philosophers, quite often – use the word exist synonymously with be, and vice-versa, and so they say that God exists and that the world is. But these locutions, though very common, have by no means eliminated the

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original meaning. And sensitive ears will certainly pick it up. Vico, for example, that very diligent and knowledgeable student of philosophical precision in words, faulted Descartes for having said I think, therefore I am.18 Descartes, not terribly sharp in such matters, uses the two words promiscuously all the time, showing not the least sign of recognizing the difference between them. The guilelessness of the writer proves the naiveté of the philosopher. Besides the relation of potency and act, the word exsistere expresses, or at least suggests, another intellectual element of no small importance, and we should mention it. As anyone can see, the word is composed of the particle ex- and the verb sistere. This verb and its cognates or derivatives express, more or less directly, the metaphysical concept that moderns call substance, from the Latin word substantia. Its pedigree is short, though Seneca and Quintilian used it, and its absence from Cicero’s philosophical works is often palpable; substratum, beloved by some moderns, therefore also emerged.19 The word exsistere, indicating substance by its verb and derivation by its particle, includes the concept of one substance, found potentially in another, which thereby passes to an actual state and begins to stand on its own. The etymology of exsistere is enough to suggest this mental synthesis in the originating concept that corresponds to that word. Note also that the particle ex- indicates, in the direct and material sense, a movement from inside to out, as the particle in- expresses a contrary movement – or rather the rest or repose that results from an effort working from outside to in. This becomes clear if the word exsistere is compared to insistere. Metaphorically, then, the particle ex- gives the direction of the action by which cause produces effect. Thus, in the originally metaphorical meaning which for us has become direct, the word exist makes the axiom of causality present to the mind, just as the Latin words subsistere and substare and our word subsist represent the axiom of substance. Gathering together all these concepts indicated by the word existence and expressed by its more direct applications, we can say that existence is the reality proper to an actual substance, produced from a distinct substance that contains it potentially. From this it follows that the idea of existence cannot stand on its own and refers necessarily to another, having the same relation to it that the effect has to its cause. But this Mother Idea can only be that of Being. Treating existence as an effect, the mind is compelled to seek a cause. But if this cause is another existence, and if what exists is an effect, the mind is forced to move up to another, higher

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cause until it finds one that is a pure cause without being an effect, an absolute cause necessary by its nature. Proceeding to infinity is not possible because there would be only an infinite succession of effects without any cause – effects, in other words, that would not be effects since they have no cause, nor, since they are effects, would they be causes. Pure, absolute, necessary Being is the only truly first cause because it is the only thing that is by its own nature and depends on no other. The idea of existence is therefore inseparable from that of Being and is represented to us as an effect whose cause is Being. In what way is existence produced by Being? Proceeding a posteriori, ascending from effect to cause, one concludes of necessity that the effect is folded up in the cause, the existent in Being, and that producing is simply unfolding. Then one will be obliged to reject creation and embrace the teaching of the pantheists and emanationists. Indeed, proceeding a posteriori, how could one reach any other conclusion? Whoever goes this route moves from effect up to cause and concludes that the cause must contain the effect in potency because the effect is an act that presupposes potency. But the cause can contain the effect potentially in two ways: either by including in itself the substance of that effect and having only the ability to change its form by unfolding and externalizing it; or else by deriving not only the form but also the substance of the effect from nothing. By advancing a posteriori, one cannot come to know the creative potentiality because to reach this goal it would be necessary to eliminate the effect before having found the potency that produces it. But if the effect is eliminated mentally, its cause can no longer be recovered because the basis on which the argument rests is missing. In fact, we can represent the a posteriori process as a line B ––––––– A, where point B indicates the idea of existence, point A the idea of Being, and the extent of the line the mind’s discursive process. Now if the mind wishes to conceive Being as creator, its thinking must eliminate point B, which expresses existence, before reaching point A, since what exists cannot be created, inasmuch as it already exists. In the first place, however, eliminating the concept on which the whole argument turns is logically absurd. In the second place, if one eliminates B before getting to A, how can the goal ever be reached? Nor, even if B is eliminated mentally, can one say that a preconceived notion of A allows reasoning to continue. If there is a preconceived notion of A, it shows that the reasoning is a priori, not a posteriori. In fact, the usual argument by which philosophers and theologians prove creation is a posteriori only in appearance, and, like all arguments of this type, rests upon an a priori synthesis. But

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if one’s route is, in effect, a posteriori, emanationism and pantheism will be the necessary outcome of reasoning, as we shall make clear in a more appropriate place. Instead of asking how the existent is produced by Being, then, one must establish how Being produces the existent. (These two ways of speaking point towards the same inquiry but express two wholly contrary methods.) Causality is certainly the link that joins the two terms of the proposition together – what produces with what is produced. Although the idea of cause is subject to various modifications, it is clear that it must be taken as pure and absolute, without limitation, when applied to Being. Otherwise, it would not conform to Being. Now cause in the pure and absolute sense is first and efficient, and lacking these two properties it would not really be cause. As first cause, it is not the effect of a prior cause; as efficient, it does not produce the mere form or modality of its effects but their whole substantiality. Accordingly, if the cause of which we speak is truly the first cause with respect to the effect as effect, then, with regard to the effect as contingent substance, the first Cause is also the first Substance – what sustains substance, that with respect to which a thing effected can be had only through a second substance. The first and efficient Cause must be creative, because, if it were not so, it could not possess those two properties. It would not be first if it took the substantiality of the effect that it produces from somewhere else. It would not be efficient if it kept substantiality inside itself and then externalized it productively but not creatively. A human being can be called a truly efficient cause – but of forms, not substances. Even of forms, however, he is not a creator because he produces them as second cause by a power received from the first Cause. The idea of creation is therefore inseparable from that of cause taken in an absolute sense. And since the idea of cause constitutes one of the first principles of reason, it follows that the concept of creation must be counted among the most original and clearest of the human mind. It is not possible, in fact, to separate the creative act from the active cause, the creative power from the capacity to act, if the cause and its ability are conceived as infinite and absolute. But since the concept of causes – even the secondary and finite – involves the concept of a first and infinite Cause, being just an abstraction and modification of that concept, it follows that the idea of creation is in every case inseparable from the idea of causality. It may be said, on the one hand, that theologians and philosophers who accept the idea of creation treat it as a great mystery; on the other,

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that all ancient philosophers were ignorant of it and that many moderns oppose it. Moreover, if creation were obvious to reason, pantheism would not have tempted the deepest intellects of every era. Nor would it keep coming up again and again in the schools of philosophy, since one of the main reasons why so many find pantheism plausible is its promise to explain the fact of universal existence without recourse to creation. I reply that the concept of creation is no more clear and no more obscure than the other concepts involved in the Ideal Formula. Every ideal concept has two sides, one intelligible, the other superintelligible. One can compare it to a point of light gleaming in darkness, giving us not what can be called a view but a presentiment of the two, forcing us to accept them. The clear assumes the obscure, as in turn the obscure is not apprehended without the clear. The obscure side of the Idea is the superintelligible, reproduced in every part of the ideal world and found both in the concept of Being and in that of the creative act. Just as the concept of Being is the root and origin of other ideal notions, so the impenetrability of Being is the root and origin of other obscurities, which is why we use the word essence to express the unthinkable. Creation taken as the link between the absolute cause and its effect is entirely clear – clear because it is the cause, since cause cannot be other than creative if it is not limited, if, in other words, it is cause simply and absolutely. But the cause is being in relation to the effect, being as active and causal. Hence, since the act of the being comes from the essence, it follows that if the essence is impenetrable in itself, the essence of the cause must also be obscure, and therefore the essence of the causal act – of creation – must be obscure as well. The superintelligible of creation is recast as that of Being and reproduces its obscurity. Since we cannot conceive how to make something from nothing, we cannot comprehend the essence of Being or the internal mode of its activity. But what is incomprehensible from one point of view is quite clear from another, since the beginning of existence is what constitutes the effect and its relation to the cause. Without having at least a confused notion of the creative act, this makes it completely impossible to understand the meaning of the term effect (which comes up so often in ordinary human speech) and of all words that express action. What is the essence of this creative act, then? In what way does Being activate and initiate what previously did not exist? In short, what is the inner nature of creation? The human mind cannot answer these questions even though its inability does not derive from a special obscurity of the creative act as such, but from its relation to the essence of the creative cause.

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So evident is this that one encounters the same obscurity just in apprehending the efficient causes of forms, since making forms is also a true creation. If pantheists and emanationists accept this creation, while understanding it no better than the other one, this happens for two reasons. One is that they are constrained by the axiom of causality, which would never happen if the creating of forms – like that of substance – were declared impossible. The other is that human beings have within them, in their free will, as well as outside, the example and proof of this effective causing of forms, which is then accepted as a fact of experience even though it is not understood. But people do not experience the efficient causing of substances, knowing it by the activity of reason alone as a privilege of uncreated Being. Pagan philosophers overlooked the doctrine of creation, and many moderns have opposed it. To avoid the reef of mystery, they wreck on an absurdity: pantheism. What does this show if not the prideful laziness of the human mind? And yet this truth had no worse luck than other ideal doctrines. There were sensists and sceptics as well as pantheists. The obscurity of creation arises from that of Being. Hence, if pantheists deny creation because it is partly obscure, the more logical sceptics deny Being because it is not entirely clear. True, by denying Being they commit an enormous number of paralogisms, but it makes no difference. Subverting the basis of all logic on behalf of logic itself, reaching an absurd goal by direct reasoning, is precisely the greatest achievement of scepticism. All the false systems of philosophy and religion have in common the error of denying what is clear while loathing what is obscure, whereas correct philosophy obliges us to accept what is obscure in gratitude for what is clear, from which the obscure is inseparable. Idealists and fatalists also deny the reality of bodies and free will because of their arcane nature. Moreover, there is a special reason why philosophers, especially the ancients, have neglected the doctrine of creation along with other parts of the Ideal Formula: because creation is simply a relation, a link, a bond between two other terms, whereas these terms express a substantive truth. Being and existences, permanent substances directly present to the mind – one the root of all knowledge, the others subject to the senses – could not so easily vanish from sight, whereas the creative act, immanent and not something substantial but modal, might readily be perceived as indistinct and therefore altered and excluded by reflection. What else? The very idea of Being was more or less altered by all ancient

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and modern philosophers outside Christianity. As we shall see below, this alteration was the chief cause of their making the concept of creative action obscure. If Being is the cause of things, then, it is necessarily the creator. But is it truly the cause? We have assumed this but not proved it. Actually, if one proceeds a posteriori, moving from the concept of existence up to that of Being, the latter must certainly be accepted as causal since its action is needed to explain the other concept. But then divine causality can be considered only emanative, not creative, as we have noted. If the approach is a priori, then, and the reflective concept of existence is not yet available, how can absolute Being be conceived as cause? By itself the idea of real Being does not include the concept of a cause working externally. Otherwise, it would have to be conceived as acting necessarily. Creation would not be free, and a fated creation leads to pantheism. In fact, if God does not create freely, his effects must be necessary and absolute, like God himself, and they cannot be distinguished from the divine nature. The idea of Being includes the capacity to cause but not the causal act, if this act is to be free in its cause and contingent in its effects. Indeed, the very capacity to create can be known only after the act because the capacity is an abstraction known subsequently to its realization, of which it is the concrete side. Therefore, if the creative act of Being is not known (and is not known by one who still only reflects on the intuition of Being itself), its capacity to create also cannot be known, in which case it will not seem any easier to acquire the concept of creation a priori rather than a posteriori. In sum, if the notion of existence precedes that of Being, it is not possible to move up to creative Being. And if, on the contrary, we have only the notion of pure Being, without that of existence, how can that Being be conceived in its role of creative cause? Nonetheless, I believe that this final step is quite simple in itself. We encounter no other problem than what arises from ingrained habits of the mind when it does philosophy. When someone is used to a way of seeing, when in his mind a certain attitude and a particular view of things have become second nature, so to speak, then it is difficult, not to say impossible, for him to see something that requires a different viewpoint – indeed, a contrary viewpoint – especially if the custom of present and recent times, the very heavy weight of universal practice, authority, and example are added to his own attitude. The more recent philosophers, not excluding those believed to be ontologists, have become so accustomed to psychologism that this method has transformed their nature.

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Now the intellectual context in which psychologism places the mind is good and right in some ways, but in other ways it is false – in very important ways, I daresay, because it is biased, narrow, eccentric, ineffective, and full of flaws. The ontologist goes to the centre and summit of what can be known, takes all the relations of things in at a glance, and contemplates them from their peak and their core – from Being. The psychologist, stationed somewhere on the periphery, can look directly only at a small part of them. The first can be compared to a traveller who learns the layout of a city and surrounding hills by climbing to the top of the highest building: without having to move, only turning his head, he can take it all in from there. The other tries to do the same, standing at a window from which only a part of the landscape is visible. Now one of the most pressing problems in which psychologism has no competence at all is creation. On the other hand, the ontological solution of this problem, the only one that I find plausible, is so far removed from the usual order of theorizing that even experts may be inclined to reject it before giving it every careful consideration and subjecting it to careful examination. To avoid this snag, if possible, I would like to ask my readers – if I may speak with the honesty that may not seem rash to those who have thought long about the topic and have sifted through every part of it – to give this matter special consideration and balance it out with the methodical procedure of the ontologism to which various parts of my work refer more or less directly. To clarify the process by which the mind acquires the idea of creation, allow me a moment to offer a hypothesis, taking as true what this discussion aims to demonstrate. I shall assume that this proposition – ‘Being creates the existent’ – expresses something real. In this way, we remove ourselves from the preconceived opinions and errors of the psychologism that treats the first truth as some unknown mental content of ours that has, at best, a relation of correspondence and resemblance with the external object. Let us move outside ourselves in thought and consider the truth by itself, having been persuaded that the intuition by which we apprehend it is a pure and simple apprehension of its object, and so, by way of that apprehending, the mind mixes nothing of its own into what is perceived. Thus, when the Formula that we assume to be true is reduced to its genuine meaning – that of an objective and ontological process – each of its terms represents an objective reality that actually subsists on its own, outside the mind. This reality is absolute and necessary in the first ele-

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ment, in Being, but in its last element, in the existent, it is relative and contingent. The link between these two elements is creation, an action that is real and positive but free. Being – the Substance and first Cause – thereby creates substances and second causes. It regulates and includes them in itself, conserving them in time by the immanence of the causal action, which, in regard to the time taken to complete it, is a continuous creation. In the aforementioned Formula, then, we have three realities independent of the mind: a Substance and first Cause; an organic manifold of substances and second causes; and a real and free act of the first causal Substance, by means of which act the one Being is connected with the manifold of existences. Such is the ontological process expressed by the Formula that we have assumed. Now let us add to it the intuition that we have removed by abstraction and then consider the Formula in its objective character. When the intuition that perceives the Formula is restored to it, the ontological process becomes psychological, and each objective element of the truth becomes a concept with regard to our cognition of it. But in this transformation there is no actual change for either of the two parts. With regard to the object, the three elements of the Formula – Being, existence, and creative action – are still realities there as before. With regard to the knowing subject, there is nothing in it but an intuition apprehending those same three realities in itself, without taking into itself alteration or division of any kind. Here one must not imagine, like the champions of psychologism, that the cognitive act makes some unknown appearance, image, or form of external reality enter into us, and that this mental entity is the terminus of our thinking, so that, for our part, the truth is seen not in itself but in ourselves. Thomas Reid has thoroughly exposed the falsity of this notion with regard to knowledge of bodies, and here we only extend his doctrine to the whole intuitive truth, standing on the same basis as the Scottish philosopher – on direct and objective evidence, in other words. Nor should one assume, like the same psychologists, that when the mind apprehends the different elements of the objective truth, it changes their order, starting with the existent and ascending to Being, while in the cycle of reality Being descends to the existent, and not the reverse. Assuming the primitive psychological order to be the reverse of the ontological order is not only a strange and gratuitous view, it is also plainly contrary to the objective evidence that we have of the identity of the two orders when it implies that our intuition alters the representation of real things. Granted, a person in a state of reflection can and does change,

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more or less, the real order of things mentally; in part, this is what science is about. But this cannot happen in intuition and has nothing to do with the first science. Therefore, since the idea is nothing but the object itself as perceived by our mind, it follows that the ideas of Being, the existent, and creation are three realities, precisely as proposed by the Formula. It also follows that the process in which we see them is equally real, given the sole addition of the mind’s intuition. The conclusion of these findings is that the Formula proposed by us is true. Our intuitive cognition must perceive its three terms in the order of their real occurrence and must therefore apprehend creation as a fact that the mind witnesses as it descends from Being to existences and apprehends them in the creative act that produces them. But to convert this hypothesis into a completely certain statement, it suffices to have in view the synthetic process that we shall mention shortly. From each part of this process it will seem obvious that one must either call into question the clearest concepts and least doubtful judgments of the human mind or else acknowledge that the process of ideation takes place as we have described it. Anyone who understands the nature and value of the synthesis will ask for no other proof. Before beginning this discussion, however, we can check the truth of our Formula by a faster method. That creation is the only way to explain the origin of existents, and that every other hypothesis leads to obvious absurdities, is too well known to need proving here. The dogma of creation, then, is a scientifically certain fact, proved indirectly when reason reflects and argues away from the absurd alternatives. But if creation really is a fact, how might we ever get knowledge of it in primitive intuition? This is the question that we have posed. The ready answer is that we count it as a fact insofar as we perceive it. Now to perceive a fact is to see, with the mind, the action – the movement, almost – of which the fact consists, and to see the origin from which the act moves, to see it as active along with the effect that results from it. But surely, in our case, the intuiting mind that perceives Being in its concreteness sees it not in its abstract character, secluded within itself, but sees it as it really is – causing, producing existents, and externalizing itself by its actions. Hence, the mind perceives existents as results of Being’s activity. A person therefore acquires the concept of existence by having a mental view of the continuing production of that same activity. Since the psychological process of intuition is identical to the ontological, the content of our cognition is not differentiated from the real order of things. Just as the three real terms – Being, creative action, and exist-

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ences – follow one another logically in the objective synthesis, so also the three ideal terms that correspond to them have the same order in the human mind. The mind then sees existences produced in the Being that produces them, and at every instant of its intellectual life it is a direct and immediate spectator of creation. The result may seem odd, but it is rigorous and irrefutable. It cannot be called into doubt without doing one of three things: either eliminate existences and fall into absolute idealism; or accept existences as uncreated and embrace the absurd hypotheses of naturalism, pantheism, and emanationism; or admit the fact of creation but deny that the psychological process of intuition, by which we know the fact, is identical to the ontological process of the same thing. But whoever wants to deny the sameness of the two processes must establish that the idea is a subjective unknown, which certainly would not arise from an absolutely simple intuition but from a mental effort that changes the real order of things. After the direction given to psychology by the Scottish school, however, this claim is impossible to maintain. If many today still insist on the contrary view, it happens because the works of the Scots – and Reid’s especially – are more cited than studied or understood. Because the idea is just the object as intuited, the bond that runs between ideas cannot be different from the nexus that links the objects. Now, in the sphere of objectivity, Being produces existences by way of creation. Then, in the subjective sphere, we acquire the concept of the existent because we perceive it, and we perceive it because we actually see it produced, before the mind’s eye. The scheme of the human mind’s synthetic labour, which we will explain in due course, will clear up every obscurity and remove all doubt about our proposition. We noted above that in the immediate intuition of Being a judgment is contained that affirms the reality of that Being, and that this judgment, the basis of all clarity, is objective and divine. Now we can add that Being, considered no longer just as Being but as causal Being, gives us the perception of a fact that is equally objective and divine – the fact of creation. Therefore, we become aware by intuiting a divine judgment and a divine fact. Through the first, Being says ‘I exist.’ Through the second, it proclaims ‘I create’ – for to think of things as real, is, for God, actually to create them. Both are objective, but one is necessary, the other free and contingent. One is only within Being, the other is reflected towards an external object. One is a pure judgment by which Being affirms itself. The other is a practical judgment, a judgment made actual externally,

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by which Being posits universal existence. Both derive from the Intelligible because the Intelligible is Being. But the first derives from the Intelligible because it freely understands itself, while the second derives from the Intelligible because it freely understands and wills an external fact. The divine judgment is the basis of knowledge; the divine fact is the basis of nature. Hence, in virtue of this supreme judgment, philosophy is something divine, as psychology and physics are divine in virtue of its operation. The judgment provides the scope and content of the speculative sciences, as the fact provides for the natural sciences. And the whole human encyclopedia has its basis in a divine encyclopedia – a primitive Formula, Ideal or Real, that comes to us given by God, a true revelation. In the philosophical sciences, the fundamental Formula is governed by the divine judgment, which is a product of the ideas. In physics, it is governed by the grand and divine experiment of creation, which is a revelation of things. The first Formula gives us the Intelligible, the second the sensible. One represents to us Being taken simply, the other depicts it for us as a creative cause. The mathematical sciences, as we shall see farther on, have a place between these two Formulas. Finally, it is important to note that the divine judgment and fact, the foundation of the real and the knowable, argue for the personhood of Being. I only mention this as a truth of great significance to which I will return and explain in the appropriate place. The true Ideal Formula that we have been pursuing, the ultimate basis of all the knowable, can therefore be declared in the following terms: ‘Being creates existences.’ In this Formula the Idea is expressed by the concept of a creating Being, and since this concept cannot be had without that of existence and creation, the latter two notions belong indirectly to the Idea and to the component elements of the Formula that expresses it. The idea of Being is thus the foundation and organic centre of the Formula. The idea of creation is its organic state. And the three concepts joined together form the ideal organism. Without the idea of creation, the bond between the two other concepts would be missing. The extreme terms of the Formula would be confused, as happens among pagan peoples and philosophers; once this most important concept gets lost, they shake the whole organism loose of its rational truths. Just as the subject (‘Being’) of the Ideal Formula implicitly contains the judgment ‘Being is,’ likewise the predicate (‘creating existences’) contains another judgment, ‘existences are in Being.’ However, just as the predicate explicitly affirms that existences come from Being as from

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a first Cause, so it also declares implicitly that existences are in Being as in a first and absolute Substance. But if existences are in Being as in the first Substance because they are effects of the first Cause, then, as second causes and substances, subordinate to the first Substance and Cause, they are in themselves and depend on themselves. Confusion of the first Substance and Cause with second substances and causes has produced pantheism. The Formula also declares that the existent, having originated from Being, gets all the reality that it has from there. Hence it follows that, just as the existent cannot (as a matter of ontology) be without Being, even though it is distinct, so likewise it is not possible (as a matter of psychology) to think the existent without Being itself, even though the two terms are distinct in their concept. This real and mental simultaneity and interpenetration of Being and existent, which still does not eliminate the very basic distinction and infinite distance between them, is what is called the entity of existences, taking this phrase in its strictest sense. Being and existences are two things and two ideas, divided and conjoined, distinct and inseparable. This real and intellectual inseparability of Being and existent is such that the two terms gradually get mixed up, even in the language of the most careful speakers, and the concepts get confused, as we have already noted. But if one keeps an eye on the difference between the concepts, the synonymous usage of the words can help show how they are related to one another. When it is said that ‘God exists,’ for example, it means that God is the highest reality in himself – necessary reality and source of that finite and contingent reality found in creatures. And when it is claimed that ‘the man is,’ it is understood that the creature is in the Creator, the existent in Being, taking from it that limited and imperfect reality that we call existence. The Formula contains an ideal truth and an ideal fact. The ideal truth, expressed by the divine judgment, is the reality of Being. The ideal fact is the divine production of the existents, and it is called ideal, even though it is a fact, because it is divine and comes from Being. The ideal fact arises from the ideal truth by means of creation, which forms the passage from Being to existent. Since creation is the bond between truth and fact, it shares at its extremes in the nature of both. The intuitive cognition that we have of the ideal fact is accompanied by sensibles. The synthesis between the ideal fact of existence and the sensibles gives rise to experience, which, according to Aristotle, is the knowledge of individuals. And surely our awareness of individuals, as we shall soon see, is given to us by creation. The doctrine that I am explaining is so alien to the current way of

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doing philosophy that it is certain to find opponents. Among other objections that will be raised against me, it will be said that humans start with the idea of existence and that they move up from there to discuss the idea of Being rather than follow the opposite route. This is entirely correct – if the topic is the process of reflection. Starting from what makes the greatest impression on the mind, and is the direct object of psychological reflection – sensibles, for example – reflection naturally passes from existence to Being, and not the reverse. For that reason, the final terminus of the intuitive order becomes first in the reflective, and it is this dislocation that has led psychologists into error. But the process of reflection would be impossible if it were not preceded by a process of intuition like the one that we have described. In proof of this, one notes that the concept and the very term existence include and express a relation to Being. But how could one apprehend this relation if Being were not already known, if the dependence of the existent on Being were not a consequence of this knowledge? The very word exsistentia (ex eo quod per se et a se subsistit) – ex ente, as it were – assumes that the idea of existence not only is not isolated but also derives psychologically from another concept, as the thing represented derives from Being.20 In intuition the idea of existence could not precede that of Being or be independent of it without contradiction. Therefore, one sees that we cannot get hold of existence except insofar as it is created by Being. And thus, in the moving and immanent process of intuition, the mind passes from Being to existence by the intermediate link of creation. This happens because Being is represented to the mind as active and creative. Hence, even though it is immutable in itself, Being is established in movement (ad extra) and not in rest, unfolding itself in an external act and in time, has gone outside that immanent and restful actuality that belongs to its nature. It is in virtue of this intuition of active Being that the ancient Orientals distinguished the unrevealed God from the God who shows himself, paying their respects only to the former. The distinction was irreverent and absurd, but it has a metaphysical root in primordial intuition, which, in the Idea, represents to us, all at once, both Being in itself and Being in its external and creative actualization.

NOTES 1 The text followed here is the first edition, Gioberti (1840); see the Introduction, sections 7 and 8.

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Part II: Translations 2 [a] H.T. Colebrooke, Essais sur la philosophie des Hindous, trans. G. Pauthier (Paris: 1834): 9, 17, 34, 35. 3 Samkyha, traditionally the work of a sage named Kapila, is one of the six main lines of ancient Indian thought. It is the metaphysical theory that corresponds to the practice of Yoga, and its earliest text survives from the third century CE. Its cosmology is fundamentally materialist, deriving the world and the souls in it from a primordial substance called praktri, meaning ‘nature.’ 4 The ‘illustrious writer’ here is Rosmini, called the ‘illustrious author’ elsewhere. 5 [a] Rosmini, New Essay on the Origin of Ideas (Milan: 1837), II, section 5. 6 [a] Ibid., II, part 1, chapters 2, 5; part 2, chapter 5; part. 6, chapter 2. 7 [a] Ibid., II, section 5, part 2, chapter 4; parts 4−5; III, section 6, part 3. 8 [a] Ibid., II, section 5, part 2, chapter 5; section 4, part 6, chapter 2; III, section 6, part 5, chapter 5; section 7. 9 [a] Rosmini, Il Rinnovamento della filosofia del Mamiani esaminato, chapters 35, 39 ff; New Essay, section 5, part 2, chapters 5 or 4, vol. II, p. 135. 10 [a] Rosmini, Il Rinnovamento della filosofia del Mamiani esaminato, pp. 492−3, nn503−5, 613−21; New Essay, vol. II, pp. 477−80 passim. 11 [a] The illustrious Author confesses that he himself has travelled this road. Speaking of ancient Catholic doctrine, he expresses himself as follows: ‘Everyone sees that I have come to the same results, but by a different route. The theological school started, as I said, from thinking about God; I started simply by thinking about man and found myself nonetheless arriving at the same conclusions. This reaching the same goal by two opposite paths, it seems to me, is a confirmation, a demonstration of the truth. Moreover, doctrine may have received a new illustration and better evidence in this way, if I am not mistaken, and perhaps language itself also gained more precision and reason a firmer and more secure way of proceeding’ (Rosmini, Rinnovamento, pp. 408−9). The conclusions are not the same since psychologically Rosmini has been able only to get at possible being, which on its own cannot have ontological value, cannot serve as the basis of the knowable, cannot give scientific and objective value to psychology itself. The whole problem arises from the difference of the method followed. Rosmini’s is sound and admirable, yet it is neither primary nor unique in that it completes ontologism without wanting to take its place. This is the only way that the new and profound analysis of our Author will be able to purge itself of its defects, establish a firm basis for itself, and enrich science. 12 [a] See n2 of this volume; [e] Gioberti (1840), I, 711−76. 13 [a] I Cor. 13:12.

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Gioberti, The Ideal Formula 14 [a] See the passages from Gerson cited in n3 of this volume; [e] Gioberti (1840), I, 776−83, citing Jean Gerson (1363−1429) as an admirer of Bonaventura, especially his account of three kinds of seeing (visio) as face-toface or intuitive, mirroring or abstract, and cloudy or obscure. 15 Gioberti uses riflesso and riflessivo throughout, usually to mean ‘reflection’ and ‘reflective,’ but sometimes ‘reflex’ and ‘reflexive.’ 16 [a] Forcellini (Lexicon [Padua: 1805], II, 250) makes it synonymous with prodire, apparere, and exire, expressed by the Italian words to leave, appear, and go out of. He observes that it is ‘often used for esse, but in such a way that it connotes some movement of what is leaving or appearing, being present or absent. 17 [a] The Crusca (Dizionario della lingua italiana, ( [Padua: 1828], III, 519) calls existence being in act and the existent that which is in act. 18 [a] Vico, Opera latina (Milan: 1835), I, 106−7, 135; cf. 54. 19 [a] Forcellini, Lexicon, IV, 255, defines it as ‘essence, nature, that by which a thing is’; the definition by the Crusca – Dizionario della lingua italiana (Padua), VI, 1144 – is somewhat better, distinguishes it as having properly to do with essence. 20 ‘The very word existence (from that which subsists through itself and by itself) – from being as it were.’

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5 Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere

The Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy1

Part I: Method Chapter I: The Topic and Purpose of This Book 1. Three centuries have passed since every natural science began to move wisely and successfully towards its goal. The situation is the reverse in the domain of philosophy, which today, as in the past, seems troubled by conflicting systems and utterly unsure of any of its truths. Like many before us, we too have set out to find the cause of this because we are unsatisfied with the common view – that every conflict of philosophical opinion arises from the insuperable difficulty of the subject. The upshot is that any investigation of a hard subject can always lead to one of three results: either proving that knowledge of certain parts of the subject is impossible, as geometers deal with a number of their problems; or constructing a field in a purely empirical way while paying no attention at all to general principles, as used to be the case in chemistry; or only using analogies that are plentiful or helpful to establish the likelihood of various things – remote from certainty, more or less – as one sees the geologists doing. But none of these three conclusions applies at all to philosophy. No one has managed to show clearly that it is impossible to construct a rational philosophy. And yet for their part the sceptics never relax their zealous efforts, every now and then, to flatten and destroy what dogmatists have worked hard to build. Likewise, if some are convinced that philosophy can be no more than some kind of probable or experimental information, empirical and diffuse, a hundred others rise up and emphatically assert the opposite. For such people philosophy is a real sci-

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ence and completely dogmatic. Its duty is to provide all the other sciences whatever measure of certainty and rationality they have in themselves. 2. So we have sought some other reason for the turmoil in philosophy, besides the difficulty of the subject, though we have nowhere to look but in the nature or use of the faculties employed in the study of philosophy itself. For in any human activity there are three things, and three only, to consider: the content, the instrument, and the purpose. Hence, since the cognitive powers are the same in every field, in that people have no organ that is better or worse for philosophy, no special means of understanding or reflecting, in the end we have had to examine the use of the cognitive powers and to suspect this use of being deceptive and defective because it has not been able to lead to any firm and clear scientific result. Here again, however, the need has arisen to explain why it is only in philosophy that the cognitive powers have been badly applied … Only in philosophy does one still encounter a double subject and a double purpose. As a science of the human mind, which is how many have seen it, philosophy makes up part of the natural history of our existence. But as the science that governs all others, it moves beyond the bounds of anthropology and crosses into metaphysics. Again, the result is plain to see: in philosophy alone one finds the content and the instrument adapted to one another and mixed up. While studying the faculties and acts of the intellect, with what but the intellect itself do we undertake such a study? This is what multiplies the difficulties and often leads to the error of arguing in a circle. 3. Thus we have become convinced that philosophy’s mistakes, ancient and modern, and its incessant disputes are to be attributed to no other cause than the incorrect use of the cognitive faculties, or, as we would put it, fallacious, divergent, and distorted methods. In fact, anyone who reads the records of the whole period from Galileo onward clearly sees a common direction, always perfectly consistent, governing the various types of physical inquiry, one after the other. On the other hand, what one sees in theoretical studies – more and more often – is the emergence of methods that are not just different but opposed, each incapable of recognizing the truth on its own. Indeed, there are philosophers who think that a supreme and completely certain science, such as a first philosophy should be, can be based only on the universal, the changeless, and the necessary, and hence that it cannot come from changeable, limited, and accidental experi-

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ence. They have therefore constructed an a priori philosophy, following the method of geometry. While never proving their authority, they have thereby accepted absolute and general principles, from which they derive every subsequent demonstration – not to mention their never having succeeded in getting beyond abstractions to particularized knowledge of concrete, sensible objects. Others assume that they can follow the natural method of the physicists exactly, without regard for the very special circumstances of philosophy, and the result is that they explain the highest principles of reason and experience by those principles themselves. Having noted this egregious error, some adhere to the natural method of the physicists only for what concerns the empirical observation of phenomena. As for the highest principles of the intellect, they resolutely profess neither to know them nor to be able to produce any proof of them beyond their being instinctively evident. With one blow they thus abolish any theory of first philosophy and put in its place a bare experiential history of the mind and its instincts. Some prefer a more daring route and a novel one. Returning to the old geometrical method, they try to make it productive by applying various clever conjectures, thereby constructing the whole science of truth and being, partly a priori and partly ex hypothesi, meaning that they add the flaw of arbitrary notions to the defects of the geometrical method. Nor do we lack proponents of a method called historical. They say that philosophy should be constructed bit by bit of fragments taken from each school in every period. Finally, others have mixed these various learned procedures together, but not in a way that has yielded anything better. By comparing the opposed systems of method that appear in the domain of theoretical subjects, and by setting what we have said about them alongside the single system that governs physical studies so effectively, we get a clear sense of the persistent reason why theoretical subjects remain so contentious and full of obscurity … For subjects of reasoning, so much conflict and so much uncertainty of opinion can never in any way be reduced, in our view, unless theoretical minds can commit themselves, with a shared will, to solve the problem before us, which is to derive from deep inquiry into philosophy’s content and purpose the specific changes and correct practices that must govern the general teaching of the natural method. This and only this, so it seems to us, must be preliminary to any philosophy. 4. However, as we reached the conclusions that arose in this way from the

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history of instability in knowledge, two forces were acting on us at the same time. One was a concept of the best philosophical method, which took shape gradually. The other was the discovery of this rather remarkable fact: that honour and glory belong to our Italian ancestors not only for restoring the natural method in all its parts but also for applying it more than capably to the special circumstances of philosophy, permitting the Italians to begin reaping the fruits of a true and stable science from this method. Their honour and glory were then obscured and interrupted by violent fortune, but it seems to us that this book of ours should win them back again, if our weak powers are up to the task. Part of our proposal, then, is to show clearly, though very briefly, that the best conception of philosophical method possible today, including its slow and judicious application to the hardest parts of metaphysics, must be the restoration and pursuit of older principles of method found by Italians, along with the development of some of the older principles of truth discovered by them. These are the two things that we entitle Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy. 5. As we glanced at the history of knowledge and looked at it comparatively, two parallel series of ideas arose in our thought, and they will be described in the subsequent course of the book. In other words, as we set ourselves to noting our thoughts on the best philosophical method and also some of its difficult applications, we shall also note how these coincide with ancestral Italian teachings. The book’s purpose will also be twofold. The intent is both to increase honour to the fatherland by refreshing memories of its ancestral wisdom and also to explain concepts that we have gathered about the method and its applications, thus finding a way to halt the war of opinions in the realm of philosophy and bring some of them back to a steady and well-defined state of knowledge. Chapter II: Attempts to Restore Human Understanding 1. The general history of knowledge reveals this continuing progress of the human intellect. Humans are taught by nature about the best, and likewise the shortest route leading to the level of truth that suits the powers of their cognitive faculties. And yet there are enough causes of error, multiplying with time, to turn human understanding away from the route taken by the happy exercise of instinct … Certainly, Socrates did much and laboured hard to lead people back to rules of common sense. And in that adage of his, gnôthi seauton, he

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planted a precious seed of philosophical reform. Besides a moral rule, this maxim may contain a rule of method – making psychological criticism a basis for philosophizing. But because Socrates had a mind that turned more readily to practical than to theoretical teachings, and also because he never taught as if the dictates of common sense could be kept subject to rigid rules, the madness of the past reappeared after a short time. Next, the Alexandrian restoration thought to flee to the old weakness of intelligences by bending them under the weight of new dogmas coloured by a contrived, mystical glow. Proclus, who set a sad example by assuming more than he ought about the powers of demonstration, dressed Neoplatonic fantasies in a geometric garment. Only in Italy, then, and notably through the work of the mighty Galileo, did the human intellect return with constancy and care to the evidence of nature. 2. As far as I can see, Archimedes had also begun a philosophical restoration in Italy, even though fate opposed his lofty design. In the time of this supreme genius, it seems that the Italic school could not rise above the attacks of sceptics or the quibbles of sophists, such were the depths into which extravagant Eleatic dogma had plunged it. In fact, this same school had produced three great principles of philosophical method: first, a primal certainty, residing in the subjective state of our consciousness; second, Zeno’s dialectic, containing the results and rules of the technique of demonstration; third, the intention, kept always in view, to satisfy reason’s demands by attempting to explain the authority of its supreme laws by way of apodictic science. If one wants to add to this the observational, experimental, and inductive spirit of old Empedocles, the whole result might include all the best principles of philosophical method. Archimedes then renewed and enlarged the induction of Empedocles and Zeno’s demonstrative power so effectively that no thinker of later times has been able to surpass him. Had he been allowed to found a school of wisdom, however, we have no doubt that he would have started that restoration of all knowledge that was delayed by seventeen hundred years and more. At that time, with Galileo’s potent help and that of other philosophical thinkers of the seventeenth century, the principles of method, the hidden seeds that we have seen surviving in the ancestral Italic school, finally sprouted. Of this we will say a little more because we find that until now no one has adequately defined and described this wondrous movement of human reasoning.

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Chapter III: The Italian Restoration 1. To form an idea of the value of a task, one must carefully examine the obstacles barring its completion. Those that the Italians encountered in the reconstruction of knowledge were the greatest ever recorded by history. Some impediments were external and had physical causes, while others were internal causes that damaged the exercise of the mental faculties. Causes of both types converged in the false teaching of scholasticism, which corrupted thinkers who submitted to it, while afflicting those who were unsubmissive with prison, torture, and the stake. Petrarch is the first person we meet who had the courage to laugh at the false philosophy of the schools and use his keen mind to reveal its defects and foolishness, but the basis of his judgment was a noble and refined sensibility rather than deep critical inquiry.2 From then on, new access to sources of Greek wisdom kindled the will to combat scholasticism everywhere, in two ways: by contrasting Aristotle’s plain speech with the spurious and mystifying talk of the commentators; and by using the charms of Cicero and Xenophon to wean thinkers away from the barbaric linguistic habits of the dialecticians. 2. Leaders of this effort were Ermolao Barbaro, Angelo Poliziano, Valla, and Pomponazzi, the last two deserving special praise and admiration.3 With clear and polished eloquence, and with a sure frankness and independence of mind that was quite rare in those days, it was Pomponazzi more than the others who explained Aristotle in the purity of his text and his views. Lorenzo Valla wrote works that were finer, in our judgment, for their courage, practicality, and insight. Certainly before 1457, the year of his death, Valla wrote three books On Dialectic against the Aristotelians, thus breaking his lance not only against the scholastics but even the master of them that knew. To us, he appears to be the first who directly attacked a number of Aristotle’s views with arguments and theories of his own, while others, protected by Plato’s shield and all his weapons, hardly felt strong enough to combat Aristotle. In his three books, rich with elegant Latin, he began by ridiculing blind trust in Aristotle’s words. He then went on to show how the highest categories and first predicables had been based on false assumptions, proving this by the correct meaning of terms, by linguistic usage, and by arguments from common sense. Valla overthrew the classifications of Porphyry in the same way, showing how the basic rules of logic are simple and completely self-evident.

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He attaches great importance to the study of signs, and even though his treatment of the subject is too grammatical, he also eliminates several mistakes of the schools. He invites the youth to look at the greatest writers of prose and poetry for the correct understanding of language. With this wise counsel, in fact, he grasped one of the most effective ways to recover the principles of natural method and put them into practice. Finally, we should not fail to mention that his subtle mind devised for his time a reduction of Aristotle’s predicaments and categories resembling the reduction of Kant’s forms and categories that some have made today. According to Valla’s proposal and declaration, in fact, only three predicaments are distinct, essential, and more comprehensive than all the others: thing (both as substance and as cause), quality, and action, so that quality belongs to thing as substance, while action belongs to thing as cause.4 This is exactly what the modern spiritualists of France have thought and written.5 In this way, the disgrace and destruction of scholasticism was completed in the second half of the fifteenth century. A few foreigners cooperated, to be sure, but they came later. And it was on the peninsula that a great many of them – Rudolf Agricola, Jacques Lefèvre, Sepulveda, Scioppius, and others, for example – had acquired their learning and their skill as writers.6 3. With scholastic authority at its end, theological and Peripatetic authority remained. Against the first, Pietro Pomponazzi bravely rebelled, distinguishing purely rational teachings from the revealed, and stating that one is the business of the pure philosopher, the other the work of the theologian. But from reason’s dim and reflected light one should not reach conclusions like those that come from the splendour of an inspired science. Although reason must allow for the debility of all natural philosophy, there is still no substitute for it. Pomponazzi therefore taught that one must ascend from natural knowledge of things to knowledge of God, not the reverse, never deriving knowledge of natural things from prior knowledge of God, as was the ruling practice of his era. This was the second step that Pomponazzi took, at the risk of his life, to move the human mind towards its independence. 4. Italians sought in three ways to shake Aristotle’s authority, though it would ultimately survive, seeming to draw new strength from custom and from the times. First of all, the disciples of the Philosopher themselves opened a breach in their master’s infallibility by changing some of his

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doctrines and adding new ones. Pomponazzi himself did this, along with Zabarella, Cesalpino, and Cremonini, for example. Second, Aristotle’s views were opposed – sometimes by arguing against them, at other times by restoring the diverse teachings of various ancient sects to a place of honour and using them against Aristotle. Finally, opposition to Aristotle came from inventing original and impressive systems, like those of Cardano, Vanini, Bruno, and Patrizi.7 In the fight against Aristotle and his commentators, Patrizi then displayed an eagerness, a knowledge, and an immense erudition that was altogether uncommon. Nearly half a century later, as Gassendi was planning to continue his Paradoxical Exercises Against Aristotle, he saw that the Italians had been there before him and left him no fruit worth harvesting.8 What turned out to be most effective in stirring people to think, however, were refutations aimed at the works on cosmology and physics, which were convicted of error rather often by sense experience. Telesio entered this debate and caused a great outcry. Others, less famous than him, took a better route to reach better results, but they did not attack Aristotle because it was not their concern.9 5. After that, one might have guessed that the Italians had finally liberated their genius from any external constraint, retaining only the internal authority of their own conviction. They were still incapable, nonetheless, of exercising their faculties of knowledge freely and effectively because for a long time those faculties had been damaged by bad habits and had completely forgotten nature’s precepts. Two philosophical practices became incredibly harmful. The first was to investigate the relations and consequences of what was already known rather than the obscure and hidden parts of what was unknown. The second, at the start of any kind of inquiry, was to begin with various generalities, usually not debated or demonstrated and often leading to specious results that were abstractions and purely vacuous. From those two practices came others equally harmful. They transformed every type of inquiry into reasoning about ideas; the aptitude for real analysis was lost, and also the trail of discovery. Detailed observation of psychological phenomena, as opposed to speculative problems, therefore fell into disdain when it was supposed that observation could not be a basis for teaching and when the maxim held that particulars do not constitute knowledge. It was also usual to attribute little value to bare experimental physics, a science whose metaphysical part was investigated, to be sure, but not the rest. Overthrowing a good many of Aristo-

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tle’s opinions seemed insufficient to prove the emptiness of his ontology and his dialectic, which had become a daily tool of reasoning, almost second nature. This produced an insane presumption about the powers of our mind and a belief that everything could be known. Finally came an excess of fantasy, a boundless love for the marvellous and superhuman, and then affectations of language and pedantic formulas, feigning scientific mystery with every word. Chapter IV: A Doctrine of Method 1. Thus it was recognized that partial corrections could not do much good, that the effective remedy lay in completely reorganizing the understanding and tearing out the diseased roots of harmful habits and unhealthy anxieties. People felt that the time had come for a doctrine of method, and – much more important – that it was necessary to restore the natural method. To study in this way was entirely novel, without example in antiquity. In Greek texts one read that Zeno had turned everything upside down with the strength of his dialectic; in the books of Proclus one saw a claim for the geometric method – or the dogmatic, as it should be called; and in Plato’s dialogues one could point in many places to quite exquisite efforts either at the technique of elimination or at that of inference, and so on; but nowhere did one find an explicit doctrine that dealt with all these issues. It was a great thing if in Xenophon one encountered some fleeting hint about the Socratic method and in Galen some special instructions about the nature of the studies that he professed. In his dialectical books Aristotle never went further than investigating the syllogism and fruitlessly enumerating the sources of invention … 2. Much praise, then, to the ancient Italians for having discovered the need for a broad and comprehensive doctrine of method, though the most ancient of them did not feel this need at all. They undertook a reform of all knowledge, but this discovery alone made it bear fruit. Granted that the physical sciences, once they found their true path, prospered and grew without limit from that time on; our task now is to prove that the speculative sciences cannot in the least be outmatched by the physical in their certainty, and, so to speak, infinite progress, as long as speculative philosophers apply to their subject a single, common method – the natural method – suitably adapted to the very special conditions of first philosophy.

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Among rationalist philosophers, the first in Italy to speak extensively about the doctrine of method was Mario Nizolio, who in his Antibarbarus proclaimed the need to reorganize thought by endowing it with true principles and the true way of philosophizing.10 He refuted not just a few propositions but all the dialectic and metaphysics of his day, declaring it partly false, partly useless. He had equal scorn for the species of Aristotle and the ideas of Plato, finding both entirely out of tune with the facts. He adopted a style completely divorced from scholastic barbarisms, and his language was plain, clear, and ordinary. Thus, even more than Valla, he anticipated and fulfilled the wish of Hobbes, the Port-Royal authors, and others who were anxious to reduce technical language to common language. Nizolio certainly understood that the dialectic and metaphysics of the Peripatetics was a constant war of words. Hence, by examining the strict sense of terms and hidden grammatical structure in light of ordinary usage and on the authority of the best writers, he was confident – and clearly he was not mistaken – that the Peripatetic edifice would be completely deconstructed. It is notable that he foresaw the position of the Scottish School, which taught that philosophical language must be determined by the simple guidance of common usage and clear, obvious etymologies. Nizolio’s doctrine of method is quite incomplete, to be sure, and more literary than philosophical. Yet it agrees perfectly with the natural method. In fact, he trusted too much in the innate capacity of minds, and he meant to give them sufficient guidance with three precepts, as follows: first, thoroughly understand and consider the value of the signs and the language in which philosophers have written; second, conduct one’s studies with the greatest freedom of mind and equanimity of spirit; third, study the writings and thoughts of all schools, excluding none, least of all those opposed to one’s own views. Nizolio’s thought, inert for two centuries while all philosophers forgot it, cited only by grammarians for their studies of refined Ciceronianisms, was thought by Leibniz worthy of restoration to human memory in a new printing, which was honoured with much praise. 3. Jacopo Aconcio, Nizolio’s contemporary, dealt explicitly with method in a book that he called On the Art of Research and On the Art of Teaching.11 His principles do not stray from the natural method nor do they arise from any ambitious theory. On the contemplation of the subject, the ordering of means to the end, the observation and decomposition of parts down to the final elements, what Aconcio prescribes is wise and

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insightful … He earns our special esteem for having thoroughly grasped the importance of method when he wrote that ‘out of thirty years of study it is more useful to spend twenty just on investigating method than to spend all thirty without the help of method.’12 … 4. Sebastiano Erizzo, a person widely read and uncommonly well informed, published an elegant and learned book On the Instrument and the Method of Discovery of the Ancients in 1554. Its topic, as one can see, is the problem of method, though Erizzo wanted not so much to teach new principles and new habits as to restore old ones … ‘There are four methods,’ he wrote, ‘definition, division, demonstration and resolution. The second, division, is the best – the only one, in fact, that yields truth – and it made the ancients excellent at discovery.’13 The method now called analytic corresponds precisely to this method celebrated by Erizzo, which is also the one proclaimed by Condillac as the unique source of all knowledge … For all that, it must be said of Erizzo that he presents the true and good method without having the capacity to develop it; in any case, the ways and means that he proposes are better suited to analysing ideas than facts. 5. Bruno’s boundless genius, though far advanced in matters of logic, still did not let him understand clearly enough what he thought about it, by reason of the great passion that he had for Lull’s old ideas, which he hoped to correct, expand, and make productive. Others suppose (and to me it seems quite likely) that he paraded this admiration of his for the Lullian art in order to appeal to the masses, to gain easy access to teaching posts, and to seize an opportunity to propagate his daring notions about first philosophy. Be that as it may, on the topic at hand what can be said of Bruno and declared confidently is this: as much as anyone else in his day, he was persuaded of the great need for a reformation of studies and a reorganization of understanding.14 He grasped the true and natural division of method in the art of investigating and finding facts, in the art of judging and putting them in order, and finally in the art of applying principles.15 He believed that philosophy must begin with doubt. Lastly, he thought that cognition of particulars and the inductions derived from them make up general truths, on which science is then securely built …16 Otherwise, overcome by his restless imagination and by the demands of his ontological inquiries, he certainly used a priori arguments more than was necessary. Nonetheless, he often turned away from them, and,

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applying a form of critical method, searched for the basis of his teachings in the facts of consciousness … 6. From many directions and by different paths, then, Italians converged on the common idea of needing intellectual reform and of holding themselves to the precepts of nature. In the course of this century, no serious work of philosophy saw the light without some discussion, short or long, of method. Mocenigo wished to treat it as an elementary operation of the intellect; in his various Reflections he does not neglect to set down its laws, which still do not go much beyond the limits of the art of demonstration.17 Bernardino Telesio rebelled more forcefully against philosophy’s bad habits. In his nine books On the Nature of Things … he resolved to look only at the facts and at nothing else – to recognize sensation, along with things made known by sensation, or things exactly identified with them, as the unique sources of all knowledge. He wanted to study the world and all its parts – the ultimate ingredients, operations, and effects of each part – so that by themselves they would then reveal what they are and what they produce. These are great and noble promises, as anyone can see, and while Telesio did little to fulfil them, no one can deny him the merit of having conceived a physics that was purely inductive and not based on the abstractions of the ontologists, as contemporary systems used to be.18 Chapter V: Tommaso Campanella 1. Telesio had followers, and it added much to his honour to count Tommaso Campanella, a Dominican friar, among those who learned from him. From the age of fifteen, Campanella began to doubt the Peripatetic fairy tales that the friars taught him. As he read and compared those who wrote glosses on Aristotle, his doubts grew. Then he looked at the text of Aristotle himself, along with Plato, Galen, Pliny, the works of the Stoics and the Telesians, and – in his words – he ‘compared them with the great book of nature, where it was revealed how much the copies resembled the original.’ While still very young, he became aware of the appalling practices and methods introduced into philosophy, which is why he wrote his book on investigation, to criticize the methods of the schools … 2. He claimed that there are two methods, or, better, two applications

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of the natural method: one in the process of discovery; the other in that of reasoning; but the second method could more appropriately be called the doctrinal method …19 He called experience the beginning of our knowledge and the guide of the intellect. Once experience is abandoned, philosophers always fall into empty enthusiasms, relying on the power of imagination to create accidental likenesses of the truth. 3. And if Telesio conceived the reform of the natural disciplines, Campanella had the courage to extend that reform to every subject.20 He was the first to devise a new compilation and arrangement of the fields of knowledge, for he felt himself obliged to begin by gathering his information together and testifying to the richness of intellectual resources. At the summit of all learning he put metaphysics, as the most general of all the sciences. He then divided the fields into the rational and the real – those that have more to do with the knowing subject, and those that are objective and examine the nature of material beings. From these two lines of theory, he derived the operative and practical sciences, the disciplines and the arts. While some might find such an arrangement unhelpful or defective, I would not hesitate to judge it better than the one developed by Bacon of Verulam … 4. But Campanella’s greatest and hardest idea was to apply doctrines of method to rational philosophy. In fact, none of those maxims that are effective in governing science remained unknown to him. The ancients began by observing the world – indeed, the universe – and moved on as best they could to mankind. But not Campanella, who wanted to reconsider the Eleatic doctrine of the subjective character of all cognitions and to locate in it the source of primal certainty and the natural beginning of any philosophical analysis. This led him to man, and from there he followed a path of criticism to the study of the world and the universe. And he arrived at this concept while looking for the cause of the unity of human knowledge … Campanella started with the method of universal doubt, and in fourteen well-organized chapters he set forth all the sceptical arguments with extraordinary perspicacity. Then he took up the refutation of each argument and concluded with the possibility of knowledge, based on the absolute reality of the sensation of one’s own existence …21 For Campanella the word sensing means something different than it does for modern sensists, for whom it goes only as far as that perception of an external object which is received by the activity of the organs. But in

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the broad Latin sense, sensing sometimes expresses any phenomenon within consciousness and any act noticed by our mind – a usage also employed more than once by our philosopher. In this way, he defined the object, purpose, and possibility of knowledge, proclaiming the principle of method that prescribes the route that knowledge must take, and what kind of certainty it must maintain as the measure and assay of all other knowledge. To sound out the extent, legitimacy, and origins of human knowledge, the object of first philosophy, he then felt obliged to consider carefully the effectiveness and use of the cognitive powers … 5. Campanella clearly understood the timeliness of the doctrine that the moderns call the critical philosophy, in keeping with Kant. And he wished to construct it only by means of psychological history and inductive observation, after which he hoped to move on to deal with being and to clarify the nature and authority of the highest universals. Telesio had already begun to outline a detailed account of intellectual phenomena and the activity of the sense-organs, but Campanella brought greater maturity of judgment to the task. He often pointed out the defects of views that claimed to explain the facts of the intellect by weak comparisons drawn from material phenomena, and he rejected the empty assumptions that ventured guesses about the first ideas and first judgments of the newborn … Had Campanella always put his methodological views into practice in just this way, and, above all, had he avoided the labyrinths of ontology, he would have become the most important of philosophers, in my judgment – though in his day this may have been far beyond the reach of possibility. 6. Even though Campanella defined the true idea of philosophical method most effectively – better than anyone in his time – a number of other Italians followed paths much like his in the same field. We will make special mention of Patrizi, whose love of Platonic abstractions never prevented him from recognizing the value of definite rules of method …22 Patrizi was the first to establish the rule of absolute certainty and of measuring every form of truth by it, as opposed to the practice of assuming general truths as premises of a first science, and he put forward the observation of phenomena and inductive experience. In the end, with an eye to first philosophy in the highest sense, he condemned the method of all those who presume to explain the supreme principles of reason by purely empirical experience.23 Using such wise and timeless maxims of philosophical method, those

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who wrote in this period often came to agreement; some of them I have mentioned above, and others will enter my discussion elsewhere. Chapter VI: Leonardo da Vinci 1. Reviewing what has been shown up to this point about the views of our Italian ancestors on method, one notes that they were quite well aware of the need to move closer to the precepts of nature even though these had not all been recognized and were never practised with good judgment. They thought about the process of induction, but they did not know how to follow it clearly. A common failing, in fact, was to make inductions hastily from a few particulars, and often with only a few weak analogies. Not only did they spoil inductive observation in this way, they also lost the fruit of any future experience, inasmuch as they bent and adapted it by force to general principles wrongly held. Universally established, nonetheless, was the maxim that facts must provide the basis of every investigation. Peripatetic abstractions were also overthrown, but this did not keep thinkers free from the tangles of a new ontology, not much better than the old one. The custom of completing and extending theories with syllogisms did not stop, and they went on rehearsing their debates instead of experimenting. But the old conceit of knowing and explaining everything no longer ruled. On the contrary, philosophers willingly agreed to admit their ignorance and the weak powers of reason … 2. But in the meantime a group of thinkers of enormous distinction was flourishing in Italy. While philosophers dithered, they moved into the physical sciences, keeping point by point to the pure rules of natural method, a more expeditious way for them to prepare a great and enduring restoration. At their head was the brilliant Leonardo da Vinci.24 He was Valla’s contemporary, and he lived half a century or more before Nizolio, Aconcio, and Telesio. Yet his knowledge of the natural art of method was so advanced, given when he lived, that one would have to hail him as the master and teacher of those others, had his writings been better known and had people been able to judge the qualifications of the sage as capably as the works of the artist. The age in which Leonardo conceived such great things, however, was still impoverished in its mental habits … Many of his contemporaries had occasional success in the practise of inductive observation and thereby contributed some worthwhile discovery, but this happened only because of the force of their talent, not from methodical effort. Their

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discoveries therefore lay lifeless, mixed with the most outrageous mistakes, like flecks of gold in mud. Such was the case with Giambattista Porta, for example, and with Agrippa and Cardano. Cesalpino in botany and Fracastoro in some areas of physics turned out to be acute, careful, and admirable observers. Maurolico and Tartaglia became eminent in mathematics, Eustachio and Fallopio in anatomy.25 But their achievement was in the special sciences, which sometimes had to involve either geometrical proof or empirical observation of phenomena, and it came long after Leonardo’s. In any case, he alone had a complete grasp of the gradations and rules of the art of discovery and used them all … No one in the world observed more than this Leonardo, and he came across no object without contemplating it at length. With exquisite care and in good order, he thought as much about tiny things as about the large … and this precise analysis never obscured his view of great syntheses as he applied empirical procedures. On the contrary, he used induction and generalized as much as any other philosopher who used demonstrative methods. Starting with the invention of a thousand practical machines and amazing devices for use in war or for other public needs, he gradually moved on to investigate the higher laws of hydraulics and mechanics. Broad conceptions of the most important truths of optics, geology, and theoretical and experimental physics abound in his manuscripts, which thus anticipate many discoveries of Halley, Kepler, Copernicus, and others of like genius. Chapter VII: Galileo 1. The great Galileo eventually followed the path that Leonardo opened, and it was his destiny to bring Italy’s restoration to glorious fulfillment. People would have deceived themselves had they thought that Galileo did this by a fortunate instinct of nature and not by enlightenment gained from philosophy – by long and deliberate inquiry into the nature of human minds. We would prefer to answer them with Galileo’s own works, where in a hundred passages one finds evidence of his long meditations on method. This is why he wanted to be called not only a mathematician but also a philosopher, making a special point of it, when he unfortunately agreed to return to Tuscany in the service of the Medici …26 In the Assayer, he lets us know how he discovered that the secondary qualities of bodies reside only in the sensing subject, and that with regard to the external object they are nothing but mere names.27 Once the animal faculty has been removed, all these qualities are taken

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away and annihilated. In subsequent discussions of forces, the vacuum, space, causes, and other great problems, he displays an insight as amazing and an approach as confident as any advanced study of those topics – especially on regulative principles, having tested each of them against the facts and his penetrating judgment. 2. But his great idea was a complete reform of method, without which he thought no field of knowledge could prosper …28 Up to now we have been able to count four or five errors of method which in Galileo’s time continued to trouble the learned and their studies, such as a certain tendency to trust authority… [To this] he angrily objected … and against another habit – discussing and debating the known while inquiring no further into the unknown – his rejoinder was just as angry: namely, that pride as much as laziness made people in his day incapable of seeking new and accurate results and unable to derive new proofs from them, and that it was easier for them to search for books and compare passages.29 Perceiving, on the other hand, that the teachings of Aconcio, Valla, Nizolio, Telesio, and Campanella were not enough to detach people’s minds from their bad and outworn habits, he was convinced that the same thing would have happened to him had he limited his work to promulgating and discussing his views on the good and true method, without extending them by new examples. That he was very wise to do so was shown a little later by Descartes, who, contesting many recent teachings of the rationalist philosophers, published new proofs a priori, abstractions taken for reality, hypotheses treated as theories and returned to use. 3. Galileo also saw that there can be no certain science of method until a science of the intellect has been established, and that in the meantime people have no effective recourse but to return tamely to the dogmas of common sense. His aim, therefore, was to restore the love of the natural method and its practices, drawing clear attention to its rules, and, in the end, making it the people’s heritage once again, perpetuating its rule with the resolute assistance of the many … He not only wrote in the vernacular but did so with elegance and eloquence, using his writing to lead young people to a natural and perfect sense of the beautiful and the true. At that time, no type of research proved more fit than the natural sciences to correct their thinking and take away their ills since no sophisms or veiled words could stand against factual evidence … In this way, Galileo forced his enemies, the Peripatetics themselves, to stoop to observation and conduct experiments …

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The natural sciences thus provided the occasion and hope of wonderful discoveries capable of wakening human curiosity – ordinary people included – and this was how it happened: the invention of the telescope, the new theory of the heavens, and new experiments on motion stirred many people and made them want to know more. Another advantage arising from the things described by Galileo was to persuade everyone that nature’s wonders belong to one and all, and that for those who use their eyes and hands there is no shortage of things to ponder. That most pernicious axiom of the philosophers – that small details do not produce science – was thus made obsolete. Galileo often noted how he had directed his research towards problems falsely regarded as commonplace and frivolous, and he added that on this point his enemies were not behaving like their master Aristotle … From the love of natural sciences that he laboured to propagate, this benefit inevitably arose: that in these sciences the facts themselves replace our assumptions and become the mind’s best guide … What he wanted above all was to plant in each person’s mind the caution, deliberation, and maturity of the art of induction. He called doubt the father of discoveries and the highway of truth … While his contemporaries looked in physics for metaphysics, he refrained altogether from attempts at explanation in areas where the senses are incompetent and reasoning is insufficient. In discussions of the infinite, the continuous, the indivisible, the one or other such features of metaphysical being, he actually found express proof that we deceive ourselves in thinking that we can understand them. And yet he did not, on that account, call it foolhardy to derive quite plausible conjectures from the general concept of the system of the heavens that he had established. The result was that modern science, despite having made enormous progress, has never caught him in a mistake, except perhaps on one or two purely conjectural points. 4. Galileo left no part of method without giving an example or a rule. In his treatise on comets he added a way to eliminate false interpretations, evaluate conjectures, and allow for helpful hypotheses.30 In more than one work, especially the polemical writings, he showed how analogies are gathered together and weighed and how to obtain the criterion of certainty from their aggregation, or, better, their approximation to identity. He taught how to divide fields of study and set their boundaries, avoiding the error of his age, which chased after encyclopedias and fantastic explanations of all creation. Galileo did not fail on that account to rise to the investigation of universal truths and the final synthesis of his astounding theories. By

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carefully connecting experience with reason, he always strove to put his findings into scientific form … He did not refrain from sharp criticisms when the speculators egregiously abused the principle of final causes, and he noted how risky it is to define them. To him it seemed an especially strange and laughable ambition for humans to impose on the universe their peculiar notions of what is beautiful, good, perfect, and so on.31 Only a careless reader of his works could not easily be convinced of his enormous depth in the demonstrative method, his great skill in deriving conclusions from arguments so that they correspond precisely to the import of the premises … It would have been much more just and reasonable, then, if Galileo had been able to offer that famous observation of Bacon’s – that if the empirical method were finally married to the rational, human minds would agree in peace.32 5. Under these rules Galileo set forth the natural method, whose foundations he believed to be no longer in dispute … He taught an application of the rules of method that was already so complete that no one in any period has ever used a better one. And in the art of coordinating observation, experience, and reason, what his school showed it could do – whether in analytic insight and accuracy or in breadth and depth of synthetic outlook – we find unequalled by any modern researcher … Galileo thought it a piece of wisdom required by his times not to go beyond the physical phenomena, seeing that intellectual conditions were not yet favourable enough to risk the thickets of debate on rationalist teachings. He had long discussions about this with Hobbes, however, who came to Florence specifically to hear what the venerable old sage had to say.33 And although he advised Hobbes on the method that he should follow in order to bring speculative theory close to geometric proof, Hobbes then mixed hypotheses with inductions and made inquiries into the natural history of the mind that were too simple. 6. In this way our Italian ancestors brought the reorganization of human thought to an end. Campanella, Leonardo, Galileo, and others mentioned above really came upon a field quite well prepared to nourish the seed that was cast there. Actually, it is no small wonder to observe that a positive philosophy and a clear experimental method have always been suited to the Italian character. This circumstance alone prevented Platonic ideas from being able to root deeply and firmly in the peninsula, for if the gentle and elevated nature of the Italians brought them near to the prince of rationalists, the very strict nature of their judgment drew them away from him …

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On the other hand, two things especially have worked among us to keep Aristotle’s authority so lively and persistent: one was that he located the original source of all knowledge in the facts of experience; the other was his statement that universals are all formed by induction. Patrizi, desirous of seducing Italy with Platonic rationalism, therefore hastened to announce that he intended to ascend to the region of ideas by induction and experiment.34 And we have seen Giordano Bruno, that rash dogmatizer, often yielding to laws of induction and looking among facts of inner sense for the experimental data of his ontological propositions. This is why no one in this first revival of every sector of knowledge wanted to restore the logic of Zeno and Proclus, as the Cartesians did, and to proclaim it the only true path of science. Everyone kept more or less strictly to the art of experiment and induction, which, while being debated by rationalist philosophers and practised in Leonardo’s physics and by others mentioned above, was also introduced into political and historical topics with subtle and insuperable genius by Nicolò Machiavelli. Chapter VIII: From Bacon to Descartes 1. In what we have been saying up to this point, we have no desire to diminish the glory of René Descartes and Bacon of Verulam, recognizing that our country’s honour must not grow by larceny nor by any invidious craft. In the histories of all peoples, one finds few as great as Bacon and Descartes. Our only contention is that in their teachings on method they did not anticipate or instruct the Italians, and that in this regard the Italian doctrine, promoted by Valla, Nizolio, Aconcio, Erizzo, and Campanella and then perfected by Leonardo and Galileo, also surpasses the teachings of Bacon and René Descartes in completeness and utility. In fact, as far as priority in time is concerned, one need only compare the dates and the publications of their books, and one will see, for example, that Descartes issued his work On Method when Galileo was nearly worn out and that Bacon published the New Organon many years after Galileo’s writings were widespread, after his discoveries had been made public and his following was long since established in many places. And while the whole world talked about Galileo’s results, Bacon’s works and reputation did not reach beyond the shores of his island for a long time.35 The New Organon and the book On the Value of the Sciences obviously contain new, important, and productive ideas on the workings of minds and especially on the art of induction.36 The other parts of method lay idle, either not discussed or not organized. But the tables that Bacon proposed, from which facts are to be well observed and collated, become

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so perplexing that no scientist has thought them worth using, and … the excessive abstraction and uncertainty of his principles greatly reduce their effectiveness … 2. Once Bacon got down to dealing with a universal method, it was proper for him to follow the trail of psychological experience. On the other hand, how could he believe that a first philosophy was not necessary once he set out to collect and organize human knowledge and to investigate the highest unity? In fact, the doctrine that he mentions in the third book of De augmentis, and wants to call a first science, has nothing to do with the highest universals nor with the common basis of all cognitions …37 Hence, Bacon is to be judged either as a practical person or as a theorist. If he is practical, who could rank him ahead of Galileo or even as his equal? If he is theoretical, we would say that he understood neither the nature nor the importance of certain principles that must have been known to Italian philosophers before him and subordinated to the laws of natural method. 3. As for Descartes, and as far as the direction of the mind is concerned, it is quite right to praise him for recounting the detailed story of his thoughts and for the four rules in which he wants to collect and enclose the whole art of method. Because of their excessive abstraction, however, and because they might include too much, none of them is defined as it should be. In fact, he and his school adapted these rules to geometrical method, whereas others might adapt them just as well to experimental induction. When he made his next move, Descartes quickly abandoned inquiry into facts and could never get back to it again. This was the reason why the schools reinvented many vices of the old philosophy, as when they disdained research into particular phenomena and asked metaphysical questions about their apparent acquaintance with what transcends every path of science … Some credit Descartes with the high honour of abolishing the tyrannical rule of authority; with putting methodical doubt on guard against every mental bias; with beginning philosophy where it must and can begin – namely, from the certainty of inner sense; with destroying the illicit principle of final causes; and finally with discovering the subjective nature of the secondary qualities of matter. But we have found that all these things were discovered first by our Italian ancestors. 4. Campanella’s maxims, both on method and on rational philosophy,

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lay scattered throughout his voluminous works, expressed in a dry and excessively professorial style, encumbered with endless discussions of Peripatetic dogmas and scholastic subtleties – two things that he would rather refute than omit. Descartes, on the other hand, coming after the Italians, found readers ready to applaud his wish to learn nothing from the ancients or the moderns (more pretence than reality) but to derive all knowledge from his own thought. It also delighted everyone to hear him speaking about the deepest problems in plain and pleasant language, without scholastic pettiness and as if he were involved in social conversation. His arguments were mostly quite successful; his principles were few, clear, and simple; all the gears in his machine were intricately connected and very well balanced. It was especially delightful to have – or to think one had – the key to all knowledge, all difficulty, and all mystery in a single book, and to hear it said that studying the Latins and Greeks was of no value, statements that gratified human curiosity and human laziness at the same time. Delightful to the fantasy, finally, was a fine new system of the created universe, written with a geometer’s pen and so elegantly organized that it seemed truly to master the world. All this makes it easy to understand how Descartes maintained so grand a reputation and lined the whole family of philosophers up behind his views. 5. In England and France, Descartes and Bacon initiated new and profound theoretical inquiries that were dying out in Italy during the same period. Bruno, Ruggeri, and Vanini died at the stake; Pomponazzi barely escaped the executioner; Campanella spent twenty-seven years in prison and was tortured seven times; others were persecuted and scattered. Thus the noble course of Italian philosophy fell into decline, first the rational, then the natural, since very few of Galileo’s disciples escaped the poverty, worry, and mistreatment to which their master was subjected. Chapter IX: A New Italian School 1. As we thus examine the histories of variation in knowledge, it seems quite obvious to us that it was Italians who set about reorganizing the wisdom of civilized nations, completely restoring the natural method and carefully laying the foundations of philosophical knowledge. Although this first effort eventually spread and strengthened its maxims through the work of the new Italian academies and the cooperation of foreign societies, things nonetheless went badly for good philosophical method,

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which had hardly seemed to emerge when it was blocked by the mass of persecutions and then contradicted again by the bad habits of Cartesian philosophy. When we think carefully about these events and make frequent comparisons with modern times, we reach the following conclusion: namely, that the good to be done in every domain of theoretical inquiry would be quick, extensive, and admirable if a new Italian school could be established and if its central task were to pick up the thread of the old abstract teachings, along with those whose main intent and primary work was to establish the best philosophical method by carefully adapting the natural method to the conditions proper to the nature of those teachings – maxims for the concerns of first philosophy. For such an enterprise, given what we have already written, this seems the sole and unique propaedeutic capable of easing the endless discord among systems and bringing philosophy into any definite and positive state as a science. We would say that a school must be created, because, in our view, only the collective activity of many thinkers can work to maintain the authority of secure principles and practices, even when their value can be measured quickly and confidently from the abundance and variety of their results. The Italians also believed this when they set the first example and taught how to unite the strengths of individual minds and multiply them by mutual influence and by setting definite goals and definite common standards. Thus arose Telesio’s academy and the one that Porta founded in Naples; Leonardo’s in Milan and the Platonic group at the Medici court; also Pomponazzi’s, larger but more secretive; and then the Lincei in Rome and the Cimento in Florence – and everyone knows what the civilized world owes these last two for having reconstructed experimental research. In this framework, therefore, let us eagerly desire and appeal for a renewal of the ancestral Italian philosophy, not because we believe there is no philosophy in our fair land today or that it never follows the footsteps of our ancestors. Indeed, it greatly delights our hearts to see it flourish again – noble, chaste, judicious, and very careful – especially in the hands of the distinguished Pasquale Galluppi, who deserves to inherit all the fame of the thinkers of Cosenza and to propagate the wisdom of Vico and Genovesi. But what would make us think it impossible today to renew all the glory of the ancestral Italian school and retake the leadership in theoretical inquiry that we held throughout the whole sixteenth century, without contest and beyond dispute – even in the judgment of foreigners? If from one perspective we see a long era of misfortune and

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humiliation, from another we recall that nature’s laws are immutable and that nature has made Italy the happy fatherland of the wisest of nations … Chapter XVII: Various Contemporary Philosophies in Other Countries 1. If what we said in opening this book was true, that all the mistakes of modern philosophy come mainly from errors of method, we should, after examining the systems most celebrated in our day, find them more or less out of line with the rules described above. And this seems to be the case. In keeping with our customary brevity, we shall confirm this finding with a few selected examples … 2. If we begin to examine our topic in light of the tendencies of modern theoretical studies, we will see that some philosophers set aside philosophy’s right and proper purpose, which is to complete the knowledge natural to our being. They then proceed straight to inquiring about primal knowledge, having begun with abstractions and keeping them ceaselessly in play. If we turn our attention in the other direction and look at the school that takes its name from Locke, we will notice that it seems to increase philosophy’s heritage abundantly, as far as the mind’s empirical history is concerned. While putting ordinary experience to use, however, like any other inquiry into nature, this school all but ignores any effort at investigating first truths. It thus falls unaware into a vicious circle of argument as it strives to explain many higher truths by other basic and apodictic principles of common sense for which it supplies no proof. Both sects, then, Lockeans and rationalists, have made the same mistake, preferring to dogmatize and not waiting for research on the mind to be completed. Thus we may hear the rationalists announcing with axiomatic confidence that some ideas and some judgments are naturally innate. And on the other hand we hear the sensists countering with an axiom of their own, which is that there is no idea or judgment inside the mind that does not come from the senses. Amidst opposing claims this remains certain, that neither of the two sects has properly grasped the empirical history of the understanding. Barely inside the doorway of psychology, they have claimed to reach a synthetic principle that would describe the essence and origin of all thought. But it gets worse: the two sects, infatuated with their dogmatic principle, often lose the results of subsequent experience, wishing to force the phenomena to fit the principle, not the principle to fit the phenomena.

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The Lockeans, for example, once they have found nothing in a sequence of phenomena to show an apodictic causal connection among them, immediately announce – in keeping with pre-established dogma – that the causal principle is the child of habit and of the constant association of particular ideas. The rationalists, on the contrary, having barely noted the same fact, rush straight to their favourite rule, their belief that the highest principles of reason are all transcendent and innate. Because of a related concern, neither sect bothers much about carefully distinguishing the positive part of their work from the conjectural part, which asks about the hidden origins of thought and the mental history of the newborn. Lockeans start with the assumption of the tabula rasa. Kant’s only starting point is pre-existing formative powers, but they are also semi-hypothetical. So nothing proves that there are not notions and concepts accompanying the formative powers, even in advance of all experience. And even if this seems improbable, it is certainly not impossible. True, the philosophers make up for their patchy analysis with a certain subtlety of argument and elevate their theoretical machinery into absolutes and universals. We have always noted that Kant’s arguments are incapable of proving the necessity of his categories. Locke’s arguments are just as defective: they work magnificently against Descartes but not against any assumption of ideas and judgments a priori. 3. Reid’s way is better. Like Locke and the old Italian school, he held that the history of the mind – when it is deep, careful, and complete – is the sum and substance of all speculative philosophy, which must neither begin with dogmas nor pursue them. Consequently, given his astute sense of method, Reid thought it useful to cast doubt on many opinions that were thought to be unassailable and to add substantially to the sum of psychological facts. But he was less successful at sticking to experimental research on the mind and not making premature synthetic assumptions. He erred by proposing that the basis of every demonstration is human consensus – good, solid evidence in itself as long as it depends on other, prior evidence, but meaningless when it becomes the beginning and end of every proof, since it is the very thing that requires proof. Reid thus mistook the means for the end: common sense is a wonderful tool for philosophy and an excellent place to start, but philosophy’s goal is to produce an account, whenever there might be one, of the reasons behind the axioms of common sense. Other less patient spirits think they can begin philosophy on a moment’s notice, leaving aside the natural history of the mind and cling-

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ing to some ontological axiom. The result being what it is, impoverished and unproductive, they keep padding it with broad and rash hypotheses. And then there are others who have recognized the poverty of the rationalist and sensist systems. But instead of indicting those systems for their feeble analyses and returning to more exact research on the history of the thought process, they have put the blame on the poverty of the human faculties and have gone on to cultivate scepticism in some cases, mysticism in others. 4. Defects of method exhibited in these doctrines and assumptions and introduced with a great sense of certainty allowed their falsity to be made evident only by the final consequences. The result was that all the particular views of the aforementioned philosophers decayed over time into other views that were more and more vulnerable to the power of logical analysis, thus better exposing the root malignancy. Kant undertook to determine a priori the possibility, principles, and limits of all cognitions. He nonetheless accepted as primitive truths, and not explainable, the faculties of the mind, the formative powers, sensible matter, and consciousness. His disciples soon realized that a doctrine established and proved a priori did not have to lead to many propositions that are revealed by experience and thus share nature’s limitations and contingency. This is why Fichte started from a loftier position and set out to prove (so he thought) the actual origin of the faculties of the mind, of consciousness, and of sensible matter. And that was not all. If the mind itself is not the origin of things but is contingent and limited, it cannot provide a basis for a theory that is the highest and truly necessary. Therefore, Schelling and others with him took the leap of contemplating the absolute, with a great deal of profitless fantasizing about what and where it is. By contrast, Locke had written that the origin of all our thinking is from the senses and from reflection. His disciples excluded reflection, proving, in keeping with Lockean dogmas, that while it aggregates, segregates, and distributes ideas, it by no means produces them. Locke had also stated that bodies give rise to ideas in us by means of certain impulses. From this his disciples derived a kind of mental dynamics and explained psychology by means of actions and reactions inside the head. They identified thought as a secretion in the brain and correlated the power of the faculties with the structure of the organs. Finding no noticeable difference between human and orangutan except in tissues of the trachea, they proposed that the delicacy of those tissues had been the cause of inventing language and hence of the whole perfectibility of the species.

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Reid had classified certain judgments and instincts, which in humans he claimed to be simultaneous, as innate and not acquired, and as secure teachers of the truth, in keeping with the perennial testimony of all mankind. Beattie and Oswald, students of Reid’s teaching, enlarged the number of such instincts and judgments by showing that the great majority of people, if not all, believe in them very firmly, and they added that nature grants common sense not to all people, but rather to most. Common sense must therefore be distinguished from common opinion, the latter being quite uncertain, the former infallible. 5. This has been the subject of our thinking and writing from the day when we began to look for the shameful reason why the field of philosophy should be so savagely contested by opposing systems, while, for more than three centuries, the populous family of physical and natural scientists of every stripe lives happily with its harmonious principles and thrives by seeking the truth as its vigour increases. Not many years ago, that noble thinker, Victor Cousin, was proclaiming in France that method is a topic of great urgency in the theoretical sciences, and that he had noticed, corresponding to every basic transformation that occurred in the sciences, a simultaneous change in method as well. With this statement we emphatically agree, and we regard it as perhaps the most useful and productive to have come out of France since Condillac. We have no hesitation in wanting this statement to get the attention that it deserves and to be discussed by a great many different people, which was the reason for writing and dedicating the first part of this book. We believe, in fact, that we have shown modern philosophy to be so remarkably contentious for two reasons: first, not being able to supply all knowledge with a first philosophy which is open and clear in its rules and arguments; second, and contrary to the example of all current fields of human learning, not being able to stop producing opposed and contradictory positions, so that scepticism wins again and the fruit of long theoretical study is lost. Now as far as first philosophy is concerned, this persistent inability to build on bases contested by no one could have its cause in the weakness of the cognitive faculties. As for the ever-recurring division of opinions, however, this is purely and simply the result of a discrepancy in methods – inasmuch as we proved this at the start. For this reason, then, the doctrine of method not only has great weight in issues of theory, but also, in a sense, is their form and essence.

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Cousin thought that he had found a good way to bring peace to all the different conflicting systems by proposing his eclecticism, in which each of those systems gets part of the glory and keeps part of the authority. To us, however, it seems that this procedure amounts to forcing oneself to harmonize results by preserving discord among causes – the causes being different ways of constructing theories so absolute and so exclusive that to hope for agreement among them is to allow oneself to believe that there is some middle term between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ We have therefore held to the only possible and effective device for quieting the turmoil and wrangling in the realm of philosophy: namely, we have proclaimed that nature has taught just one method for producing all the sciences, and we have done so by showing the following: that truth is one, and hence there is one sure and best way to achieve it; that truth can be theoretical or practical, and so method must be able to take either form; that empirical truth is always prior to the reflective or theoretical, and therefore the empirical method must come before the theoretical and doctrinal; and finally, since nature herself teaches us the original truth, that it is the same with the first original method. This, then, is how one must undertake any speculative study, just as the natural philosophers have undertaken theirs, with wonderfully successful results. Next, we have affirmed that such a reorganization and application of the natural method to any kind of abstract study rightly belongs to our very dear country. For she it was that restored this method to health in the schools of Leonardo and Galileo, having begun to apply it most skilfully to abstract philosophy through the efforts of Nizolio, Aconcio, Erizzo, Campanella, and other eminent figures. Finally, we have proposed our own views on these topics, but we have derived them from ancestral Italian sources, and in doing so we have taken our start anew from maxims of the current French school. For the French have declared that philosophical method consists entirely in the complete observation of facts of consciousness, a truth that we believe no sensible thinker will wish to contradict. The problem for the French school, however, is to find the right and proper way suited to that type of observation. For by natural necessity everyone makes observations with the help and illumination of the highest principles of common sense. But philosophy’s task is to give an account of those principles, or at least to show that doing so is completely impossible, and neither can be done with broad practical methods of observation. Hence, there can be little or no definition of philosophical method as long as the type of obser-

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vation specific to speculation goes undetermined. And to this task we have given our special attention by seeking to solve the basic problem with which we opened this book, expressing it in these words: to derive from deep inquiry into philosophy’s content and purpose the correct changes and practices that must govern the general doctrine of natural method.

NOTES 1 Mamiani (1834) is the first edition; we have used Mamiani (1836); for Rosmini’s reply, see Rosmini (1836); also section 10 of the Introduction. 2 [a] De vera sapientia; [e] cf. Petrarca (1496). 3 Lorenzo Valla (1407−57), Ermolao Barbaro (1454−93), and Angelo Poliziano (1454−94) were all humanists, but Pietro Pomponazzi (1462−1525) was a philosopher (and an Aristotelian), like most of the figures from this period named by Mamiani: see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992). 4 [a] De dialectica contra Aristotelem (Venice: 1499), book 3; [e] cf. Valla (c. 1497). 5 Mamiani may be thinking of the followers of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743−1803). 6 For Rudolf Agricola (1443−85), Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1460−1536), Juan Ginés de Sepulveda (1490−1573), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992); Caspar Schoppe (1576−1649: Scioppius) was a convert to Catholicism and an anti-Protestant (also anti-Jesuit) controversialist who wrote a widely read Philosophical Grammar. 7 For Girolamo Cardano (1501−76), Andrea Cesalpino (1519−1603), Cesare Cremonini (1550−1631), Francesco Patrizi (1529−97), Giulio Cesare Vanini (1586−1619), and Jacopo Zabarella (1533−89), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992). 8 Pierre Gassendi (1592−1655) turned to his lifelong project of recovering ancient atomism when he decided that he had been preempted by Patrizi in refuting Aristotle: Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992). 9 For Bernardino Telesio (1509−88), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992). 10 On Mario Nizolio (1488−1567), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992); Nizolio (1674) is the edition by Leibniz mentioned just below. 11 Jacopo Aconcio (1492−1567) was a religious controversialist who also wrote influentially on method in Aconcio (1558). 12 [e] Aconzio (1558): 13.

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Mamiani, Renewal 13 [e] Sebastiano Erizzo (1525−85) wrote on Plato, politics, poetry, medals, and other subjects, including method: see Erizzo (1554): 49−51, 169−72. 14 [a] Brunus nolanus de umbris idearum, etc. (Paris: 1582); [e] Bruno (1582). 15 [a] De triplici minimo et mensura (Frankfurt: 1591), book 1, chap. 1; [e] Bruno (1591). 16 [a] De progressu et lampade venatoria logicorum (Würtemburg: 1587); [e] Bruno (1587). 17 [a] Philippi Mocenici universales institutiones, etc. (1588); Filippo Mocenigo, Archbishop of Cyprus, was a patron of Patrizi; see Mocenigo (1588). 18 [a] Bernardini Telesii consentini de rerum natura, etc. (1565), part 1, in the preface and elsewhere; [e] Telesio (1565); a 1588 edition of Telesio’s De rerum natura is bound with the work by Mocenigo cited in n17 above. 19 [a] T. Campanellae de libris propriis et recta ratione studendi (Paris: 1642); [e] Campanella (1642): 51−6. 20 [a] Prodromus philosophiae instaurandae, etc. (Frankfurt: 1617); [e] Campanella (1617): 27−31. 21 [a] Universalis philosophiae, etc. (Paris: 1638), in the first part; and Philosophiae rationalis et realis partes quinque, etc. (Paris: 1638), especially the logic; [e] Campanella (1638a), (1638b). 22 [a] Discussionum peripateticorum (1571), in book 15 of the first volume; [e] Patrizi (1571). 23 [a] Panaugiae libri 18; [e] Patrizi (1593). 24 [a] B. Venturi, Essai sur les ouvrages physico-mathématiques de Leonardo da Vinci (Paris: 1797); [e] Venturi (1797). 25 For Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486−1535), Giambattista Della Porta (1535−1615), and Girolamo Fracastoro (1470−1553), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992); Bartolomeo Eustachi (1500−74), Francesco Maurolico (1494−1575), Niccolò Tartaglia (1499−1557), and Gabriele Fallopio (1523−62) worked in anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. 26 [a] Venturi, Memoria di Galileo (Modena: 1818), II, part 1; [e] Venturi (1818−21). 27 Galileo (1623). 28 [a] Galileo, Opere (Padova: 1744); Delle macchie solari (Bologna: 1655); [e] Galileo (1613), (1744). 29 [a] Lo Spettatore: Dialoghi di scienza nuova; and elsewhere; [e] Galileo (1638). 30 [a] Macchie lunari [!]; Discorso sulle comete; and elsewhere; [e] Galileo (1613), (1619). 31 [a] Nunzio sidereo; [e] Galileo (1610). 32 [a] De augmentis scientiarum, preface; [e] Bacon (1624).

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Part II: Translations 33 [a] Targioni, Notizie degli aggrandimenti delle scienze fisiche, in vol. 2; [e] Targioni-Tozzetti (1780). 34 [a] Nova de universis philosophia in qua Aristotelica methodo, etc. (Ferrara: 1591); [e] Patrizi (1593). 35 [a] Cousin, Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie, in vol. 2; [e] Cousin (1829). 36 Bacon (1620), (1624). 37 Bacon (1624).

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6 Bertrando Spaventa

The Character and Development of Italian Philosophy from the Sixteenth Century Until Our Time Inaugural Address for Lectures on the History of Philosophy in the University of Bologna, 18601 Gentlemen, the topic of my lectures for this year is the development of Italian philosophy from the sixteenth century until our time. To pick up again the sacred thread of our philosophical tradition; to revive the consciousness of our free thought by studying our leading philosophers; to search in philosophies of other nations for seeds received from the forefathers of our philosophy and then given back to us in new and better organized form; to understand this circulation of Italian thought whose meaning we have mostly lost; to recognize this return of our thought to itself in the great theoretical insight of our most recent philosopher; to know, in short, what we were, what we are, and what we ought to be in the movement of modern philosophy, not limbs isolated and cut off, as it were, from the life of the world’s peoples, nor captives bound to the triumphal chariot of a particular people, but a nation free and equal in the community of nations – this, gentlemen, has always been my life’s desire and pursuit. And now that Italy has already accomplished a great part of its renewal, and, wholly united in a single purpose, awaits only the time and the occasion to complete it, I have decided that to declare this plan wholeheartedly, though not to carry it out entirely, would be the best way to inaugurate this chair in a university as ancient and as rich in so many Italian memories as your own. If it is true that nations, like people, also have their own spirits, and, if the more capable those nations are, the livelier is their consciousness of this spirit in all its manifestations, then, if this consciousness is what makes up the true nationhood of a people, I think it not useless to ask you to hear from me the history of our thought, the deeds of our heroes – oftentimes martyrs, in fact – of the mind. The philosophy of a people is not a sterile and abstract business for a few

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individuals but the most complete expression of the power of a nation’s genius. I will not tell a precise and detailed story of all the systems that arose in Italy after the Middle Ages. Let us leave this long, novel, and difficult task for more peaceful times. Here, the main thing is to describe the great moments of our philosophy by paying a call, as I would put it, at the most glorious wayposts on the journey that our thought has taken over the space of nearly four centuries, selecting only those principles and ideas that have left an enduring mark on the events of history and have thus become the heritage of European philosophy and have determined the final form of Italian philosophy. For this purpose a few systems and a few names are enough: Bruno in the sixteenth century; Campanella at the start of the seventeenth century; Vico in the first half of the eighteenth century; Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti in our century. In so choosing, let us not set other systems entirely apart and break the golden chain of national tradition, for those other systems are imperfect and transient forms that have meaning only in the greater systems that complete them. By giving an account of the latter, we may also account implicitly for the former insofar as they are true. This is the case especially for those philosophical systems or endeavours of the sixteenth century through which the Italian spirit strives to overcome the Middle Ages. The whole period is the time of a new creation of the Spirit. But the original labour of thinking is somehow concealed in the guise of old forms and movements in conflict. It still lacks the common consciousness of unity in which different manifestations of the understanding come together – consciousness, in other words, of the new principle, which, having brought the Middle Ages to an end, had to reveal itself as an organic whole in modern times. Finally, after long exertions by so many different routes, all the power of Italian theorizing seems almost exhausted and comes down to two systems that are already knocking at the door of the new world. Their inner motives are those that somehow form the two poles of modern consciousness: namely, the real infinity of God and the spontaneity of human thought. Italy, for a whole century after Bruno and Campanella, envying the many triumphs of the special sciences, produced no other original philosophical mind except Vico. At last, following the many imitations, more or less ingenious, of foreign systems in the latter half of the previous century and the beginning of our own, it was only with Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti that she arose again in a form worthy of her. Those systems I will not describe at equal length because my main pur-

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pose is to understand the highest level to which theory has risen in Italy. Only at this level do we see all our past in its true light, and all our future as if in its seed. In my judgment, such is that lively, vast, and deep intuition of the universe which – with all the contradictions that are more apparent than real, perhaps, or, if they are real, are necessary and not accidental – even Gioberti’s opponents admire so much in all his works. Thus, all that I shall say of the other systems you should consider only a general introduction to my account of this last one. A common belief is that Gioberti is only Rosmini’s antithesis and thus that the only undertaking worthy of our philosophical activity is to reconcile them, to find a third system that accepts what truth there is in both and rejects what is false – close to what has long been said about Plato and Aristotle. This view is in some sense correct. However, taken as a general criterion of the character of the two Italian systems and as a rule for the future of our philosophy, it is no less false than the view that treats Platonic idealism and ontologism (so-called) and Aristotelian empiricism and psychologism as two equally imperfect and opposed developments of the great Socratic tradition. Just as the Aristotelian idea – since by now it is obvious to everyone that Aristotle, like Plato, Rosmini, and Gioberti, also has his idea – is the development and necessary completion of the Platonic (the latter immobile and transcendent substantiality, the former absolute activity immanent in things), so Gioberti’s intuition and idea contains in itself, as its first moment, Rosmini’s intuition and idea. By this comparison, however, note that I do not mean to affirm that our two thinkers relate to one another in Italian philosophy as Plato and Aristotle relate in Greek philosophy: that Rosmini is our Plato and Gioberti our Aristotle. Comparisons like this, often taken literally, explain nothing; on the contrary, they frequently breed confusion. Others might say with equal justice that Plato is the Greek Rosmini and Aristotle the Gioberti, and still one would not really know anything about any of the four as they really were. What I want to say is this: just as Aristotle is the more complete Socratic and thus includes Socrates and Plato in himself, so the reconciliation of Rosmini and Gioberti is not something that remains to be done but was already done or at least undertaken by Gioberti himself; it is simply a question of understanding this reconciliation well and making it bear fruit. I do not deny that there is a side of Gioberti that appears to be exactly the opposite of Rosmini; understood in this way, abstractly and apart from his other features, this side of him for many represents all of Gioberti. And then they say: ‘Rosmini’s principle is possible Being;

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Gioberti’s is real Being; their common principle, therefore, is Being,’ which they view from the two opposed and hence partial perspectives of possibility and reality. Let us combine the one with the other and thus ascend to a higher concept, to the unity of the possible and the real, to true Being, in other words. To put it differently, the main point is to avoid identifying God with the world. Now this identification is of two kinds, cosmological and ontological. The former makes a single reality of God’s reality and the world’s; the latter makes a single idea of their ideas. By following Gioberti, the principle of real Being, one avoids the former, and one avoids the latter by following Rosmini, the principle of possible or purely ideal Being. The conclusion is that God and the world are not just really but also ideally distinct and different. The argument is correct, but the flaw is in the basis or common principle of reconciliation, which is Being – pure object, in other words, immobile and indifferent substance, nature or existence, clearly not activity, thinking, understanding, and willing, personality or spirit. Accordingly, once it is granted that reconciliation of the two opposites has been achieved, the unity that results from them is itself an opposite just because it is the Being that keeps outside of it the other one that is true principle and true unity together – understanding. In this way, the flaw in Greek philosophy repeats itself: pure ontologism, Being simply as Being, sensible or intelligible, as the absolute principle of existence and knowledge. It is not understood that this philosophy succumbs to the blows of scepticism and expires in Neoplatonism, rather than reviving, precisely because the mind has no longer found its final satisfaction in the pure object, material or ideal, but has searched for something else of a more human kind as the absolute – namely, the Spirit. The search for God as Spirit – this is the meaning of the decline of ancient philosophy and the rise of modern philosophy. Now if the relationship between Rosmini and Gioberti were really as described above, all the difference between them would be a question only of more or less. Their common character would be an ideal objectivism, like that of the Socratics, because Being, for both of them, is not the sensible but the intelligible, and its reality is ideality itself; except that for Rosmini the ideal side of Being would have the advantage, and for Gioberti the real, and thus reconciliation would be found by balancing the two sides. On this view, Gioberti’s importance in the history of Italian philosophy would be small or none. His whole worth would amount to being the same, more or less, as Rosmini, or, to use a phrase made

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famous by the great philosopher of Rovereto, he would be Rosmini by excess or defect. And settling the great conflict between Rosminians and Giobertians would be a matter of arithmetic. But fortunately Gioberti is entirely different. His true excellence is precisely the new and deeper concept of the real and therefore of the ideal, the permanent elimination of the pure ontologism that his friends and enemies – standing more on the letter of his teaching than on its foundations and internal relations – believed he had resurrected. For him true being is not pure being, pure unmediated being, but absolute Relation. It is not the One pure and simple, but, to use his own language, the Triune; not the point but the circle; not absolute rest but absolute motion, which, as absolute and infinite relation with itself, is also absolute rest. Thus he says: ‘Being is thinking; thinking is creating; creating is revealing oneself.’ Where someone else says is, then, Gioberti says creates. Here, if I may say so, is the whole revolution in theory that Gioberti achieved: Being is Creating. In this way, the idea is no longer the pure Platonic Intelligible, object and absolute substance, absolutely separate from the world and the human intellect that contemplates it. It is not the Aristotelian God, who, as pure and abstract thought, thinks only himself and not the world. It is not the unconscious universal force that disperses and exhausts itself in the manifold of its manifestations. But it is that for which to be is to think; which does not think because it is but is because it thinks; which thinks all that is thinkable and therefore all that there is; which thinks itself and the other, and itself in the other; which creates by thinking, reveals itself by creating, and, in revealing itself, does not vanish but abides and remakes itself eternally the same as itself; which in this absolute equivalence does not cancel its own manifestation, which it has posed or opposed to itself, the natural world and the human, but from beforehand only cares for, considers, and conceives those worlds eternally, and only in this infinite preconception is there love, not blind force – absolute personality, not pure individual; Spirit, not substance or simple nature. The Spirit: this is the true unity of the real and ideal – the idea or the universal, in other words. Since it is consciousness and personality, it is and subsists; it is real and individual as universal. For the idea, any other way of subsisting, whether as pure universal in itself (Plato’s poetic intelligible) or as the universal immanent and subsistent only in the particular (the Aristotelian nature), is always either a fantastic reality or a reality inadequate to ideality, a contracted and not actual ideality, in other words. This perfect equivalence of real and ideal, or absolute transpar-

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ency of the real, is found only in that whose Being is its self-knowing and whose self-knowing is the root and foundation of all being. Thus what Gioberti in his early works calls his ontologism is basically nothing more than the true spiritualism. What he says to be present to human intuition is not being simply as an object or as pure existence or as unconscious totality of the universal determinations of existence; it is God himself as absolute personality in the fullness of his power, intelligence, and love, as Creator in the true sense of the term, as creative and re-creative activity, in other words. He is not external, then, but within us, and this inwardness is our true inwardness with ourselves precisely because he is a self-aware personality. Without such inwardness, we, as personality and awareness of ourselves, would not apprehend him as personality but only as existence. It has been said that the ancient world, the Greek world, was beautiful but lacked love. The cause of this defect is in the very essence of love, which is two consciousnesses or personalities in one, without the one cancelling the other but with the one preserved and nourished in the other. The ancient world did not know love because it did not know how to conceive of this presence of two in one, and, I would say, their near identification without eliminating difference. This is possible only by means of the Spirit and in the inwardness of the Spirit. Antiquity did not know love because it did not know the Spirit. Gioberti’s merit is to have included and summed up in his own system not only Rosmini, and therefore Galluppi, but also Vico, likewise Campanella and even Bruno. My bringing all these names together will seem strange to you, especially when I say that our philosophy begins with Bruno and ends with Gioberti. What connection can there possibly be between these two philosophers? I have no wish to stir up old hatreds here. You all know about Bruno’s unhappy death. In that other era I do not know what might have been the fate of the author of the Protology, the Philosophy of Revelation, and the Catholic Reform of the Church.2 But, whether it is true or false that there may be a certain resemblance between the two philosophers in some aspect of life, between their teachings there appears to be no analogy. Bruno was judged a godless and irreligious man and was burned alive as such at Rome. Gioberti is celebrated in the public mind, if not by the Index, as the most forceful defender in modern times of the free alliance between faith and reason. And so he is, beyond doubt. Granted all that, I openly affirm that what is great and immortal in the philosopher of Nola – the concept of God’s real infinity and of divine revelation as nature –

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lives again and becomes real only in Gioberti.3 To put this another way, the usual verdict on Bruno needs to be reviewed and corrected. Luckily we can now reconsider this judgment by freely studying the works of our philosophers, all the more in that there is no question here of inventing theories but only of making history speak. And the history of human thought lies more in the writings of victims than in the verdicts of persecutors. To disclose my full intention to you, I must make known, as if by anticipation, the conclusion of my lectures by telling you about the notion that I have formed for myself of the character and the development of our philosophy. Gentlemen, modern European civilization was born in great part from that obscure and confused unity of different nations that bears the name of the Middle Ages. This unity was the very idea of humanity, unknown to the ancients and revealed by Christianity, even though at the time it was not realized in its true form. The essence of this idea was the free community of interests, opinions, feelings, and purposes of all peoples, a community not possible in Greek and Latin culture because the basis of that culture was the purely national state and so excluded any different civilization. And this distinct culture, even though it aspired to embrace the whole world of nations, could not really achieve unity except by negating and absorbing every particular nationality in the abstract formalism of the Roman city. Humanity for the Greeks was nothing but Hellenic nationality, and for the Romans only the universality of justice and law. Rome may have been right, since the national cultures that it rejected had in them nothing truly human – or Christian, we should say – but were only natural. Without the Christian idea true humanity is not possible. The system of the Middle Ages was a different matter: justice, dignity, human and social existence were not based on a given nationality as in Greece nor on the universal city as in Rome. Their basis was the very nature of man as man, the infinite value of his immortal soul, his inward affinity and communion with God, in whose image and likeness he was created and then re-created by redemption. Man’s law was God’s law applied to the human race. But this unity was still abstract, confused, and rather chaotic; only time and the perennial action of the Spirit could cause the moral cosmos of nations to be born of it. It was the idea of Christianity only in its crude, spontaneous, and primitive form, and it had no foundation in concrete and living interests. The reason, gentlemen, is that, like the complete community of a single people, the true

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unity of peoples – the true existence of mankind, in other words, based only on the existence, value, and free expression of the various lives of the nations – consists only of the free and rational development of the individuals who make it up. Now the defect of that unity lay in being something entirely otherworldly and external to what had to be united: the world, life, civil and political institutions, the state in general, science and art, commerce and industry – these were thought of as things without truth. As such, even though they were the work of rational creatures, they could not become a serious field of human action since they had no part of the eternal and divine in them. The only serious issue for humanity was religion as representation of the other life. So much did people believe in the truth of the world that somehow they all expected to see it end with their own eyes. Hence it happened that all human interests generally, not yet permeated and moved internally by the idea that had to be the essence of those interests, were left to their own devices, producing that state of moral disorder and brutality that differs little from barbarism. To achieve a true and concrete unity of peoples by forming them into nations upon a common basis, which is the Christian idea itself, it was necessary therefore to negate the unmediated unity of the Middle Ages and thus the very principle that gave value to that idea. This principle was the externality of the eternal and the divine – their existence beyond worldly things, in other words, beyond the nationality of peoples itself, and, in general, beyond the present and concrete life of mankind. I am certainly not saying that Christian humanity was considered something godless at that time; on the contrary, it was held to be sacred. But this property belonged to it as to an abstract existence, a pure genus unrealized in its species – which are the nations, precisely. Just as they did not see that a person is not a true and real person without the concrete and harmonious satisfaction of all his interests, so it was not understood that humanity exists and is completely realized only through the nations. Dante himself did not have a correct concept of mankind nor of the nation. His perfect person was the believer; true philosophy was theology; and Italy was the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Thus the whole law of humanity appeared to be concentrated in one power alone; the idea of Roman universalism flourished again; and the only novelty was the split between the two powers that claimed this universal monarchy and the struggle between them. The system of the Middle Ages had its root in an ideal principle, and therefore it could not be vanquished except ideally. This victory was the result of a resurgence of science and letters,

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of philologists and free philosophers, and in this resurgence the first and highest laurels go to Italy.4 Yes, gentlemen, without this victory the new world would have been impossible – it would have been impossible to recognize human dignity in all spheres of life, impossible to shape the peoples of Europe into national states. And Italy, still in combat for its right to be a nation, is the very one to whom her sister nations most owe their status. The truth contained in the system that gave way, especially through the work of Italian thinkers, was an indomitable aspiration for heaven, the eternal, the divine. The falsity was to treat the phenomenon – or rather all the goods that we prefer to call corporeal, worldly, or earthly – only as a means or a ladder to climb, and, worse, not also as the seat of that infinite for which they searched so ardently. It was necessary, then, to make people understand that these goods also contain something of the ideal and thus of the eternal. Now for this purpose the new establishment of the State was not enough, with its emerging independence from ecclesiastical power. In ordinary awareness the State always appears as a temporal power that governs only people’s external lives; the meaning that strives for eternity is thought to be beyond the State’s sphere. In our time, too, the same well-informed thinking ordinarily sees nothing more in the State than a purely external arrangement for protecting the people’s common interests, or, for the most part, a physical force to make justice and equity rule among them. True, even on this view of the State, the effort that we make to submit the instincts and natural inclinations to the law of reason does not fail to leave its traces in the course of time, both on the inner thoughts of individuals and on the history of peoples. This gives rise to a great work, a moral world, of which we are just small parts. And unless one can deny this world an infinite value, it is clear that our ongoing activity in the life of politics – our share of this work – also has something of the eternal in it. But on its own, gentlemen, philosophy is barely capable of grasping this thought, and bringing it to public notice is quite difficult, if not impossible. Still, beyond the State is a sphere of human activity where even ordinary belief can foresee something beyond temporal events. Science, literature, and the arts are purely spiritual activities, which, while providing effectively for the education of the soul, are likewise routes by which the soul returns to God and reunites with him. Thus they form a kind of third power, and from now on people will also base their aims on it. This belief was the true cause of the ruin of the Middle Ages. It came

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to be understood that man and nature in general are not sin and nothing more, an existence entirely abandoned by God, who can be reached only in special and extraordinary ways. God exists not only in external nature but in human consciousness itself, and man has the power to raise himself to God and realize the divine ideal not only by representing it and through the vagaries of external worship but also by religious feeling, by aesthetic understanding, by the practice of social life, and by knowledge. This faith in human ability and in nature’s living and divine reality was the inner motive for the theories of all our philosophers: Telesio, Pomponazzi, Cesalpino, your great townsman Achillini, Cremonini, Zabarella. But in this glorious phalanx of free thought the two greatest are Bruno and Campanella, who surely mark two special directions in the development of our thought from that time onward. Defining these different directions is the key to the history of our thought. In Campanella it is as if there are two persons: the medieval man, the Dominican, the disciple of St Thomas; and the new man with new aims and instincts, who always hesitates to contradict the other person, meaning only to reconcile this opposition between the new science – especially the understanding of nature – and the beliefs of the Church. As a young man, then, he defended Telesio’s physics against the Aristotelians of the day. But on the other hand, drawing on the religious piety that he drank in with his mother’s milk, he seeks to inquire more accurately into the relation between natural life and the supernatural. He wants to reform philosophy and social conditions as well, but by preserving – always promoting, in fact – respect for the Catholic Church and religion. For peoples he allows progress, but this progress must be aimed at a universal monarchy with the Pope at its head, at the extirpation of heresy, at the community of goods and women. He attributes some importance to worldly affairs and to the State especially, and he does not treat them as a mere nullity. On the other hand, the world and the State for him contain nothing authentically divine and absolute, and they have no real value except insofar as they serve the purposes of the Church. The divine for Campanella is always the religious element alone, and the true state is a church-lay State. He acknowledges the value of sense and experience; indeed, he bases all of human and natural science on the latter. As the foundation of all understanding he posits consciousness of the self and the spontaneous activity of the mind, so that we must admire him as the precursor of modern empiricism and rationalism both, of Bacon and Locke and of Descartes. Despite all that,

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natural science for him is not something divine and is based mainly on the material soul more than on the immortal, whose sole object is the religious idea and the world beyond. From this comes the dualism that divides the natural from the supernatural throughout Campanella’s system, and he does not know how to reconcile them. He also maintains that nature needs to be studied because it is the great book or volume of God, and he actually says that philosophy consists of this reflection. This puts him in open opposition to the Middle Ages that sought God outside of nature and outside human consciousness itself. But at the same time he adds that creatures are no more than images and vestiges of God; the world in general is a sort of statue of God and nothing more; it is not an aspect of God’s life, and God in his truth is absolutely outside of the world and exists without it. Therefore, what makes us know the true God is religion alone and definitely not philosophy, which for this reason is queen only of the natural sciences and always the handmaid of theology. But if philosophy, and, in general, all sciences based on the contemplation of nature and man do not make us know the truth that is God himself, of what use are they? How can we justify the need for their existence, and, in general, why must we pass through this mutable and material life on earth? Campanella replies that he knows nothing about it; on the contrary, he says, on this topic even guesswork is risky. Thus, in general, Campanella does not understand the necessity of the finite; he does not know how to grasp the humanity, and, if I may say so, the worldliness of God. The finite for him is a pure fact that cannot be explained. From this, one sees that Campanella’s philosophy has both a theological and a sceptical character. His scepticism lies in the belief that human knowledge is not enough for everything because it is always limited and incomplete. His theologism comes from the need for extraordinary measures to come to the aid of reason. This second trait also belongs to the scholastics of the Middle Ages, but the difference between them and Campanella is precisely his scepticism because scholasticism was dogmatic and theological without first having been sceptical. In the latter, theologism is a beginning; in the former, a result. This scepticism, which must be distinguished from the ancient kind, is the new element in philosophy. Joined with the study of nature – produced by it, in fact – it takes various forms in various philosophies and leads to various results. Thus in Cusanus it had already taken the name of learned ignorance and served to prove the need for God’s word and for faith. In Pomponazzi it comes out as opposition between sense and

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intellect, experience and reason, the one limited but certain, the other limited and uncertain, so that one must believe more in the former than in the latter. The same opposition exists between natural knowledge and supernatural: as philosophers we must follow the first, even when it contradicts the second; as believers and children of the Church we must stand on supernatural knowledge. Thus, the same sceptical tendency that results in theological dogmatism for Campanella, for Pomponazzi produces a separation, if not an opposition, between philosophy and theology and the division of the human person into two, the thinker and the believer. This separation becomes deeper in Telesio and others who came later. Anyone who thinks about modern philosophy recognizes this sceptical element in all its systems, more or less. Even in absolute idealism, which claims to know all truth, it manifests itself as consciousness of the inability of finite understanding to grasp the essence of things, which is then granted not to simple faith but to human thinking itself as reason or dialectical and theoretical intellect. Campanella’s significance in the history of our philosophy is as follows, then. He is a free philosopher who trusts the senses, experience, and selfconsciousness, but he does not have the philosophical independence even of Pomponazzi, Achillini, Cesalpino, and the philosophers of the Paduan school – not to speak of Bruno. He is the least free of our free philosophers. He is not a scholastic, and he is greater than Bruno insofar as he seeks to base philosophy on the principle of self-consciousness, as his master Telesio had based knowledge of nature on the senses. But in his conclusions he agrees, more than one would think, with the content of the hierarchical doctrines of the Middle Ages. He removes the shackles from science only to let it make new ones of its own and submit itself freely to faith. In short, he is the philosopher of the Catholic restoration after the Reformation. His goal was to reconcile the old world with the new, scholasticism with free thought – an impossible exploit, at least then. Gioberti undertakes the same feat two centuries later, but with a much different attitude. Bruno was a different person: a different spirit, a different mind. Campanella, buried alive in the cause of liberty for twenty-seven years in those pits they call prisons in Naples, bears up heroically to cruel torment many times, writes the greater part of his many and voluminous works threatened by torture, and at last by a pope’s favour sees the light of day again to die old and at ease in Paris. Bruno, also a Dominican, leaves the cloister as a young man; throws away his monk’s habit; goes wander-

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ing through Europe; visits France, England, and Germany, preaching his free ideas at every stop, seeking peace everywhere but never finding it, always unhappy with everything and everyone except one thing alone – the truth. He cries out: ‘The university I dislike, the mob I despise, many things leave me dissatisfied, and only one inspires my love; to that one I freely subject myself, happy to suffer, rich in need, and living in death’; ‘My toil, torment, and agony is for love of this one alone.’5 Driven by fate, he returns at last to Italy to be imprisoned by the Inquisition of Venice; turned over to the Roman Office; interrogated, tortured, and burned. They often say that truth is the greatest suffering in philosophy as well as its greatest consolation. If this is so, I believe there is no one for whom truth produced more suffering or more consolation than poor Bruno. Was this the source of his enormous enthusiasm and that restless spirit that seemed calm and quiet only when facing death? ‘In Bruno,’ writes an historian of philosophy, ‘there is the elation of a great soul that senses in itself the immanence of the Spirit and knows that the whole life of thought consists in the unity of its being and of all beings. In the depth of this awareness there is something resembling the sacred frenzy of a bacchante, something that overflows itself in becoming its own object and expressing so much richness.’6 And here is the whole difference between Bruno and Campanella. For Campanella the universe is certainly not a dead thing. All things live; they sense, in fact; and the universal soul moves and nourishes them. But this life is only a shadow of the true life; the source of all life is beyond it. One does not reach this source with the intellect, which is always condemned to feed on water and mud. We taste only some semblance of it by means of faith. Bruno also allows this incomprehensible source to exist, or at least he does not absolutely deny it. But in confirming it he reduces it to the tiniest little point that causes no torment for the human mind because in nature, in the universe and in the world – in other words, as Bruno puts it, in that heavenly Amphitrite who is infinite begetting, a perfect image, and likeness of the divine begetter – the mind, living, real and unfolded, contemplates all the treasures that the point can conceal.7 Thus, the universe for Bruno is not only the statue of God but his infinite revelation; not the tomb of dead divinity but the throne of living divinity; it is the true and only life of God, in fact, because to live is to be revealed, and one who begets, contemplates, and mirrors himself in his begetting is revealed. Without the universe, God would be abstract infinity, not real infinity. Bruno concedes the first to the affairs of the theologians. The second he assigns to philosophers as their only and true God.

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Here is the point where one sees what truth there is in Bruno and what is false. The scepticism that we usually see crucified as the enemy of everything good, is, when one reckons it up, often one of the most powerful allies of faith and religion. The reason is that unless there were something to show us the limits and weaknesses of human understanding, we would have no need to believe: everything would be as clear as the light of day. Now scepticism, which begins after the Middle Ages with Cusanus and continues with all philosophers after him, reduces to a mere appearance in Bruno. Like Spinoza after him, whose true predecessor he was, Bruno does not believe because he is not sceptical enough. He is satisfied with the God in nature. Indeed, for him nature is God himself in things, as their substance or identity and as absolute lack of distinction between thought and extension, ideal and real, form and matter. The supersubstantial and incomprehensible God of the theologians does not so much set a limit on understanding as show no regard for it. Thus, if there is a defect or imperfection here, it lies more with God himself, as absolute and otherworldly principle, than with the understanding, which cannot know God because as completely simple – as pure unity without begetting, or, as Bruno also says, without making one thing different from another – he is in no way knowable, not even for himself.8 The truth in Bruno’s teaching, therefore, is to have confirmed that God cannot be known unless within him there is real distinction– unless he manifests himself, in other words – and that nature is God’s revelation. The false part is to have taken nature as a unique revelation, judging knowledge of God as nature to be the final and most complete level of knowledge. Since Bruno did not doubt the truth of this knowledge and did not use scepticism to see the flaw in it, he fell into the following contradiction. God (the Substance) does not know himself, and inasmuch as man (the mode of the Substance) knows God, man is superior to God, the mode to the substance, because the knower is superior to the known that does not know itself. To resolve this contradiction, one would need to say either that knowledge has no importance and hence that conscience, freedom, and personality are mere appearance, or that, if knowledge has value, God is not simply substance and nature. God as manifest is surely more real than God as a closed unity. But is there no other? Is there not a God that knows himself, whose essence, in fact, is self-knowing, and, just because he is known to himself, man knows him, knows himself, and knows the world? Briefly, what Bruno lacks is understanding of real divine revelation, of God as Spirit, in other words. Because of this he has no faith, nor indeed any religion, since where the

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Spirit is lacking, so are both of these. But it is a different matter to say that Bruno was a man without God. On the contrary, God is everything for him and in everything, and if there is a defect here, it is in annihilating everything in God, including the human personality itself. The error is just an incomplete idea of God, recognizing only one side of his real essence. Speaking philosophically, at any rate, this side is worth more than the abstract and empty God of the scholastics. To be fair to Bruno, one must also note that it would not take much for him to rise to the true concept of God and man. Speaking of God, he calls him the highest individuality, the absolute monad, and in the monad he locates true Being.9 But the essence of his monad is not conscious knowledge, not the representation of multiplicity in unity, not the one that returns and possesses itself in its differences, but the one, the Minimum, that dissolves and exhausts itself by multiplying, by becoming Maximum, in other words. He cannot grasp the unity of Minimum and Maximum that would be the true and perfect Individual. With Bruno and Campanella in place, the route that modern philosophy must follow is already set: in one direction, the autonomy of the Spirit as awareness of the self and of things, as intellect and sense; in the other, God, not as an empty name but as a real infinity living in the world. The Spirit has come so far that it no longer wants to know about a God – about a truth, in other words – of which one can say only that there is nothing to say. It wants a truth that can not only be thought but also felt as an object of experience. Campanella’s principle – ‘The most certain first principle is to be and to know’; ‘Conscious knowledge is being’; ‘Knowledge of oneself is one’s being’ – becomes ‘I think, therefore I am’ in Descartes. His ‘Sensing is knowing’ becomes perception in Bacon and Locke, the sole source of all knowledge.10 Bruno’s God-as-nature becomes Spinoza’s God-as-Substance-and-Cause. The consequences that followed from Cartesian intellectualism and Locke’s empiricism are well known. The first led directly to Spinoza’s pantheism, the second to the French materialism of the last century. Leibniz rose up to combat empiricism and Spinozism. Reproducing and perfecting the intellectualism of Campanella and Descartes and the monadism of Bruno, he opposes the innate intellect to the tabula rasa; to Substance without will and intelligence, he opposes the monad as absolute representation of the whole manifold in the unity of thought; to the necessary and fated chain of causes and effects, the pre-established harmony; to existence as a simple modification of universal being – as a pure particular thing – the ideal universality contained in the individual-

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ity of consciousness; to extension as a divine attribute equal and parallel to thought, space as mere phenomenon of the idea. This polemic, if it succeeded against pantheism, still lacked the strength to block the development of empiricism and its degeneration into materialism. On the other hand, with his incomplete concept of the monad, or, to put it more precisely, of the Spirit, Leibniz helped replace Bruno’s and Spinoza’s God-as-Substance-and-Nature with something that differed little from the abstract God of the scholastics, thus contributing to the stubborn disregard for the true and living side of Spinozism. Leibniz foresaw the true problem of modern philosophy, the mystery in which all the mysteries are summed up. For him this mystery was not nature but the Spirit; if the Spirit were understood, everything would be understood. But he himself conceived the Spirit as a natural entity, as being, since, even while restoring its essence to ideality, he still treated this ideality as merely unmediated and definitely not as its own product from itself, as the development or energy that overcomes and idealizes the real. The Leibnizian monad became a pure thing in the hands of Wolff, and then people were heard to speak not only of material things but of spiritual things, and of the first and highest thing, which is God himself. The soul became a simple thing opposed to and different from another composite thing that is the body, and God became a completely simple thing above, beyond, and absolutely different from all things.11 Once Spinozism came to be abhorred as contrary to divine and human personhood, and Leibniz’s monadism was transformed into the atomism of pure being, which was no match for the strength that empiricism drew from the life of nature, how could one think about the world, man, and God? The world was thought of mechanically and explained by purely mechanical laws. It was the age of natural science and mathematics; everything was calculated, weighed, and measured. Man was thought to be either pure will, pure being for himself, unbound by any connection with other beings, or a purely natural being and a force operating naturally. In the human world, then, in the world that is man’s proper business, either there seemed to be no law, because there is no law where will rules alone, or the law was just the law of nature, and the life of nations and humanity – history – was a mechanism like the law of nature. Accordingly, the State emerged on its own from the will of individuals by means of contracts, and language arose in the same way from a kind of convention. On the other hand, there were those who said that the willing also wills by a natural law, as water falls, fire burns, and so on. In short, it appeared that the world, natural and human, had really

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been abandoned by God. God had made the world, but God was not at all visible in the world. And in truth they had reduced God – when they did not say that he was the same as matter – to what they could do without. The world looked to itself and went on its way like a watch wound up for eternity. Plainly, to escape from such degradation it was obviously necessary to deny both the abstract monotheism that opposed a materialism no less abstract, as well as the naturalism of Bruno and Spinoza, and to take from this a theoretical concept of God that would be neither pure Being nor merely Nature. This could not be done without denying empiricism and intellectualism at the same time, and making philosophy’s problem not unconscious reality – the pure object, Being, whether God, soul, or nature – but conscious reality, conscious knowledge, the Spirit. This problem is the real meaning of all German philosophy – psychological in appearance, metaphysical at its core, as in fact it shows itself to be in its most recent phase. In the first half of the last century, when the damage was not so serious, the only God that everyone was looking for in the universe and in mankind was still just nature, since man himself was considered a natural being. Then, as if foreseeing where things were headed, one person turned up to claim that he had discovered a New Science. Was it empty boasting, or rather an insight anticipating what we in our current century know to be the real problem of philosophy? ‘Philosophers until now,’ he said, have contemplated God only in the order of natural affairs. Rising higher, I contemplate in God the world of human minds, which is the metaphysical world, in order to demonstrate Providence in the world of human souls, which is the civil world or the world of nations. Contemplating God only through the natural order – inasmuch as he has given existence naturally to things and people, in other words, and naturally preserves it – philosophers have demonstrated only one part or attribute of his providence. Through the part that most belongs to human beings, whose nature has this primary property of being social, I shall contemplate God as provident in moral political affairs or in the civil customs by which nations have come into the world and are preserved. And this new and higher contemplation is possible because this civil world has certainly been made by humans; hence its principles can and must be rediscovered within the modifications of our very own human mind. It must amaze us that all philosophers strive to pursue the science of this natural world, whose science, because the Deity made it, he alone knows. But they neglect to think about this world of nations, whose science,

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Part II: Translations because humans have made it, humans can pursue. This oddity has resulted from the weakness of the human mind, which, remaining immersed and entombed in the body, is inclined naturally to sense bodily things, while to understand itself too much strength and effort is needed. And yet inasmuch as man becomes almost like God, and this science is of a kind truly divine, to that extent man himself has made the world that he wants to contemplate with this science, since in God knowing and making are one and the same, and man alone participates in this divine nature. The difference between man and God is that originally man has made this world of his without knowing what he has made – believing, in fact, that he has done just the opposite. And, in a way, this is a kindly cunning on the part of Providence, which, without force of laws, but by making use of man’s own customs – whose practices are as free of all force as man is to celebrate their nature – as a mind different from and at times contrary and always superior to the particular and limited ends that humans have proposed for themselves, makes them the means to serve larger ends and uses them always to preserve the human race. Thus, men want to act on their animal lust and abandon their offspring, and from this they produce the chaste state of matrimony from which families arise; the Fathers want to exercise unrestrained paternal power over their clients, and cities arise; the nobles want to abuse lordly liberty over the common people, and they become servants of the laws that make popular liberty, and so on. What did all this was Mind, however, because people did it with intelligence; it was not Fate, because they did it by choice; not Chance, because the same results come perpetually from the same actions. This Mind or Providence is the unity of the Spirit that informs and gives life to this world of nations.12

With these words, which I have collected faithfully from the whole of the New Science, Vico posed a new problem, a new view of man, the world, and God. Until that time, man had been viewed as a natural being, as a pure individual, studied only in those abstract, common, and general qualities that he had brought with him from birth. Nature was viewed as a whole unto itself and as having its real meaning only in itself; some made it derive from God, but no one recognized it as a means to a higher end. God was viewed only as the author of nature. The human world appeared either as part of the natural world or as the pure product of man’s will. Vico wants to find a new metaphysics, a metaphysics of the human

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mind that proceeds according to the history of human ideas, not of those ideas that result from contemplating the abstract human psyche – from abstract intellect and abstract sense, in other words, as when philosophers search for the origin of the ideas of space, time, substance, cause, and such things – but of those ideas contemplated in God as the Providence or Mind or Spirit that informs and gives life to the world of nations. The ideas that philosophers studied up to that time were the general determinations of Being, of the natural and the spiritual. They were human only inasmuch as they could be thought by a human, but they were neither human nor even natural as properly representing and defining humanity and nature, either in their abstract existence or in their concrete life. When this being – the person, the plant, the stone, for example – is said to be substance, cause, space, time, and so on, nothing is said that tells what the person, the plant, the stone is in itself, but only what all beings have in common as beings, not as real, concrete, determinate beings, that is, but as beings in general, as an absolutely neutral average of all beings. Human ideas, by contrast, are for Vico those that not only can be thought by man, like any other idea, but also express the human essence – which are this essence, in fact. They are not the abstract essence, as when one says that man is sense, imagination, intellect, appetite, and will, and then these faculties are described in detail, but the human essence as real, living, developing, and becoming a true person, family, society, nation, people, State, or, in general, history and humanity. In truth, what acts in the world and makes the world human is not that isolated abstract psyche and mere skeleton of the spiritual individual studied by psychologists, but man as belonging to his own family, nation, or state at a given time and period of history – that psyche, in other words, that could be called national and, since it is a unity that informs all nations, universal as well. One example will do. Psychologists study the movement of cognition from sense to intellect, and they call this movement the life of the spirit. Their rule is that the mind does not understand anything for which it has no basis in the senses. Vico studies the sense and the intellect of the human race, of the Spirit as history, and the moving from one to the other is the life of mankind. In this way he shows that the poets at first had sensed as much about common wisdom as the philosophers later understood about arcane wisdom, so that the former group could be called the sense, the latter the intellect of the human race. Sense is the first life of the people – that level at which the people as

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whole is the poet who sees and does everything in a practical way: it is the age of myths and false religions. Understanding comes when people are reflective enough that every people knows what it is and what it wants. And philosophy is the highest level of this reflection or the most complete consciousness of the being of a people. This movement from sense to intellect is a real movement, an internal development, and certainly not merely adding one thing to another. The intellect exists already in the sense, but only implicitly, and yet what moves the sense and gives it life and consciousness is the intellect itself, because in the activity of the sense the intellect makes itself available as its own material. Vico’s real merit, then, is to have grasped this concept of the Spirit as free development of itself and to have applied it to explain the human world. Just as the intellect appears to produce itself from sense, while really it is the intellect that has posited sense – or, to put it better, has presupposed sense for itself – by positing itself as true and real intellect, so also in the human world, in the true life of the Spirit, in history, the universal intellect prepares its own materials in the spontaneous and animal life of the various peoples, causing the common end to emerge from particular ends, public life from private interests, marriage and the family from lust, the city from the excesses of the Fathers, the laws from abuse of lordly authority, and so on. This intellect is not an external mover, and man is not a machine that realizes an end that is not its own. But the universal end that man fulfills by satisfying his particular ends is his own proper end, and he fulfills it freely because in doing so he celebrates, as Vico solemnly says, his own proper nature.13 The result of this new view of man and the human world is a new view of the natural world and God himself. Just as sense has no meaning by itself, but only as the material and infolding of the intellect, so nature is nothing more than the cradle of the Spirit. It is a world upon which another world must arise and develop. Likewise, God’s real infinity – his Providence – consists not merely of his revelation as a natural system of things but mainly of his revelation as a human world. In the former, things are simply posited; in the latter, man on his own makes himself what he truly is. The former corresponds to God as Being, the latter to God as Spirit. Of the former, God is the only author; of the latter, God and man are the authors, God as creator and man as co-creator, as Gioberti would say, so that this highest creative activity of God as human Providence is in itself divine and human at once, and for that reason it is love. Thus, God’s infinity, purely natural in Bruno, became spiritual

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infinity in Vico. One was the negation, the other the affirmation of the personhood of God and man. After Vico, what should our philosophers have done? What they should have done, in my view, was not to stop studying the human psyche, which was really the right path. But they should have studied it not just by understanding its abstract existence with the specific purpose of confirming the old metaphysics of Being, but by discovering the metaphysics that Vico described as belonging to the human mind, and by grasping human ideas instead of ideas merely thought by man. The problem was to find a new metaphysics to serve as the foundation of the new science – of the science of the Spirit, that is. This problem formed the deepest motive of German philosophy: to grasp the Spirit not simply as the soul but in the full reality of its manifestation – this is the meaning of that philosophy. Thus Kant studies the psyche as cognition and destroys the whole edifice of the old metaphysics, which treated the soul, the world, and God as mere objects. Fichte studies the psyche as pure consciousness of oneself, and clearly he remakes the natural and human universe as an infinite production of the I. Schelling studies the psyche as substantial reason and as equivalent in its two equal and parallel manifestations of the ideal and the real, reproducing and transfiguring the pantheism of Bruno and Spinoza. Hegel studies the psyche as absolute Spirit, which, inasmuch as it is infinite mediation or relation of itself to itself, is presupposed to itself as pure ideal, as pure real, through its being posited as actual unity of the ideal and the real. Hence Hegel’s claim to have put a new metaphysics in place of the one that Kant destroyed, a metaphysics identical to logic, whose first principle is not Being but thinking as absolute – the human Idea, in other words, as Vico calls it, in its greatest abstraction and as its own absolute beginning.14 Our philosophers, by contrast, saw nothing in the new philosophy but a problem of psychology, not only the minor figures but also Galluppi, Mamiani, and even Rosmini. Rather than using their psychological studies to move on to the new metaphysics, they employed them either to prop up the old one or negate it entirely without putting anything else in its place. On the whole they did not see that the new psychological research was not only incompatible with the old metaphysics but that this research led necessarily to a new metaphysics, and they tore down only to build anew. Therefore they fought the critical philosophy because they thought it was the absolute negation of all metaphysics, when it was only

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the negation of the metaphysics that had run its course and planted the seed of a new one. Galluppi knows nothing of God but his existence and declares that the claim to understand him is unworthy of his infinite essence. Rosmini allows us only negative cognition of God, for which faith then makes up the loss, so that the God of his philosophy does not much differ from the Supreme Being of the previous century, which is recognizable neither in nature nor in the mind. In all this where is the great idea that Vico had brought to the world and left as a national heritage to Italian philosophers? The services that Galluppi and Rosmini rendered to philosophy are great, and I am not the last to acknowledge them. As psychologists they have few equals, but this is their whole value. The negative is that they grasp only the bare bones of what there is: man, the world, and God. Of man they say only that he has one faculty or another, from which comes one idea or another; of the world that it has one determination or another of the most general kind, which is contingent, temporal, finite, and so on; of God that he is, is Supreme Being, the most real being; they cannot even say that he has created the world since their philosophy comprehends being but not creating. This is all they say about anything. But as for the life of man, the world, and God, as for their history – since not only man but also nature and God have a history, and history in general is just the divine thinking of creation – they have nothing to say, nor can they say anything. So this explains why neither Rosmini nor Galluppi has a philosophy of the real, a philosophy of nature and the Spirit. They have logics, theories of ideas, and psychologies. Rosmini also has a philosophy of law, but law and psychology, as parts of the philosophy of Spirit, are a minor affair if they are without a philosophy of art, language, history, and religion as well. These parts are not found in their systems not because they lacked the time to devise them but because there could be no place for them. Where the principle is pure being, there can scarcely be an experimental psychology; were it otherwise, the inconsistency would be egregious. In our philosophy, then, Galluppi, Mamiani, and Rosmini somehow continue and complete that sceptical religious approach that we saw in Campanella. For them, in order to establish the need for another source of cognition, the chief aim of philosophy is to prove that reason cannot know everything. Gioberti’s merit is to have understood the complete vacuity of this situation. When he utters the word nullism, it is not an expression of his angry and emotional heart but of his shrewd and thoughtful mind, of

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the deep feeling that he had for the reality of things. Nullism is the absolute unknowability of God. What corresponds to the absolute unknowability of God is excluding any philosophy of the whole real life of the world and man, of the whole positive dimension of nature and history, and generally the whole life of creation. What remains is only pure idea without fact, pure being without manifestation, pure essence without activity. Everything positive is left to those who are not philosophers, to their observation and experience. And since these people do not find the idea at the bottom of their stills or in their microscopes, there is reason to conclude that the living God, the God of nature and the human race, is the God of faith, not of science. Even in Gioberti there is a sceptical element. Although the Idea manifests itself to the Spirit in full and absolute reality – as Creator, that is – there is still a side of it that intuition cannot apprehend, the superintelligible. Nonetheless, when it is seen that this side is reduced to something quite small, as in Bruno, this real essence of the Idea, which is distinct from the rational, is certainly not a totality of determinations different from those that reason knows, but only the unity and nexus of those very determinations. And if reason could recognize this nexus? If it could see how one determination produces another? This is what other philosophers claim, and Gioberti certainly has not shown that this is impossible. Thus he reduces the mystery to its least expression, to a single point that for some is perfectly clear. On the other hand, the superintelligible that appears as a fixed and unbreachable limit in the first form of Gioberti’s system shows itself to be something that keeps fading away as the system develops. Intuition is no longer a limited potency, capable of knowing only one side of the idea, but is an infinite potency to know, and in itself all that is knowable, except that the act is always in time and in continuous progress. Thus the difference between divine and human knowing is only that between act and potency, but the content of the knowing is the same. God is just the Idea of the world in its absolute state, and the world is the Idea divided and multiplied. Gioberti thus reproduces Bruno’s realism, but by completing and resolving it in a higher principle, and on the other hand he establishes the new metaphysics that Vico asked for. At the same time, he meets the religious needs of Campanella, Galluppi, and Rosmini, not by separating faith and knowledge but by reconciling them in the unity of the ideal science. This science is based on the principle of creation – on the infinite Idea as development of itself or as absolute relation to itself. The Idea as pure Being posits the existent, and as existent it returns

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to Being. To put it differently, the Idea is threefold activity: pure and indifferent activity; activity as pure manifestation and difference in itself; activity as representation of the manifold and of real difference in the unity of the spirit, conscious of itself. Actually, then, there are three creative cycles: the ontological cycle, the cosmological cycle, and the human or spiritual cycle; in other words, the pre-natural, natural, and supernatural. God as true God is not any of these cycles but their complete unity, absolute and indivisible. And therefore he is not pure Being, as the old metaphysics supposed; not pure nature, as Bruno and Spinoza affirmed; not pure abstract Spirit, as ordinary monotheism affirms. But he is Being, Nature, and Spirit, not as they are in their difference and distinction, but as transfigured and identified in a unique subject. As such, God is in everything and penetrates everything. Nothing is without God, but nothing is God because he is the unique God, not as the One opposed to the many, but as beginning and end of the many such that none of the many is God because the many are not their own final end. This immanence of God together with transcendence is what constitutes Gioberti’s monotheism. Gioberti reconciles experience to science, history to theory, erudition to wisdom, and philology to philosophy by appropriating the principle of creation for philosophy and making creative activity consist not only of creating the existent – of positing nature, that is – but also of bringing the existent back to Being – of developing the Spirit, that is – and thereby also including the human as co-creative in this second divine activity. But in so doing he imposes a serious obligation on philosophy, whose very existence depends on fulfilling it. As the most perfect form of the Spirit’s activity, as the highest level of the return of the existent to Being, philosophy is the supreme science and truly divine. But it is above everything and rules everything not as something isolated and placed beyond all other activities and products of the Spirit, but as embracing them all and using them as matter and sustenance for its own life. Philosophy is not only the beginning but the final and general result of all the special sciences. And if it is true that its object is the divine Idea of creation and that this idea is manifest in all reality, both in nature and in the spiritual world, philosophy must take the idea wherever it is found, contemplate it, and reassemble the golden chain that connects and sustains all creation. Forget a single link, and philosophy is no longer a real and positive science but an empty abstraction. The disrepute into which it has fallen in recent times, especially in those regions where it had found its most ardent and impassioned practitioners, has no other cause

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than this inclination to transcend the real and to be persuaded that theoretical insight into the universe can be had only by bare concepts. To study the real and all the real, to know all the manifestations of nature and history: this is the absolute state of every true philosophy. Gentlemen, such is the concept that I have formed for myself of the character and development of our philosophy. Let me summarize my thoughts. The character of our philosophy is just the same as that of all modern philosophy, essentially different from the character of ancient philosophy: it is the search for the first principle of everything not in absolute objectivity, material or ideal, but in absolute mind. Its development is the unfolding, the opposing, and ultimately the uniting of the two moments of the absolute mind, objectivity and infinite subjectivity, the living reality of nature, and the autonomy of human consciousness. Informed by this deepest motive, our philosophy overcame that abstract and unmediated unity of the Christian spirit, which, separated from its two real moments of nature and humanity, appeared in the Middle Ages as empty and transcendent Being. From one side, then, came Bruno’s naturalism, from the other Campanella’s psychologism; from one side, in other words, immediate intuition of God as simple substance and cause, from the other, consciousness as direct perception only of the finite I and finite things. And given the conviction that knowing is imperfect, given that sceptical approach by which truth – God himself – was known by way of reasoning and only superficially, the true objects of knowledge were only the world as mechanical aggregate of entities and man either as pure will or as himself a mechanical entity. The final consequence of this approach was, on the one hand, the absolute thing; on the other, absolute matter as God. Vico was the first to reconcile the necessity of nature with the freedom of the Spirit, but it was only prophecy, not science. He conceived of God not just as natural order but as the moral order of the world, and definitely not as two parallel and equally unmediated systems, so that the moral order was nothing but the same natural order in a different form (as in Spinozism). Instead, he conceived of God as the intellect that disposes the natural order as matter and means for the moral order. Thus, the absolute Prime was no longer substance but subject, not Being but Mind. Along with this concept, Vico needed a new metaphysics that would move on to human ideas, and therefore it would be based on the study of human thinking. Hence the need for psychological research, or, to put it better, for treating humans as knowing. But this treatment could

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not be philosophy’s final goal nor a means of propping up the old metaphysics; the only course for this approach was to build a new metaphysics on the ruins of the old. This task of destruction explains the sceptical character of the new philosophy. Galluppi, Rosmini, and Mamiani represent this direction in our philosophy after Vico: they are philosophers of knowledge. Superb psychologists, they study the act of knowing in all its aspects. To this achievement Mamiani adds the noble enterprise of recovering the philosophical tradition of our ancestors in the Renovation and the Dialogues.15 Wanting real results from his research, he strives to reconcile his philosophical notions with the dictates of ordinary common sense. But the defect of these thinkers is having failed to see that the whole meaning of psychology lay in the need for a new metaphysics, to replace the metaphysics of Being with that of the Spirit. Gioberti alone realized that psychology was a means, not an end; a means of putting a new principle in place, certainly not reinforcing the old one. This new principle he expresses in the Ideal Formula, which is nothing other than a new concept of the spirit.16 From now on, the Spirit’s essence is no longer the contemplation of Being but the knowledge of the Spirit that creates the Spirit. Its privilege is to be able to know its own creation. Thus the Spirit alone is no longer a natural Being, because, as intuition of the creative act, it assists, as I shall put it, in its own origin. Its being is the very act from which it sees itself being produced. This is the meaning of Gioberti’s insight: certainly not that the newborn person knows God the Creator, but that the human intellect is in itself the potency of this cognition – infinite potency that embraces everything knowable and must be actualized infinitely. To know itself absolutely: this is the goal of the Spirit; this knowing is its absolute freedom. And this must also be the goal of our philosophy, the problem for our future. So that this knowledge does not decay into pure abstraction, however, it must presuppose the whole of reality, not only the natural but the human as well, all the domains in which the Spirit’s activity is manifest. If the Spirit is the final end and true meaning of everything, one can say that the Spirit is in everything, and hence the Spirit alone knows itself absolutely and is free when it knows everything and knows itself in everything. This is the knowledge of the creative act, of the Spirit as immanent and at the same time transcendent in all things. In my judgment, then, gentlemen, the highest level of our thinking is the philosophy of Gioberti. It alone corresponds to the spirit of the age.

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It alone sums up and digests in itself all the most glorious moments of Italian philosophy. It alone brings our philosophy back into the communal life of European philosophy. It alone can restore to Italian thought that freedom and that glory that does justice to it as it becomes a national philosophy. Italy abounds in genius for theorizing; what is missing is agreement of theory with experience.17 The first principle of this agreement is in the system that will be the subject of these lectures. You, young scholars, now have excellent support for succeeding in this enterprise. In this University, risen to a new day, you can now freely learn all those disciplines that are the basis of philosophy, not only the natural disciplines but history in all its branches, scholarship, and philology. ‘Freely,’ I said: and you must apply the first act of freedom to this same system. There is no question of accepting it blindly in all its forms and propositions, but of understanding, developing, and bringing to fruition all the good that it contains. This system is more a beginning than a system. You must shape the beginning into a new and complete system. The beginning is divine creative activity – freedom, or the absolute law of the Spirit. This freedom and this law you must grasp in its essence so that with full consciousness you can make it effective in life as human beings, as citizens, and as Italians.

NOTES The text used here is Spaventa (1972a), I, 295−332. Gioberti (1857−8), (1977), (1989). The philosopher of Nola is Giordano Bruno. In Spaventa’s day and later, the period called the ‘Renaissance’ in English was often called Risorgimento (‘Resurgence’) in Italian. Burckhardt’s great book, which appeared around the time when Spaventa gave his speech, eventually changed this usage in Italy, where the Risorgimento is now the period that Spaventa lived in. 5 Bruno (1958), I, 346−7. 6 Hegel (1996): 24. 7 Amphitrite, the hesitant bride and jealous wife of Poseidon, is an obscure character in mythology whose name is sometimes just a synonym for ‘ocean.’ Describing the primeval chaos, Ovid (Metamorphoses 1.14) names her in this way as not yet distinct from other things. In De gli eroici furori, Bruno calls her ‘the source of all numbers, of all kinds, of all reasons which is the monad, true essence of the being of all … From the monad which 1 2 3 4

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8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17

is divinity proceeds this monad which is nature, the universe, the world’: Bruno (1958), II, 1125. Bruno (1958), I, 319−22. Bruno (1958), I, 304−5, 332−3. Campanella (1638a), 2.6.8.1, p. 59. Christian Wolff (1679−1754) was a follower of Leibniz who influenced Kant. Spaventa takes this précis of Vico’s theory more or less verbatim from several different sections of the New Science, as he says below: Vico (1977): 86−9, 96−7, 232, 244−5, 272, 592, 705−6. Vico (1977): 87. Vico (1977): 243−5, a key passage for Spaventa’s interpretation of Vico: ‘Setting out to find the nature of human affairs, this Science proceeds by a rigorous analysis of human thoughts about the human necessities or utilities of social life, which are the two enduring sources of the natural law of the tribes … Hence … this Science is a history of human ideas, which seems to be the basis on which the metaphysics of the human mind must proceed. This queen of the sciences, following the rule that ‘sciences must start where their material starts,’ began from the point when the first people began to think as humans, certainly not when philosophers began to reflect on human ideas … This Science … comes to describe an ideal eternal history by which the histories of all nations run their course as they rise, progress, stabilize, decline, and fall … In fact, we go on to claim that anyone who meditates on this Science gives himself the narrative of this ideal eternal history inasmuch as he makes it for himself, following the maxim ‘It had to be, has to be, will have to be,’ since this world of nations was definitely made by humans (which is the first indubitable principle posited above in this work), and hence one must search for its mode within the modifications of our own human mind.’ Mamiani (1834), (1846). See section 8 of the Introduction. See section 1 of the Introduction for Bobbio’s restatement of this theme nearly a century later.

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7 Pasquale Villari

Positive Philosophy and Historical Method1

Today there is much talk about the positive philosophy and its applications to the natural, moral, and historical sciences. If you take a look at periodicals that discuss new books or new scientific topics, you will find the issue constantly debated. There are philosophers who attack and philosophers who support the new doctrine, and it is noteworthy that the most eminent authors have been joining the argument for some time. In England it is Mr J.S. Mill who supports the discussion, along with many others. In France, where the positive philosophy had its origin in this century, those who have entered the fray as advocates are not only students of the moral sciences, like Littré, Renan, Taine, Vacherot, and others, but also some of the most illustrious students of the natural sciences, such as Berthelot and the great physiologist Bernard.2 If we look to Germany, on the other hand, the positive philosophy has found many barriers to break because in some sense it was foreign merchandise that came from France, and Germany greatly distrusts the French philosophical mind. Today those barriers have been surmounted, however, and German positive philosophy, while it still has no leader, has countless distinguished followers. The works of Comte and Mill have been translated, explained, attacked, and defended. The debate is at its most passionate, and the positive philosophy has won great victories. I will mention no names because the young writers are many; a few years ago, Büchner wrote a book titled Science and Nature in which he listed the most important of them.3 How did this philosophy come to be? What is its aim? I do not intend to give its history because the subject would require too much effort. I wish instead to define its nature and character. I will say only that the first origins of this philosophy can be found in many great writers of

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the past, both Italian and foreign, but that the first to give it a name, describing it clearly in many publications and creating what amounts to a body of doctrine, was Comte in France. And yet he often let himself go on with strange and excessive claims that spoiled the success he had otherwise attained. After Comte came Mill: with his incomparable insight he distinguished Comte’s mistakes from the true claims, and by lending the authority of his name to the positive philosophy he gave it enormous standing in England, where it became widespread earlier than in France. In truth, however, this was not the work of a single person but a product of the times, and so it seemed to spring up everywhere at the same moment. For this reason, I intend to discuss not the opinions of any individual philosopher but the general direction taken by the positive philosophy. How and why did it come to be? And what is its aim? What happens in the history of the human race often seems to be what happens in the lives of individual people as well. When we have been busy for a long time with abstract issues, an intense and passionate need for poetry and art arises in us. And if we come upon a new poem or novel, we almost devour the book while reading it. But when we have grown weary from reading many poems, we want to turn to the philosophers instead. This action and reaction is constant, observed throughout history as well. After the materialism of the eighteenth century came the German pantheism that ruled Europe in the first years of this century. But when the human spirit had passed through an unending series of systems, each succeeding and destroying the other in turn, the spirit became weary and posed a question that could not go unanswered without the gravest consequences. All the sciences – so it came to be said – after wandering aimlessly for a long time, finally found a method by which they could make consistent progress, more or less quickly, but also confidently. Each time that physics or chemistry came upon a new fact or found a new law, science kept being enriched by these new findings. And once these truths were accepted and approved by science, they ceased being disputed. Anyone who tried to resist them would not be listened to – would be ridiculed instead. All this is exactly the reverse of what happens in philosophy. From the time of Socrates up to our own day, it has really always been the same show that philosophy puts on for us. We see a kind of spontaneous generation and sustained destruction of systems, a continuing mass sacrifice going on from century to century, with no way of knowing which divinity it is to whom the perennial offering has been given.

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And notice: now is not the first time that these charges have been made against philosophy – and positive philosophers are not alone in making them. Immanuel Kant was surely the first great innovator in modern philosophy, having founded the eminent German school that reached its final form with Hegel but derived entirely from the Critique of Pure Reason. But Kant began his reform with precisely this same observation: metaphysics is not a science, he clearly stated; it has been capable of no real progress, presenting us with so wretched a spectacle that if it cannot change course, it must resign itself to being struck from the roster of the sciences. Metaphysics seems to be an arena where all we do is display skill in a combat that has no goal, a field where no fighter ever manages to gain an inch of ground, or at least no victory crowned by lasting success. Kant created a new system that other philosophers attacked in turn; he thus proceeded to reconfirm in his own case the truth of his original observation. Not that there are not many truths and ideas of the utmost importance in Kant, to be sure, as in all great philosophers, nor that reading them does not elevate and ennoble the human spirit. But metaphysics, as positive philosophers say, is an essentially systematic science, and it wants to comprehend the Absolute, to explain the universe with definite formulas of its own, with definite principles that it always thinks discoverable yet never does discover. The goal of all its efforts – its essence, almost – is a general system, and it always ends in ruins. In this way, a science keeps being destroyed without ever managing to put a single one of its great truths beyond doubt – not one of those first principles for which it searches across so many centuries. Some accept and some reject the existence of a personal God. Some affirm and some deny that the human soul is immortal. Some tell us that everything in the world is mind, others that everything is matter. If Kant’s system is true, Condillac’s whole philosophy is a heap of absurdities. If Rosmini’s system is true, Hegel’s is absurd, and vice versa. You notice, in fact, that philosophers of the different schools are not fighting about which truths to add next. They deny the very name of ‘philosopher’ to one another because their disagreement is about the very nature and essence of their most basic and general doctrines. Surely this is a rather deplorable outcome. Perhaps we might resign ourselves to it if only one of the many subjects that occupy the human mind were involved. But philosophy is so closely linked with every one of the moral sciences that it makes them all subject to its own fate. When sensism ruled in France, we had Rousseau’s social contract and Bentham’s legal doctrines. Condillac then wrote a general curriculum

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informed by the same principles, seeing nothing in the whole course of history but interests and sensations, where Bossuet had seen only Providence.4 Then came Hegel’s teachings to give us a new science of right, of history, of beauty, and so on. In fact, philosophy embraces the whole of mankind’s intellectual and moral life, and thus all the sciences that deal with people and society in this way are linked with it. So it is that the question asked of metaphysics by positive philosophers acquires extraordinary force. Their point is to find out whether we can, for once, give a firm and secure foundation to all the moral sciences, or whether we must resign ourselves instead to see them all subjected to these unending reversals without ever being able to say: Look here, an indisputable truth has been found at last. These are not unfair overstatements about philosophers. Each of us knows that when one asks what the good is or the beautiful or the just – ideas that metaphysics treats at length and that are also the foundations of morality, aesthetics, and law – spiritualists, materialists, and pantheists, philosophers from every school, are then immediately ready with as many different answers, all of them irreconcilable contradictions of one another. At last the world has wearied of this perpetual contradicting. Some straightforwardly maintain that metaphysics is not and cannot be a science and that we must therefore resolve to abandon it forever as something that produces only irreparable damage to our powers of intellect and great disorder in our minds. Keine Metaphysik mehr – no more metaphysics! This cry echoes from one end of the educated world to the other, and at one time it could even be said that the metaphysics was German. This is the title of many recent works written there and the motto used by various groups – not to say schools – of German scholars who have resigned themselves to put metaphysics alongside astrology and alchemy and say goodbye to them forever.5 Others are not so easily satisfied, however, or they are less resolute or perhaps more cautious, and they say: It is not for us to eliminate from history the name of a science that has occupied the minds of so many famous thinkers for so long. Sciences arise from natural needs of the human spirit, and since human nature does not change and since such needs persist, they will not be eliminated from history. Astrology and alchemy did not disappear but gave rise to astronomy and chemistry. Let us see instead if it is also possible to rescue metaphysics, along with all the moral sciences, from their uncertainty, contenting ourselves with few truths, but well-founded ones, putting aside useless hypotheses and excessive ambitions. Today, a rather large number of writers has joined

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in this effort, and I propose to give a brief account of their conclusions because the topic truly deserves so much of our attention. If we want to set about putting all the moral sciences on a firmer foundation, one that enables us to distinguish what we really know from what we do not know, assuring us of progress that is slow but steady, we need first of all to see if there have ever been other sciences that were once in the state that philosophy is in today, and then we will have found where and how to get out of that state. Now besides the moral and philosophical sciences, there are also the mathematical and natural sciences. And, as for the mathematical sciences, their origin is almost unknown to us. We do not know what effort the human spirit made before managing to abstract numbers from quantities and lines, and surfaces from bodies. Who first saw an object shaped like a triangle and then derived the mathematical triangle from it and began to study its properties? Who derived the mathematical surface, line, and point from a real surface? We do not know. From our very earliest days, mathematics appears before us already formed and equipped with its scientific character; like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, it was born in full armour. Even though mathematics does not also refer to the experience that belongs more properly to the other sciences, it has a method, as we shall see, that is based on absolute clarity, on the principle of contradiction, and this cannot give us much help in the philosophical sciences, where there is so little absolute clarity that disputation never ceases. To believe that two and two make four, that the whole is greater than the part, we do not need any proof. But thinking cannot be weighed or measured or expressed in figures, and so all attempts to apply the mathematical method to philosophy always turn out to be futile. The dependence of the method on the nature of the science is absolute, and believing that numbers and formulas can be applied to passions of the human heart or to ideas, to insights of our intellect, would display an absolute ignorance of human nature and of the nature of thinking. If we set pure mathematics to one side, then, since its original source is unknown to us and its method cannot help us much in philosophy’s hardest tasks, what we find next is a sequence of sciences whose primitive history is known to us, and these sciences give us cause to say a great many things. At last we come to the crux of the question. The sciences are certainly the result of that activity through which the human spirit, by contemplating the truth, seeks to attain it. Now this human spirit changes constantly. The first inhabitants of the earth contemplated the world and nature rather differently than we do today. The

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minds of those who still led a nomadic life or lived in lake-dwellings, who created the first manufactures and made attempts at the first sciences, were certainly not in the same state where we find ourselves after so many centuries and so many generations. Even in our individual lives there are different stages at which not only the body but also the spirit exists in various states. The hold that imagination has on us in early youth is surely not what can happen at maturity when passions and imagination give way to reflection instead. Many philosophers have observed that the seasons of our lives are closely related to the ages of mankind. Our Vico showed that in the world of nations, as he used to put it, there is also an infancy, a childhood, and an adulthood. If all that is true, we ought to find the same thing in the history of sciences as well. Since they are the result of the various operations and different faculties of the human mind, the sequence of events ought to be the same. It is at this point that the new positive philosophers enter the conversation with an observation that belongs to Comte, and it has a very great deal of truth in it. All sciences generally pass through three stages, they say, taking three different forms corresponding to the three states in which the human spirit exists in those periods. When man acquires the use of reason, he no sooner observes a phenomenon than he seeks its cause inductively. At this primitive stage, the human race has no method, no scientific discipline, and it is full of superstitions, and so for every phenomenon it has recourse to an imaginary god. Apollo brings light, Jupiter commands the thunderbolt, and so on. In this state of affairs, the sciences do not yet actually exist; this is the time when mythologies are created instead. But priests are the only scientists or philosophers at this point, and thus the sciences are still in their first state or stage, which is theological. Little by little things change, the human spirit evolves, and man is no longer content to find the explanation of every phenomenon in a divinity made in his own image. Needing something less sensible and material, he has recourse for every phenomenon to an abstraction, and then he seeks a single cause to explain the universe. The Eleatic, Ionian, Pythagorean, and other schools show us the primitive stages of this new state of the sciences. One person observes that a living animal generates heat, that a dead one grows cold, and that two pieces of wood rubbed together produce heat. And instead of imagining a divinity of heat, light, or fire, this person then imagines a hot spirit and a cold spirit, asserting that heat is the vital principle of the animal and the essence of the wood. He makes still another move and announces that he has finally discov-

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ered that heat is the first principle of the world, and then he completes his system with an explanation of the universe. But right away someone else objects, claiming that the first principle of the world is different: light, air, numerical harmony, unity, substance, the Idea, the Absolute, and on and on. Once the word has been found, the system has been found, and the human spirit has free rein in this new arena. Shackled neither by facts nor by experience, it assembles and disassembles the universe at will, demonstrating all its cleverness, all its subtlety, skill, and flexibility. This second stage that the sciences pass through – the age of systems – was called metaphysical by Comte, but other positivists called it scholastic instead because its golden age was in the medieval period, just when scholasticism was dominant. At that time philosophy and the natural sciences were in the same state, somehow forming a single science. As the debate went on in one domain among Nominalists, Realists, and Conceptualists, seeking to learn whether beings are pure names or real things or something of both, what effect did this actually have in the natural sciences, the part of that philosophy that gave it integrity? They were looking for the inner nature of things, imagining a third essence in the stars, in water, in earth, in plants, and so on. Quiet or raging, sad or smiling, these spirits or essences were the cause of natural phenomena. These metaphysical abstractions were endowed with all the human passions, as the more ancient divinities had already been endowed with them. And an essence of all essences was the vital principle of the world. In this way, systems were multiplied to infinity, and when the natural sciences were not inseparable parts of philosophy, they were occult sciences like astrology, alchemy, and the rest, forming an appendage that could not be cut off from philosophy. So what show did the natural sciences put on for us at that time? The same one that philosophy puts on for us today. A series of systems that destroyed one another by turns, with no possibility at all of true and authentic progress. Now, however, we are used to seeing few years pass by without physics, chemistry, and all the natural sciences announcing some great discovery to us, some new conquest. What are the conquests of the Middle Ages in what was then called natural philosophy, the product of so much study, so many exhausted minds, many of them even of the highest level? We cannot give any answer because at that time the natural sciences were, more than anything else, an elegant gymnasium where the human mind went for exercise – as it goes to philosophy today – without ever securing any result. It has been said a thousand times that the Mid-

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dle Ages made no progress because it was enslaved to authority, because it did not practise observation, and did not know about induction. But Aristotle’s authority was overthrown, observation had been born along with the human species, and alchemists spent their lives making observations. Induction is also born with our reason, and the scholastics did nothing but induce and deduce constantly, with extraordinary finesse, but with never any possibility of certainty. When Bacon himself – so much in favour of induction and observation and so unhappy with the Greeks, the Romans, and every authority – observed a flame flickering, he said that the spirit of fire was rejoicing, and with those words he fell back into the scholasticism that he fought. Marsilio Ficino was a philosopher and a physician who observed, induced, and deduced, always finding that third essences were causes of everything. On them he based a system that was complex and ingenious, and nothing remains of it today. It was always the same story. Telesio and Campanella located the first principle of the world in the cold and the hot, Ficino in third essences, and Giordano Bruno in the single substance, but they were all stuck in the same uncertainty. And Bruno was still burned alive because he had been too bold an enemy of authority, while Telesio and Campanella endured harsh persecutions for the same reason. They observed, induced, and deduced, but the natural sciences at which they worked so hard could make no progress – obviously a sign that something else was still missing. Reading what they wrote, one would almost say that the human mind still needed to test, exercise, and develop its own powers. And if they still delighted in building those castles in the air, some of them were daring creations indeed. One fine day, the world was tired of it. The poetry and the art that had done so much to educate the human spirit decayed rapidly in Italy. Philosophy dried up, and the ability to generate systems seemed to stop all at once. On every side the shout went up: facts are certain, experience is secure! This is what Bacon said, this is what everyone in Europe said, and many things were tried with some success, but the main road was still not securely located. Then came Galileo, and, if you’ll allow me an analogy that is a bit too common, he took the cart of the natural sciences, put it on wheels, and pushed it down the road at high velocity so that the sciences have still not stopped and perhaps will never stop again. Galileo brought to completion one of the most extensive revolutions in the history of the human spirit. And with him, if we wish to use the language of the positivists, the natural sciences leave the metaphysical stage forever, at last entering the third and final stage, which is the positive.

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It is very important to see how and in what ways this transition was made in order to decide next if an equal transformation is possible in the moral sciences. What did Galileo add to the procedure, then, to the method followed by the ancients? Certainly what Galileo added brought about reform so vast and radical that it is hard to comprehend how the man dared so much and succeeded in it. And yet the thing is so simple that it turns out to be more difficult to explain why the thought came so late. The truth is that Galileo’s scientific courage was incomparable because he said this for the first time: I treat inquiry about essences as an enterprise that is all but impossible. When you tell me that the cloud is steam, that the steam is water, that the water is substance or force or matter, you always come to an unknown that you cannot explain, and at the end of your account the essence remains as obscure as before. Therefore, we need to abandon research about essences and prefer just one small and certain truth to a thousand large truths that are uncertain and hypothetical. Since Galileo had the courage to renounce the inquiries that for so many centuries had occupied the whole human race and all the greatest intellects, he ended the Middle Ages for ever with these simple words and began an era of research and facts. This was the negative part of his reform, however. The essence of the world and of things may still remain unknown to us, but if we are to content ourselves with just a few sure truths, how are we to find and verify them? Aristotle’s authority had collapsed, as I have said, and observation and induction had already begun. But as soon as the observer proceeding by induction ascended in this way from the particular to the general and grasped the first idea, with the help of logic he went right on from one idea to the next, moving farther and farther from the real world by his own power and his own imagination. But Galileo said to observe the phenomena, determine what they are, and then make an induction carefully, by seeking not the essence of the phenomena but their cause or law. And when you believe you have found it, stop right there. Before taking another step and moving on to another law, check what you have found against nature: test and test again – in a word, experiment. You see the lamp swinging, and by induction do you not suppose that the swings are isochronous, all happening in the same space of time? Even so, do not derive any conclusion from that. Instead, check with nature and question her, because, if you know how to ask questions, she will answer. Not only can you make your observation again every time you see another lamp swinging, you can also build a pendulum in a thousand different shapes and make it swing in a thousand directions with a

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force that is always different. If the law that you have found is correct, the swings will always be isochronous, and only then will you be able to say that you have discovered a truth because your idea did not stay in your mind; instead, you checked it in the external world and asked nature to confirm it. The law has been verified, and no one will ever be able to call it in question because you can always check it and ask nature to speak on your behalf again. I took the pendulum by the end of the cord, says Galileo, and I held it in the middle, making it move in a thousand directions, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, and the swings were always equal. And now also draw the consequences that derive logically from your law. Having made your induction, also deduce if you like. But when the first deduction is done, check again. Do not assume that you have found a second truth unless nature has replied again. You make a ball roll on an inclined plain, you find that velocity keeps increasing, and you induce that it increases in direct proportion to the squares of the distances. Then you experiment, measuring the velocity and changing the angle of the plane’s inclination over and over. The law always turns out to be correct, and therefore it has been verified. But look, your mind takes another step and says that if the ball rolls down the inclined plain by this law, then heavy bodies ought to fall by the same law. Once a scholastic was in possession of the first law, he would have drawn not only this conclusion but a thousand and a hundred thousand others, and he might also have formulated a new system of the universe. What did Galileo do when the second idea came to him, namely, that heavy bodies fall by the same law? He took another step, not by going on to another idea but by ascending the Leaning Tower of Pisa instead. From there, holding a clock, he dropped heavy objects and measured their velocity, and nature replied to him again that the law was verified. We know that there was more, and that we ended up learning that all bodies are attracted in the direct proportion of their masses and the inverse proportion of the squares of the distances. This was the law of universal attraction discovered by Newton. With this law we have been able to measure the orbits in which the planets move, and we can predict, many years in advance, the day, the hour, and the minute when a star or a comet will pass through our meridian. When the day comes, the astronomer sets up his telescope and looks at his chronometer, and as soon as it marks the first minute and second of the hour, he goes up to the eyepiece and sees the star passing by. The star that passes tells him again that the law has been verified and is correct.

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But now that we have finally succeeded in understanding the law of universal attraction, what do we really know? Various facts and relations among those facts. We know that there are heavy bodies and that these heavy bodies are attracted in a particular way. But what are heavy bodies, and what is attraction? These two things – the only ones at which the Middle Ages laboured – remain unknown to us, as they were to St Thomas and the scholastics, and to Socrates and Plato. Today too – as Galileo said – we can treat knowledge of the essence of bodies and forces as an enterprise that is all but impossible. Facts and laws, then, or relations among these facts: that is what we can know in the natural sciences. Everything else remains deeply obscure. Anyone who lapses into inquiring about first causes, said Newton, shows by that alone that he is no scientist. How different such wisdom is from that of philosophers! After Galileo, in fact, natural science and philosophy, which had been united for so long, said goodbye to one another and parted forever. Philosophers accused Galileo and his followers of materialism. You look for matter and the facts, they said. You neglect the first truths on which other truths depend, those without which no other science is possible. But the followers of nature have responded: We do not know what universal attraction is. But we use it to draw the movement of stars on paper and to predict the point in space where they will be a hundred years from now. We do not know what light is. But we have created the science of light that uses the telescope to bring the stars near from millions of miles away, making us see mountains and valleys on the moon. And with the microscope this science has discovered a universe that would have remained unknown to you for eternity. Do you wish to be uselessly persistent about this, or even to despair, unless you can find out what the essence of the electrical fluid is, even though we can confine it in a metal wire, make it flow in any direction we like, and use it to carry our thoughts beyond the ocean? You look for the essence of steam, again uselessly, while we have calculated all the varieties of its power. We have created the railroad and the propellerboat, transforming industry and renewing it. Philosophers stubbornly wanted to stay on their path, but students of natural science followed the road indicated by Galileo. Alchemy, astrology, and all the occult sciences have faded away, and real, rapid progress has begun. For so long has mankind been educated and disciplined by the schools, by art, and by literature, that as soon as a possibility could be seen of exiting this completely subjective and ideal labour, people have turned to reality with uncontrollable ardour, and, instead of mov-

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ing from system to system, they have gone from conquest to conquest, extracting a new secret from nature every day. But the most important thing of all to notice is that when any of the natural sciences has persisted in following the ancient way of systems, it has never been able to find a way out of disputes, and it has never been able to make any sure and stable progress until convincing itself – like the other sciences – to follow the experimental method and renounce inquiries that are not possible. It was not long ago that physiology still persisted in research into the vital principle. But what came of it? The powers of the finest minds were spent in vain on this mysterious something. One person would say, ‘The essence of life is force.’ Another would say, ‘It is a certain vital principle.’ And someone could be found to say, ‘The essence of life is the Idea.’ And so we had dynamism, vitalism, and pantheism, but still no physiology. Or to put it differently, science still stayed in its scholastic state, unaware of the positive path and unable to enter it. Today, physiology has taken a big step: its final transformation, though not complete, may have begun before our eyes. How is all this being done? I shall permit myself to mention the celebrated Professor Bernard, very much one of those who have contributed and are contributing to this progress in physiology. This is roughly how he puts it. Today, the issue is not knowing what life is. This we do not know, and perhaps we shall never be able to know it. Of all the definitions of life, the only one we can accept without protest is this: life is the opposite of death. Everything that science can attempt reduces to understanding the conditions that determine vital activity. But understanding the vital principle, as belonging to the inner nature of all things in general, seems likely to remain unknown to us forever. When the scholastic saw venom act immediately to snuff out the life of an animal, he wanted to know how the venomous spirit ate up the vital spirit, and he came to no conclusion. We want to know instead how the venom acts on the blood, the blood on the nerves, and so on, and learn what can serve as an anti-venom. For the Middle Ages, the generation of the disease was the development of a febrile idea. Opium caused drowsiness because it had a dormitive virtue. All that has vanished, and physiology has renounced knowledge of the why of things, looking instead for the how. We know that a given amount of hydrogen, combined with a given amount of oxygen, produces water, and thus we can produce water when we wish. But what hydrogen or oxygen is, why we need that particular amount to produce water, and thus what water is – that we do not know. In truth, as Bernard concludes, absolute knowledge of the simplest

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phenomenon in the universe would require absolute knowledge of the whole universe, from which every phenomenon somehow radiates and eventually participates in its general harmony. Therefore, no science is possible without renouncing, at least for the present, inquiry into first principles and systems: science cannot be systematic, nor should it be. What, in fact, is the system of physics, chemistry, or mathematics? We have only facts – and laws of greater or lesser generality. The science always stops at the point where it can no longer check or test, and the system begins where the science ends. In physics, one of the most important discoveries of our time has been to learn how motion is transformed into an equivalent amount of heat and vice versa. Our body can produce as much motion as the heat that it produces and is not used for other purposes. The steam engine produces as much motion as the heat that it can produce and transform. Once a scholastic had discovered the transformation of one fluid or force into another, he would have moved on right away to transform all fluids into a single fluid, going from there to the vital principle and thence to the general understanding of the universe, to the system. Physics stops, however, with just what it has known and tested. Everything else is outside of science, which searches only for facts and their relations – or laws. When it is possible to pass from a particular law to a more general one, from the falling of heavy bodies to universal attraction, this is the only system that science can aspire to. And now if we turn to philosophy, what do we observe? Instead of facts and verified laws, instead of slow and continuous progress, we still have the eternal conflict of systems destroying one another. In a word, philosophy is still at the metaphysical and scholastic stage. It still looks for first truths, first principles, and the essence of things, and it never succeeds in finding them because it persists in an impossible enterprise. It wants to know the inner nature of God, the soul, thought, the universe, and all the things that are unknown and perhaps always will be. Our reason is lost in confusion, powerless in the presence of such questions, and the mind finds shelter only in faith. But the metaphysician wants to respond in absolutes. So he fantasizes ingenious systems that give us nothing more than phrases that very soon will be attacked and destroyed by other phrases. Such systems often enough give us proof of the author’s talent, but they are far from hitting the mark that they aim at. Here is an important observation, however, that there are some parts of philosophy that also acquire a scientific certainty: there is no doubt about logic, for example. Laws of reasoning have undoubtedly been found, and no one denies it. On this point all systems agree – if we except

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Hegel’s, since he deals with questions of metaphysics under the heading of logic and thus he returns to disputes that come back into play every time there is a wish to discuss the objective value and origin of those laws. Well, then, how has logic made such progress? It has observed facts and looked for laws in them. It has sought to know how human reason speaks, but it has not troubled itself with knowing what reason is. Is this not a great lesson for the metaphysicians? Look at psychology as it studies, examines, and observes the human faculties and passions. Very good, the disputes are beginning to end even here, and there is some clarity and certainty. But all this lasts only as long as facts and laws themselves are not studied. Once you ease up a little and want to ascend to first causes, you are getting close to metaphysics, and right away the uproarious battle begins. There is no more truce or peace. What is at issue, then? One philosopher says: being creates the existent, and this is the point of departure for building a system. But another philosopher says: possible being, and from here starts a voyage towards a second system. And so it goes with the many other words – the Absolute, the idea, nature, substance – that give rise to just as many other systems.6 But what is the method by which you discover and test your assertions? That’s the question today that has put the field of metaphysics into disarray. Some positivist has remarked that metaphysics is a sort of poetry like any other, and this has greatly scandalized some philosophers. They have gone even further in Germany, however, where some are plainly saying that the time has come to put an end to metaphysics and that the name ‘science’ must no longer be used for a heap of empty words or clever assertions, none of which can be demonstrated: metaphysics must be ranked with astrology and alchemy. Goethe had already said it: metaphysics is a science that teaches the things known to everyone, or else the things that no one will ever know. It seems that many share his opinion today. I don’t want to deal with all the personal opinions, however, and all the exaggerations. Instead, let’s ask what the reform is that the positive philosophy seriously wants to bring into the study of philosophy. True, some start by claiming that science, for the present, can know only facts and relations among facts – or laws – and then they go on to say that all the rest is illusory, that abstract ideas are dreams, and so on. But then they fall back, by another route, into the scholastic metaphysics that they want to combat. We cannot deny the existence of certain ideas just because we cannot have absolute cognition of them now. Instead, this is the crucial problem: to provide ourselves with scientific verification of the truth, we have so far only two methods – the mathe-

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matical method and the experimental – but metaphysics can use neither of them. It cannot use the mathematical method based on absolute clarity because metaphysical truths are subject to constant dispute. Everyone agrees that two and two make four, that a straight line is shorter than a curved one, and that the whole is greater than the part, but they all disagree about being and the existent, about the Idea and the Absolute. And how would you like to apply the experimental method? How and where would you like to check whether your definition of the Absolute, God, the Infinite, and so on is true or false? What experiment will you do when called into question about this by systems opposed to your own? Saying that there are truths accepted by all systems does no good: the reason is that the primary and least expendable value of a system lies in its having an organic unity, and disagreements among philosophers go precisely to the fundamental truths on which all other truths depend. It seems, then, that only two ways are left to us. One way is to say that philosophy, by its nature, will never be able to escape from systems, and so it will never produce scientific verification for the truths that it claims to have found. But philosophy must in that case resign itself to being seen as abandoned by the positive and scientific spirit of our times and to run the risk of being put with old and useless contrivances like astrology and alchemy. The other way is to attempt a revolution like the one that Galileo made in the natural sciences and to see if it is possible to find a method that indisputably verifies at least some, if not all, philosophical truths. Positivism has attempted this revolution, which it did not so much create as spread, improve, and apply, inasmuch as it could be shown that the seeds of the reform are very ancient. However that may be, all modern philosophers always agree just on the issue of the new direction and new method of philosophizing that they have adopted. They have seen the new method as having been followed all at once, by many people, in different sciences, at the same time, and always with equal success. Therefore, we should not be busying ourselves now with the works of Comte or Mill, nor with those of Taine or Littré or others. We should instead be studying the road that science has generally taken, more by pursuing its natural development than by heeding the impulse of any particular author. Let me therefore describe this method to see what results it has produced or is capable of producing. The goal of philosophy, above any other, is knowledge of man. In us philosophy finds various faculties, various ideas, and a reason that obeys certain laws, and out of all this it makes a field of study. Consequently,

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because philosophy is used to searching for the essence and the first and eternal cause of everything, it has a great tendency to locate humanity somehow beyond space and time. What we see in the world is societies, peoples, and individuals in transformation, changing every day. But philosophy thought it would be more successful in understanding humanity by skipping the study of the contingent and mutable. And this was a huge mistake. How would you propose to understand the nature of this entity that changes constantly if you have no knowledge of the laws that regulate its inevitable changes? You wish to have absolute knowledge and find the essence of man, but you do not think to study him first in the only situation in which you can observe him. But let’s go further. In man you find an idea of the good, the beautiful, and the true, and you want to know their nature, essence, origin, and value. This dooms you to a subjective labour, and you derive your claims about the nature of the good and the beautiful only from your reason. But reason can be fooled, all the more when your opponents deny you even the name ‘philosopher.’ In that case, what will you do to test the nature of the good, the beautiful, and the true? What will you do to test what thought, reason, and the human soul are? In a word, how will you tell whether everything that you find in your consciousness and in your reason has a real objective value outside you, that in the end it is not an illusion of your mind? This is philosophy’s fatal flaw, the place of shipwreck for all systems. Who has examined our reason better than Kant? And what was the conclusion of his system? He frankly declared that reason is powerless to prove the objective value of its own ideas. Reason can certainly be said to have an idea of time, space, beauty, and so on, but do these have value outside us? That, according to Kant, is the question that can have no answer. Yes, if only we had that absolute knowledge of first truths that the metaphysicians strangely claim, all other knowledge should follow from them by logical inference. But the attempt to get to this point has been made again and again, too many times and without success. What is the use of starting over from the beginning now that the world is weary of this and has lost all confidence in it, now that even the fecundity that creates different systems seems to be extinct? So the question comes down to this: can we find a way to get from the I to what is outside the I by checking and testing the ideas that we find in ourselves, along with what we have thought about those ideas and what we would like to make convincing to others? If this is impossible, philosophy again resigns itself to being abandoned by the scientific spirit

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of our times. So then, these ideas that people find in themselves – this thought, this reason, this consciousness that philosophy studies – are they static abstractions or are they something concrete, real, and living in the world? It is worth giving an example to explain this more clearly. Let me imagine that you are working on the idea of the good. You read the interminable volumes written about this by philosophers, and their contradictions terrify you. You start to think for yourself, and you find no secure method for knowing whether your novel thoughts are true or false. Can you get it right when Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Hegel have not been able to come to agreement? Before abandoning the enterprise as hopeless, however, you make an observation: this idea that you find in yourself is generally found in almost all other people. So then, take a people or a society: in the abstract imagine a moment when there is absolutely no idea of the beautiful among these people except when you have the capability or power of instilling it in them. What would happen then? As soon as they can contemplate the idea of the beautiful, the imagination of this people immediately goes to work. This is the start of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry; in a word, what some call the world of art emerges and springs forth. And this is a real, sensible world that you can observe, study, examine, and classify as you do with all of nature’s productions. What are these works of art? They emerge precisely from the idea of the beautiful, which, putting the faculties of our mind into motion, clothes itself in a sensible form. And then we get the statue, the painting, the poem, and so on. Suppose further that this idea actually becomes faded or dim but later lights up again before the mind of this people. Well then, art will follow its own path because in the end it is just the sensible manifestation of this idea of the beautiful, about whose essence you have laboured uselessly for so long. You go into the Vatican and find yourself in the middle of a city, as it were, populated by Greek statues. Are they not something that you can see, touch, and feel? You can arrange them and distribute them by period, by order of excellence, by artist, and so on. In the final analysis, just as universal attraction, heat, and light produce natural phenomena, the idea of the beautiful likewise produces social phenomena, and you can study them in the same way. And if it has been possible to establish a science of forces, light, and heat without knowing what they are – and actually only from the moment when you have renounced knowledge of their essence – will it not be possible to establish a science of the beautiful by renouncing knowledge of its essence for the present?

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Perhaps this science will not be able to quench all of your noble desire for the truth all at once. But it can make you learn what the conditions are in which art flourishes or decays, what are the means of advancing it, what conditions and qualities are required of the artist, what consequences follow from the flourishing of art for the human spirit and society, and so on. True, these are less ambitious items of knowledge than all that you might desire on the nature of the idea of the good, just as what has been learned and discovered by optics is less ambitious than what scholasticism wanted to find out by looking for the essence of light. In every case, however, the former items are possible and demonstrable by facts because you always have the history of art as a check and as a sort of test of your theories. But the latter items always remain uncertain, if not impossible. Take another example, the idea of the just. One person tells you that the just is the useful correctly understood, and another adds that it is an eternal idea, independent of the useful and often contradicting it, a manifestation of the Absolute, and so on. And philosophers have never been able to establish clear agreement on this point. Yet we have this idea of the just, and all people have it. Therefore we accept it as a fact and study it, as the forces of nature are studied. If a people lacked this idea, what would follow? A society without law and without rule, subject to unconstrained will. Do you think it possible, then, all at once, for the idea to penetrate the heart and mind of this people? Suddenly you would have laws, statutes, institutions, codes, a norm and rule for human actions, and so on. These are the social phenomena that derive from this new agent called the just, and from this emerges law, just as optical phenomena derive from light. Can you not observe, study, and classify various pieces of legislation in their eras and in their rise and fall, and, by so doing, learn better to understand the nature of right, its laws and its various forms? Today, in fact, a science of right already exists, without any ability on the part of philosophers to reach agreement on giving a definition of right. With this science there has come to be a good possibility of improving the law-making of all civilized peoples, something that the scholastics – with all their discussions about the eternal idea of the just and its relations with the idea of God – did not do and never could have done. Let me go on to another example, since we can repeat the same observation in all the social sciences. Read ancient authorities on politics, and what is it that interests them? They end up inquiring about the best government – meaning an impossible government that has never existed

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nor can ever exist. The best government assumes a populace of the best people, but they do not exist nor probably will ever exist on earth. Everywhere we see ambitions, jealousies, and interests battling the nobler passions, and it is for such people, who change and become different in every period and place, that we need to find a government. What good would it do, then, to search for the best government, that abstract, immutable, and metaphysical government that cannot be applied to any people? Modern politics, without simply denying society a path towards ideal perfection – which is easier to foresee than to define – abandons inquiry into the best government, asking instead which government is better for a given society. If there is one problem that I long to solve, it is certainly this: for a particular society to find the institutions that are the better aids to its progress. If this new direction has turned less theoretical, it has still been rather more useful for mankind and has been able to prevent much unhappiness and many disasters. Where now, in fact, is that string of impossible plots that took place in the Middle Ages, when every nobleman thought that a government dreamed up in an hour’s exalted imagination could be put into practice? Now we know that the greatest person described in our histories wanted to restore the ancient Roman Empire, and to call up armies and armed men for this purpose against Florence, his native land. Ordinary people today would never let themselves be deluded by dreams like those that for so long ruled Dante Alighieri’s mind in this way.7 We are all convinced that society’s laws are as inviolable as those of nature, and that instead of capriciously opposing them, we should understand them in order to manage and make use of them, just as we make use of natural laws and agents. Only in this way can new laws and new institutions be productive. To add many examples is useless because one could multiply them infinitely. Examining the whole human being, not as an abstraction but as what really stands before us, with his faculties, passions, and transformations from era to era and year to year, we will find that his life has a constant counterpart in the life of society and in the history of the human race. Every new idea, every faculty that we observe in the human person, inevitably gives rise to a new series of social facts. Christianity is a religious reform that takes place in the individual conscience; well then, might it not have altered society and modern history? The philosophy of the eighteenth century is a new doctrine; well then, do you not find it immediately at work in the American Constitution, and do you not find it among the primary causes of the French Revolution?

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In the same way, we can extend this inquiry into infinity. Take the most abstract ideas, the most metaphysical, or the most concrete, as suits you best – the idea of God, for example. We are not speaking here of what faith or revelation can tell us. Faith can believe what reason still does not understand, but now we are dealing only with reason. The fact is that the most ardent desire of metaphysics has been to prove the existence of God indisputably and to get knowledge of God’s nature out of this. Well then, without being accused of impiety, we can say that metaphysics has not reached its goal. When I say that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, I have a sure way of silencing anyone who might want to contradict me. But St Thomas, Leibniz, Bossuet, and many others have spoken without ever managing to silence the sceptics or the materialists, and even today the battle among pantheists, materialists, and spiritualists rages livelier than ever. So it is useless to delude oneself. Metaphysics does not have the power to reach its goal scientifically; it is not and never will be able to put an end to disputes about questions that are the most important and vital for its existence. What does a philosopher do when he wants to write a treatise on the nature and existence of God? He withdraws within himself, seeks a cause for the world, seeks in his ecstasy to contemplate the Absolute, and looks at how this idea arises in him, how it grows bright and grows dim in his consciousness. But in this state is he sure that his preconceived ideas do not change the meaning of his observations? Can he test the absolute objective truth of what goes on in his mind? Well then, if faith makes us believe in a God, and if reason is powerless to explain its nature, we should not uselessly persist in overstepping the natural limits of our intellect. If this idea is really in us, it must carry its inevitable consequences into society; it must produce visible facts as real as natural phenomena. Such facts exist, and they are called religions; throughout history, the number and various forms of such religions are infinite. You can study them and understand them, observing the monuments, rituals, commandments, and infinite number of cults that religions produce. What do you learn by such a study? You will not get absolute and full knowledge of God, something you have renounced for the present. But you can experiment and use history to test how the idea of God emerged – not in yourself, to be sure, but in humanity – how the idea grows bright and dim, and what consequences this constant alternation has for civilized populations. From the savage’s cruder rituals, you advance to the gleaming images and timeless serenity of the Greek gods, whom later you see vanish, destroyed on their altars by a new feeling that emerges

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from Christian consciousness, and this new feeling changes society, history, literature, and the sciences. Might all that not be a practical study – positive, testable, and tested – of how the idea of God and religious feeling emerge and develop in the human race? Well then, the science of religions, or rather comparative mythology, already exists, and it has been an endless source of light for the history of civilization and for understanding mankind. Only when we have been able to comprehend and explain Greek mythology, in fact, and understand the divinities to whom Homer and Plato sacrificed, only then shall we have grasped the history and humanity of Greece, when it has appeared to us in a new light. Even the superstitions of the savage reveal to us the secrets of his consciousness, and thus we learn to understand more about him than he could know about himself. Might this not be a practical, positive, but also progressive knowledge of the human heart? This visible study of the ideal world that becomes real, does it not make our faith more alive and more solid? I cite a final example. Anyone who has read books about philosophy knows that one of the questions with which philosophers have struggled most is the origin of language – human or divine. This thinker supported one view, that thinker another, and volumes were written without being able to come to any sure conclusion. Some lost their way in research about primitive language; having no other device, they thought they might suggest an experimental method, proposing to keep a baby in a room and feed it without ever letting it hear the human voice in order to see what language it would naturally speak. They decided to subject the infant to conditions that were entirely contrary to nature, in other words, in order to learn what would happen naturally. Nonetheless, such problems are very important because the origin and development of language is quite closely linked to the history of the human spirit and the origin of our ideas. Each new word is the sensible image of a new emotion, a new thought. Each new language is the mirror in which a new civilization is reflected. Accordingly, philosophers gave much effort to this, but they laboured in vain. This is a strange thing to say! Languages live all around us: they are born, they grow, they age, and they die, almost under our eyes, I might say, just like living things. It is as clear as the light of day that if we want to understand the history and nature of languages, we should do as we do when we use botany or zoology to understand the history of plants and animals. In other words, for the present we give up as pointless any talk about the inner essence of the plant, the animal, and the language.

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We study, organize, and classify them, researching the laws of their modifications in various regions and at various times. So then, a science of language has emerged today, and in effect its method comes so close to the experimental method that the distinguished philologist Max Müller has found many reasons to claim that this method should also put the science of language among the natural sciences.8 We are not obliged to accept his view. Indeed, we can hold, as we do hold, that since language is a manifestation of the human spirit – as Müller himself confirms – then, for that reason alone, the science that deals with it must go with those that study man’s moral and intellectual nature. The view of that learned philologist and the reasons he adduces clearly prove what method that science has adopted. Today, in fact, philology and linguistics have studied, classified, and organized languages by period, by family, and by genus and species, so to speak, as they do with plants or animals. The laws of their birth, growth, change, decline, and death are understood. But when the philologist has an idea of his own or devises a new theory, science does not accept it unless he has first demonstrated and tested it by checking and experimenting with languages. The savage’s crudest and most inarticulate sounds and the least respected dialects have thus become a precious archive for the philologist’s constant toil as he seeks to find the links in the chain of the various families of languages. And if today, with some confidence, we can define the direction and development of the languages of the first Aryan peoples, tracking them step-by-step up to our time; if we can understand how dialects rise to the level of educated speech and how they decline or decay again; if we can stand beside the Kaffir or the American Indian as he tries to express ideas that are still clouded by his barbarity; have we not (in little more than half a century) come close to solving the problem of the origin of language – far closer than philosophers had come from Socrates down to Hegel? Have we not made progress in our knowledge of man? Add up everything I have said, and one conclusion clearly follows: namely, that if we set aside all the particular forms that positivism takes and focus on its general character, it comes down to applying the historical method to the moral sciences and giving that method the same standing that the experimental method has in the natural sciences. Hence, positivism is a new method, definitely not a new system. For me, it would be easy to show that its very first seeds are found in Vico’s New Science and in other Italian authors, but this is not the place for such a discussion. It suffices to note that this method, explained rather clearly by Comte,

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was by force of events introduced simultaneously in many sciences, completely revitalizing them, and that it saw itself accepted by many people who had never read the works of Comte. What is the issue today, then? Can we say that from now on all of philosophy’s problems can be solved by the historical method? Certainly not! The point is to define two things clearly. Metaphysical systems have not attained the scientific certainty that they have sought. Using the experimental method, Galileo deprived them of an immense piece of territory, and now the historical method is going to deprive them of an even more immense piece by causing a new series of sciences, which constitute an essential part of philosophy, to pass from a scholastic stage to a positive stage. The study of the human spirit has finally found a practical, sure, and positive path. As we move to this path, we must renounce the systems, absolute understandings, and first causes, which, for now, are too remote from us. We can understand only facts and laws based on those facts, but they are facts and laws of the human mind and of thought. On one side, we have the human being with his faculties, ideas, and passions. On the other side lie society and its history, which are nothing more than the reflection, impersonal and independent, of the individual will, of this same human person. In history we find the same ideas and aspirations and the same passions transformed into social facts. Because it will always be the great privilege of our nature, then, our spirit also turns back upon itself, seeking to understand and study the human person. But when it reaches a conclusion about human nature, it stops. It does not surrender to that speculation, which, guided by logic alone, would carry it from idea to idea and on to infinity, unable to tell whether it gets closer to reality or goes farther away. It recalls that the human person exists in history and that therefore the truth of its inductions about humankind can be checked and tested against history. If you have renounced knowledge of essences, and if you want to examine how our reflection, imagination, and faith are related – knowing that they are also three real faculties of our mind, and hence three facts whose laws you can study, observe, induce, and even theorize, if you like – only remember that from imagination, faith, and reason come art, religion, and science. Try to see, then, whether your observations about the human person have analogs in history. There are certain peoples – or at least certain periods in the history of peoples – in which art has decayed almost completely, and others in which scepticism consumes and nearly destroys religious faith, and then all at once it revives. All this gives you a way to check what you have

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believed to be laws of the human spirit. Up to this point, you have only looked in history for facts, and from the human mind you have been able to get only speculations, never checking them against the facts: from one you get pure empiricism, and from the other scholastic philosophy. But after what Vico found – that the laws of the world of nations are the same as the laws of the human spirit that created this social world: from the one you can get the science of history and from the other the science of man, tested and demonstrated. For if history somehow gives you the external world on which to experiment and verify the inductions of your psychology, the psychology then becomes a torch that illuminates history. The laws of the one, if they are true, must be checked against the other, and vice versa. What is the reason why you are so eager to read history? Because, as I have already noted, there is an important relation between the seasons of our lives and the stages of the human race, and all of universal history is none too large to include mankind. For what reason, when you were eighteen, were you an ardent reader of the history of knights and crusaders? You could feel yourself, an unknown youth, akin to Godfrey and Peter the Hermit, finding your own passions depicted in those exotic adventures. What can the historian’s genius ever do except make past generations live in front us and stir our passions powerfully by telling us about the Greeks and Romans? Is this not perhaps the ability to discover and appreciate the secret relation between us and the history of a past whose children we are? In our spirit the historian finds the explanation of humanity’s great revolutions, which for us is the source of much delight because we discover boundless riches hidden inside ourselves, being made aware of them for the first time. We journey through all of universal history, finding something that belongs to us in every era, every society, every great person, something that is like a property of our spirit, like ourselves. Thus we become aware that there is a kind of synthesis in us, an epitome of mankind in a determinate form. It is not possible for you to understand yourself, in fact, unless you also understand the civilization of your country, where you were born, and where your spirit took shape. And how would you propose to understand Italy without also understanding the culture of the peoples that surround her – Europe’s culture? Can you understand Europe without the story of her past? Think for a minute: if there had been no Empire and no Roman law for you to learn as a youth, is it likely you would have the same political and legal ideas that you have today? And if there had been no Greek society, if

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you had never acquired knowledge of a Homer or a Phidias, of those monuments and those writings, things that since infancy were like food for your spirit, would you have the same ideas about art and literature that you have today? As the geologist tramps across the earth’s different strata, he can read the history of the natural revolutions to which our planet has been subject. In words said unconsciously, the philologist finds the history of revolutions that language has undergone in former times. And the philosopher cannot claim to understand mankind unless he finds the story of past generations there, each one of them having left its legacy for man. What is the reason why dialects, popular and primitive song, and the crudest mythologies are studied with so much ardour? Why is it that remains of an unknown civilization – lake-dwellings, for example, or monuments of primitive America – stimulate almost all the learned of Europe to do new research? Might it be idle curiosity? Surely not. The reason is that in every part of history lies a part of ourselves, so that a new historical discovery can, in some sense, announce a new discovery about the human spirit. Popular poetry and primitive song enable us to study man when he is still not in a position to study himself. To conclude, then: the positive philosophy renounces, for now, absolute knowledge of mankind; indeed it renounces all absolute conclusions, but without denying the existence of what it does not know. It studies only facts and social and moral laws by patiently checking the inductions of psychology against history and finding the laws of the human spirit in the laws of history. Thus, it does not persist in studying an abstract human person, beyond space and time, composed only of pure categories and empty forms; instead, it studies a real living person, mutable in a thousand ways, stirred by a thousand passions, limited at every turn, and yet filled with boundless aspirations. But at this point the opponents of the positive philosophy ask a good question: after all that, have you perhaps reached the goal set for itself by metaphysics? You have renounced first truths, and they are precisely those for which metaphysics has searched, because they are the essence of metaphysics. You claim instead that there should no longer be such a science and that you put metaphysics with astrology. But you do not get around to telling us that your method solves the problems that philosophy has left unsolved. To this the positivists reply: we are giving you not a new system but a new method, and it is going to do neither more nor less for philosophy than the experimental method did for the natural sciences. Divide problems that have a solution from those that remain unsolvable for now, and deal only with the first. The medieval physicist wanted to know what

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force, light and heat are. The modern physicist has created mechanics, optics, and the science of heat by renouncing knowledge of what those natural entities are. If the positive philosopher finds the science of the human being and its ideas without knowing its nature, he surely will have brought off an equivalent revolution in the moral sciences. Is it possible that metaphysics and scholasticism have had such success in solving the problems that positivism abandons? But there is still more. As you meditate eternally on the essence of force, you have not taken a single step, while mechanics, which makes progress every day, discovers the laws of force. And if the day for discovering all those laws had come, would this not be rather close to knowing that essence? What else could that essence be but the synthesis of all those laws? And what else could absolute knowledge of thought be except what unifies the knowledge of all its laws? But to unify them, they must first be found. From one side, then, we get a method that persists in reaching for an impossible goal all at once and cannot move a single step forward, while from the other side comes a method that renounces reaching that goal and still gets closer to it every day. But this does not make the metaphysicians surrender. Indeed, full of indignation, they give this reply: you deny first ideas, then, you deny the science that Aristotle and Plato worked on, and for you there are only facts and laws. So you are materialists or sceptics consumed by doubt. Not at all, reply the positivists. We belong to the people who have renounced the impossible, and we recognize the limits of reason, which is the only way for it to make progress. And really, what good does it do to raise those ancient accusations that have been used in vain against every progressive step that science has taken? They have become dull and rusty weapons that wound only those who use them. The pyre did not extinguish Giordano Bruno’s teaching, and the Inquisition did not silence Galileo: those fearsome phrases have been used too often for them to have any more value. Positivism is a method that wants to lead us to study facts and find the relations between our spirit and human society. It makes us see how our ideas are the life and reality of historical facts. Can positivism maintain, in good faith, that it is just the same thing as materialism? True, there are positivists who are used to denying the existence of ideas, as there are also others who want to explain their essence. But then those positivists overstep the bounds of the science that limits itself to saying that we do not know, for now, the inner nature of ideas, and so, by another route, they fall back into the metaphysics that they wish to combat. Still, a final

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word needs to be said on this grave question. The historical method does not presume to shed light on all problems of metaphysics, much less to do so all at once, just as the experimental method did not and does not claim to answer all of scholasticism’s questions. And yet the human spirit keeps asking itself those questions. There are scientists today who write clever books about the system of the universe, the plurality of worlds, and so on. Such books will never stop, and they are not useless: hypotheses too have great importance, serving temporarily to unify the facts already known, if nothing else. But real science stops where those hypotheses start. And so it is not to be hoped, even after the progress made by positivism, that people would stop asking themselves what space is, what the infinite is, what God its, whether my soul is immortal, and what will become of me in the other life. Science cannot answer these questions, but they still torment our spirit. Beyond reality, or, if you like, above it, there is an ideal that flickers confusedly before us and never leaves us, that keeps tempting and pushing us to ask new questions; in a way, it is the life of our life, and it keeps making us hope to step beyond our nature’s limits. Since only vulgar minds do not find this ideal in their consciousness, we should not deny or doubt it. But it cannot really be part of the science that verifies by testing, and it keeps going on without ever stopping. Poetry, music, metaphysics, and faith follow behind this ideal, from which they cannot, should not, and do not wish to remove themselves, even though they are destined to stay behind it and never reach it, feeling it rather than understanding it. This is why it has often been said in our day that metaphysics is another type of art. But for now, metaphysics must resign itself to having been abandoned for some time, and, I would almost say, abased. No one, in fact, wants to hear it any longer. No metaphysical system prevails in Europe, and were a new system to appear, it would be greeted with suspicion, and, I would almost say, with disgust. It seems to have been struck by a sudden sterility, while bearing the burden of the universal suspicion that surrounds it. We lack the time to chase after new speculations in order to build new systems. The philosophical spirit is busy, and it is needed for new and manifold inquiries made possible all at once in so many sciences, where the laurels gathered are more secure and more useful. To create comparative philology and mythology, no smaller speculative talent is required than was needed to build the systems of Hegel and Schelling. Accordingly, we are far from wishing to discredit the philosophical and speculative spirit, which is really indispensable for all the inquiries

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that people are undertaking. Having acknowledged that metaphysics is not a science, in the strict sense of the word, and having seen its territory limited by science every day, we declare that the territory still remaining is vast, that it starts where science stops, and that there is always a noble job to do there by deepening the thirst for truth and raising the human spirit to aims nobler than itself. Hence, metaphysics is still an immemorial monument to man’s highest faculties and to his deepest lack of power: it is a noble gymnasium of human talent. A person educated by it in abstract questions and pushed to reach its unreachable goal will bring all the more passion for exploration, along with a loftiness of reasoning, into positive, exact, and scientific research. In such research, going from the particular to the general, the induction that somehow divines the laws of nature and proves them by testing needs just such help from the divinatory genius that art and philosophy develop and instill. History makes us see that every great scientific revolution has always been preceded by a great philosophical movement in which the human spirit somehow sharpens and exercises its own powers and is then empowered to apply them with surer certainty and greater vigour to win new victories over nature. Scholasticism preceded Galileo; Bacon preceded Newton; Spinoza and Descartes preceded Leibniz, the mathematician and philosopher; while Kant and Hegel preceded the whole renewal of social, historical, and anthropological sciences of which I have spoken and which is the main business of our century. And if metaphysics seems dried up and dead today, we must still note that all the sciences have acquired a more philosophical character. While they squeeze metaphysics out everywhere and take a new province from it every day, the sciences are still providing new material for future metaphysical speculations. In fact, if metaphysics aims at the unity of what can be known, it must also change because of the uncertainty of its systems, now that material for science is growing while the domain of metaphysics is shrinking. If metaphysics cannot or does not know how to progress in the certainty of the scientific method, it is still a product of the human spirit, and must, along with this spirit, be changed and transformed, just like art, morals, and society. Powerless to give us a true and exact understanding of man, metaphysics makes the human noble and educates him to aspire to great ideas. The sequence of its systems becomes, in the hands of the historian, a sound tool – on a par with religions, languages, and all of culture – for examining the powers and nature of the human intellect. Philosophers, therefore, and especially Italian philosophers, should

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not be alarmed at the great progress made by the historical method and the positive philosophy. Metaphysics will not be destroyed, but it certainly will be chased back to its natural borders. Therefore, instead of going astray to hurl useless accusations of materialism or scepticism, philosophers should recognize in Machiavelli, Vico, and many other Italians the first seeds of this new and inevitable progress that brings us to the truth and not to materialism or doubt. They should remember that it has never been possible, even once, for torture and the stake to stop progress towards truth, and that today vague threats do not halt progress. They should remember that every honest search for the truth is equally useful for all sciences and fulfills mankind’s most sacred duty.

NOTES 1 Villari delivered this prolusione in Florence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in 1865; it was published in the first issue of the journal Politecnico in 1866 and republished in Villari (1868a), which is the version followed here; see also Villari (1999b): 111−48. 2 Paul-Émile Littré (1801−81), a classicist converted by Comte to positivism, was the great French lexicographer of his age; Ernest Renan (1823−92), a patriarch of academic Orientalism, wrote a scandalously secular Life of Jesus; the historian and literary scholar Hippolyte Taine (1828−93) was also known as a positivist; Étienne Vacherot (1809−97), who taught philosophy and its history in Paris, wanted to reduce metaphysics to psychology; Marcelin Berthelot (1827−1907) showed that all of chemistry, including organic chemistry, had to be understood physically; and the great physiologist Claude Bernard (1813−78), whose most famous book was An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, made lasting contributions to the fundamentals of human physiology. 3 Ludwig Büchner (1824−99) was a physician and a philosopher whose commitment to materialism was also political and cultural; the first part of Aus Natur und Wissenschaft was published in 1862. 4 According to Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627−1704), a theologian who theorized about absolute monarchy and wrote elegant sermons, since the Providence known to humans is really God’s law acting in history, history is really the same as Providence. 5 As a crude slogan, ‘no more metaphysics’ was perhaps inevitable in German philosophy after Kant’s searing critique of its failures, and, again, after Hegel’s aggrandizement of them. But the response at mid-century in

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8 Francesco De Sanctis

The Principle of Realism1

Recently I happened to see the Annual of a Philosophical Library published in Leipzig at the end of 1868, which had already become a sizable collection of sixty-seven volumes. Looking at this series, I was struck by certain names that have been out of fashion for a while – Descartes, Bacon, Locke, and finally Condillac. I seemed to be right in the middle of the eighteenth century. I was also astonished that the study of philosophy was still pursued with such ardour in Germany, that something on so vast a scale could still be published: among us it would find very few readers. And this Library contains more than reprints. I find prefaces, clarifications, and commentaries in it, sometimes taking up several volumes and revealing the presence of an active and organized mind. That mind is President Kirchmann’s.2 Then I remembered the Berlin Philosophical Society, of which Kirchmann is one of the most active and distinguished members. I had heard about his Philosophy of Knowledge and his Aesthetics, and a few months ago I was sent a booklet titled The Principle of Realism.3 I became quite curious to know what this Realism was in Germany, causing so much uproar and rescuing Locke and Condillac from oblivion. And it excited me all the more that our philosopher ends his work with the wish for intellectual community among educated people from all countries. Hence, even though these topics are mainly outside my field – a real digression in the history of my thinking – I still read and I keep reading and I do not tire of reading. It was perhaps the first time that I read a book in German so quickly. This happened not because the author was expert in that pandering and those cunning moves that the French call the art of making a book. It is because he does not let his thoughts wander; he moves straight ahead, always speaking simply and clearly, sticking closely

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to his topic. He is austere in his writing, all order and precision, averse to phrase-making, formulas, and sophisticated fog, free of all sentiment and fancy. And because there is much talk here in Italy of Realism in art and science – though it is usually vague and confused – I think it worthwhile to explain the ideas of a writer who has devoted a great deal of his intellectual life to this problem. Realism is not to be confused with empiricism and sensism, these being crude starts on Realism. And it is not the same as materialism, which has grown up from a rather superficial application of thought to the problem of matter. Hegel himself condemns empiricism. But he could not condemn Realism in its present form because Realism puts thinking in as lofty a position as the Idealists do. Here is the difference. Idealism treats thinking as the unique and direct source of being because what is highest and first in being can be learned only from thinking. But according to the Realists, existence can be known only by perceiving, and the only purpose of thinking is to elaborate the content of perception, purging it of false appearances and deriving the general from it in the form of concepts and laws. The instruments of knowledge, therefore, are perceiving and thinking. And our author, before giving us the principle of knowledge according to Realism, analyses these two instruments. Perception comes from the senses and also comes from consciousness – from internal sense, or, as the author says, internal perception. The organs of the first (perception) are the senses. The second has no organs. At its foundation lie the various states of one’s own soul as they exist in desire or in feeling pleasure and pain. This could be called apperception (Selbstwarnehmung). But because this gives you information only about your own soul, knowledge of the states of souls belonging to other people is missing. By physiognomy, gesture, and attitude you can evaluate this through reasoning and thus through thinking, but you cannot see any farther into it than your own experience takes you. The consequence is that Know thyself is also the basis of all these mental states. Experience gives you the object as outside you – something out there – and gives it to you directly and immediately, as the principle of causality, with no use of categories, without anything discursive, without action and reaction. And it gives it to you necessarily. Even the most fanatical Idealist surrenders to this necessity and must locate the object outside himself, as existing. Without perception the concept of existence would be absent from thinking. The existent has a content and a form. As content, the existent comes into the soul by way of perception in the form of knowledge – something cognized. But it does not get to us in the same

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way as form, as just being alone. The resistance presented by this form through its duration and limitation reveals its presence so that being in its positive nature eludes knowing, and its concept for us is only negative – the unknowable in things. When Schelling and Hegel said that being and knowing are at once the same and different, they spoke the truth, since they are identical in content, though in form they are eternally different. How things work when the content of being enters the mind by way of perception is a problem of philosophy and physiology, as unsolved today as in the time of the Greeks, despite so much progress. Science has only transmuted being into knowledge (Idealism) or knowledge into being (Materialism). Materialism forgets that all our observations have managed to establish the reciprocal activity of the brain and states of the soul – but not their identity. There is no instrument perfect enough to fix the ultimate boundaries of the bodily, the smallest parts of the brain and their vibrations. The connection between the end of the bodily and the beginning of the mental is still unknown. Movements of small parts of the body are and always will be bodily – different from knowing. All the systems of monism are just a game – that of Plotinus and those of Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This unity that is immediately divided again into being and knowing is an empty word. Depending on how good the magician is, we can get anything we want from this unity, but it has nothing to do with what can be conceived of. But there is a second instrument of knowledge – thinking – and if we carefully observe what it does, we see that it gives us some clues: in memory, it repeats; in synthesis and analysis, it unites or divides; and it compares, contrasts, relates, and expresses different types of cognition, attention, certainty, and necessity. These are its activities or powers. When it remembers, it no longer needs an object; representation is enough. When it divides the object into parts, properties, elements, and concepts, it assists language and cognition; and from concepts it ascends to the laws that are the aim of science. Joining objects with parts of objects, as the poet does, it produces new images or representations, without being able to pass beyond the forms of what exists. Formal unities other than those that exist cannot be represented; they are empty words, like many such philosophical notions. To summarize: humans can know the content of everything that exists – body and mind – only by perception. In its two forms, perception alone provides the bridge that leads from being to knowing, and perception alone confirms the identity of the content as being and as knowing – its truth, in other words. The simplest form of this principle of knowledge can be expressed in these two propositions:

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what is perceived exists; what contradicts itself does not exist. In the union of these two propositions lies the principle of Realism: from this comes not just its content but its truth. Thinking elaborates the content given by perception, and in virtue of the second proposition (the principle of contradiction), to which perception is subject, thinking rejects everything that is contradictory because it is false. And the content thus purified is true. Thinking is thus higher than perceiving; it is the light and guide of perception. Only what thinking confirms to be true is a truth. But the work of thinking does not stop there. With the power of analysis and synthesis it forms species and genera, finds concepts in things, and uses them to discover universal laws. The principle of Realism comes down to the old proposition that nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu, including among the senses also the inner sense, or internal perception.4 Only on this principle do we get any knowledge of bodily and mental things. Science has no other way of knowing being. Concepts of things are not innate, not revealed by higher substances or by divinity. We must get them by our labour, by the effort of experience and thinking. And since the content of things is inexhaustible, the labour has no end. Both in practical life and in science, this is the only way. Philosophy has no ways of its own. There is no intellectual vision such as Plato, Spinoza, Schelling, and others describe. Such a vision is just a jumble of experience and thinking, a hypothetical faculty of mind that includes the direct content of experience and the analytic and synthetic power of thinking. There is no mental faculty that gives a content of being which was not given first by perception. There is no fantasy of the philosopher or the poet that can augment the types of simple determinations of colours and sounds or simple states of the soul – pleasure, pain, desire, and moral sentiment. Absent what sees and feels, it is impossible for a colour or feeling to be represented to anyone. Art can put the pieces together, but it cannot invent them. Most of all, it is dangerous for science to use feelings or desires in its search for truth, be they moral, religious, or scientific. Leaning towards the Absolute or unity would be dangerous in this way, like the desire to find a rigorous logic in the origin and development of things. This is why the value of mathematics, which is devoid of such feelings, is widely recognized. The more that feelings operate in the sciences, the more disputes multiply. Alongside this knowledge of being there is a different knowledge in

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the soul that does not provide any content of being but surrounds it with an infinity of relations. Forms thereby emerge whose origin is in the soul and are closely linked with being. A natural illusion will make these also – these especially – seem to be true being. The forms of relation represent no being, however, and in their purity they are empty of any content that exists. But because they can be applied to any content and are closely connected with it, these relations are confused with the concept of being, both in the ordinary appearance and in the scientific illusion. Because they include objects of the most contrary kinds, and because they mark the same object with the most contrary features, contradiction arises. Kant’s antinomies and Hegel’s contradictions arise just from this confusion between relations and the concept of being. The forms of relation do not arise from one another; they are suggested by experience as they gradually manifest themselves in the language of educated people in the form of adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions – such as not, and, and or; equality, number, and whole; whole and part; cause and effect; substance and accident; essence and non-essence, form and content, external and internal. Application of these forms requires more than one object – at least two. Thus, they are not representations of any one object. An object that can take one of these forms can take the opposite form; in various relations it can be near or far, young or old, and still remain always that object in its being. The relation therefore does not acquire being, and it is a mistake to confuse the two. The same object can be sometimes whole, sometimes part, sometimes cause and sometimes effect. A part can turn into a whole, an effect can turn into a cause, accident into substance, and so on to infinity: when Spinoza plays this game the human becomes a mode or accident of God. These infinite series that play so large a part in philosophy today thus belong to relations that express the alternating succession of their oppositions, but the infinite chain of causes and effects does not lead to an infinite cause-and-effect series in being as well. This confusion is the basis of Kant’s antinomies. In the thesis the object is treated as existent and thus as finite. In the antithesis it is treated as a relation and comes under an infinite series. To resolve these antinomies it suffices to understand the nature of relations. But since Kant did not understand this, he was forced to reduce the existent to a mere appearance. There is a similar confusion in Hegel that produces its own contradictions. He finds a contradiction in the concept of limit because it establishes the reality of existence but is also its negation, given that in the limit lies the ending of one object along with the beginning of another. It is clear that the limit

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is a determination of being and not a relation, but here it is taken at one time as existing and at another time as a relation. But if these forms of relation are not derived from being, where do they come from? Realism can give no answer: it finds them in the thinking that all people do and in all languages, just as the principle of contradiction is found there. These forms have the ability to assist thinking and to provide more accurate cognition of things. By comparisons, contrasts, and relations, sciences get complete possession of the object. As knowing, being has already become spirit: by means of these forms that give you similarities and differences, connections and sequences, it becomes even more spiritualized. To these forms the sciences owe a great deal of their progress. The various ways of knowing also belong to the activity of thinking. When I see someone for the first time, my knowledge comes from experience. When I remember and represent him from far away, the knowledge is of another kind – mere representation. And if I add attention to it, there is knowledge at yet another level, more intense and more exact. There is also certainty when knowledge comes from authority or faith, and there is necessity when it is based on the principle of contradiction. Now these levels of knowledge do not express a determination existing in the object but the particular mode in which it has been known. Here also it may be that the link between the mode of knowing and the object is so close that ordinary thinking and language treat this mode as a property of the object. So we hear expressions like a recognized person, a certain fact – after lightning there must be thunder. To uncover the illusion it suffices to realize that the same object is known in various modes – recognized for that person and certain for this one. No one any longer doubts this. Meanwhile, anyone who looks at the history of philosophy from the earliest times will see that the true and first being has been sought precisely in those categories that express forms of relation and knowledge but are not images of any being and therefore are not capable of providing knowledge of being. Experience has been held in low regard as too crude a tool. And because the being provided by experience is mutable, because experience also has its own illusions and deceptions, and because it is only concepts that bring the eternal and the immutable along with their content, experience – according to Kant – cannot give us general laws. Thinking was proclaimed the unique path to truth, and alongside intellect a special type of reason was discovered, which, like an intellectual vision, could effortlessly insert the highest concepts and laws

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into our brains. Relations and various modes of knowing – such as those that do not derive from being yet have the kind of connection with it that enables them to appear to be its categories – confirmed philosophy in taking this direction. These categories of pure knowledge thus became the categories of primal being, and the Absolute was discovered. Kant’s categories – with the exception of the Real – are also of this kind. However much he recognizes that they are only forms of knowing and do not originate from being, he still gives them the meaning of being when he claims that experience is possible only through them. The principle of knowledge according to Realism cannot be proved in the form of a geometrical deduction or syllogism. But a few observations can support it. Above all, the objective value of perception and the principle of contradiction are facts accepted by everyone and used by everyone, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from childhood on, even though the child does not recognize them. They are propositions born into the soul. They are not empty formulas. They indicate powers of the soul that work according to the aforesaid principle and fill knowledge with content. Therefore, within human knowledge they mark out the laws of an irresistible force and a fact. They work by necessity, and all are subject to them. Since the principle of Realism is common to all people, since it is that by which they acquire their cognitions and determine the truth of those cognitions, it is possible for this philosophy to have a clear and precise language free of contradictions and accessible to the most ignorant and simple people, who find in this philosophy the same laws and forces that operate in daily life and have shaped much of their way of thinking and speaking. Not only in philosophy but in all other fields of knowledge – morality, law, the fine arts – Realism provides a solid foundation from which observation and induction can lead to truth, just as in the natural sciences. Ethics especially is impossible if time and space are unreal, as the Idealists claim; if true reality is without space and time, human actions turn into mere appearance, devoid of moral value. To create an ethics, Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer had to abandon their Idealism; in an artificial way, they had to give a kind of reality to a world that had been reduced to a phenomenon. Beyond this, Realism needs none of the assumptions required for the functioning of other systems – no categories, no dialectical developments or genetic sequences. Realism gets directly to its object. To acquire knowledge a person needs only the senses, assisted by the powers and activities of thinking to correct illusions, eliminate contradictions,

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raise knowledge to the highest concepts, and, by means of induction, elevate it to the highest laws. Then, at those highest levels, thinking gradually diminishes the differences and oppositions that abound in the first phases of knowing. Realism does not demand that differences disappear completely, however, nor that the dualism of body and mind, being and knowing, dissolve in a higher unity of monism. Realism certainly does not claim that this is impossible, but it does not make it obligatory, as do Plotinus, Spinoza, and the philosophers of identity. It also manages (and perhaps it needs) to descend again to differences in order to use them to achieve analysis and the richness of existence. And just as Realism needs no assumption nor any higher unity, likewise it needs no schema for the partition of its material. It does not divide things by twos or threes. It follows the differences given by the object and uses those concepts that lead to the knowledge of laws. Therefore, realism has no absolute system. The order in which a content appears is a relational concept to which nothing in the object corresponds, serving only to make knowledge easier. In existence, all differences, all concepts – high and low – and all the forces at play subsist together and within one another. A system is useful for learning and teaching, and for such a purpose this system or that system can be used. We can begin from above and descend synthetically to particulars, or we can begin from below and ascend analytically to the more general. In physiology we can start with the blood or the nerves and in jurisprudence with real or personal rights or with the right of the State. All these systems have excellent outcomes, and each has its advantages. This shows that the system does not emerge from the facts, and that there is no genetic development on which the truth and necessity of the content is based – as Idealism claims. Similar constructions can flatter our vanity, as we demonstrate dialectically from the podium what has been achieved by experience. This method involves no necessity – only a choice. The whole point of Realism is to develop all the richness found in existence, leaving the selection of a system to the judgment of teachers and students. Idealism puts method above everything, however, and torments itself about it, leaving the development of content in the shadows. Thus, Hegel’s logic is just an artificial construct of pure concepts dancing like spectres before your eyes and leaving you dissatisfied because it gives you no way to get to knowledge of the world that exists. It is certain that all systems originating from pure thinking provide a weak defense against error and doubt; they are easily discredited, and there is no way to put an end to disputes. Realism provides a basis of fact

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about which all people agree, and this cuts off the disputes. It is easy to correct experience, tracing its illusions back to laws, cleansing it of the falsity introduced by imagination and sentiment, testing and retesting its results with new and more accurate research. And when a new discovery is made, the whole structure does not collapse, as it does with Idealism. The new settles down upon the old, and when the new is such that it destroys the whole structure, there is still plenty of material left to construct the new. Realism not only rejects other systems, it also provides an excellent criterion for discovering what is false in them by showing where they stray from nature and fall into errors and contradictions. With this criterion, Kirchmann refutes Kant and Hegel, lingering long over the explanation and refutation of the system that has recently become so famous: the philosophy of the unconscious. Hartmann owes his success to a method that is essentially experimental and inductive, making it possible for everyone to follow him in his more abstruse and subtle conceptions. But if the method is based on Realism, the author substantially contradicts it with his hypothesis of the unconscious. This is a first being outside space and time and having two attributes, an unconscious ideal and an unconscious will, in the end deriving an Idealism from Schelling that can be resisted at many points.5 In philosophy, of course, just as in the sciences, we use hypotheses to explain various problems, and, sometimes – especially in talented intellectuals – various conceptions suddenly emerge and lead to a new truth. But Realism, while continuing to admire the intellectualism, is not satisfied with the obscure and contradictory notions that entangle the new concept. Wishing to see the concept clear and well-defined, free of contradictions, and compatible with the findings of experience, Realism applies to these methods and these products of genius the same philosophical test that applies to all the special sciences. It keeps whatever passes this test. Anything else will be a nice game but not the truth nor even a start on it. Such hypotheses are common to almost all great philosophers: Plato has his ideas; Aristotle his doctrine of divinity in metaphysics; Stoics the identity of virtue and pleasure; sceptics the impossibility of finding the truth; scholastics the harmony between mysteries of the Christian religion and philosophy; Descartes universal doubt; Spinoza the unity of thought and extension; Leibniz the pre-established harmony between knowing and being; Kant the phenomenal character of the object; Fichte the subject/object; Schelling the intellectual intuition; and Hegel has

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dialectical development. Naturally, given these examples, no philosopher today can remain content with the solid foundation provided by the experimental sciences, so they fabricate new hypotheses and find true being in them, putting to use all the riches of imagination and sentiment. The genuine Realist philosopher rejects these aids, even at the cost of seeming flat and boring. Realism is no Minerva suddenly sprung from the brain of a Jupiter. Its principle has always been in use, but with conscious and scientific rigour only after the Middle Ages. Bacon, Locke, Hume, the French encyclopedists, and even the modern materialists have worked to give it shape. The example of natural scientists who have achieved such great results by observation and induction has strengthened this movement. Recent inquiries into the forms of relation and knowledge aim to restore the a priori to its true condition, not allowing its links with the a posteriori to lead it into error or to mix one thing up with the other. This proves that Realism can follow thinking even to its highest levels and its most subtle operations. This is not empiricism, of which Hegel could say that it applies the categories uncritically and without consciousness. On the other hand, the new Realism can still be considered a recent development of Hegel’s teaching. All the great ideas of that distinguished philosopher – such as the identity of being and knowing, the objective nature of concepts, the meaning of morality in the history of the world, and a number of others – are not only accepted but reworked by it. When what is obscure and contradictory in Hegel – the false mixed up with the true – has been removed, Realism presents these teachings in their full truth and in a clear form. Concluding in this way, Kirchmann expresses the wish that his account might win many followers for Realism and eliminate various misunderstandings. Only through Realism can German philosophers escape their isolation – the closed circle of initiates and believers – and enter a living communion not only with all educated people but also with philosophers from other civilized countries. It is just this wish that has moved me to provide my fellow citizens with an idea of Kirchmann’s account as exact as I could make it. We are usually more inclined to admire the Germans than to study them and acquire full mastery of their culture. The influence of German thought on our culture is great, and just for that reason, if we want to be free people and not machines, we must study their thinking and look at it from all sides. Accurate study of someone else’s thinking makes us original, even when we convince ourselves to appropriate it. Kirchmann has produced a work useful for drawing the proper lines around Realism, distancing it from the crude superficiali-

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ties of empiricism and the hasty hypotheses of materialism. In this way, he has eliminated many preconceptions and many objections that arise from confusions of this sort. But he has not succeeded, it seems to me, in attracting many followers to his Realism as a doctrine. In this regard, his account seems neither complete nor persuasive to me. Few will be able to share his iconoclastic loathing for imagination and sentiment, which still coexist in the mind alongside thinking and give it light and warmth. If these forces lead thinking astray and deceive it, watch out for them. But it is excessive to chase them out, as if the spirit could be sliced into pieces. Few will be able to deny, as Kirchmann does, the presence of thinking in perception – even in an unconscious way – and its primary importance in the origin of cognition. If it is true that there can be no knowledge of being without perception, it is also true that without thinking there can be no perception. Arguing about before and after is useless; they co-exist and work together. I tip my hat to perception, but I cannot throw thinking out. Without these exaggerations and others like them, Realism could survive, I believe: mainly it could survive as a method; as a doctrine, it is hard for Realism not to lapse into materialism and sensism, as with Locke and Condillac. Realism as method is the Realism of Bacon and Galileo, which was one of the most progressive moves ever made by the human spirit. If the abuse of thinking and the progress of the natural sciences have led people back to this path, we have only to rejoice for it. In this sense, Kirchmann has been completely successful, and we can only accept all his observations with due recognition and pray that Realism may penetrate even into philosophy if we follow the path already taken by many stalwart souls. We have a whole series of economic, moral, and philosophical principles by which the present generation has lived. It would be good to do the test again and put the suggestions of pure speculation to the trial of experience. When pure thinking does not succeed in building confidence in its results, systems abound and confidence wanes. Then we may stand on experience, and where experience does not succeed, we should be humble and not rush to conclusions. Realism is the general revising of our beliefs and opinions, and if there is any point of pride for modern philosophy, it is just that many of its principles govern this revising. Realism encourages serious study and puts it to use in practical life, detaches it from hypotheses and generalities, directs it to the possession of reality, restores confidence in human knowledge, and prepares a new synthesis – the new age – by amassing new materials.

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But many are discouraged and talk about the end of metaphysics, as we used to talk about the end of poetry. Metaphysics and poetry are eternal, however. They have their sunsets, but they also dawn again on the horizon. We already see how much metaphysics multiplies in the midst of Realism. And what are natural selection, the principle of heredity and evolution, the unconscious, and the internal states of atoms but attempts at metaphysics? What ought to worry us instead is this excessive haste in metaphysics, perhaps more as a residue of old habit then as a true awakening, the result of new and sufficient preparation. It is noteworthy, however, that all these concepts do not come from constructs of pure speculation, as they used to do. They have come as results of long and patient observation of things, broadened and elevated into laws through a process of bold and ingenious induction. They are tools of Realism that construct new kinds of metaphysics. Constructs of pure thinking have no more credit and no following. Metaphysics can go nowhere without Realism as its passport – at least in appearance. Kirchmann can be happy, then, and declare himself generally satisfied. We are deep in Realism. The new generation runs after us with the same passion that made others of us in illis temporibus run after Hegel.6 Whether it’s Realism or Idealism, however, the important thing for the young is to study and to study enough. Study is the best system of all. And serious study is the only source of a people’s greatness. A people that studies is always free and creative. Today there is progress. But we are still neither free nor creative.

NOTES 1 This article, or essay review, appeared in 1876 in the Nuova Antologia; we have used De Sanctis (1990): 121−37, including the very helpful notes by the editor. 2 On Kirchmann, see the Introduction, section 12. 3 Kirchmann (1864), (1868), (1875). 4 A scholastic slogan based on Aristotle: ‘There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.’ 5 The Unconscious of Eduard von Hartmann (1842−1906) is a descendant of the post-Kantian Absolute: see Hartmann (1878). 6 In illis temporibus: in the old days.

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9 Francesco De Sanctis

The Ideal1

Let me start by welcoming our friends and members. We have had enough rest and relaxation. Now that the holidays are over, here we are back at our favourite club. This year let us offer you a regular series of talks, at least one a month, and also some readings and discussions on the same schedule. Not to get down to detail, let me now announce a first reading for the evening of Thursday, 22 November, to be given by our distinguished friend and companion, Professor Persico, based on his short story.2 I had been intending to give you a talk myself, but the hardest thing for me has been finding a topic, a subject for it. I started daydreaming about it some time ago, but I finally wore myself out and came to a sudden stop, asking myself: ‘What drives me to spend so much time on the Philological Circle? What drives all the members to promote its growth?’ And this was my immediate answer: ‘It’s just that feeling of duty that drives us to seek the good of others – the feeling of the Ideal.’ Having got this far, I also cried ‘Eureka!’ But a person has a kind of double person inside – two persons, as it were – and one of them pokes fun at the other. So there I was, interrupted once again by this question: ‘Professor, why would it occur to you to give a talk about the Ideal? Speaking about the Ideal at a time when everything is Real? You run the risk of looking like a diehard. Or anyhow like someone who lives in the clouds or the Kingdom of the Moon, showing that you don’t know that the Ideal is dead and buried.’ Even so, allow me at least to give the funeral oration. As one who has had the sad task of recording on their tombs the virtues of many dear departed friends, you will not want to stop me from saying a few words about the burial of the Ideal. The Ideal was the companion of my youth and has stirred my heart many times. In delivering its eulogy, perhaps I can beg a requiescat from

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its enemies as well. Let me not conceal from you that in thinking about giving this funeral oration, I have secretly wished, as we accompany it to the grave, that we shall realize that it is still alive – immortal, in fact. The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is alive. Therefore, as one should when someone has died, I ask myself: ‘How was it born; when was it born; how did it live; and when did it die, if it did die? Above all, when the Ideal is born, how is it born?’ We look at an animal. What is it? It is a being with no purpose but life, no purpose but preserving its life and preserving it in a state of well-being. Can this purpose be called the Ideal? Certainly not. Let us move on to the human and think about it first of all in infancy, when it is almost an animal. The baby is anxious for the breast, driven there by the instinct for life: is this an Ideal act? No. Now think about the savage when all he does is hunt and fish, when he has no rule of morality other than self-preservation, sacrificing even his own kind to it. Is there anything Ideal in the savage? Again, no. Hence, the Ideal is born when the feeling of being human is born in a human being, when thinking develops, when a person conceives an idea of what was a feeling for him the day before. A human comes to generalize human qualities, conceptualizing glory and the fatherland, for example: at that point, ideas are born. But we still do not have the Ideal. When does one of these ideas become the Ideal? This happens only when that creative human faculty called imagination takes hold of ideas, and, by working upon them, produces feeling and informs all human action with it in such a way that the idea becomes like the pillar of fire that guides the human race. The Ideal then wholly occupies the human, taking different forms in art, religion, philosophy, and history. If it is true that the Ideal is born together with the feeling of human consciousness, how is it born? The Ideal is not something floating in the air. The Ideal is produced, like everything else. From what is it produced? From the Real, by that reality which you take to be its enemy. Here is the reason: as reality evolves, it must reach a point where it is capable of creating its own Ideal from itself. If the Ideal is the child of the Real, any historical reality must have its corresponding Ideal. The history of the Ideal is the history of the human spirit. Since no one has yet written this history, it would be absurd for me to pretend to do it in a few words. Nonetheless, in order to give you some sense of the principle that it sets forth, I shall mention a few of its large features by way of example. Suppose the human has reached the point in the development of consciousness where he can think about his animal nature. Suppose he is

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struck with a kind of terror in the face of nature’s immense fecundity. Then you will have the idea of the infinite mixed with the idea of nature. In the corresponding period, we find the Pyramids and vast structures representing the infinite, along with the Sphinx that represents the mystery of nature. Now take a step forward. Suppose that in the development of human thinking, the mind comes to distinguish beautiful form from ugly form, getting a sense of aesthetic imagination or the feeling of beautiful form awakening in the mind. The mind will then create the Ideal of art, which is the Greco-Latin Ideal. Take another step forward. Suppose that this Ideal has run through its history, its cycle, and has come into its decadence. And suppose that from then on, in that form, the person feels bestialized, and that possessing that form feels like a mind in need of a free and autonomous life. Suppose he feels that in that form he has found neither a weapon nor a tool but a prison. Then not only will he not yearn to create a form for himself, he will yearn to get rid of the one that he has. He will aspire to achieve freedom of mind as his ultimate purpose. Then we shall see that this person will create a new Ideal in contradiction to animal form, yearning for a life in which the spirit is free and independent. For a long time, mankind has lived on the basis of this Ideal. But now comes another idea. The human says to himself: ‘I am not just an individual who must provide selfishly for the salvation of my soul. I cannot isolate myself from the chores of life and make the idea of religion my only aim. Human life is no ephemeral appearance. It also has its own goal, which is to provide for the welfare of humanity.’ And look: another new Ideal arises, summed up in the Gospel passage ‘love one another like brothers.’3 Human life becomes a mission. There you have it, gentlemen, a series of ideas and the Ideal created from each of them. And this series of Ideals following one another in the human condition represents the continuous development in us of the part that is human and not animal. Therefore, it is we ourselves who are the Ideal, and what we have created is ourselves. It is a negation, and it is progress, which leaves bestiality behind. But then you ask, ‘Why do you stay just with this idea so that the Ideal is only the human?’ Because, gentlemen, we find ourselves in a strange time when everything is Realism and when we believe that the Ideal no longer exists. And I find not just this Realism that opposes humanity. I find a still stranger phenomenon as well – a certain satisfaction in looking more lovingly today on our animal part than on the human. Having had to try to prove that man was born from the monkey, we end up thinking more of the monkey than of man.

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Indeed, facing this Realism, what is the Ideal? What gives the Ideal its logical, typical, and emotional perfection is an illusion of the human mind. It is a mere extension of the mind that has nothing to do with reality. Thus, as thinking becomes an effect of chemical compositions and morality a question of bodily temperament, we find ourselves fully in the animal kingdom. As art follows this impulse, we find that all the qualities that are really human appear to be bestialized: idea turns into instinct; imagination is a manifestation of the machinery; passion is appetite. So it looks to me as if man is walking backwards and reverting to his bestial side. And yet, as I watch the human race embeasted, what gives me comfort is certainly not explaining such a thing but seeing the Ideal peeping through even from beneath this momentary depravity. Modern civilization is quite different from the civilization that shaped the age when Messalina and Agrippina went to the circus to applaud the gladiator who died elegantly.4 Today people protest. And what form does this protest take? It is above all the laughter, denied to the animal and granted to the human, that produces a benign irony about this dominance by the animal side. There is a great lesson in that laughter to which we surrender ourselves in carnival. Weary of being human, we are happy to be animal for a few days. And then, gentlemen, when that animal nature asserts itself and is asserted as a negation of humanity – of the homo sum – the human protests, and this protest is called disdain or indignation. Humanity appears in us and reacts against this degradation. Another protest erupts when humanity sees the Real immensely distant from the Ideal and cannot hold back a cry of pain. Look at Schiller and Leopardi.5 But we ask, ‘Do you not realize that this cry is the swan’s last song, the funeral bell announcing the end of the Ideal life?’ No, gentlemen. It is a painful cry full of desire and foreboding, and as long as there is pain and indignation, the Ideal is present. While believing this, it also comforts me to discern an enduring fact at the heart of this phenomenon: namely, that science prospers and flourishes, that the struggle with nature snatches new secrets from it, looks in it for laws, and directs its forces. This forms a richer reality that is more secure in its methods and criteria than the one that preceded it, and the new Reality is also bound to succeed in forming its own Ideality. This has been called an age of transition, an enfantement, an age of birthing. Indeed, what is this second half of the century but a laboratory for preparing the reality that will have to produce its own ideality? In the consciousness of the age, in the phenomena that accompany this animal

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Idealism, in laughter, in the grotesque, in comedy, in pain, and in indignation we see nothing more than the sign of something labouring that will bear is own fruits. At one time we used to shout, ‘The King is dead. Long live the King!’ Now I say, ‘The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is risen!’

NOTES 1 De Sanctis read this short occasional piece in November 1877 to begin a second year of meetings for the Circolo Filologico in Naples, of which he had been a co-founder in the previous year; it was published posthumously, and we have used De Sanctis (1990): 139−46. 2 Federico Persico (1829−1903), a lawyer, poet, novelist, and critic, was active in politics, where he started as a follower of Gioberti; he founded the Circolo Filologico with De Sanctis; and he had recently published Persico (1875), soon followed by Persico (1877). 3 Cf. John 13:34, but the language is as much Mazzini’s as the Gospel’s: see De Sanctis (1990): 144, ed. Giovannuzzi. 4 Messalina was the third wife of the Emperor Claudius, followed by Agrippina when Claudius had her predecessor killed for plotting against him; Agrippina was Nero’s mother; the name ‘Messalina’ became a byword for sexual debauchery. De Sanctis is thinking of the enormously popular plays on such Roman subjects, as well as later Italian subjects by Pietro Cossa (1830−80), Cossa (1876−81), and De Sanctis (1990): 145. 5 Giacomo Leopardi (1798−1837) was a scholar before he became Italy’s greatest Romantic poet, and a favourite of De Sanctis.

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10 Marianna Bacinetti Florenzi Waddington

Pantheism as the Foundation of the True and the Good1

To Baron Bunsen in Cannes2 Distinguished Baron and most cherished cousin: It was truly a comfort to receive your most interesting letter; it makes me very happy and does me honour. Any praise coming my way from a person like you, so wise and so fair, gives me courage and strength. I like what you say, and it gives me matter for meditating much more carefully, inasmuch as we may find ourselves somewhat at odds. But we agree to the extent of not accepting a personal God outside the universe. Indeed, what would that God be who contemplates the universe from some faraway place, like the head of an army watching his troops? Aristotle, who wants to claim that God is detached from the world, has a nothing-God. To find Aristotle’s God, we must look for him in that rich, infinite, eternal nature of his that he paints in such lively colours. Bruno, too, after describing an infinite universe that is full of life, living spirit, soul, and mind, sets God apart from it, as inert, barren, and useless in equal measure. Schelling posits a nature full of life and strength in which is contained, and from which develops, a child-God who grows up like a human and at last becomes the reason in which God attains his end and his perfection. Such a God cannot be the true God. Therefore, all those philosophers who have expanded nature into God and God into nature, have, in some sense, left the true divine nature unstated while by implication demonstrating it absolutely. But in order to escape the accusation that we have been hearing now and then – absurdly from some people – that these philosophers are pantheists, they do not want to emphasize this or clearly admit it in so many words.

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In every ancient and modern philosophy, however, no matter what the system is, I always find a foundation of pantheism that is more or less explicit. Indeed, it is mainly in this foundation, I believe, that God’s universal potency, supreme excellence, and superabundance of expansive and universal action shows itself. In this universal nature lies the infinite divine Ideal that contains everything and makes everything. And all the things that are in that most perfect Essence are without defect; they become disorderly and unruly only from their own limitation as they depart from the complete infinity in which they exist. But their ideal goodness always remains intact in the divine thought. And as they withdraw from that real and ideal existence, they themselves carry with them, along with their limitation and imperfection, something of that infinity and excellence in which they never cease participating. In humans especially, where there is receptivity of ideas – of those eternal principles that are the source of every virtue and all our goodness – the dignity of their derivative nature manifests itself in a better way. What is there to oppose, then, to the true meaning of the infinite universal world? Is it not perhaps true that the nature of things is in God and that things are in God? When is it not the true meaning to say that God is everything, and, at the same time, that all things are God? This is why Saint Paul said that God moves in us and we are moved in God – a statement worthy of that great mind, but susceptible to a pantheist interpretation.3 But is Bruno’s ideal ontological pantheism not compatible with the moral practice of good? Do we not find one Being, good and perfect, when Bruno moves, as he does, from the One to the variable and multiple and from the variable and multiple to the One? Do all things not derive from this one Being, and do those things not still participate in the qualities and nature of the Cause from which they proceed, though in a fragmentary way? Do we not aspire to the Infinite? Do we not participate in the Spirit that penetrates everything and is in everything? Through the elements and our own aspirations, then, we get the capacity for good. As Bruno himself says, each of us has a little bit of holiness up to the moment of our first appearing in the world. And since God is all goodness, all will, and free necessity, we possess something of God at the appropriate level that befits our finite nature, and therefore we can behave according to our capability and the principles that form the personal essence of our soul. You say quite correctly that in order to recognize the laws of the mind’s operations, we must observe and analyse the mental facts recorded by history, just as one does in the natural sciences in order to discover the laws of physical phenomena and to gain certainty of the inner connec-

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tion that exists among various things. This enables us to see how the inner facts of understanding and consciousness proceed in parallel with physical and moral facts. It is true, then, that in the progressive course of history and in the analysis of the visible universe – just as in the course of each of our own lives – we can find the link that unifies all human knowledge under a single point of view. But it is also undeniable that the highest metaphysical truths are those that really constitute pure knowledge and cannot reach our minds by way of analysis and experience, coming only from a primordial synthetic vision that the mind has and which we get from the mind. Analysis and experience follow later, affirming our intuition of what is positive and higher. And in those true and purest essentials shines a light so bright that it gives them an undeniable clarity needing no proof; it emerges from their objectivity and has none of the subjectivity that might produce error in them. And if this were not so, how could we have the idea of Absolute Being? But the radiant light of that universal Idea illuminates all the other ideas, and it is this precious ontological Idea to which we must turn for the stability and veracity of knowledge – a deep, pure, and uncreated Idea that resides in our soul and that humans cannot acquire on their own, neither through reasoning nor through any conclusion. In the best and highest sense, it is this Idea that stirs us to search for the origin of things. With its truth and sublimity, it does not leave us content to search feebly and ineffectively, wishing us instead to rise, with settled confidence, towards what it wishes not to be unknown to us. As I read your learned letter again, I am delighted to see your fondness for our Bruno, a great talent and a free one deprived too soon and too cruelly of life. I have been writing on matter now, treating it at first metaphysically and then physically, focusing especially on the Idea of Bruno that makes matter divine. I have also written about the disorder of individual existences and the eternal order. And I have brought up another topic, the infinite striving of the human mind and the constraints on it. I am still thinking about related matters as well, while waiting for happier times to do philosophy, and then I shall see if these things can be published. But since I have taken none of my inspiration from the living and little from the dead, just as I have always done, I have no expectation of doing anything whose merits deserve praise or print.4 Whatever comes of it, I follow the impulse of my spirit and take delight in dealing with philosophical topics, rising in desire to the high places of wisdom that we mortals can still reach only fleetingly. The answer to so many large questions rests only with the One that comprehends all, is all, and knows all. We are happiest, meanwhile, when the Idea of ideas

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shines so brightly upon us that it permits our spirit, impassioned and inflamed, to move for a few moments to the supernal spaces, and, filled with desire and love, to rejoin that eternal existence in union with which we taste a little of the beatitude that is the life of the Absolute, towards which we feel an inborn and irresistible drive. After Schelling’s death, King Maximilian sent me a very interesting manuscript containing Schelling’s whole philosophy compiled by his best student, whose name I do not now recall. Had I read it sooner, I would have organized my Bruno in a different way.5 We have not had the pleasure of seeing Charles and Mary again because the time was too short for them.6 I pray God that sometime soon I might have the pleasure of seeing you again and talking with you about philosophy. I am sure that your conversations with me will be productive and will make me a great admirer of your profound wisdom and deep learning. Trust that I am your affectionate cousin, Marianna Florenzi Waddington. 2 May 1860

NOTES 1 This text, a private letter written in 1860 and not published by Florenzi Waddington, may be found in Florenzi Waddington (1978): 25−35, with notes by the editor. 2 Baron Karl von Bunsen (1791−1860), a Prussian diplomat in Rome, Bern, and London, studied theology at Göttingen and published in a number of fields; he was the Marchesa’s cousin by marriage and corresponded with her about translating Schelling. For the letter from Bunsen to which this letter replies, see Florenzi Waddington (1978): 30−2. 3 Acts 17:28. 4 For the Marchesa’s published views on pantheism, see Florenzi Waddington (1863). 5 For Schelling, Maximilian, and the Marchesa’s translation of Schelling’s Bruno, see section 13 of the Introduction; her translation of the manuscript is Florenzi Waddington (1864b). 6 ‘Charles and Mary’ may be Charles Waddington-Kastus (1891−1914) and his wife; Florenzi Waddington (1856) is a translation of Waddington-Kastus (1848), whose author taught philosophy in Paris: see section 13 of the Introduction.

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11 Marianna Bacinetti Florenzi Waddington

Remarks on Pantheism: The Infinite, the Finite, God, and Man1

God is the Ideal, the infinite Ideal, the infinite Thought from which everything develops in immensity, eternity, and variety. Being infinite, God cannot create the finite because the finite of itself cannot be perceived by an infinite mind since that would be to create something contrary to its being. Also, by having to create from nothing – which seems to me absurd – God would not be able to create something that was not in conformity with his infinite being because that would be to create something not worthy of his eternal power. To create the finite, it would be necessary for God to have created a substance different from himself. Because he contains everything, God creates nothing. Everything unfolds from him, and thus there can be no existence different from him because two different substances imply a contradiction. Either there would be two equal Gods, which cannot be, or two unequal Gods, which again is impossible. By accepting a lower God and a higher God, or rather a God of good and a God of evil, we will get the doctrine of the Persians, and with that we accept two Gods, one opposed to the other.2 Spinoza says that a substance conceived per se cannot include the concept of anything else. It is being in itself, the cause of itself, whose nature entails existence. And since its attributes are its essence, it is therefore all existence, the essence in itself of uncreated nature, the cause of the existence and essence of everything. If the substance had been produced, it would need to have an antecedent cause, and then it would no longer be a substance because substance has the principle of existence in itself.3 For this reason, the finite must be indistinguishable with respect to the infinite and identical with it. And every individuality is just a finite appearance, a phenomenon, which, from our point of view, can be called a relative substance at whose base there is always infinite potency. The

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life of things is really phenomenal because when mind is wedded to matter, the ideal to the real, and when this is organized in time, the organization is inconsistent, temporal, and subject to dissolution. And since there is nothing essential in this union, the only union that remains is empty and phenomenal: in things there is not really that identical life that is true life in God, where mind and matter are one from eternity. Matter or bodily substance is identical with spiritual matter and form. Ideal and real, finite and infinite, are substantially one. Conceived in this way, matter is just divine substance – a single substance inseparable from the One. And those philosophers cannot be called materialists who have elevated matter and acknowledged it as actually identical with mind, not divided from it. The only materialists are those vulgar philosophers who have taken matter down from its elevated position and dropped it to the bottom, reducing it to a living death of mechanical motions and thus abasing this divine and holy principle. But in divine matter lies all the restless possibility of the immaterial principle that arouses it to call forth from its breast the whole infinite infinity of its products, the things that exist wholly in it and have their true, eternal, luxuriant, and magnificent life in that eternal One, the God who is aware of himself. But in transient life it is only the non-transient Idea that lives in individual things, as the idea of life realizes itself in organic being. Like every other idea or essence, the idea of life is eternal. And ideas have a special autonomous life in that every idea is true, eternal, alive in itself, and infinite in its kind – contained in the infinite thought and in every kind that the idea realizes in individuals, many of which carry the imprint and mark of that living typical Idea. Only the essence of things is real, then, and not subject to time. But the organic individual that is produced infinitely in time is condemned, made subject to the condition that the very image of life in it is temporal: it is condemned to pain and death, and only the idea of life is immortal. But since things that appear in time always have infinite potency as a foundation, since neither mind nor matter is corruptible but eternally alive in the infinite absolute Ideal, because there is this infinite possibility and actuality in things, it follows that they always go on reproducing themselves visibly under finite features. And their apparent finitude is just an infinite finitude, indistinguishable in the complete and perfect Being that is the All. This Being that is God, then, is all potency, an immense ocean, and we are a drop in that ocean. This drop always has the nature of that ocean. It is a finite appearance – finite because it is no longer in the infinite ocean and now has a life apart, an incomplete life. In the finite

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drop the infinite potency is unhindered, however; it is finite only to our imperfect eyes. But in its full being the infinite and finite, the perfect and imperfect, are just the same. They do not exist, in fact, because in the infinite ocean all is infinite, all is perfect. Everything that shows itself comes under various forms, various modifications of divinity that manifest themselves everywhere and variably. Hence, this drop is the form of divinity and preserves its nature. And even though it loses the perfection of the whole through its individuality, there is still no doubt that it has in itself a certain freedom and a certain necessity of the same kind from which it emerged, having emerged from that ocean which is all freedom, necessity, eternity, and infinity. Through this freedom the individual has a certain responsibility, a moral sense, recognizing good and evil, reward and punishment. Good and evil exist in the human will, but since there is still necessity in the human (prove necessity), what is wholly evil from a human perspective is not wholly evil in the sight of God.4 Humans have put things in various categories, and if actions do not correspond to those categories – to classifications and qualifications made by humans – this is how evil arises. But good is the love of the Good itself – the love of God, which is the Good in itself. The rewards and punishments of the next life will be participation in divinity and proximity to God in greater or lesser degree. Therefore, if we always take the love of God as the rule of our actions, we cannot but realize the Good, passing through successive transformations (metempsychoses) until we become worthy of reaching the immense divine ocean and returning to where we emerged. In this immense ocean, in that blessed unity, there is one life, one activity in which there is never an end to the infinite potency of unfolding and becoming manifest. Since there can be no inert potency, which would be nothing, this potency is all potency – activity within and activity without – so that it cannot exist without a subject to work on. It finds this subject in itself, taking its own visible development as its own proper term or subject. The potency is the free cause of what it reveals through the necessity of its own nature. In infinite uncreated potency, therefore, there is no creating by will and choice. There is only full, immense, and eternal development of the infinite Thought in which are the ideas, the imperishable types of things. The books of Moses say that after God created each thing, it seemed good to him.5 Anything that he might have wished to call ‘good’ in that way must always have been something determinate, able to be better or worse, permitting a choice, a distinction among the things that arose from his divine potency. This is not acceptable, then, because God knows

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neither the beautiful nor the good. God is neither beautiful nor good but the perfect infinite Idea of each thing. Since God is itself all beauty and all goodness, how can infinite absolute beauty see beauties and goodnesses apart from itself? How can it judge and create one object that emerges from it as more beautiful and more good than another? More and less, small and large, least and greatest are all human things, and by going that way we do not make ourselves like God; we make God like us instead. God cannot will to choose because he is neither will nor intelligence nor freedom – nothing in particular. God is the whole universally and contains it all. God’s understanding is infinite and does not understand one thing better than another. God is without number, without quality, and without quantity. God is each thing identical in the One, the identical in itself. In God the ideal blends with the real, number with unity, and the finite with the infinite, and in everything that appears in the finite is the incarnation of the Infinite, where infinite potency always shines forth. There is an All that is all, then. There is nothing but God, and God exists, as Spinoza shows, because existing is a potency and not existing is an impotency, and there can be nothing but God because there is nothing but God. There cannot be any other substance of a different nature, and the divine nature cannot be affected by the action of any other substance. All things are in God, and everything that happens, happens only through the laws of God’s infinite nature. If I distance myself from the idea of pantheism, everything confronts me as determinate. Everything becomes barren and dry. I no longer see that infinite production of things – magnificent, eternal, and unceasing. I no longer see that infinite and mighty Being into which my soul needs to leap, in which it takes nourishment, comfort, and hope, breaking those too confining bounds of individuality. To say that the idea of infinite space and time comes to us from cognizing finite space and time will be useless. No: this finite notion does not take us towards the eternal and infinite. That idea, that certainty, that inexplicable cognition comes to us from direct intellectual intuition. Our mind sees, feels, and contemplates truths whose proof is inward and invisible, just as undeniable as truth itself. But this view that we have comes from the view of the soul’s essence, which is eternal in God (to be proved).6 Therefore, by the same mark of necessity, truth, and eternity that they have in God, we see, feel, and cognize all those eternal, necessary, and true things. We realize, then, that true knowledge comes from divine knowledge, which in God is a complete whole. We get it through a vision in God, so to speak.

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Here it is as if one could say – as Malebranche affirms – that everything is seen in God as if in a mirror, by way of intellectual intuition. Schelling and Gioberti, those two illustrious philosophers, therefore maintain with great truth that science and philosophy have direct intuition as their foundations.7 And without this the science of all sciences – philosophy – could not be constructed and could not exist. Indeed, if there were no direct intuition coming straight from God, what certainty and what knowledge would sensible things produce by empirical means alone and by the experience of the senses? Based on what truths could humans have and get knowledge of the highest things? Otherwise, humans would be little more than animals. Because we have come from God, it is absolutely necessary that we have something higher that things here below would not permit us to have. Intellect and reason, in fact, are the most divine faculties that we have; they give us evidence of God and are of that same infinite nature that the most perfect Being possesses. In order to be fit for the world, products of what might be called a lower God – though not the true God – will conform to the world. By reason of cause and effect, this could not be unlike ourselves. But we also have infinite and eternal features like those of the eternal and infinite Cause. The individual and contingent features that the soul gives to things, and the power of determining them in time and conceiving them under the notion of time, is a temporal power found only during the soul’s existence in the body. Otherwise, determination would be impossible, since the soul that has the eternal feature could never be measured or extended in time. Schelling – one of the greatest minds of our time – reveals to us a doctrine that is wonderfully sharp in insight and majestic both in its sublime poetry and in the logical apparatus that he means to take all the way to its conclusion. But I can neither praise nor be fully satisfied with the notion of a somnolent God that he posits. At first God is a child in whom all things are stored as in a state of lethargy. Power, Spirit, and life then appear when God reaches his full development. God is not God except when the universal Spirit in its highest development becomes reason in mankind. God has then achieved consciousness of himself, meaning that he is understood and felt in consciousness, in human reason. At this moment, when he is reason and absolute Knowledge, aware that he is God and that he exists as a real living person, God has reached the point of his full greatness. It is not as his essence or action that God becomes God in human reason, but, as has been said, as life and real existence. Thus it seems that in his God, Schelling locates the essence – the seed of

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being – of possibility and becoming, but not the existence that God gets from man or from human reason and consciousness. It is therefore in us that divine activity attains consciousness of itself. At first this activity of the divine Spirit was the activity itself, the Spirit that stirred unconsciously in its spontaneous development. Now it is no longer unconscious; it is the absolute Reason that is identical with human reason. On that assumption, it seems to me that the great philosopher gives a kind of superiority to man, in whom and through whom God becomes God and develops in his absolute fullness. If we accept this, might God not instead be called ‘negated’ and subjugated to man, so to speak? Granted, God is realized in his highest freedom as essence because in that uncreated essence, existing from eternity, is the seed of each thing, and before it there was nothing at all. But during the same time, God turned out to be wanting because of blind action and by an involuntary law, lacking consciousness. In short, God showed himself unfolding as pure necessity striving for expansion and externality. This God of Schelling is not the one that I know because I think that God has always been immense – equally infinite, eternal, and uncreated. Therefore, God is without beginning and without end, and everything that arises and develops from God has in its foundation the mark of the divine nature. In every finite thing is the infinite potency, and by the law of cause and effect, things cannot be of a nature utterly unlike what produces them. I maintain, however, that human reason derives from the divine, not the divine from the human, as one might conclude if God really attained self-consciousness in human consciousness. In the end, without the human from which God gets life and absolute reality, God could not be God, according to Schelling. It is therefore evident that man actually becomes a divinity before God. But I think that human reason comes from the divine instead, from absolute Reason, and is part of infinite Thought. From that aspiration, that anxiety that we have to seek the divine and the infinite, it is clear that human reason gets part of the divine. And our reason seeks to grasp the holy Knowledge from which it emerged by seeking to understand itself and to understand and contemplate God – eternal primordial Activity, absolute Substance, the universal Essence that has produced everything eternally in its own eternal immensity, necessity, and complete freedom. I understand this necessary development of divinity as always immense and equal, not reaching its fullness by different degrees yet revealing itself in different degrees. Rather than accept the principle proposed by the illustrious philosopher for the production of things, I

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would be tempted instead to accept a creation ad onta from Genesis.8 The latter diminishes divinity, but Schelling’s view totally deprives God’s majesty and infinite potency of its rank and dethrones it. This is why I wish not to accept the common account of creation, since it puts divinity into decline, for every created thing brings with it a special act of will, a special act of intelligence, particular acts of determination and choice, while God reveals himself in constancy, variety, and immensity through the free necessity of his nature. God is no thing in particular. God is not intelligence – let me repeat – nor will, nor goodness, nor happiness, but is all potency in immensity and continuity, without distinction of number. Bruno’s system is much more useful, to my way of thinking, because Bruno sees matter as the immense Ideal, the possibility of things united to actuality, which is form identical with matter. In All there is life, and this results from the antagonism of two potencies united by a third force: the result of this bonding is that existence appears.

NOTES 1 For this unpublished work, see Florenzi Waddington (1978): 99−110. Although the manuscript is undated, its content places it near the Marchesa’s letter to Baron Bunsen of 2 May 1860, and before the Filosofemi published as Florenzi Waddington (1863). The prose is unfinished, clearly not meant to be read except by the author as notes in draft. 2 The Zoroastrians of ancient Persia recognized two high gods, one good and one evil. 3 ‘Product’ and ‘production’ are terms of art for Schelling. 4 ‘Prove necessity’ is the author’s note to herself. 5 Gen. 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31. 6 ‘To be proved’ is the author’s note to herself. 7 Malebranche explained his illuminationist theory of cognition – seeing in God – by analogizing God and a mirror: just as seeing objects in a mirror is not the same as seeing the mirror, so seeing things in God is not the same as seeing God’s essence; for Gioberti on intuition, see section 8 of the Introduction. 8 The phrase ad onta combines a Latin preposition (ad) with the neuter plural of the Greek word for being: the Marchesa may mean to revise the usual understanding of the Genesis story so that God creates only in a diminished sense, using what already existed.

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12 Francesco Fiorentino

Letters on The New Science to the Marchesa Florenzi Waddington1

LETTER 1 Distinguished Lady and Friend: In our frequent talks together about the enormous value of The New Science, you have pointed out to me various statements that clearly foreshadow German philosophy, and you have asked why people have tried so hard to conceal these similarities and twist the teaching of the greatest Neapolitan philosopher into such strange shapes. I have answered with a few words about this, but since the question is a serious one and needs more clarification, I have decided to write about it, in confidence that this will please someone who finds philosophical debate (a rare thing in our day) neither tiresome nor annoying. Now that Vico’s name has escaped the oblivion that gripped it for so long in the previous century, Italians and foreigners alike invoke it today, making it the object of praise as excessive as the scorn heaped upon it in other periods. The way of the world, as we almost always discover, is Golgatha yesterday, Tabor today, the Bastille then, and now the Pantheon.2 After Vico published The New Science, he avoided crowded places so that he would not run into anyone whom he had mentioned, probably fearing their rebukes and sneers. Were he alive today, he would have quite a different reason to hide. Rightly or wrongly, everyone wants to be seen as Vico’s follower. For every statement he made, there are a thousand interpretations, and his words are cited and distorted to the point where none of their meaning is left. In the academies, among philosophers and jurists, there is a real struggle to be or to appear to be Viconian – at any cost. In my opinion, however, going overboard with praise is as harmful as the ceaseless denigration used to be. And I have always felt that one

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bit of misplaced praise takes Vico to be the author of a metaphysics not just unlike the one begun by Descartes and cultivated with special care in Germany but also completely opposed to it, thus cutting Italy off from the progress of knowledge in the rest of Europe. Should we welcome this privilege as our heritage, we would be forced either to certify what we know as infallible or confess its impotence, stuck in a rut that would embarrass the Chinese. But I think I am built neither for the arrogance of the first claim nor the fecklessness of the second. We Italians are people like everyone else, fit to share the common destiny of our nature, frequently off course but always moving towards the goal that never changes, on the path that always leads there. The haughtiness that nations have, a stimulus useful to peoples in decline – and one that our heroes therefore revived at a certain point – would be awkward and childish today. And in our boasting surely we would not be forgiven for what people put up with a little while ago when times were bad. Having grown stronger, we therefore seek to be fairer, and we set national hatreds aside when the stakes are the fate of human knowledge. And you, my lady, have you not read or heard it said that philosophy – true philosophy, anyhow – is all Italian and only Italian, not much done by other peoples, and done just to the extent that they have imitated us; that Vico erected the Pillars of Hercules for philosophy; that he is the only leader worth following, any other being untrustworthy and ready to rush headlong into a bottomless abyss; and that he was the steadfast opponent of Descartes, implacably objecting to the modern aberration, as it is called? Speaking for myself, I have heard all too much of such things, frequently even from people of talent, and this confirms my intention to air the main arguments because a view so widely accepted deserves serious examination since it must have come from some deep source. I want to start by finding out whether Vico really has nothing in common with Descartes – with the modern thought that came before him, in other words, and also what came after him. Then I will try to figure out why some interpret Vico in the one way, others in the other way. Finally I will touch on the clearer and closer connections between Vico and Kant, especially between the New Science and Kant’s Critique. If only because of the nature of the texts – and because I am talking with you, a learned devotee of the theoretical sciences – I shall refrain from going into those more minute details that would soon become tiresome. It was as if Vico foresaw the disputes that would arise from the secret inner workings of his genius, for he had the brilliant idea of providing his own self-revelation. He set about writing a Life where he speaks at

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length about his studies and the thinking that produced his books.3 But this far-seeing effort was not much help because any truly creative genius has something inside that remains unclear to the person himself. Something flashes through his mind unawares, which he cannot escape and cannot hold still enough to see it squarely from every side. In science as in poetry there is inspiration, and this sudden flash, whence the mind catches an unexpected glimpse of an unknown world, evades the searching thoughts of anyone who finds himself struck by it. The task of real criticism, then, is to investigate what not even the author himself understood, to uncover the hidden struggles of his genius and shed light on the shadowy workings of the remotest reaches of his mind. In every great genius, the old person confronts the new, and they fight so fiercely that the battle stays long undecided while the mind wavers in doubt. Then, as if by instinct, it takes shelter in the past, and the old person prevails. But final victory always goes to the new person, whom the struggle makes stronger while the other weakens, and, in the long run, gives up. The creator of a new system can be called a battleground that no one sees. Hence, it is not a wise plan to make one of the parties to this conflict disappear by suppressing it or by describing great people as if they were formed in an instant. History done in this way by lopping off the process of coming-to-be is a falsification of science. Not departing from our plan, we are presented with two lines to notice in Vico, as there were two before him in Descartes, and two after him in Kant. Vico lays out of one of these lines; he traces its origin to Plato, and he is on the right track. But the other line, not understood by him, is based on the new principle of Descartes – the Descartes whom Vico followed and made productive while believing that he was attacking him. In his learned work on Vico’s thought, Ferrari is not interested in these various details that the modest Neapolitan investigated in the history of his great predecessors.4 For him The New Science is a solitary monument with no basis in past advances, rising as if by enchantment like the palaces described by Ariosto. In his view, neither Plato nor Tacitus nor Bacon nor Grotius – the four authors from whom Vico took inspiration – had enough power to cause the new science to be born.5 Ferrari is right, in one sense, because no haphazard erudition does any good without a mind to develop it. Books create opportunities, but they are useless without intellectual energy. Just as the apple that fell in front of Newton cannot be called the discoverer of universal attraction, neither could the lamp in Pisa’s cathedral, swinging there in plain sight for Galileo, disclose the laws of the pendulum to him. But besides external events and the talent that belongs to the indi-

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vidual, which are almost accidental factors in discovery, there is a logical and necessary process by which the human spirit develops. When it reaches a fixed boundary, the spirit needs another route, and, if it finds one, new ideas are required. These ideas the spirit knows how to call up as needed, and they present themselves in obedience to its irresistible command. The route is still the old one, but new needs have broadened it, and these ideas that seem so novel were latent and implicit in those that came before. Vico was there in Plato, then, but incomplete, undeveloped. There were seeds to be fertilized and then sprout, causing the New Science to spring forth from the Republic. As a ‘matter of fact,’ Plato said that there were as many ways to rule as the spirit has faculties, and that the latter sequence also preserves what we take to be our mind’s structure and hierarchy. And since reason comes first among powers of the mind and reigns supreme among all the others, rule by the best and the wise, which corresponds to reason, must likewise necessarily be first. After reason, courage comes second, submitting to reason’s wishes and defending it against the force of the sensual appetites, and the corresponding result is that rule by warriors comes after rule by the wise. Finally, since appetite is the lowest of our faculties and by nature formless and variable, the democracy that derives from it also takes the lowest place and represents just that manifold variety of inclinations that Dante symbolized by the beast with the speckled hide.6 Vico acknowledges that after he read Plato there began to form in him, without his being aware of it, the notion of thinking about an ideal eternal law, and, along with that law, an eternal city, which in turn would be the model for commonwealths of all eras and all nations.7 There is no need for us to treat this idea as outside Vico’s plan or dragged in by force and unnaturally, after the New Science was written, to explain a work already completed. When we read how all forms of government arise from one another in a way explained not by chance external circumstances but by the internal order of the faculties of the mind, we cannot help noticing that the Greek philosopher’s Republic and the Neapolitan philosopher’s New Science are based on a common design. Next, once I saw that Vico had reached two very weighty conclusions, I was persuaded that he took Plato’s principle seriously. The first is that Plato’s ideal republic is a consequence of the metaphysics that he adopted, meaning, in fact, that the science of ideas and that of the spirit must proceed in tandem, bound together by unbreakable bonds. The second conclusion is the brief but profound criticism that Vico makes of Plato’s Republic, which deals with mankind not as it is, after the Fall, but only as it ought to be. Vico therefore noted that the Athenian philosopher

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misses that development, which, supposing humanity to be what exists in primitive times, then gradually arrived at the model government that Plato depicts right away, almost hastily, in the Republic.8 Thus, where Plato starts his sequence with the initial assumption that reason rules, Vico, by contrast, begins with animal appetites and proceeds along exactly the opposite path. One assumes that man is perfect and starts his account with the ruling faculty; the other, treating man as fallen, begins from the senses. Plato models the Republic on metaphysics. Vico disconnects the two things and claims that the world of human souls moves away from the world of minds, and, while metaphysics connects directly with God by the faculty of contemplation, the philosophy of history, basing itself instead on faculties of will, uses a process by which we gradually get closer to the immobile idea contemplated directly by metaphysics. In short, metaphysics for Vico aims at the true, and it has no process, just as the Idea has no process. But the philosophy of history is based on the certain, and it has a process, just as mankind has a process. Who is right, Plato or Vico? This is the question that follows automatically from what has been said above. But before answering, I wish to note that between Plato and Vico there is a real shared design, and that the Greek philosopher’s Republic is the first earlier work connected with the New Science. For the sake of the immobile idea, Plato forces human facts within limits equally immobile. Vico breaks these boundaries and sets mankind free, but he does not dare to unshackle the idea. He is halfmodern and half-antique, and for now I believe I must content myself with having described him in this latter way. At another time, I shall write you about what I take to reveal the first traces of the modern Vico, and all this chatter of mine may not seem entirely pointless to you. Meanwhile, guard your friendship for me, which is precious – believe me. Bologna, 27 March 1865 LETTER 2 Distinguished Lady and Friend: I’m not sure what it amounts to, this bit of babble that I’ve started to put together for you, nor if it seems mostly a waste of time. Since it’s no bother for you, anyhow, I intend to go on with it to the finish. Who knows? By continuing, we might get to an issue that more reluctant minds and

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those more remote from theoretical subjects might find worth thinking about. I cannot conceal from you that I have become hopeful about this, convinced as I am that in Vico’s new science we find not only discussions of a philosophical problem but also material with implications for problems of origin – the origins of history, art, religion, and law, topics continually discussed but never finally resolved. In the meantime, we cannot do without these things, and anyone who tries not to deal with them often turns back to them despite himself – an indisputable sign that all these issues are living in human consciousness. But in getting back to origins, as it gets darker and darker, the thing that you’re looking for gets smaller and smaller, and, for one reason or another, dismay overcomes you and you’re tempted to abandon the task. Proof of having great talent – and a privilege that comes with it – is not letting oneself be defeated by difficulties, redoubling one’s effort at every obstacle. For a good twenty-five years Vico laboured over his book and gave it a title that he himself calls invidious, The New Science.9 Over so long a period he had to overcome many serious obstacles even within himself, not counting external impediments, for it is in the nature of the human spirit to turn on itself if there is nothing outside to attack it. The Neapolitan philosopher therefore had plenty of problems, and they came to him from the very teachings that had helped him in his early efforts. The last time I wrote you, I mentioned how Plato first suggested to Vico the design for thinking about the new science, and this theory, which was effective when he first started his project, began to be only half-useful to him quite soon. Plato, being too fond of ideas and their immobility, was happy to squeeze everything inside this cage, as he did with the history of humanity in his Republic. From his own experience, Vico perceived – and would have occasion to say – that the ideal nature of Plato’s conception cannot be identified with history without doing grave harm to it. He therefore hastened to extract history from this ideal and base it on a different principle. Vico thus arrived at the cardinal distinction between the true and the certain: where the philosophy of history was a science of the true for Plato, for Vico it becomes a science of the certain. And we can describe the certain as the living truth and human fact, which gradually escapes the confines of particularity that encumber it and keeps reaching for universality and convertibility with the true. In this exchange, as the true acquires awareness, the certain, for its part, gets the benefit of universality, with the following result: although the true lies beyond the mind that contemplates it, according to Plato, and

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therefore cannot attain awareness of itself within human consciousness, Vico claims that it can do so by means of a process. Now this process whereby the human spirit comes to be recognized as such is history, which is either completely missing in Plato or else stuck on like an ornament, for no other reason. This defect did not escape Vico, who observed of Plato ‘that instead of confirming his secret wisdom with the common speech of Homer, he decorates it.’10 This remark is quite profound, for the Neapolitan philosopher reveals the secret that he used to complete the Athenian’s half-complete theory. History cannot be for the Idea what a frame is for a painting, an empty ornament and nothing more. On the contrary, history needs to be so connatural with the Idea that the Idea becomes history and history becomes a confirmation of the Idea. Should that marriage not take place, the Idea would be sterile, and history in turn would stay empty and disconnected. Moreover, note that what Vico wants is not a systematic, artificial history produced without spontaneity, but the common history recounted by Homer. And Plato could find no excuse in the Cratylus, where he resorts to philology in order to authenticate philosophical systems, which is why the two schools called on philology, rather than reason, to serve them in that most celebrated era.11 Vico took the historical element seriously, on the other hand, and made it one of the foundations supporting the new science that he was devising. He makes two things converge on history as if on a single goal: the philosophy that is based on the true and grounds itself in reason; and the philology that springs from the authority of human will as it labours over knowledge of the certain. Reason and authority are therefore the two components of the new science, and if it was Plato who suggested the first to Vico, the second had an entirely modern origin. For any compatriot of Machiavelli, examples of this must have been available right next door. However, the two main ingredients, quite attractive and well fitted out, were available before Vico, but they were disconnected – indeed, regarded as incompatible. Philosophy worked by abstractions: arrogant about the heights it had to attain, it paid little attention to the course of history and human events. And history did just the opposite: content with the solidity of its documents, it either took no notice of ideal processes or went even farther and mocked them. Philosophy and history were both losers, the first being short on evidence, the second on rationality and coherence. Johann Georg Hamann, whom Goethe compared to our Vico in talent, used to say that nature is a Hebrew word having only consonants,

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and that reason must add the vowels.12 It seems to me that this is exactly how Vico looked at knowledge as a whole, dividing it into two domains, one covered by reason, the other by authority. And then he showed that philosophy contained the vowels of history, while philology contains only its consonants. Vico gave philology a very large role, describing it as ‘the theory of everything that depends on human will.’13 Yet his solitary researches may lack the evidence and support from oriental languages that assist modern philologists. Being too shut up in the world of Rome, neglecting the rest and evaluating what little he knew of it by the Roman standard, may have done him harm. Despite all these failings, we still cannot deny that he is immeasurably far ahead of those who travelled the same road after him. He made philology important, raising it from the detailed study of words to the lofty position of a scientific system. And he studied the lives of peoples in all the most important phenomena that usually characterize them, never content with collecting witty anecdotes and popular stories as many do today – to what end, I am not sure. When Vico came on the scene, there was no shortage of erudition. Every book published carried an unbearable load of it, or else it would have had no value, giving the swarm of learned experts no reason to applaud. The only thing lacking was to use erudition moderately and know how to direct it to some reasonable purpose. In order to do so, erudition had to be subjected to regular laws, distinguishing what was real and solid from the worthless and spurious, tracing the provenance of scholarship, and using such connections to link it with thought. No longer trusting that this could be done, Descartes took himself out of it and disowned the attempt: rather than untie the knot, he cut it. The Discourse on the Method marks a cross on the back of every such inquiry, revealing its uselessness and showing that a mind encumbered with so many little bits of information would then be ill-equipped for the richer and very important task of knowing oneself. Descartes may not have been entirely wrong about the academies and scholars of his day, but he had not seen that while a person or an academy might look for childish amusement, the human mind produces nothing without meaning. His plan went too far, then, for there was an alternative not opposed to the Cartesian principle, I believe, but derived from the very same method – a plan to redo those learned inquiries from a different point of view, inasmuch as they uncover the hidden nature of the spirit that becomes concrete in its products. And had Descartes reinstated the thinking that was banished for so long, he would not have needed to leave it naked and impoverished in order to complete its restoration;

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instead, he could have diligently procured it a retinue worthy of so great a power. He would have needed to look at every move already made and look deep inside in order to extract the seed, forgotten but still fertile, from the shining husk. And this was the inquiry that Vico undertook, a plan to enlarge the Cartesian method without altering it. In his hands, philology was no longer the irreconcilable enemy of philosophy, as it appeared to Descartes. Each is bound to the other by a knot that cannot be untied, using speech as the transparent mirror that reflects thought. History thus becomes philosophy’s mightiest adjutant, and the fact can actually substitute for the deepest truth. Vico thus completes Descartes by reclothing his thought in forms that had been taken away. He took on the task that the Touraine philosopher no longer believed in, and he reconciled Plato and Tacitus forever, the man of ideas with the man of history. By sealing that marriage, Vico made the philosophy of history possible, though as long as the world had kept reason in confinement, this philosophy could not aspire to the level of science, ending up in Bossuet with the threadbare concept of a heavenly Providence regulating human actions until their ultimate and external resolution by the Incarnation.14 It never hurts to repeat that an external cause is never enough to make knowledge. If a person does not look inside himself to dig out the true causes of facts, he will wait a good long time before heaven rains them down upon him. And here I want to put an observation before you that will be better supported by what comes next, and it is that the Providence we meet with in The New Science is more in name than in truth, so much so that it has nothing to do there except make us recollect Vico’s first steps. But this is not yet the time to examine the titular rights of all the words found listed in The New Science. Meanwhile, let us consider how its result could be a notion of human development based on the very nature of the spirit but without recourse to supernatural causes or events partaking of marvel and mystery. Vico told us the story, how he spent nine years in the castle of Vatolla and how those years – putting it in Machiavellian terms – were not spent sleeping or playing games.15 However, although we know what books he read and the circumstances that brought them to him, we do not know how he used them. But with his own works in front of our eyes, it is easy for us to figure these things out, trying to guess what path he took, noticing the pauses where his unquiet spirit got some rest. The main stopping-points appear to me to have been The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, The Sole Origin and End of Law, and The New Science.16 The first of

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these works was printed and published in 1710, and please do me the favour of noting the dates, whose importance for our purposes we shall see later. Its intent is to track down in a few Latin words the remains of the remotest Italian philosophy, which, so it seemed to Vico, had to be found hidden beneath that covering. There our Vico sees truth converted into what is made in a mind located above our minds, as the eye of reason catches its solitary existence in a distant glance. And while that sovereign mind makes all and knows all, ours rests content with a science of smaller scope, as it keeps harvesting the elements of things scattered hither and yon. The only making suited to us is the mathematical, whose deep structure we therefore see, whereas in physics we see no farther than external appearance since physical things are copies and simulacra of divine ideas. But who does not portray the old metaphysics – the Plato of the Republic and Timaeus – along these lines? In this first work, then, Vico is still Platonic, just as Descartes is a Platonist when he sets aside his I think, therefore I am and takes a big leap into the most perfect Being and St Anselm’s famous argument. No wonder, then, that some have thought that this is where Vico and Descartes agreed – as Bouillier, among others, did in his history of Cartesianism.17 But they did not realize that on this point Vico and Descartes are not so much alike as both modelling themselves on ancient metaphysics. Both Vico’s sovereign Mind and the most perfect Being of Descartes bear the imprint of the Good from Plato’s Republic. It is still a resemblance, but copied over, not an original resemblance. From this we see why Vico, at a more mature stage – actually, a year after publishing the New Science – scolds Descartes for this same failing, of which he too had been guilty in The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. Indeed, writing to Esperti he says that ‘Descartes establishes as a rule of truth that the idea has come to us from God, but without ever defining it.’18 And the Cartesian idea lacks definition because defining implies connecting and linking by genus and difference, so that an idea is interwoven with the most universal items by way of the genus and with the most concrete by way of the difference. But if Vico’s observation is correct, it could then be a rebuttal against the infinite mind that he himself proposed, since it too is without definition and isolated from the rest of the system. After a while, Vico figured out the difficulty involved in accepting a mind of that kind, and in The New Science he turned to a living psyche that is both defined and capable of development in a logically and historically organized system. And in this transformation he was truly Cartesian, making no use of any other mechanisms than those that thinking sup-

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plied. Therein lies Vico’s novelty, and therein lies the real resemblance to Descartes – not the old one copied over from Plato, which is the only one noticed by the French critic.19 Next you will ask me the reason why he changed paths, at what point he changed, and whether he changed all at once or slowly? These are the questions that I think I hear you asking, and I shall answer them at another time. Now I only mention to you that ten years after The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians came the Universal Right, and fifteen years later The New Science.20 In addition to the actual content of the books, which we shall discuss when we have a chance, that sequence of publication clarifies for us how Vico finally came to rest in The New Science, from which he expected more glory than from any of his other works before or after it. Hence, when Solla wrote to tell him that he thought more of his oration for the death of Angiola Cimini than of any of his other works – including The New Science – the kindly Vico, seeing what a stupid thing his friend had said, quietly replied that his own opinion was certainly just the opposite.21 What a hard life that unfortunate genius lived, so that regret had to come to him even from the praise of close friends, along with the certainty of having wasted his labour, at least as far as contemporaries were concerned! If it were me, I would have been much more contemptuous of Solla’s praise than of the miserly refusal from Cardinal Corsini or the painful neglect of the three generations who allowed that astonishing talent to be a teacher of rhetoric.22 Thus I cannot forgive him for having desired and requested approval and favour from vulgar minds and from hearts hard in the way of the courtier when there would have been more glory for him in not seeking this at all. Perhaps his name would have been much more famous – as a person, anyhow – if in his mature years and as a professor in Naples he had been able to preserve that youthful audacity, which, in the solitude of Cilento, pushed him almost to boast of his misfortune, scornful of all comfort.23 What do you say about this, distinguished lady? I can see you smiling at these words of mine and perhaps reproving me gently for having left The New Science in order to be annoyed with its most excellent author. But what do you expect if I cannot stick to my target, even when very great persons are involved? I ask Vico’s forgiveness, and yours, and in letters to follow we shall discuss the rest of his works. Keep me in your friendship then, which honours me greatly, and consider me yours. Bologna, 3 April 1865

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LETTER 3 Distinguished Lady and Friend: The last time I wrote you, I ended with various questions that I promised to answer, one by one, and now, to keep my promise, I begin by making another question out of them. Have you never found yourself faced with something so difficult that it has made you change your mind, forcing you to reach the same goal by a different route? I think so, since this is what normally happens to everyone who wants to find the truth without being too careful. And if less educated people are taken to be changeable at every shift in the winds of theory, the learned commend them for it, and science pays them back. In my view, then, Vico found himself in that same place, more or less, where all distinguished thinkers end. Having accepted a philosophy that I call Platonic (more to accommodate popular opinion than to express my own views), Vico sought to make it fit the primordial era of Italian philosophizing. There he did his best to investigate various words that he believed to contain a hidden wisdom perfectly suited to that type of philosophy. A clever strategy – had it been more successful – since his aim was to give an air of venerable antiquity to new concepts, most of which he had proposed for the first time. With great courtesy and precision, the Giornale dei letterati published at that time in Italy made him realize that various interpretations were inexact, that the conclusions of the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians led to contradictions, and finally that the basis on which his whole system was built was dubious.24 Vico replied once and replied again, countering with new clarifications when objections were restated and defending himself as best he could. But he went no farther with the second and third parts that made up his original design – an absolutely sure sign that the difficulties had defeated him. Thus, the controversy had a double outcome, which is not very common: first, it ended politely; second, it led such a person as Vico to think things over again for himself. I will not go into all the details of this controversy, nor will it be necessary to do so, since everyone knows them. My only point is this: how could so subtle and perfect a philosophy be found in the Latin language, seeing that the Romans began to philosophize only at a rather late date, and even then, lacking knowledge of their own, they borrowed all their inquiries of this kind from the Greeks? This observation was so much on the mark that when Vico could not make the

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rough and warlike Romans the actual authors of such enormous wisdom, he turned back to the Etruscans, concluding that the Romans could have spoken their language as philosophers without their having been philosophers themselves. A quick way out, to be sure, but no longer enough to sustain the intrinsic and hidden power of Latin words – words whose learned interpretation was supposed to be a remedy grafted on at a later date and lacking the native and spontaneous value of the words themselves. If so, what did the Etruscans do to get it? On Vico’s new hypothesis, the problem would have been displaced but certainly not solved: if there were primitive words, and if these words could have a deep and arcane wisdom within them, it still remained to decipher it. It was suggested to Vico that he apply himself instead to Rome’s most ancient laws, where an original manifestation of that people was surely to be found, and where indisputably there was a collection of practical wisdom, at least, if not theoretical wisdom. At first he seemed not at all compliant with this advice: repaying his advisors with problems that they had first brought forward, he claimed that uncertainty and scarcity might be no less an issue in those legal documents than in what produced the labile language of metaphysics. Either because self-regard yielded to concern for science or because the choice seemed not so hopeless to him, he gave the question more deliberate consideration than he had before and turned from the wisdom of Socrates to that of Romulus, from the school to the assembly, a direction apparent most obviously in the Sole Origin and End of Law.25 This work of Vico’s makes the transition from inner speculative wisdom to the common and spontaneous kind; it is his progressive step towards the true sources of science and history. Since law-making stands between the particular interests of life and the absolutely universal ideas of the mind, it is the natural mediator between theory and practice, between remote abstractions and what is alive and concrete. Professor Giani, in the learned interpretation of this work that he provides – the first one produced in Italy – astutely recognizes its special, characteristic feature, its treatment of the conciliation between philosophy and philology.26 Hence, one realization after another made it impossible for Vico not to notice that the Twelve Tables, with all their marks of coarse rigour, had something reflective in them and a kind of generality that did not belong to a truly primitive people. And he went back even farther, to the cave-dwellers, to the earth’s virgin forests and their thunder-struck sons, to the crude, savage rites that inaugurated the birth of the first civilization.

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Thus, it seems clear enough to me that when Vico’s problems provided the occasion and the material, the ensuing philological investigations caused him to move on from the most ancient wisdom of the Italians to universal law, and then from this to the new science. The process that led him there was philological, then, and not philosophical, as it was for Kant after him. This also seems to be the reason why Vico lacks the awareness of his own path that shines through so clearly in the philosopher of Königsberg; why the foundation of his philosophy constantly conflicts with his own teaching; and, finally, why Vico describes the development of the human psyche as it reveals itself in history, whereas Kant outlines the process as it hangs together in individual consciousness. When Kant saw the weakness of the philosophy of experience and the validity of Hume’s objections, both these considerations caused his resolve to provide a more stable basis for science, which he found in the intrinsic form of thinking. Vico, on the other hand, kept to the same course by explaining history, convinced by the thought that primitive words could have been neither universal, like those of the most ancient wisdom of the Italians, nor general, like those of the Twelve Tables. But since all these products belonged to the same human mind, though at different points in time, he foresaw the unity that by developing itself gives birth to history. Like a distant prophecy, the new metaphysics that still had to be born with Kant flashed before his sharp eyes. And then the new guest whom Vico admits unawares comes to blows with the old residents, but Vico can’t figure out the real cause of the scuffling that he hears in his house. Joking aside, Vico often does not understand himself because no one really understands anything without having consciously deduced it. But there is more, and it is more remarkable than what happened up to this point, meaning that Vico makes not only what he did not know how to make but also what he had at first thought unmakeable by human knowledge. In fact, having carefully noted that knowing goes along with making, he regarded the latter as real knowledge, which was capable of explaining how things came to be. But he thought that such knowledge belongs only to God – except for mathematics, where humans truly have knowledge because in this case it is the human himself who is the maker. And for that reason the criterion of clear and distinct perception proposed by Descartes seemed to Vico not enough to give certainty to scientific cognition since its use in physical and practical matters does not give the kind of proof provided by mathematics: in mathematics, we know the truth by making it, but not in the other sciences. But then if we look at The New

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Science, we notice that humans no longer make just the mathematical sciences but also the others that Vico calls ‘practical matters’ – history, religion, art, law, and science.27 Thus he violated the prohibition that had been established, extending the limits within which he had imprudently confined the human mind: a venturesome violation, whose fruit was The New Science – as a pedant would surely be aware. It is not enough to register the violation, however, unless we emphasize the cause from which it came, and to me it seems to lie in this, that when Vico rejected the Cartesian principle and criterion, his rejection did not produce the unshakeable contradiction that others have surmised. That this is the case is not a claim of mine based on guesswork or imagination; I find Vico himself saying so in his first reply to the Giornale dei letterati. This revelation is precious indeed because it puts us inside the thinking of this great genius and also because it provides new confirmation of an ever-enduring fact, which is that people who exaggerate corrupt what is taught instead of defending and clarifying it. Thus, Vico says that he does not confirm the Cartesian principle, ‘but that the cogito is an undoubted sign of my existence, and yet since it is not a cause of my existence it does not produce knowledge of existence for me.’28 Here his distinction reveals itself clearly: while the direct consciousness of Descartes could give him the certainty that he existed, it was still not enough to show that thinking produces existence. In other words, this is what Vico wanted to say: If you make me see how I think is a cause of my existence, then I too will surely be Cartesian; but as long as the I think is only a direct certainty of this existence, I shall never regard it as a scientific principle. Now this was bringing Cartesian consciousness to completion, not weakening it, much less denying it. It was an elevation of thinking from the level of subjective certainty, where Descartes had confined it, to that of a universal and creative principle. Immanuel Kant also went beyond Cartesian consciousness and moved up to the transcendental consciousness where he found the primitive unity of the categories, and he did not profess to have contradicted Descartes in this. On the contrary, he considered himself the new and improved Descartes. Moreover, I will say that Kant completes Descartes by putting Vico’s presentiment into effect, the reason being that the German philosopher was the first to try to make us see how the I think that contains the categories or specific functions of thinking is the universal and necessary condition of the human mind. My claim, then, is that Vico does not contradict the progress of philosophy that developed between Descartes and Kant but that he actually

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reconnects them both and that he is the successor of the French philosopher just as much as he is the precursor of the German. But since Kant had thought in a mature way about the course of Locke’s philosophy and about Hume’s serious objections to it, he could consciously state the problem that Vico had only divined. The Neapolitan philosopher did not have confidence that he could untie the knot that he surely loosened up a bit in The New Science, the knot that Kant sets out to untangle with his fearless and self-aware critique. Vico teaches how the human being makes history, Kant how the mind makes knowledge, and in this they both reveal that thinking is the supreme maker, thus fulfilling the promise that knowing should depend on making – the one unconsciously, the other fully aware – and both observing the rule made by the Descartes who wanted the new science to be based on thinking. Now you will tell me that it is my duty to prove that Vico’s new science was really based on thinking, as understood by Descartes and Kant, and not on divine thinking, as Providence is still called – which is what some believe. I know that I have taken on this duty, and I will try to do the best that I can. Please accept my feelings of esteem and friendship, then, and consider me always yours. Bologna, 18 April 1865

NOTES 1 The text used here is Fiorentino (1876). 2 Golgotha was the hill where Christ was crucified, Tabor the mountain where he was transfigured. Fiorentino actually mentions the Gemoniae, not the Bastille; it was a notorious Roman site where the execution of criminals began. And the Pantheon he had in mind was the famous Roman temple in Rome, not the later Parisian monument. 3 Vico began to write his autobiography in 1725 at the age of 57, two years after having failed to progress from his chair in rhetoric in the University of Naples to the much more important chair of law; the first version was published in 1728 and updated in 1731; see Vico (1975). 4 Vico (1975): 121−30; Vico (1835−7), a six-volume collection of Vico’s works, was edited by the historian Giuseppe Ferrari (1811−76); see also Ferrari (1839). 5 Vico (1975): 154 says that he ‘found a fourth author to add to the three he

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6 7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15

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17

had set before himself’ when he read On the Law of War and Peace by Hugo Grotius (1583−1645), a towering figure of the day who made fundamental contributions to the notion of natural law in political and legal theory. Dante, Inferno, 1.42: ‘quella fiera a la gaetta pelle.’ Vico (1975): 121−2. Vico (1975): 122. Vico (1977): 696 explains that he could not avoid the ‘invidious’ title because he had, in fact, invented a new science that reveals ‘the ideal history of the eternal laws on whose basis the deeds of all nations operate in their rise, progress, stability, decline, and fall,’ this being ‘a universal topic in that it deals with the nature common to nations by that property possessed by every science that is complete in its idea.’ Vico (1975): 154. By ‘the two schools’ Fiorentino may mean the Italic and Greek traditions from which later Greek philosophy emerged, the former represented here by Pythagoras, the latter by Plato; although Vico saw Pythagoras as a better route than Plato to native Italian wisdom, he took Plato’s Cratylus as his model in Vico (2005), and a great deal of his evidence in The New Science is also etymological, and often far-fetched, even by the standards of the day; see Vico (1975): 148−50. Hamann (1730−88) was an early reader of Vico in Germany: Berlin (2000): 243−358. He made the remark about the Hebrew alphabet in a letter to Kant: Hamann (1955−75), I, 450. Vico (1977): 91. For Bossuet see the notes to our translation of Villari’s prolusione. Vico lived as a young man, from 1686 to 1695, in the castle of Vatolla in Campania, with the support of the owners, the Rocca family, for whom he worked as a tutor; Vico (1975): 119−23 De antiquissima italorum sapientia, the first part of a larger work that was never completed, appeared in 1710, followed by two critical reviews in the Giornale de’ Letterati; Vico replied at length to both reviews in 1711 and 1712. De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno, inspired by his reading of Grotius, appeared in 1720, as the first of three volumes of a work on universal right. In 1723 Vico began what was to become The New Science, publishing a first version in 1725, a much different second version in 1730, then adding corrections and additions through 1733; the final version overseen by Vico appeared posthumously in 1744, the year of his death. See Vico (1722), (1977), (2002), (2005). The famous ontological argument developed by Anselm of Aosta and Canterbury (1033−1109) aims to prove God’s existence from a definition

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18 19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought. Descartes first used a version of the ontological argument in the Discourse of 1637. See also Bouillier (1868): 521−45. Fiorentino read Vico’s letter of 1726 to Giuseppe Luigi Esperti, a cleric who was part of Vico’s complex network, in Vico (1835−7), VI, 5. The French critic is Bouillier, in Bouillier (1868). See n16 above, on the chronology. Nicola Solla was a student of Vico who wrote an early biography of his teacher; Vico discusses the learned Angiola Cimini (or Angela Cimmino) in Vico (1975): 180−1; for Vico’s answer to Solla, see Vico (1835−7), VI, 6−10. When Vico dedicated the first version of The New Science to Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini in 1725, the implication was that financial support would follow, but the Cardinal, who became Pope Clement XII in 1730, reneged; Vico (1975): 11−17, 173. While waiting in vain to be called to a chair in law, Vico taught rhetoric, a less prestigious subject and less rewarding financially. Cilento is the part of Campania where Vico lived as a young man in the castle of Vatolla. Although Vico himself says that the dispute with the Giornale de’ Letterati was polite, it was also long and intense; Vico (1975): 152−3. Vico (1722), begun in 1720. The legal scholar Costanzo Giani (1826−69) was the editor of Vico (1855). Vico (1977): 185, 323, 600. Vico (1711): on the Giornale de’ Letterati, see nn16, 24 above.

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13 Francesco Fiorentino

Positivism and Idealism1

No one used to thinking about the course of human events can help noticing the variable success enjoyed by various fields of study, no less than by any other institution or practice. It will be easy for any such person to see that some fields that were once sought after and fashionable were soon completely forgotten or taken up without enthusiasm. Usually, in fact, the eventual oblivion has been in proportion to the antecedent ardour: the greater the expectations engendered, the more distressing the consequent disillusionment. Nowadays – and it could not be otherwise – philosophy has met a similar fate, sometimes praised to the skies, sometimes trampled in the dust, depending on which intellects are in charge, whether they are the haughty young or else older people given to circumspect doubts. So goes the world! History has its own ups and downs, just like people: sometimes the human race sails on, as fast as desire; sometimes it runs aground in dismay and disillusionment. Reversals of this kind do not lack causes, however. Every era is made of an aggregate of traditions, principles, and doctrines with which it stays content until it occurs to someone to suspect that they are unstable. Until that moment, there is no hint of suspicion, which for most people is not an issue. But then – as with a building whose walls tumble down all at once, and no stone is left upon a stone – not one principle or doctrine in this whole mental world any longer has any value or authority at all. It must be completely rebuilt, completely redone from the start, and reconstruction begins with a preconceived dislike for anything from the past. But this dislike too is unreasonable. And history takes on the difficult task of keeping what must be kept, leaving in the rubble the useless weight of countless frameworks worn out by time. Nowadays we are in the habit of getting upset with any speculation at

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all – indeed, any idea of any kind. And since we still need something to do, what has become fashionable is careful research about facts. Positivism is the name given to the philosophy that takes this path, and Idealism is the name that we usually give to its opposite. Two philosophies, Positivism and Idealism, have been set up facing one another, and two categories have been walled off, the category of facts and the category of ideas. This sharp opposition does not mean the end of all philosophy, however, only that one philosophy takes the place of another. The founder of the positive philosophy, Auguste Comte, in the famous Course that he published from 1830 to 1842, proposes to find the most general relations of objects belonging to the different sciences, and because relations of quantity are simpler, he puts them first.2 Accordingly, he puts mathematics at the base of the whole encyclopedia, and mathematics is supposed to be the key to explaining chemistry. Chemistry is the key to biology and biology the key to sociology. Starting with quantitative relations, Comte gradually moved up to more complex linkages and finally reached the most complicated connections of social life. That was his plan, but it did not last. As soon as he started to think about life, he realized that he could go no farther with mechanical laws alone. He sensed the need for final causes and admitted it – those same final causes that he had proposed to banish in the first sections of his Course of Positive Philosophy. Then he formulated a principle that departed from his earlier view: namely, that higher forms cannot be explained by lower forms.3 Through George Lewes, Positivism travelled across the Channel to a soil where it could take root more easily. Here were the traditions of Berkeley, Hume, and Bentham. Here, as Stuart Mill wrote to the same Auguste Comte on 4 March 1842, the nation had more positivity.4 Anyone who knows the history of English philosophy understands that theorizing was gradually restricted there to the phenomena alone. Locke had banished every idea of substance. Berkeley had banished every cause. Hume had reduced every nexus of causality to a mere association of ideas. Accordingly, a philosophy based on the phenomena alone, which excluded everything absolute and all necessity, could not help being favourably received in England. Bentham emphasized utility. And if, as Macaulay said, the glory of modern philosophy lies in seeking the useful and shunning ideas, then, from Bacon until now, no nation has done more to make this maxim effective.5 But the fact is that a question remains: Is this really the glory of modern philosophy? Will we be wiser when we have extinguished the light of every idea and when we have pursued every means of multiplying the comforts of life? And the most brilliant of

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your philosophers, those celebrated as ancestors of this positive philosophy, is this also how they understood the destiny of their science? When Galileo founded mechanics and discovered the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter, was he interested in nothing more than utility? But let us set these questions aside. Positivism formulated its rigorous laws on the logic of Stuart Mill – laws that are not new but newly assembled and stated more emphatically. There is no deduction of ideas, no necessary link between one idea and another, merely an association that is almost accidental. There is no definition whereby, once we know a thing’s essential features, other features can be inferred. There is only description: a thing is thus and so, disconnected, without a reason. No demonstration holds: reasoning shows only that after one thing we encounter another thing that we might just as well not have encountered. And so induction – the much exalted induction – has no other value for Mill than adding these facts to those facts, an unfruitful type of addition that fails to extend our knowledge beyond what direct sensation grasps and perceives. None of these doctrines is new, nor does plentiful learning suffice to excuse Mill’s impoverishment of reason and his reduction of it to impotence. Locke had already contested the validity of the syllogism. And Hume had shortened the reach of induction, limiting it to a mere expectation of like events based on the subjective link of the association of our ideas. Stuart Mill is the genuine article for Positivism – the philosophy that is the genius of his nation, so horrified by ideas, so anxious to corner the facts. Not even in Comte did he accept the frequent use of the term system. Because this word suggests a common nexus of dependence, it seemed suspect to him; such a thing simply did not exist, so he thought. And Mill goes still farther. Although Comte called a halt at the problem of life, declaring the lower sciences of mechanics, physics, and chemistry powerless to explain it, and putting what new ideas he had back into sociology, there was no obstacle that could stop Mill, who wants to use the same methods for the moral sciences and the natural sciences. It does not escape his attention – and for this he earns all due praise – that the eternal question for every religion and every philosophy is whether human actions, like all other natural events, are subject to invariable laws. Do we really find in these actions the causal constancy that is the basis of every scientific theory of consecutive phenomena? In fact, he does not use the term natural laws to cover that necessary dependence whereby, when one term is posited, the other must inevitably be posited. Instead of natural laws, he would much prefer the locution natural con-

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formities. Call it what you will, natural conformity or natural law, it still remains true, in any event, that one thing connects with another in the sequence of natural facts. In moral actions, however, there is an independent activity that posits and determines itself by breaking loose from the adamantine chain of the causal series. That said, I do not intend to settle this question, simply to mention it. Claiming that we must use the method of the natural sciences in the world of ethics and human history appears to assume an answer to the prior question – specifically, it assumes that there is no activity that does not come into the sequence of cause and effect and is not determined by another action preceding it, which, in turn, determines the action subsequent to it. Now this verdict has not actually been rendered, and we still have no arguments on one side or the other that are unobjectionable. On the one hand, some people say this: I know only facts, and facts, inasmuch as they enter into consciousness, exist in a nexus of causality and occupy a moment of time with a before and after. This is the argument made by Kant, adjusted later in various ways. On the other hand, some people make an objection: there is something in our thinking that experience does not supply but that all experience assumes. There is something primitive, irrational, and a priori, which, in the domain of practice, is freedom. If experience is powerless to grasp it, reason can only accept it. This is another thesis proposed by the same Kant, and when it is opposed to the first it constitutes one of his famous antinomies. So then, with all this show of judgments straightforwardly rendered, we have still not wriggled free from the fatal grip that held Immanuel Kant, that giant of intellect. It’s no use, then: we apply the method of the physical sciences to the natural sciences, but first we must decide whether the forces that we have in mind are all equivalent to physical forces. Clinging to the doctrine that the whole fabric of nature and that of mind as well reduce to a single law of causality does not mean that all debate has been cut off and that this single law has necessarily been proved. Herbert Spencer made great efforts to close the distance between natural causality and freedom, finding clever ways to bridge the gap by bringing memory as close as possible to instinct and instinct as close as possible to intelligence. He thinks that the theory of the average person, upon which statistics is based, has confirmed as much stability in human phenomena as can be found in natural phenomena. Considering the movement of the whole human race in the aggregate, he thinks that exceptions conflicting with this stability can be seen to grow sparse gradually and finally vanish. All this we may not understand. We may indeed

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be content to contemplate the mighty effort and ingenious inquiries involved in settling the dispute that separates mind from nature. But our admiration does not mean that without further ado we would simply believe such a thesis to be definitively demonstrated. When Positivism does not simply boil down to Mill’s scepticism, it shares with Idealism the aim of basing all knowledge on a single principle and the same method. Comte among the French and Spencer among the English walk this same path. Halfway down the road, Comte becomes more timid as he gets deeper into what he calls the inner solidarity of life. Spencer is more daring, never turning back before the fearful distance that separates instinct from intellect. Hence, anyone who thought that evicting Idealism would forever end the effort to construct an ambitious and audacious synthesis must be disappointed. It is true that all Positivists agree in speaking only of relative knowledge and in entirely excluding the Absolute from what we know. And for Spencer the Absolute is still just the antithesis of science, a term without which the relative is not possible, the dark basement where religious faith has its place and spreads out without hindrance. This notion of the relative is not new in the history of speculative thought, however; it was advocated by the Sophists, who made man the measure of all things, the criterion of all truth. It lies at the foundation of Hume’s philosophy and Kant’s critical philosophy especially, which excluded any knowledge of the noumenon or thing in itself. In this regard, then, the novelty has nothing to do with Positivism. Indeed, let me note that one finds this sort of relativism in Absolute Idealism itself, which has seemed to be the system most sharply opposed to such a view. If certain bothersome and parrot-like imitators of Hegel had got it right, that conflict would be immense and impossible to resolve, as even I understand. Given that Spirit is essentially history, however, who does not see that absolute knowledge, absolute religion, and absolute art cannot, even for Hegel, imply a goal that is definitively established and cannot be surpassed? Who does not realize that nothing is more opposed to that decree of Idealism – those pillars of Hercules that certain annoying commentators have tried to erect and thus block any further progress? That something is absolute can mean only that, at some given time, mind can no longer conceive of anything but that particular form. In ancient Greece, Greek science, art, and religion were absolute because, at that point, Spirit could take only those forms, in the same way that one cannot make an armful bigger than an arm (to use a phrase of Mon-

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taigne’s) or a handful bigger than a hand.6 Understood in this sense, Idealism’s notion of the Absolute implies nothing more nor less than Positivism’s notion of the relative. If some form or other were absolutely complete – maximal and unsurpassable – such an Absolute would not be becoming, and thus it would be present to us not as history but as sterile repetition, neither of these consequences being compatible with the real essence of Hegelian thought. Nonetheless, this difference remains: for Positivism, especially as Mill understands it, there is no reason that governs and unifies the forms that change through history, while for Idealism nothing happens without reason. For Mill, history might well have turned out otherwise. The way that it turned out was pure chance, for better or for worse. Now without excluding the role of accident – of which there is also a great deal in the history of human affairs – will anyone be content to eliminate all the guidance that reason gives? Let the threads in history’s cloth be as varied as you like and as randomly coloured: do all of us still not detect a pattern beneath them that plans and places the threads? If there must be one method for all the sciences, as Mill also holds, are we all not aware that the rule of chance, so recklessly wild, will even invade the territory of mathematics, and that not even the rigid relations of number and figure will be secure? From so extreme a conclusion Mill does not shrink, depriving even mathematics of reason’s invariability. Between chance and reason the human mind will never hesitate to choose, resolutely and scornfully rejecting any science that would deny it that firm foundation. Grounds for consequences as outrageous as this are there to find in the analogous excesses of Idealism, which, as it departs more and more from facts, gets lost in the inaccessible and cloudy heights. But as it turns out, Positivism has neglected ideas instead of neglecting facts. Since Idealism starts from the knowing mind and recognizes the impression that mind can make on the coarse material of experience, it sees value only in the stamp of the idea and disregards the objects stamped. But Positivism, starting contrariwise by observing facts, registers their faintest features and varying linkages. Naturally, it is struck by their stunning mutability and remains unconvinced that there needs to be anything changeless hiding beneath that changing surface. Furthermore, since Positivism lacks the stability of the knowing mind, there would be no place from which it could gaze at these fleeting phenomena, and without that gazing no science would be possible. Each of the two systems has its own flaw, then, depending on where it starts. Idealism puts too much trust

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in deductions based on the eternal fabric of cognition. Positivism wavers and worries too much about tying up loose threads. Indeed, sometimes it loses all confidence in itself; thinking it impossible to put cloth on the loom once the cloth is already woven, it gets the threads tangled as soon as it touches the first knot. Positivism and Idealism have a common aim after all, and the two can be seen as different faces of a larger system that we can call Monism. Here too, however, there are different ways of proceeding. Positivism gives nature the upper hand, and man does not figure in nature except as an appendix. This is the position of Renaissance naturalism, writ large but unchanged in substance.7 Alongside nature’s immensity, the human being dwindles and nearly vanishes – a nameless atom. The contrary response from Idealism is that without this atom that immensity would be lost and unrecognized. Only this atom has the power to stand up to the whole vastness of nature, says Idealism. This atom resists nature and from its consciousness unleashes an undetected force, thereby knowing the laws of nature, and, in knowing them, coming to regulate them and make them serve its needs. Which of these two sides of Monism gets the right measure of things? The founder of Positivism, Auguste Comte, begins by magnifying the importance of nature and ends with these memorable words: ‘The study of mankind and humanity is the leading science: more than any other, it should attract the regular attention of highly intelligent people and stimulate continuing concern through public discussion.’8 In his view, it is obvious from the very expressions we use that other fields serve only as introductions to the human sciences. In fact, when we use words like ‘inorganic’ and ‘inert,’ they make sense only in contrast with the human. He concludes that the science of sociology – the moral study of mankind – is the ultimate science and that biology itself is just its final prelude. In this last part of his course on philosophy, the disciple of Saint-Simon got the best of the disciple of Broussais. In fact, Stuart Mill noted that while Comte had attributed the origin of positive chemistry to Lavoisier and biology to Bichat, he reserved for himself the glory of opening the positive era of sociology.9 Perhaps progress in research caused him to see the greater significance of human history. Or perhaps the poetry and music that he took up in the later years of his life tempered the mathematical rigidity with which he had begun. However, whether it was art or science that led him to see that the study of mankind is primary, it is no small credit to him that he came close to this distinctly modern view: that without the human mind, nature is a closed book with seals that cannot be broken.

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But can nature and mind be studied in the same way, by the same method, and with the same results? This is another controversial question about which it is easy to get confused. Ever since the great Galileo rejected all authority and all the problems of the schools to turn to experience and to induction, nature has revealed itself in new ways. The laws that Galileo discovered, even though they did not reach beyond facts of sensation, had the great virtue of producing a need to see the world of Spirit transformed in the same way. What he did for external facts, Descartes attempted for subjective consciousness, and Kant achieved this in his immortal critique. The problem was that it was hard to apply the powerful inductive method to the individual and solitary mind because mind lacks that indispensable point of control and connection that facts provide, and that becomes clear and concrete only in the collective psyche. Giambattista Vico, inventing a science that was both a philosophy and a history of the human race – and trading the truth of science for the certainty of history, as he himself used to say – completed Galileo’s project and made the inductive method of the experimental sciences available to the science of the mind.10 I am certainly not claiming that historical induction left Vico’s hands in as complete a state as experimental induction had left the hands of the scientist from Pisa. In fact, after criticizing Descartes for being shut up inside a single consciousness and neglecting philology, what did Vico himself do but apply to the psychology of peoples the same hierarchy and the same faculties contained in the individual psyche: sense, imagination, and reason? But anyone who wants to take into account the greater difficulty of the philosophy of Spirit, as compared with natural philosophy, cannot go too hard on the philosopher from Naples. And here it is not beside the point to sketch the difference between natural induction and history in order to reply to those who are too quick to preach and teach that the moral sciences should adopt the same method if they want to do things reliably. The basis of natural induction is solid, whereas the basis of historical induction is mobile and always changeable. Natural facts are always present to us either as stable or as readily reproduced, and most of the time, from our point of view, they are exactly identical as long as circumstances are the same. Therefore, the observer can grasp them in their native integrity and honesty as he assembles them, disassembles them, and tests them in countless ways. With mental facts it is not the same. When such facts pass us by, they leave no trace, or else whatever trace they leave cannot reach us unaltered by time – or without the actual

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imprint of the person who has transmitted them to us. It is not within the power of humans to reproduce such facts entirely. What creates them is already different; the environment in which they move is different; and the sequence to which they belong is different. Induction cannot get started in a reliable way, then; it is forced to proceed by guesswork that is rarely correct and often misleading. Calm, stable, and serene, nature does not alter the measure of its products in order to change what it produces. Under the crust of earth that we walk on, the planet has stored away for us the buried and ineradicable proofs of its distant transformations. But the ephemeral commences with life and reaches its peak with mind – this fickle, gabbling Proteus that has no constant face. Like a raging blast of wind, mind goes so fast that there is no time for any one of its actions to get a grip on another. When one act begins, the other is already gone forever. Nor is memory so very prompt or so fixed on taking everything in, or, having done so, on preserving them all. Thus, in individual consciousness, as in the history that mirrors the collective life of peoples, the activity that creates is never the activity that reflects. If the point is to re-weave the course of history, then, how can we re-enact a process that is so long, so fast, and so laborious? How can we return to the infancy of our race? How can we revive that unthinking childhood when languages, myths, customs, and religious rites were created without yet giving birth to science, without reflection to inspect or regulate creative activity, without the forethought of a riper age to see to the preservation of the evidence? Littré, in the wonderful preface to his Dictionary of the French language, claims that the history of words can be treated as equivalent to natural facts since what he calls the ‘drawplate’ of words – the sequence of all the words roughed out before reaching final and finished form – should be treated like the methodical process by which the experimenter moves from the sequence of observed facts to the result of induction. But what is his point? What Littré says is all well and good, but how can we have access to all the rough forms of which his drawplate is constructed? Would we not need to fall back on guesswork most of the time when a link turns out to be missing from the chain?11 If this happens with a language formed so recently, how great will the problem be for very old and primitive languages? The equivalent of natural facts will never have the same value, the same persistence, the same undeniable reality as the natural fact accessible to observation. The same argument holds for all other products of the mind, not all of whose intermediate forms can possibly persist.

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This is why all those who attempt these researches into origins slip unconsciously into guesswork, more like philosophizing than telling a story. The result is that philosophy, having been banished in name from the class of positive sciences, comes back into all the philological disciplines, unsummoned and unwanted. Indeed, who else but the philosophical soothsayer is there to reconstruct the first enthusiasms of the mythopoeic imagination? Who else repopulates the first temples, descries there the first artless acts of worship, and restores the first crude rituals? Who divines the first anxieties of moral awareness and the shame that coloured the cheeks of the person who first felt guilt? Who goes down into the hollowed caves, approaching the household fire to reconstruct the first ties that bound primitive families together? How little evidence remains of the kind called positive today! And how much, by contrast, does the reason of the philologist, the moralist, the jurist, and the historian perceive as unavoidably primitive? Cut away inductions by reason, and how large a piece of positivity will you have chopped off along with them? Reduce induction to the poor sterility to which Stuart Mill has condemned it, and very little of the positive will be left in these researches. But this is not the end of differences between natural and historical induction. Natural forces remain always the same while changing their forms. But the primal forms, those that make up the skeleton of the world, as it were, neither increase nor decrease. In the domain of Spirit, however, increase is undeniable. The moral and intellectual environment not only changes but also expands as the number of ideas develops and enlarges. And as it expands, it weighs more on individuals, substantially altering their activity. In fact, what happens in the world of nature also occurs in the world of Spirit: the mind is surrounded by an environment of customs, beliefs, languages, traditions, and ideas no less than the body is surrounded by the atmosphere. The mind lives, breathes, and moves in that environment without being aware of it and without feeling the immense weight pressing on it from all sides. Unlike the quantity of gases that surround the body, however, the moral and intellectual environment is not always given. It grows in the course of history. And it is both producer and product of that history, both origin and result. This constant variation in one of the most important agents of history – indeed, the most important agent of all – makes it rather difficult, not to say impossible, to check on human actions. The changed environment teaches and guides the people living within it in different ways. The dispositions that develop there propagate, and each genera-

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tion thus becomes astonishingly unlike the next. But, always assuming that these generations are not transformed physically and do not inherit good or bad habits from their ancestors, could anyone say that they act under the influence of the same mental causes if, beyond any doubt, these are perpetually mutable? That is how it is with history, then: those are the difficulties of reconstructing it and basing it on valid inductions. More than the rushing waters of a river into which no one plunges twice (to put words in the mouth of the Greek sophist), the torrent of human affairs permits no halt or respite. Given all these difficulties, then, all we can do is philosophize. We practise philosophy as we practise religious faith or art. Show that such things are useless, and the human mind will answer with the words that Madame de Staël gives to her Corinne: ‘How I love this uselessness!’12 But it is not only the heroine of a novel who will say this: Stuart Mill himself, that most austere spokesman for the English mind and positivism, will also tell us so. ‘It would be a serious mistake,’ he says, ‘to believe that thinking – intellectual activity and the search for truth – is to be counted among the most powerful inclinations of human nature or that it holds the highest place in human life except in entirely exceptional individuals. And yet, despite the relative scarcity of this element in comparison to other social forces, its influence is the chief cause that determines social progress.’13 In other words, while few are made for hard thinking, and though the human race cannot stick close to these few bold and restless spirits, it will still always travel behind them. So where will that proud irritation with ideas lead? Where will that vaunted preference for the useful lead? Galileo, who among us can be called the founder of the positive method, knew almost by heart the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, the creator of those vivid fantasies, so remote from the real world, that Leopardi correctly called ‘empty pleasantries.’14 For us, awareness of the real and of life has never destroyed or diminished the splendours of imagination and the deep speculations of intellect. And if the hasty and hazardous syntheses of Idealism have shown Positivism to be right, this does not suffice to deny the human mind any conception at all of system and any synthesis. Cut away the branches growing wild and fruitless, but do not rip every seedling out by its roots and stock. For the rash claims of the one group and the disheartening denials of the other there is always a constraint that is healthy for both. This is to use ideas, but not arrogantly, and to study facts, but not narrowly, and

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then to weave facts and ideas into a broad system where the one does not conflict with the other and where all have a place and a reason. Idealism can be empty and Positivism can be blind if one is detached from the other, following the judgment that Kant reached about the pure concept and bare intuition. An idea that is not verified and not checked by facts is not an idea but a daydream. A fact that does not hinge on an idea, that does not express a reason and give evidence of law, serves absolutely no purpose. Given the strictest dictates of Positivism, such a fact must be condemned as useless. What lights up the fact is the idea shining inside it, raising it from the sphere of mere accident to that of lasting reality. How many lamps were there swinging in the world before the one in your cathedral caught young Galileo’s attention? Who noticed them? Who remembered them? Who made use of them? And what good did this swinging do until your great townsman extracted the laws of the pendulum from it? The pretentious contempt for ideas, the even more pretentious curiosity about disconnected facts bundled together in great heaps without the light of the idea and without that secret control which is the ingenious and divinatory role of the inductive method – this will cause amazement in fools but will surely not satisfy the minds of intelligent people. Meanwhile, indefatigable compilers of catalogs have now replaced indefatigable builders of systems. It used to be deductions from an assumption of some kind that suffocated us. Now it is the recorders of varieties and anecdotes who bore us to death. Here it is the claw of a monkey or there the tail of a fish or the shape of a prehistoric tool that takes the place of the risible quibbling that Cremonini employed to fight Galileo and prove Aristotle right.15 In me they all awaken the same sense of disgust – those who believe they can explain everything with the marvelous fecundity of the Idea, and the others who think they hold the key to unlock every secret chamber of nature and mind just because they have gathered up and recorded all the curiosities and anecdotes. Needless to say, I have no particular person in mind; I regard every discipline as necessary and useful; and it really delights me to see anyone enthusiastic about his own studies. But I believe that philosophy has the special task of correcting these exaggerations that are so much opposed to one another. Even in the judgment of a famous Positivist it is philosophy’s duty to coordinate all the sciences and find a way to unify all human learning. Experience, says Herbert Spencer, ‘is knowledge of the most humble kind, and it is not unified knowledge; science is knowledge partly unified; philosophy is knowledge wholly unified.’16

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But precisely because philosophy has this moderating function, it must be careful and cautious in its statements. Philosophy, Kant used to say, must not teach thoughts but teach thinking − specifically, by impressing on the mind that habit of honesty, criticism, and organization that is so large a part of intellectual development. Not being satisfied with arguments that are too easy, weighing and evaluating difficulties, knowing how to highlight facts, and knowing how to control the risks of deductions; keeping an eye on the historical development of humanity, judging everything in its context and every institution in its time, and always remembering that the criterion of truth lies not in the proud isolation of the sciences but in the mutual linking of particular truths so that one can give strength and emphasis to the others: these are the main fruits of this intellectual education, the difficult task that is entrusted today to philosophy. True Idealism must not neglect the results of the positive sciences nor neglect history, and true Positivism must remember that the most important of all facts is human thinking, which not only stands above all other facts but is also the one without which the others would be as if they did not exist for us. In my lectures, then, I will follow this path faithfully – the path of trying to show in my ideas not only the internal process by which they are worked out in subjective consciousness but also the historical process by which they have emerged in human affairs. Both these processes are histories: one history is hidden and happens in the deep recesses of the mind; the other is open and reveals itself widely in the passage of centuries. Thus the streams of Alpheus and Arethusa ran unseen in the depths of the sea before coming into the open and flowing together.17 One story will help the other. Internal history supplies those subtle touches and quick strokes that have left no trace on the large story. External history provides a more visible version on a larger scale of those same results that consciousness has sketched only with faint lines and shadows. The first will give us a basis for deduction, the second for induction: the former is philosophy’s primal warp and woof; the latter contains the countless and varied threads used by the human race to weave and embellish it. Hence, if I cannot apply to our science the same method used in the positive sciences, I shall apply the one that is more akin to it and that we call the historical method − historical obviously in the double sense that I have described, without denying the need for unity, which for my purposes is not just useful but indispensable. Indeed, in order to philosophize it is necessary that facts and ideas can be linked together in a single

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sequence – like the golden chain that the Homeric Jupiter trusted he could use to tie up all the gods. So if facts cannot enter into what we can know, we will take care not to let them do us violence because they force themselves on us. And if the connections and conjunctions by which I try to link them up are my conjectures, or mere need rather than undeniable proof, I shall not hesitate to say so explicitly, thinking it much more helpful to admit difficulties than to beguile your minds with false and fanciful demonstrations. In short, I shall see to it that the study of philosophy in this flourishing University works with the same seriousness – though not in the same way – that leads to success for philology, mathematics, law, and natural science. Here the tradition of wisdom is ancient. And the rebirth of science, though it began elsewhere, found its final expression here with the great Galileo, whom your Fabroni was not wrong to call almost a god among philosophers.18 So while Galileo did not set out to do philosophy in the strict sense, he nonetheless paved the way by perfecting the inductive method, an indispensable precursor of the historical method. Here, where the government set up a normal school many years ago and assigned it to educate new generations for the difficult task of teaching, here it is also necessary to strengthen the minds of these students even more by training them in the strict discipline of argument, careful inquiry into the facts, precise definition of ideas, and that sense of measure in all things which is the source of lucid mental clarity and firm integrity of character. As our new institutions are attacked on all sides, sometimes by troubles so stale that they stink, sometimes by rash and half-baked novelties, all apparently turned loose and whipped up by winds blowing in opposite directions; in this circumstance it is the duty of science to make our minds stronger by bringing under control the excesses that claim the pretentious title of principles and beliefs and by submitting the unruly person of talent to the conquering force of reason. From ideas well defined and well organized come firm convictions; from convictions well rooted come steady personalities; and from them both States get exuberant life and truly lasting glory.

NOTES 1 Fiorentino read this speech in Pisa on 24 January 1876; it was published a month later in Naples; we have used the text in Fiorentino (1935): 9−23. 2 Comte (1830−42).

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Fiorentino, Positivism 3 [a] To call attention to the contradiction that Comte encountered would be pointless unless it were from the same work that contains his early doctrine; we would by no means insist if it were from the other work where he tries to find a basis for the religion of humanity. To me it seems that an honest critic has this obligation above all: not to judge an author except for a doctrine explicitly held and acknowledged by him. But in the second work that Comte wrote between 1850 and 1856, titling it Positive Religion, he bowed to a form of mysticism wherein, with Mill, one must deplore the decline of that great intellect. Born in 1798, Auguste Comte died in 1857. I plan to write a short biography taken from Littré’s and from the trial held in Paris on the occasion of his last will and testament. 4 As the editor of the Fortnightly Review, George Lewes (1817−78) promoted positivism in England. The material that Fiorentino mentions is in letters from Comte to Mill, 4 March 1842, and Mill to Comte, 22 March: see Haac (1995): 54−62. 5 Macaulay (1861): 341−408. 6 Montaigne (1967): 251. 7 Following the normal usage of the time, Fiorentino has Risorgimento for ‘Renaissance.’ 8 For Comte see part 11 of the Introduction. 9 Comte studied and worked with Saint-Simon from 1817 to 1824; Marie F.X. Bichat (1771−1802) was a pioneer of modern histology and pathology; François Broussais (1772−1838) was also a physician and pathologist, and his conception of disease as deviation from a normal state influenced Comte: see Mill (2007): 37−8. 10 Vico (1977):177−8. 11 Littré (1863−77), ‘Introduction,’ 9.5, where he is thinking of a drawplate – a tool used to make wire by drawing it through a series of successively smaller holes or channels: ‘The drawplate (filière) is, by comparison to the tool of that name, a series of channels (pertuis) through which the word must pass: these channels are the forms that the word has in the Romance languages. For an etymology to be valid, it is not enough for it to fit the state of the French word; when the word is common to all the Romance languages or to several, it must fit the Italian state, the Spanish, the Provençal … What makes the etymology of the verb so difficult … is that the drawplate does not let all the Romance forms pass through …’ Fiorentino transliterates filière as filiera. 12 Inspired by the poet Diodata Saluzzo Roero, Madame de Staël (1766−1817) published Corinne in 1807, after a trip to Italy with Schlegel and Sismondi: see Staël-Holstein (1841): 230.

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Part II: Translations 13 For Mill see part 11 of the Introduction. 14 Leopardi’s ‘To Angelo Mai’ (see Leopardi [1824]), which was addressed to an eminent philologist, expresses nostalgia for Tasso’s epic of medieval chivalry: You towers and cells, you knights and ladies, gardens and palaces: thinking of you, my mind is lost in a thousand empty pleasantries. 15 Cesare Cremonini (1550−1631), a distinguished Aristotelian philosopher, became notorious for refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope. 16 Spencer (1901): 119. 17 When the young huntress Arethusa could not outrun Alpheus, the river-god who chased her, Diana turned Arethusa into a spring that ran all the way from Greece to Sicily and in which the waters of both Arethusa and Alpheus mingled. 18 In the late eighteenth century, Angelo Fabroni edited a Giornale dei letterati in Pisa, where he was also the head of the university: see also Fabroni (1778−99) for his biography of Galileo.

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14 Antonio Labriola

History, Philosophy of History, Sociology, and Historical Materialism1

It perplexes us that the word ‘history’ has been used to express two different levels of ideas: the totality of things that have happened, and the totality of literary devices used to attempt an account of them. The Greek word actually corresponds to the second level of ideas and expresses the subjective attitude of inquiring. The literary sense of the word, then, starts with the father of history: ‘This is the account of the inquiry made by Herodotus.’ Around the middle of the nineteenth century, when the need for an organized discipline of historical inquiry began to emerge, Gervinus devised the term Historik, by analogy with Grammatik and Logik.2 The German word Geschichte, however, which comes from geschehen, ‘to happen,’ represents the first level of ideas, or rather it represents the series of events that have happened. This, seemingly a matter of no consequence, becomes a major issue for the concept of a philosophy of history. I site as examples the many blunders made recently in Italy in discussions of historical materialism. In these debates, many people, even those with intelligence, have not understood that this doctrine has to do with the notion of a fact or an event, not with a philosophy of inquiry or a narrative art. Hence, when some people ask if history can become a science, two approaches are required, depending on whether the word is applied in the first sense or the second. In the second case, it is especially important to remember that until the nineteenth century there were no scientific procedures for historical research. Even when some clever person made tacit use of critical method in writing a literary account of a particular period, it was never the case that this criticism took the form of a principled statement of rules and standards. Hence, as people felt the need to deal critically with history, particular doctrines of exposition and inter-

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pretation took shape and solidified, so that today one can talk about being trained philologically to be an Italian medievalist, for example.3 It is not history in the narrative sense that has become a science, then, because narration will always end up in the sphere of intuition. If our means of achieving the reconstruction of the past have become exact or scientific, we classify this as linguistics, epigraphy, and so on. If writers who discuss these issues carelessly wanted to pose the problem correctly, they would have to put it this way: How much technical education is needed to master the evidence required for an examination thorough enough to recover the form of the commune of Florence at the beginning of the fourteenth century? If instead we apply the dilemma of science or art not to these techniques of ours but to the totality of things that have happened, we immediately realize that the dilemma does not apply. In all likelihood, no one will ask a physiologist if digestion is an art or a science, even though one can say that physiology is an art – or rather an experimental technique – and, at the same time, a science in its conclusions. And when we say that history, insofar as it is the sum of events, is not subject to the art/science dilemma, we have in mind something very basic that is not merely an obvious observation. If, as noted above, we need many scientific means and methods to recover the truth about facts that we then wish to recount in a narrative or expository art, it is because history in the objective sense no longer appears to us as an accidental product of a set of random acts – nor as the promulgation of a higher plan, which would be the theological explanation – but as something spontaneously self-moving that represents the sum of human actions in the development of humanity itself, from the animal level up to its current state. And after we have acquired the notion of this multiform process that is history in the objective sense, it is absurd to be asked if it is art or science since it is really the basis of all art and all science. The arts and sciences are moments, aspects, and so on of this same human development. When we establish criteria in aesthetics for epic poetry, for example, or establish principles of law and economics in the practical fields, we are doing nothing but extracting from history some of its conspicuous forms, some of its decisive elements – not because these forms stand above it as its rule or model but because they are history itself in action. And, finally, given this way of seeing history as an objective sum of events, it is understood that from the new scientific conception comes a change in the direction of research for anyone who studies history as a discipline that must start with exposition and narra-

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tion. I have expressed these things in somewhat difficult language precisely because the difficulty of expression helps me remind you that we are dealing here with science or philosophy, not with literature, because the greatest difficulty – especially for Italian thinkers, who are said to be artistic by nature – lies in grasping that history is not a genre of literature and that it is not covered, as it once was, by books of rhetoric in the chapters on eloquence. And even at the risk of seeming to waste time by repeating myself, I wish indeed to repeat myself and restate the problem. The word ‘history’ expresses two levels of concepts: with respect to the object, it is the sum of events; with respect to the subject, it is the art of narrating them. This art arose originally by accident from secondary aims of moral education, political apologetics, and a taste or a talent for storytelling. Disciplines dealing more or less scientifically with historical research emerged only in the nineteenth century, at which time historical narration came to depend on a scientific education in research. To get a clear idea of this process, compare the first books of Titus Livy with the first chapters of Theodor Mommsen: Romulus, Remus, and Rhea Silvia have vanished, but in their place an exact conception of the social condition of the ancient Italians has appeared.4 And we can look at Dante, our father, with a bit of a smile because he actually believed that Aeneas had come to Italy to prepare the way for the papacy. But the concept of objective history has changed because in us the basic notion of humanity has changed, because the way is open for us to reconnect history with prehistory and prehistory with theology; because we have substituted a clear idea of collective forces for the notion of the inventive individual; and, in short, we have rediscovered the true subject of historical action in the formation and development of societies. And this precisely is the true and proper object of the philosophy of history when it aims to understand the direction of events that have already been confirmed by research. That field of inquiry, when it does not deal with general problems, starts with what is traditionally called history – namely, narration and exposition. I will not stop here to describe the encyclopedia of various disciplines required for anyone preparing to do historical research. Such an introduction to method is no longer limited to the little work by Gervinus (the one that introduced the word Historik), but extends, for example, to the large volume by Bernheim, the Manual of Historical Method.5 It is understood that all parts of the discipline of philology enter into this preparation, and that is not all. It is understood that the content and

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instruments of this preparation change, depending on whether the period is ancient or modern. Today, there is a philology for the French Revolution as there is for the New Testament: no wonder there are so many specialists, so many special publications, so many historical journals and academies to oversee these studies. In this field of research, we are constantly threatened by that extravagant empiricism that torments itself with details and ends up making scholars out of people who have no wisdom. No need to mention here that as the mass of details has always increased and always keeps increasing, the capacity for artistic exposition keeps declining because it is just where the mass of details grows beyond bounds that the capacity to organize, summarize, and relate them to one another is at its rarest. Hence it is never superfluous to recall what Mommsen says, that writing history requires imagination more than anything else – as big a slap as could be at professional scholars.6 My point here is to shed new light on the relations between the two senses of the word ‘history’ that we have already explained. Whoever undertakes to tell a story, whatever the sum of particulars may be that he has gathered, and whatever effort he may have made to arrive at a sincere and intuitive representation of the past, when that person attempts such a representation, he always ends up letting himself be guided by certain conceptions and preconceptions about human nature, about human destiny, and about the ethical, theological, or philosophical meaning of events. The manner of representing events is a reaction to conceiving the nature of the event as objective. There is no historian who can really be called impartial, then, since to be so he would have to stand outside all points of view, which is as contrary to the natural position of the intellect as to the natural position of the eye. I mean that those who prepare themselves to study history can say that they are really prepared by a scientific method only when, besides mastering correct methods for learning the facts, they also manage to acquire an adequate idea of the principles that direct events, inasmuch as these principles are in the events themselves. And I mean to say that the scientifically trained historian must also have attained that degree of intellectual maturity that consists in being able to deal with those questions that constitute the philosophy of history as a whole. Why would you want to call a historian scientifically trained if, after acquiring mastery of the linguistic, paleographic, epigraphic, and other tools needed to study the history of Egypt in remotest antiquity, for example, such a person then found himself looking at more or less certi-

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fied facts but had not decided between the theory of race and the theory of the natural environment; did not know whether religion is the cause or the effect of social conditions; had not made up his mind about the customary or the authoritarian origin of law; had not mastered the psychology needed to judge whether the force of individual personality is indifferent to chance or providence, to predestination or mechanical causality? Since Villari has stubbornly maintained in so many polemics that history is not a science, I would ask – with his kind permission – how he, of all people, could attempt in his various studies to explain the origin of the commune of Florence?7 Now we can see what the art/science dilemma comes down to. Maintaining the double sense of the word ‘history,’ we have shown, in the first place, that research about facts has become and continues to become always more scientific, which does not exclude narration as the final goal of research. Secondly, we have seen that understanding the confirmed fact depends on the implicit or explicit philosophy on which the historian bases his interpretation. Now it would be out of keeping with the current state of the social sciences and the current state of scientific philosophy if the majority of historical researchers, like so many new avatars of Thucydides, Tacitus, or Machiavelli, wished to abandon their distinctive bent when they interpret. And they will do well instead to acquire whatever complement of philosophy they may need from the science of others. Twenty or thirty years ago, when all Europe was in a state of philosophical decay, all this would be seen as heresy. Now, however, Bernheim concludes his treatise on historical method by discussing the philosophy of history – that comprehensive interpretation without which facts have no meaning.8 The result is clear in itself, that the philosophy of history deals with history only as objective – with the event, in other words – and does not deal with history as subjective and therefore not with research about the event. Every time we talk about the philosophy of history, we mean to refer to principles that we take to be directive for the sequence of events, and, when they are known to us, they help us understand the events themselves. Let me propose, then, that progress, in the broad sense of the term, is history’s directive principle. It is important to note that this concept was unknown to the ancients, just as it was unknown through the Middle Ages; it is an idea that gained depth and precision only in the eighteenth century. This concept, once it was grasped, became the standard measure for classifying historical facts no longer in terms of perspective but as

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an ascending series. And hence we speak of conditions that are primitive or advanced, declining or static. The concept of progress, applied more and more often to the different conditions of human life, thus turns into the notion of a ladder or an ascent, mankind’s developing perfection on the path of civilization. When this habit of comparison has taken shape, we seem to be able to apply a standard criterion for gauging the differences that separate the Greeks of the Homeric world from those of Periclean Athens, the Romans of the first century Empire from the German barbarians who stood against them. Through this process of adding quality to the historical facts, as I would call it, the facts acquire the feature of value. And if there were no such values, it would be useless to spend time reconstructing the past because – if my colleague Professor Ceci will permit me, though I have still not read his ‘Bibel-Babel’ article – it would not have justified the effort of working for a century on Old Testament criticism, and would not have been worthwhile for every civilized nation in the world to labour away at excavating Nineveh and Babylon if, in the final analysis, we did not manage to understand what the value of Babylonian culture is.9 By this I mean its intrinsic value; its value in relation to Egypt; its value in relation to later Indo-European civilizations; its value for the non-Semitic components that originally constituted it as well as for the Semitic components that it assimilated; and, above all, its value for that small Old Testament people whose world-historical importance – which seemed enormous as long as the prior history of Asia was unknown to us – has been reduced to a minimum, so that we can regard that people as a small or secondary link in the great chain of events of Asian history in general and Semitic history in particular. 2 And thus, little by little, we have arrived at one of the other themes mentioned at the start, when I said ‘history’ and ‘sociology.’10 Just now, in fact, while identifying the object of the philosophy of history, I happened to mention in passing that this object consists of differences, oppositions, and sequences of social forms. I will not stop here to deal with the origin, development, and criticism of the concept of sociology from Comte onward, nor do I feel obliged to examine exactly what the positivists have meant by using that term. When I say sociology here, I mean to refer to everything that can be an object of our thinking when society exists. In this sense, sociology existed in fragments before Comte

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– and long before, I would claim, since there was a generalized jurisprudence called Natural Law as well as research on the production and distribution of wealth that forms the content of economics. These two disciplines have belonged to the modern world since after the Renaissance.11 Going back to antiquity, however, many problems of sociology (so-called) entered into what Aristotle called politics, for example. And the very historians who were interested only in narrative, even without saying so, were forced in various ways to use as evidence what we would now call the social context or environment. With these observations, I do not intend to cast doubt on the more specific features of scientific autonomy that the positivists have understood to belong to sociology because its task is to study all social phenomena globally, going beyond the particulars of law, economics, history in the strict sense of the word, and so on. On this assumption, we see for ourselves that sociology – which really still needs to be established and to develop – would occupy the whole field of the philosophy of history. This was the view of Paul Barth, extraordinary professor at the University of Leipzig, who wrote a book titled Philosophy of History as Sociology last year. The second volume has never appeared. Paul Barth has been busy with many other things, and I hope that he leaves the first volume without a successor.12 Therefore, standing on our assumption and avoiding all questions of terminology, competence, and disciplinary boundaries, I mean – and I mean to say – that every time we propose to study the directive principles of history’s movement, our first obligation is to get completely beyond the external narrative in order to represent the character and constitution of the specific society that we call the people of Israel before the Assyrian conquest, for example, or the Roman people as one of the Italian societies. And then we may begin to ask ourselves: are we dealing with a large grouping or a small one; is the grouping solid or unstable; does the grouping have a fixed location (and is therefore agricultural), or is it still inclined to nomadism? Then we can ask other questions: is it a grouping by blood, where race and society coincide, or is it a coalition of various groups related by blood? At what level is its social differentiation; are all the people free, or are they free, less free, slaves, clients, and dependents? In this way, classes are gradually defined by the economic situation and by the functions that they fulfill; and as we immerse ourselves deeper and deeper in this social analysis, we begin to see what the history really is – to see, in other words, how that state of coexistence is produced. The manner of that production is the object of research.

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I will not say that we are at the point of being able to group all historical facts under distinct sociological forms so that an art of recounting them would be the equivalent of a scientific representation of events. If that were the case, the problem – or rather, problems – of the philosophy of history would already be solved and there would no longer be any discrepancy between history and philosophy of history. In some cases, even those sociological forms that are easier to characterize are always presented in the concrete and with great detail and specificity, because, in fact, while in the abstract we can make the agricultural phase something precisely distinct from the industrial phase, no people has ever really existed that was exclusively one or the other. Thus, because of the difference between industry in Rome and industry elsewhere – at a time when industry was never absent, even where conditions of living were mainly agricultural – Rome’s situation in a certain period took on a particular character as compared to that of another Aryan land that came close, more or less, to its situation.13 The same can be said of trade, which can indeed become the predominant and best defined mark of a whole population, as was the case with the ancient Phoenicians. But in a more or less elementary form, it is never absent, if only as the adjunct of that basic economic life that will be a hallmark even of primitive peoples. With these brief remarks, I have wanted to say that the historian must be on guard against classifications forced on us by a schematic sociology that would like to claim that the way of life of a particular human group could be indicated in a few rather short strokes. And the reason lies in the fact that history begins to have society as its object after society has already been differentiated and become complicated. Yes, the prehistoric horde can present homogeneous features of people related purely by blood, people who choose to keep themselves spatially separate from other tribes and vaguely express the form of law, morality, and religion in simple custom. But when we find a particular arrangement in which the specialty of the priests has already emerged, for example, even though they are just magicians or sorcerers; or else the class of warriors has taken shape and the distinction of lordship has arisen from their privilege, along with its consequences of slavery, and so on; and this gives rise to the need for a leader and then to the origin of dynasties; at this point, we are far from the primitive and homogeneous, and we are moving stepby-step towards those internal and external struggles that constitute the main fabric of history. If you stop and give careful attention to these ideas that bring with them the novelty of rigorous criticism, you will find there not only a com-

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plement to those first remarks that posed the art/science dilemma but a good answer to this new issue: sociology or philosophy of history? And now we wish to give a brief summary of what this answer is: A. When we set out to think historically about a series of human events – the Punic Wars, for example, or the German Reformation – we must always refer first to their social features, not only to understand the terrain on which the facts develop, but also to understand the motives for the struggle between the classes, for the warfare, for the innovation in legal institutions or economic affairs. In this sense, the sociologists are right to maintain that the closer historical research comes to a scientific way of thinking, the more support and guidance it finds in the direction of sociology – insofar as human groupings can be thought of as elements in morphologies. B. But it would be a serious mistake to follow the professional sociologists in their assumption, which is that history is destined to be absorbed by sociology. Sociology deals with types, meaning that it deals with what is abstract in relation to the concrete of history. When the sociologist speaks of the feudal type, he abstracts from all the other elements which in addition to feudalism constitute France of the twelfth century, for instance. If these elements had not existed in part, they would not have developed later into what is called either the authority of the monarch or the power of the judge, or the merchant class and then the middle class, and so on and so forth. And this is why one cannot apply the concept of the organic to sociology, because, for example, one would first need to assume that the feudal type of society itself automatically became bourgeois, although the class struggle cannot emerge except where classes already exist. C. The historian always works on the heterogeneous – one people that has conquered another, one class that has overcome another, priests who have overcome the laity, and lay people who have put the priests in their place. Now all this is sociological, but it is not typical as in the schematisms of sociology because the heterogeneous has to be grasped empirically, and this grasping constitutes what is proper to historical research and what is difficult about it. Even if I grasp the general process of the formation of the middle class, no abstract sociology will ever make me understand why the event called the Great Revolution occurred only in France. Being a philosopher by trade, not a historian, and teaching the

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philosophy of history, I have always been happy to defend the particularity of research methods, not because I become an admirer of simple particulars, but because I hold that the interests that lead us to study history do not rest only on those merely sociological schemes, useful though they may be, but on our confidence that the interpretation of history – of complex aggregations of facts linked to one another – must lead us to say something deeper, something called understanding human destiny in the language of the ideologues. D. And it is precisely on this general and complex understanding that the philosophy of history rests, inasmuch as we are interested not in generic social forms (the economics of slaves or of wage earners) but in the complexity of these forms when they carry the names of Athenian life or Roman life, Romans of the Republic or the Empire, neo-Germans or neo-Latins, the discovery of America and the colonies, the nineteenth century and world trade, and so on. The concept of what is called historical values, the values that refer to the general and complex idea of progress, appears only in relation to these concrete and complex forms. E. If the word ‘progress’ is limited to this meaning, no one will want to confuse it with that disastrous idea of evolution that has given so high a price to all the more or less triumphant idiocies now in circulation. Evolution is an excessively generic term that covers every form of becoming. But someone who will work hard and dig deep to understand the lexical development of neo-Latin forms from Latin forms will not thereby understand the evolution of fungi or the natural history of the crab. The generic idea of evolution remains a postulate of what Aristotle called first philosophy, and the special sciences must deal with single lines of evolution. The generic idea of progress implies that concept of evolution which gives us the right to evaluate the various forms of human life. By having a connection with history, the abstract features of the concept of evolution acquire just enough of the concrete to support a concrete appraisal. When we say that we have made more progress in civilization than people of past times, we do not mean to say that the abstract entity, humanity, has somehow grown a new skin or a new beard. Instead, we mean to say that slaves no longer exist, for example, that all people are equal before the law, that wives are not bought, that children are not sold, that priests do not have the right to send you to heaven on a whim, and so on, up to the point that consciousness of progress has become faith in

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progress and a reason to have faith. And, if one eliminates this conception, the study of history no longer has a rationale and is once again confined to the useless multiplication of particulars. 3 The analysis that we have given of the concept of sociology in relation to history, and the question that we have posed – whether the problems of the philosophy of history can simply be reduced to sociology – lead us naturally to examine a line of thought called historical materialism. First of all, I note that in many books and journal articles appearing in Italy one sees discussions of the term historical materialism that show a strange passion for wordy sophistry. Someone has even made this astonishing claim (and honoris causa I will say that it is Professor Asturaro): that historical materialism would be a good thing except that the name has ruined it.14 There is also another person who would be absolutely in love with the theory but for the unfortunate fact that its two most important advocates were the great communists, Marx and Engels, who, naturally, had received neither the Order of the Red Eagle nor the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus.15 No one need make a serious reply to critics like these, who would judge a theory good if they could suppress the names of its inventors. I realize that even if the name were different, the issue would have the same importance, and that the point of the debate is really this: the existence or non-existence of that famous thread running through the material conditions of human life, so that when those conditions change, everything else changes. But even the case for the terminology is not irrelevant since it somehow summarizes the historicalpsychological origin of the doctrine. It is quite well-known that Hegel’s dialectical idealism had its negative resolution in Feuerbach’s materialism. But Feuerbach’s materialism, while denying the ideological basis of Hegel’s doctrine by putting the individual person face to face with nature, reduced religion to a merely imaginative projection of the individual’s needs. Feuerbach’s materialism paid no attention to the historical world, just as eighteenth-century materialism had paid no attention to it, while exactly reflecting the needs of that Great Revolution, which, in the name of natural right, denied historical rights. But, when Marx and Engels began to criticize both Feuerbach and Stirner and the Hegelian Left, at the urging of the contemporary Socialist movement, they found that traditional materialism up to Feuerbach offered no explanation of history – and that is how

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the theory got its name.16 Although one can ask whether the project of historical materialism was a success or not, one can certainly not pretend that the doctrine is true but the name is false. I shall clarify this with an example. The general schematic psychology that I have outlined in my other course is based mainly on the assumption that psychic phenomena start and stop with the life of the individual.17 But we know that the sensists were inclined to claim on the basis of the materialist hypothesis that all complex psychic phenomena must be explained by the primitive data of sensation. However, our individual consciousness contains many elements that cannot be explained without the existence of society and history. You use language not as individuals but as social subjects. And thus one may say of law, religion, and moral ideas that they exist in us only through the medium of history and society. But biological materialism does not tell me how the dogmas of Christianity emerged, nor how the grammatical forms of neo-Latin emerged, nor, in general, how social structures exist. The task of historical materialism has been to find the material conditions of the historical social world. This task is parallel to – not derived from – what the pure positivists have called sociology. Let me note here, by the way, that when I mention the word ‘positivism,’ I always do so with great hesitation, because positivism, as it developed from Saint Simon to Littré, was essentially historicism, the urge to explain history. All those who call themselves positivists in Italy, however – with the single exception of Angiulli, who really came from the Hegelian school – have lapsed into materialism as it was before Feuerbach.18 They always start with the individual and always end with the individual, and so they do not understand the morphology of history. Our positivists generally fall short of Comte, who was so much a historicist that he denied the possibility of an individual psychology. Having claimed that the name is neither accidental nor irrelevant, that it actually reveals the origin of the doctrine and its stance towards those contemporary or somewhat later views that struggled to overcome the limits of idealism and ideology, and before going on to discuss the content of the doctrine itself, to the extent that it reflects my own views about the philosophy of history, I must define the general concept of the social phenomenon. A social phenomenon occurs only when relations of action, cohabitation, and cooperation exist between people. To ask how far the form of cohabitation reaches makes little difference here. It can happen in a small, simple tribe geographically isolated from the

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rest of the human race. But this will not happen – namely, that there is a small tribe – without phenomena of correlation that are not directly explained just by the bio-psychological state of each of the individuals and that arise only from the fact that the individuals depend on one another. For continuing cohabitation to go on in such a tribe requires a particular form of speech that must arise from the successive adaptation of different individuals not only to specific and stable associations of sensations, memories, and so on, but also to sounds and grammatical forms. The origin, stabilization, and development of language are the most general and direct signs and symptoms of social states of mind. It was precisely the effort to provide reliable canons of interpretation for the science of language, in fact, that gave rise to the notion of social psychology in one of the successors of Herbart’s school. The proper content of language recurs in forms of custom that precede law or take its place. And it recurs again, especially in elementary forms of the acquisition of material goods, or in what is distinguished later by the name of economics. All those who deal with psychology, staying with the pure schema of individual psychology, can only stick to pure abstractions. Anyone who sets out to study the forms of the will, for example, pursuing the project that I proposed in my course on theoretical philosophy (and I no longer know how far I will be able to take this), must almost entirely avoid the true and proper content of the forms of volition since this content is always social.19 The will that takes shape is not the will that wills itself; it is the will by which one learns to make shoes or play the piano, to recite verses like Pastonchi or read badly like Formíggini.20 Those few generalities that I have just mentioned about features of the social fact do not claim to be anything like an introduction to sociology, much less a chapter from the concrete logic used by Wundt and company.21 Speaking to students and not to members of an academy, I have tried to introduce the most basic distinguishing conditions of the social fact, as it then becomes the real basis and subject of history, as I once said in dealing with the question of sociology or philosophy of history. And, by briefly showing where the true difficulty of understanding the social fact begins, and by showing this right after defending the terminology of historical materialism, I have certainly not meant to attribute the discovery of the social phenomenon to the inventors of that doctrine. I do not belong in the illustrious company of those Darwinists who only just miss attributing the discovery of nature to Darwin. To justify the term historical materialism, I have looked at it from the point of view of that internal crisis that Marx suffered when he broke with Hegelian idealism.

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Independently of that, however, the definition of the social phenomenon was constructed during the nineteenth century through studies of law, economics, mythology, linguistics, and so on. In this way, the term sociology finally came into use, employed more as an encyclopedic summary of a whole new view of human life than as the name of a special science with a special method. With regard to this whole great movement, historical materialism is a special case, and now that we have given a preliminary defence of the terminology, we can move on to explain the content of the issue. I have often said that there is no way to substitute science for history, as if all historical narrative and exposition could be reduced to schematisms of reason. But I once noted that while history remains what it is – the representation of the event – it is also true that, in light of the great progress made by the social sciences, our mental attitude in thinking about events has changed. You will recall that I have denied that sociology can be substituted for history. I have been especially opposed to treating as equivalent to history that abstract sociology which, for example, treats a feudal society as isolated and autonomous, whereas concrete history, once there are class differences and state power, has no knowledge of a time when the social type was purely homogeneous. In consequence of all that has been said up to now, when I speak of historical materialism, I do not mean to refer to a sociology which, by isolating the type of feudal society, let us say, from what is historically concrete, then tries to prove analytically that political institutions and moral habits, let us say, are correlated with that economic type. Instead, when I speak of historical materialism, I mean history recounted in materialist terms, as I have shown in ten or twelve years of considered accounts of specific historical topics. And I have done this without worrying about two questions that I find completely irrelevant: namely, whether in so doing I might really be the rightful heir of Karl Marx, and whether or not, by so saying, I might have helped a particular political cause. The last course that I taught, for example, when I still had the use of the pedagogical and democratic tool of a human voice, was dedicated to short chapters describing the life of the nineteenth century as it passed into the new century.22 And in that description I was far from lavish with prophecies of imminent victory for democracy and socialism. If the genius of Marx, a communist, was just what was needed to discover the defining principles of historical materialism, and if, just because he was a communist, he was infinitely far from defending the existing social order – to understand is to overcome, says Hegel – that does not mean

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that the final fortunes of historical materialism as a doctrine depend on the séances pratiques of socialism. Suppose that the current stage of European civil society, dominated by the middle class, were still to perpetuate itself for centuries: this would by no means contradict historical materialism because the perpetuating would only show that society based on competition can still exist. A few years ago, it is true, Bebel promised a social republic in Germany by the year 1910. Apart from the fact that I do not know whether Bebel was pulling his neighbour’s leg, it is certain that he was never offered a chair of philosophy of history.23 No abstract sociology, then, and no worrying about practical projects ‘when socialism comes,’ but real, authentic philosophy of history, as we have just defined it – history recounted in an understandable way. Here, I insert something parenthetically that also comes into my other course on theoretical philosophy. Having often described the various issues that I have dealt with up to this point, and in defining the social complex as the subject of history, it occurs to me to use the term social consciousness as well. However, while sociologists of every stripe and colour use and abuse this term and thereby leave a chaotic impression in the minds of readers, and while many people try to use this expression to signify things that are obscure, I think it useful to subject the term to critical examination in order to bring more clarity to what has already been described. The term we often describes the exponent of social consciousness. Now turn your attention to the variable content of this we. At one moment, you can say that we are all in the same family, that we have a certain name, that we live on a particular kind of food and do a particular kind of work, and that through these conditions of our existence we feel set apart from the rest of the world. At another moment, we students and professors mean to speak as members of this university, in which we participate while also being individuals able to enter into and to exist, as we do exist, in as many other spheres of the we as are expressed by saying ‘we Romans,’ ‘we Italians,’ ‘we Catholics,’ and so on. That we contains nothing mystical or mysterious, then, nothing surprising or miraculous. Indeed, the more it is used to express or describe something, the greater the development and definition in many individuals – each calling himself I – of a conscious grasp of connection to a family, a clan, a people, a party, and, if you like, even a mafia or a band of thieves – which is all the same to psychology. At a high level of development of civilization and thought, this we can be as broad, for example, as all of Indo-European civilization. If you deprive the we of its natural centre in the many cases of I that feel something in common, the we becomes merely a useless

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symbol. The we exists only in the consciousness of each one of us insofar as we are individuals. But it is not the sum of individuals because its content lies in the bonds that connect individuals, bonds that are primarily material – bonds of shared blood, shared food, shared housing, and economic cooperation. Already contained in the brief description of the fact that I have provided here is what I would call a topical outline of the explanation of the fact itself. Given the broad meaning that we have attributed to facts of consciousness, in that consciousness represents an aspect either of a biological situation or of a social situation, there is no discrepancy between the meaning of I and the meaning of we. When psychology was not yet a science, when spiritualists of every type could indulge themselves by making I the extra-temporal attribute of a spirit standing above all creation, when idealists repeating Fichte could make the I a transcendental self-positing, either the problem of the we did not arise or it appeared as an imaginary claim for a collective and extra-individual spirit. But now that we use the I as a variable expression for internal apperception of variable states within us, so that – beyond the empirical I expressed when I say, ‘Here I am, teaching’ – we do not accept an I that is purely possible or transcendent, no wonder that the function of apperception, in one and the same framework of consciousness, uses both expressions – I and we. This does not mean that no one makes mistakes in applying these words, since their correct use can be achieved only by sophisticated psychological science. A little commentary will clarify these statements, which really need lengthy exposition. It is obvious that in the advanced state of our civilization, individuals can make mistakes in using the expression I as opposed to we. One reason is that most people do not know that what is attributed to individual consciousness is, in most cases, nothing but a residue of custom and tradition. But this same mistake – one that anyone who is not a real expert can make – is evidence for the fact that as civilization grows, the inclination grows in individuals to extend the range of their I, and yet the more we turn inward, the more we also find that the sense of the collective prevails over the sense of individuality. By now it is a settled empirical certainty that the human race emerged from the horde that was a continuation of the animal horde. In this horde the we was everything – the we that expressed the need to live under coercion in conditions without which the struggle for existence would not have been possible. The emergence of individuality as true authentic consciousness is a late product of more recent historical events. This subjectivity of ethical or aesthetic consciousness appears so natural to us because our

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reflective education knows no more than the ancient Greeks, who tell us that Solon makes the law, that Herodotus writes history, and that Alcaeus composes his haughty personal poetry. To us it seems almost inconceivable that millions and millions of humans from various races have lived for untold thousands of years – or centuries – with their individuality absorbed in custom and the I wrapped in the we. If we stand back a bit from the prosaic discussion in the preceding pages, we may fall again into what Marucci, along with other enraged positivists, calls metaphysics, for lack of another terminology that would be more exact.24 The trouble, however, is that making such a metaphysics out of sociology is just what the positivists have done, for we read that they have filled the world with an endless number of symbols for the social organism, the collective spirit, and so on. Our prosaic statements, if I may review and compare, come down to this: Nature produces male and female individuals of a particular race. But when these persons come into the world, they do not develop as isolated subjects face to face with nature and living only in nature. Instead, they develop within a social group that gives homogeneous features to each of them, and these are just the product of that social relationship – a certain way of speaking, a certain emotional rhythm, certain shared fantasies and, above all, the imitation of practical functions. As internal apprehension of their own conscious existence emerges – what we call the I – the function naturally divides into I and we. Yet the individual can be mistaken in referring some particular content of experience to the subject I rather than the subject we. All those scientists – idiots, more or less – who used to deduce language, law, justice, and the state from choice, inventiveness, and individual will, knew nothing at all about these two major issues: that at first individuals were born in the horde; and that individual consciousness based on the I arises little by little in the heart of the we. That is all I have to say by way clarification. If what I have said up to this point is insufficient, anything else would only make it obscure. NB: As in previous lectures I have explained the concept of historical materialism, and along the way I have alluded to socialism. I believe it useful to note that many now think they can account for their socialist aspirations by forming a collectivist mental representation of the society in which the we would again reabsorb the I – a lovely way to return to primitive conditions. Not because it affects the explanation of socialism, but because it is important for the subject of my course, it helps here to recall that everything supports the claim that the gains made by individuality will never again be lost, and, in fact, that recent progress in

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the civilized world will empower the personal more and more. By giving a theoretical account of a society that is communist in the economic sense of the word, we mean only to say that the means and instruments of production could no longer be private property but would belong to the collective through the exercise of labour needed for the production of material goods. This means that a great many individuals, now subject to a hierarchy of bosses, would gain greater freedom because, since the labour of the one (who are many) could not produce wealth for others (who are few), each person would be allowed the most favourable conditions for intellectual and moral development. All of you now present are masters at claiming that such things are purely utopian. But I, dealing here with social consciousness and with individual consciousness, must make you understand that this so-called utopia is not meant to be a return to mankind’s primitive state – in keeping with the old Egyptian image of the serpent that bites its tail, and other such old saws of the decadent rhetoric that the illustrious Professor Loria finds so delightful.25 Ancient Egyptians have no right to have their images and symbols recognized as meaningful for modern science because those ancient Egyptians, in fact, never created Greek science, nor the Latin city, nor Roman law, nor those other things on which our civilization is based. Following my digression on the reduction of social consciousness to the we and my prosaic explanation of it, and focusing on everything that I have already said to put the concept of history into helpful terms, we can now offer a brief review of the essence of that historical materialism whose definition we have been seeking. At first sight, it might seem needless to say that every society depends on the material conditions of its existence since this amounts to translating an observation of common sense into a technical formulation. Forget those people who look after the happy concerns of science and art; forget those often superfluous categories of the professors and priests; forget – in other words – all those who live at third or fourth hand on the products of another’s labour. The basic framework of society depends on relations that hold among those who produce material goods directly by their labour and with its instruments. This is what Marx called the form of production. That the basic structure of society, or rather its economic framework, has varied from prehistory until our time is beyond all doubt, and that these variations must have their rhythm and must in themselves show signs of process is more than likely, if we recall all that we have said before about making history something like a science. History is, above all, variation in the basic frameworks.

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But what is the specific character of historical materialism? That specific character is represented, in the first place, by a rather simple statement: namely, that human beings have produced the law and have tried the various schemes of organization that eventually become political, always in keeping with the corresponding state of the economic framework. The second statement is more hypothetical in character: that mankind’s mythological conceptions, and therefore religious conceptions as well, and also moral dispositions, have corresponded to a particular social condition, which means that the history of religion and ethics is psychology in the broad sense of the term. Another key element implicit in this conception is that the social framework is a framework to the extent that society presents itself to us as a hierarchy and as an arrangement of collaboration and of division into peoples and families and classes in various relations of dependency and superiority. The result is that society always has in itself the tendency to instability and is therefore given to conflict and corruption, progress and regress. The doctrine of historical materialism, given the two elements of the economic framework and class conflict, becomes the key to understanding the real and authentic revolutions, those changes in the complex state of society from which innovations in law, new political directions, and new moral attitudes are derived. In the section dedicated to asking whether history is science or art, I said that there is no substitute for telling the story, as you will recall. When historical materialism has reduced to its simplest expression the sum of conditions that make up the passage from the feudal age to the age of the middle class – let us say – it will have done everything that it should to explain the general causes of the French Revolution. But when the task is to provide an intuitive representation of that unique thing which is the Revolution itself, we can proceed only by natural norms of exposition and narration, which will be congruent with the theory as long as the narrator or expositor applies the same criterion to each detail and illuminates the linkages between events by always paying attention and making sure that they are not out of harmony with the general perspective.

NOTES 1 We have used the text edited by Franco Sbarberi, Labriola (1976a), where the editor describes it as ‘notes for a course on the philosophy of history given by Labriola at the University of Rome in the academic year 1902−3.’

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Part II: Translations 2 The books written by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE came to be called ‘Histories’ from the word historia used in the first sentence of his work, where it means ‘inquiries.’ Georg Gervinus (1805−71), an historian whose liberal hopes were shattered after 1848, was known first for his history of German poetry and later for a progressive history of Germany in the nineteenth century, which led to a charge of treason and the end of his career; Labriola is thinking of his Principles of History (Historik) of 1837: see Gervinus (1835−42), (1837), (1854−60). 3 The target of one of the polemics that runs throughout Labriola’s notes is Villari (see the Introduction, section 11), who discusses medieval Italy, among many other things, in ‘Is History a Science?’ (1891); his study of medieval Florence is Villari (1893−4). 4 Theodor Mommsen (1817−1903) was the leading ancient historian of his age, best known for his History of Rome. 5 Bernheim (1899); see also our notes to Croce, ‘History Brought Under Art.’ 6 When Mommsen won the Nobel Prize for Literature around the time when Labriola was writing this essay, the speech conferring the award stressed his powers of imagination. See Mommsen (1886): 6. 7 See n3 above on Villari. 8 See n5 above on Bernheim. 9 Luigi Ceci (1859−1927) pioneered the study of historical linguistics and taught it in Rome when Labriola was there; he was also active in educational reform and administration. The Bibel-Babel controversy erupted in 1902 when Friedrich Delitzsch, an Assyriologist, claimed that Mesopotamian myths were the basis of what most people believed to be the biblical record of mankind’s origins: see Ceci (1882). 10 Both words occur in the title of this piece. 11 Unlike many earlier Italian authors, Labriola uses ‘Rinascenza,’ perhaps because by 1902 ‘Risorgimento’ had more pressing uses. 12 Paul Barth (1858−1922), a critic of Hegel’s philosophy of history, taught at Leipzig; the title of the work that Labriola mentions is reversed, Die Philosophie der Geschichte als Sociologie: see Barth (1890), (1897). 13 Greece would seem to be the other ‘Aryan land.’ 14 Alfonso Asturaro (1854−1917) taught sociology in Geneva: see Asturaro (1897), (1903). 15 The Order of the Red Eagle was a Prussian military award, and that of Saints Maurice and Lazarus was bestowed by the Kingdom of Savoy. 16 Max Stirner (1806−56), whose name at birth was Johann Schmidt, was a theorist of anarchism and a critic of Feuerbach who influenced Marx, Engels, and many other nineteenth-century thinkers, often negatively; he is a prominent target of The German Ideology: see Stirner (1844−5).

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Labriola, Materialism 17 The role of the individual in society is a major theme of Herbart’s psychology: see section 14 of the Introduction. 18 Andrea Angiulli (1837−90) was a positivist who focused on problems of education: see Angiulli (1868), (1888). 19 Labriola alludes to the illness that prevented him from speaking in public. 20 Labriola jokes about two of his students: the poet Francesco Pastonchi (1874−1953) was writing for La Stampa and other newspapers during this period; Angelo Formíggini (1878−1938) later became an important publisher. 21 Wilhelm Wundt (1832−1920), who led the development of experimental psychology in his period, also had enormous influence on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. 22 Labriola refers again to the illness that prevented him from speaking. 23 August Bebel (1840−1913), who founded the Social Democratic Party in Germany, believed that socialism could be effective in his lifetime. 24 Achille Marucci later wrote about the psychology of will. 25 Achille Loria (1857−1943) was a prominent authority on political economy in Labriola’s day whose theories were determinist and cyclical. The serpent that bites its tail is the ouroboros, described in the imaginative account of Egyptian hieroglyphics by Horapollon.

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15 Benedetto Croce

History Brought Under the General Concept of Art1

Is history a science or an art? This question has been asked many times, but the usual judgment of the educated world is that the question is trivial, one of those usually raised only out of common confusion and then badly answered. Those who have asked and are still asking it, in fact, either fail to give it a precise definition, or, if forced to offer one, limit themselves to indicating merely this question: whether history, besides being verified exactly, should be represented in a lively way and be well written in the artistic sense. And the vague sense of the question tallies with that of the answers, the most common being that history is science and art all at once. A different answer, that looks much sterner, however, has taken shape among the most learned authorities on history, notably in Germany, where experts on history have a mental habit widespread there and often feel the need to philosophize about their discipline.2 Given the growing sense that their work is important, serious, and difficult, a certain natural pride has emerged among historians and has contributed to their response. Indeed, everyone recognizes the amazing progress, starting a century ago, made by historical studies both in methods of research and criticism and in methods of interpretation and understanding. Whole histories of civilization utterly unknown before have been discovered, and histories already known have been understood in an entirely new way. Experts on history have therefore discarded the old chain of roses that used to link their discipline to the belles lettres and have proclaimed its strictly scientific character. No one has stated this with more clarity, perhaps, than Johann Gustav Droysen, distinguished author of the History of Prussian Politics, in an important and intriguing little book on the Elements of History (Grundriß

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der Historik). History for Droysen is science and certainly not art; science and art go in opposite directions and are irreconcilable; artistic concerns are harmful to history; the so-called artistic histories, especially abundant in English and French literature, are nothing more than works of rhetoric – rethorische Kunst.3 Such ideas have prevailed among experts on history, from high to low, and we find them explained in great detail in the extensive and excellent Manual of Historical Method (Lehrbuch der historischen Methode) published some years ago by Professor Ernst Bernheim of the University of Greifswald, which in effect collects the views of the discipline that are widespread among German historians. We can see them in their fullest form in this book by Bernheim, thus sparing us from multiplying footnotes, which would be easy to do but also redundant.4 In his conclusion, Bernheim claims: (1) that history is a science and definitely not an art because its aim is to provide not an aesthetic pleasure but knowledge (Erkenntnis); (2) that the results of historical science, since they are reported in prose, obviously fall within the domain of art, in one sense – because prose is a type of art – but this says nothing special about history as compared to any other scientific account; (3) that it may sometimes turn out that a work of history can be a work of art as well, but for Bernheim this is a very rare event, and, in any case, purely coincidental.5 Obvious answers, are they not – quite clear and crisp? You would give exactly the same answers to anyone who asked you if chemistry and physics are sciences or arts. The question would seem to be closed. Attempting to reopen it would be the only reason to find one’s thoughts faced with that charge of Begriffswirrung – conceptual confusion – which Bernheim describes as reaching its peak whenever someone claims that history is art, or science and art at the same time.6 Yet when two words are frequently brought together, there is almost always some real reason for the juxtaposition. When a question arises persistently, however confused it may be or badly put, one must be wary of easy answers that seem to cut the knot. At the bottom of the poorly framed question must be some problem to discover, which is its real, though unconscious, motive. Now if people ask and keep asking if history is science or art, there is one answer that settles nothing and almost begs the question: that history, being a science, has the same relations with art that all other sciences have with art. If the question has come up for history but not for other sciences, it would mean, on the one hand, that history seems not to be a science like the others, and, on the other hand, that its connection with art appears greater

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and different than that of other sciences with that very same art. We need to stay with these two points and clear them up. Actually, after the incisive claims about history’s scientific character that I cited above, it is intriguing to see Droysen himself letting this sentence slip from his pen: ‘And it would not be without interest to seek the reason internal to history that makes it, alone of all the sciences, enjoy the equivocal fate of having to be an art as well, a fate shared not even by philosophy, despite Plato’s dialogues.’7 He does not realize that the problem starts just at the point where he thinks he has finished with it. To seek the internal reason for the connection that some detect between history and art, and then to determine what this connection or relation really is, we must go back and clearly establish the content of the three concepts that come into such a discussion: science, art, and history. An odd, but not uncommon, fact arises for these three concepts: we believe that there is an agreement about their content that does not really exist, and this gives rise to endless ambiguity, making some see the problem as entirely without substance, while preventing others from saying exactly what the problem is. Experts on history, for example, usually start with too narrow a concept of art and too broad a concept of science. Popular opinion goes wrong, however, by using all three concepts in an imprecise and contradictory way. As it happens, nonetheless, we shall find our inquiry leading us closer to this popular opinion – that history shares the nature of art – than to the view of those who locate it definitively among the sciences. And no wonder. However vaguely it may be expressed, a true feeling for the real nature of science, art, and history operates in ordinary consciousness, although it has been completely lost in the course of learned polemics – as often happens. Let us begin, then, by establishing these basic concepts. And I hope that readers will not be scared off, having been assured that we are not attacking the question at too great a distance, but bringing it back to its own territory instead, the only place where it can be quickly and easily settled.8 1. The Concept of Art I was speaking, then, of the apparent accord on what the concept of art is about, and, generally, on the aesthetic contemplation of things that involves art. To questions about the nature of the aesthetic world in general and the world of art in particular, the answer is unanimous: the world of the aesthetic is the world of the Beautiful, and art is an activity

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aimed at producing the Beautiful. But trouble starts with the meaning of the word ‘Beautiful.’ May heaven save me from getting into the endless and subtle disquisitions that form the object of aesthetic science! That science was born, grew, and bore wonderful fruit in Germany, though in other countries it has never been much cultivated nor well – particularly in Italy, where it is now completely neglected. I forbear lamenting this neglect and move on.9 For my purposes, it suffices to mention the essential features of the view of the Beautiful and of art that I find acceptable. What is the Beautiful? Up to now, as far as I know, four main answers to this question can be or have been given. First is the answer of Sensualism, which reduces the Beautiful to a type of pleasure. The second is that of Rationalism, which identifies it with the True and the Good. The third is the answer of Formalism, which makes it consist of unconditionally pleasurable formal relations. The fourth belongs to what a recent historian of aesthetics calls Concrete Idealism, which arose mainly from the deep insights of Hegelian aesthetics and sees the Beautiful as the representation or sensible manifestation of the Idea.10 Now as for the first two, they are still tending wounds inflicted on them by the mighty Kantian critique. Never again will it enter anyone’s mind to confuse the Beautiful with the pleasant, save perhaps some French or English pseudo-philosopher, one of those who call their chattering ‘philosophy’ for the same reason the good people of Florence used to call Dante’s beloved ‘Beatrice’ – because they knew not what to call her.11 Likewise, no one will any longer locate the Beautiful in the world of theory or the world of ethics, however deep that view may be in other ways, since an invincible impulse of our mind pushes us to seek out the relations that must exist among the highest idealities of the human spirit – among the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.12 More than anything else, the formalist theory of aesthetics is an anomalous episode in the history of philosophy, and I shall say something about it mainly because it has remained totally unknown to us. Herbart, wishing to detach aesthetics from approaches full of fantasy and from vague intuitions and reduce it to an exact science – having already done so quite successfully with ethics, psychology, education, and other disciplines on which he made a still indelible impression – correctly asked that one begin by analysing individual instances of beauty.13 By analysing the simplest aesthetic facts about music and observing that a simple tone is never either beautiful or ugly, that the judgment of beautiful and ugly always emerges from a relation between at least two tones, that

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two tones coming in one order are pleasant, but unpleasant in another order – by these and similar observations he was forced to the hypothesis that the Beautiful consists solely of formal relations of pleasure, and that every aesthetic pleasure therefore arises from form, independent of content. Having no chance to develop a complete theory of aesthetics, Herbart left only a few remarks on the topic that the reader finds scattered through his works. Disagreement about the teacher’s thoughts arose among his students, some supposing that he did not mean to exclude the expression of content from the Beautiful.14 But Robert Zimmermann, advocating the strictly formalist interpretation and following the partial efforts of others whom we need not name here, tried to construct a complete system of aesthetics based on Herbart’s views. First he brought out a major critical history of the discipline, followed in 1865 by the publication of his Aesthetics as a Science of Form, in which all the phenomena of the Beautiful are explained as purely formal relations of pleasure.15 In a work of poetry, for example, what is ordinarily called poetic content gives pleasure – according to Zimmermann – through particular formal relations of character, of feeling, and so on among the persons in the piece. What is called expression gives pleasure through the formal relation of correspondence between content and form. And the so-called externals of form (verses, stanzas, and so on) do the same through formal relations of pleasure. All these various relations, of which the work of art would be the sum, Zimmermann classifies and reduces to a few first principles – five aesthetic ideas meant to tally with the five practical ideas of Herbart’s ethics. But after Zimmermann, who remained the only preacher of formalist aesthetics, no one continued with it.16 And we agree entirely with Hartmann in judging it ‘the contrived construct of a perfectly fruitless insight.’17 The last of the theories that I mentioned, which has given rise to a very rich aesthetic literature, remains robust. And it is this one that prevails among the well-informed, if I may speak in broad terms. This theory locates the Beautiful in the expression of some thing, called the ‘sensible manifestation of the ideal’ in Hegelian terminology. I cannot establish this claim, which at first glance seems strange and yet is the only one that explains all the aesthetic facts. I am forced to refer to the works of specialists, of which the last to be published, and the most noteworthy in many ways, is Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Beautiful.18 Nor can I describe how the process of expression works, which is actually one of the most successful parts of Hartmann’s study, titled ‘Theory of Levels of Concreteness in the Beautiful’ (‘Die Koncretionstufen des Schönen’).19

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Suffice it to say that expression of a content appears decisive in the phenomenon of the Beautiful, even in the simplest, and, may I say, the most physical cases of beauty. Herbart was wrong to believe that pure form is what gives pleasure in the relation or consonance of two tones. Leibniz peered much more deeply into the nature of the pleasure produced by musical consonances, defining them in a rather bizarre way as ‘a covert exercise of arithmetic by a mind unaware that it is counting.’20 And we can confirm that in pleasurable impressions of the senses – those that derive either from agreements of tones and colours or from other senses said to be lower – what gives them their aesthetic character, albeit unconsciously, is always the (symbolic?) expression of a given content.21 It appears that pleasure comes just from physiological stimulation, but it is not so. With Leopardi, we might almost say with love bending, even as bodies clasp, just towards this, but not towards that –

not the physiological stimulus but the meaning that makes it full, the idea of which it is the bearer.22 So also, if we go to the opposite extreme and consider mathematical propositions or philosophical concepts – the most rarefied products of the mind, of thinking at its most abstract – we see that these become objects of aesthetic discernment only when they are embodied externally in speech and other means of expression. And they are beautiful insofar as their expression, in every respect, is adequate and effective. Aesthetic form is not, as some believe, something that has aesthetic value in itself – applicable to some contents, supposedly, but not to others – like a coat of many colours or a diadem of sparkling jewels. It is a projection, we might say, of the content. When the topic requires it, even technical language is aesthetic, and in the event that it is required, it is actually more aesthetic than any other language.23 Starting with that concept of the Beautiful – understanding the Beautiful as the expression of a given content, in other words – we easily explain the judgments of approval or disapproval that the aesthetic sense customarily gives of its various objects of nature and art. We also explain the relativity of judgment according to which an object is seen from one point of view or another, as the saying goes: actually, the object is treated as the expression of one content or another. A specimen of an animal species will be ugly, for example, if viewed as an expression of what is animal in general, because, in the given specimen (the form), animal

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life (the content) may not be fully reflected, though it could be beautiful if viewed as a typical expression of a given species of animal, since in that case it is treated as an expression or form of a different content.24 In short, an object is beautiful or ugly according to the category by which we apperceive it.25 Now one specific category of apperception, in fact, is art. And in art, all natural and human reality – beautiful or ugly from various perspectives – becomes beautiful because it has been apperceived as reality in general, which we want to see fully expressed. When they enter the world of art, all characters, all actions, all objects lose (artistically speaking) the features that they usually have for various purposes of real life, and they are judged uniquely by the greater or lesser perfection with which art depicts them. In reality Caliban is a monster, but he is no longer a monster as a figure of art. One sees from this how wrong it is to believe that the proposition, ‘art represents the Beautiful,’ entails that art has as its content those objects that seem beautiful from various natural points of view. ‘The Beautiful!’ De Sanctis once wrote: then tell me ‘whether there is anything as beautiful as Iago, a form that has emerged from the utmost depths of real life, so full, so concrete, so finished in all its parts, in all its gradations, one of the most beautiful creatures in the world of poetry.’26 And he was right. Without doubt, the concept of the Beautiful is the same in art as in nature, but in art the ideal that we keep present – the content that we want to see represented – is simply reality in general, whereas in nature the idealities are particular forms of reality. From here comes the distinction which, though not at all abstruse, is not easy to express clearly and often gives rise to confusions. If we restrict ourselves to this concept of art and view it as a representation of reality, then clearly most of the reasons that scandalize many people, making them deny that history is a product of art, disappear.27 Such scandal is entirely justified when it starts from one of the three theories about the Beautiful or art that we have rejected: namely, when it is thought that art’s purpose is either (1) to develop the pleasure of the senses and imagination, or (2) to represent the True and the Good, or (3) to create a summary of formal relations of pleasure. The goals of doing history are incompatible with these three aims, or compatible only in unusual and accidental circumstances. But outrage seems not to be equally justified when we accept the definition given above: that art is the representation of reality. May history not also be a representation of reality? Yet those who oppose identifying art with history say this: ‘You are

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mistaken. History does not represent reality, as art does, but studies this reality scientifically, which is a far different matter. Therefore, there can be only one artistic feature of historical writing, the same that belongs to any type of communication that must be turned into good prose. History is a science.’ So let us see what science is. 2. History and the Concept of Science On the concept of science there are certainly not the disagreements that we have described about the concept of art. Yet one should not believe that there is agreement. Some – many, I would have to say – confuse science with knowledge or with learning in general. Any proposition expressing a truth, then, is a scientific proposition according to them. But when I say ‘I took a walk today,’ their procedure does not give me the right to conclude that I am making a scientific statement. Such a concept is so broad that it really lacks all the distinctive features of science. And anyone who wants to give precise meaning to the function of science will agree with those who distinguish it from knowledge in general, pointing out that science always seeks the general and works by concepts. Where no concepts are formed, there is no science. According to Herbart’s excellent definition, philosophy itself, highest of the sciences (if there is a hierarchy also among the sciences), is just the working out of concepts left confused and in mutual contradiction by the special sciences. Now if we start from this concept of science – which is the only precise one – we can justly ask: ‘Of what is history a science? What concepts does it develop?’ Bernheim (I continue to cite his book for the reason mentioned above) immediately supplies an answer to our question. ‘History,’ he says, ‘is the science of the development of humans in their activity as social beings.’28 And so we would have learned what history is a science of. But reflecting a bit on this string of words suffices for us to discover that the definition of history given here is merely apparent. History is not the science of development; it does not tell us what development consists of; history sets forth or rather recounts the facts of development. Defining the concept of development is a job for philosophy, actually for metaphysics, and it would occur to no one to shelve a book that dealt with the concept of development alongside books about history. If the book dealt with historical development in the proper sense, the most one would do is to put it with books on the philosophy of history. In a few well-known pages of his great work, Arthur Schopenhauer

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became the first to give serious reasons for denying that history has any scientific character. ‘History lacks the basic feature of science, subordination of the things that come into consciousness, and it knows only how to present a mere coordination of the facts that it has registered. This is why there is no system in history, as there is in the other sciences … As systems of what is known, sciences always speak of kinds; history, however, always speaks of individuals. History would then be a science of individuals, which entails a contradiction.’29 An excellent study by the philosopher Lazarus expresses that distinction between science and history even more rigorously.30 History deals with individual and concrete facts; history obviously relates particulars to the whole but does not thereby acquire a scientific character; the whole is different from the general, the proper object of science. ‘What interests science is not the single fact but the law that recurs in each fact; for history, the goal of research is each single fact or the ensemble of such facts. History does not deal with facts, events, actions, or persons as such, but always with this fact, this person, and so on. For science, this determination is entirely without interest because science looks for the general – what exists in all the individual objects, in other words. Summarizing briefly, on one side we have logical abstractions, on the other simple processes of psychological condensation; on one side, general concepts, on the other, condensed concrete representations, even if they are not quite individual; here the singular as abstract specimen, there the singular as concrete individuality; here the goal of research is the general law, there it is the individual process.’31 I agree entirely with those observations. History has only one aim: to narrate the facts, and saying narrate the facts also means that the facts must be collected carefully and shown as they really happened – traced back to their causes, that is, and not just set forth as they appear superficially to the untrained eye. This has always been the ideal of good historical writing in all periods. And even now, while methods of research have made progress, while the interpretation of the data of historical tradition has made progress, the ideal of doing history has not changed because it cannot change. History narrates.32 A writer who deals with historical topics, not knowing how to evade the arguments presented above, has said this: ‘History is not a science like the others, but it is a science, not an explanatory but a descriptive science, like geography.’33 But I challenge him to tell me what descriptive science means.34 The character of Don Abbondio exists in rerum natura.35 Is the quite perfect description that Manzoni gives of it science, then?36

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As for the example of geography, if geography finds itself in the same position as history, it too is no science. But let’s stick to the task at hand and not try to skin two cats, as they say. From the strong feeling that history is not a science, and from the comparison between history and the sciences in the strict sense, have come the many things written up to now about history’s uselessness and uncertainty and so on, and here, out of regard for our native land, I shall mention our countryman from the Abruzzi, Melchiorre Delfico.37 From the same source came Buckle’s great enterprise, which caused a stir in the world of science thirty years ago; whether its failure was more comic or tragic is hard for me to say.38 Finding his scientific sense unsatisfied by tales of history, Buckle proposed to make history a science, extracting the laws that govern it from the mass of facts, as science requires. But little by little his celebrated work fell into oblivion, and now it is not hard to see that he made an egregious blunder, even setting aside much that one could say about the very existence of historical laws themselves – laws which, in any case, could lead to another discipline but could not eliminate history in the proper sense, which does not deal with laws but narrates what has happened.39 Therefore, in denying history the character of a science, we must take care not to connect this claim with a negative judgment about history. Schopenhauer exaggerates in this direction, as usual, even in opposing the excessive regard for history in Hegelian philosophy, and Buckle is ruled by the same sentiment– not to speak of poor Delfico, who is absolutely obsessed with it.40 History is not a science (nor is poetry a science!), but in saying this we do not mean that it is not something of great importance or that one need not keep doing it as it has been done up to now, teaching it in the schools and giving it the place that is given to it in the life of the modern mind. Alongside history – or rather, alongside the doing of history – a science is taking shape, which, even though it is not what Buckle imagined as a determination of the laws of history (Buckle’s four laws!), is definitely a search for the concepts under which we think about history, and for the first time it really deserves the name philosophy, or, if you will, science of history.41 But we must take care not to confuse this philosophy of history in the modern sense with philosophical history as it developed in idealist philosophy and then, with Hegel, reached the state in which it became popular for a while and then was discredited forever – justly so.42 The new philosophy of history studies the process of facts to determine the real principles in which they are grounded, along with the sys-

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tem on whose basis acts of historical knowing can occur. It also deals with those particular problems of the theory of knowledge that relate to the method of doing history. This set of issues, which arise from thinking critically about history, is something solid, quite different from that alleged rhythm of ideas that Hegel meant to depict in his treatment of these issues.43 To conclude, then, the material of history can certainly give rise to a science, which is philosophy of history in the sense described above. But in itself history is not a science. Now if history is not a science – and if at the same time it is not the futile labour, unworthy of the human spirit, that Schopenhauer supposed it to be – what is it? 3. History and the Concept of Art Presented with any object whatever – a person, an action, an event – the human mind can carry out only two different operations. It can ask what the thing is, and it can imagine the object in its concrete appearance. The mind can aim to understand the object or simply picture it. In short, it can submit the object either to a scientific process or else to an artistic process. It does no more than this. A psychological event (a feeling, desire, or action of some kind), an instance of kindness or cruelty, of love or ambition, and so on can lead an artist to portray them with the tools of his art and lead a scientist to analyse them for motive and development and locate them in a category of psychological science. Macbeth and Richard III, represented as they appeared to the poet’s imagination, are two artistic creations; studied in their internal workings, they add a page to criminology, as the science of crime has recently been called.44 A flower on the painter’s canvas is an object of art; the botanist describes its features and assigns it a place in his classifications. What gets done, then, is either science or art. Whenever the particular is subsumed under the general, the result is science; whenever the particular is represented as such, it is art.45 We have seen that doing history does not develop concepts, but reproduces the particular in its concreteness, which is why we have denied it the characteristics of science. Therefore, it is an easy inference that if history is not science, it must be art. Bernheim says that history is the science of development. We say it is the representation of development, the representation of human affairs inasmuch as they develop in time. And as such it is a labour of art. Having put this proposition forward, we should now add some clarifications and eliminate any possible difficulties.

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In the study already cited, Lazarus analyses the psychological processes that belong to history, according to him, but which are actually just those processes expected of any artistic representation. They add up to the two principles of condensation (Verdichtung) and substitution (Vertretung). By means of the first process, many long sequences of representations are turned into a few short series, something like what happens when an orchestral piece is arranged for piano. And by means of the second, many representations, or entire groups of them, are included in just one that stands for all the others.46 Note carefully, moreover, that it has not been said that representation of history must occur solely by means of imagination and the art of language. Architecture and music have no way to portray historical reality, of course, but for painting and sculpture this is not so. Records of the life of the Stuart court under Charles II left by contemporaries – Hamilton’s Mémoires, for example – are they not perhaps equalled by Lely’s paintings that can be seen in the museums of Bethnal-Green and Hampton Court, having preserved for us just as lively a record of those ladies and cavaliers and their way of life? And the Roman history paintings of Louis David, have they not as much historical value as Rollin’s Roman history?47 This bringing of history under the general concept of art – once the concept has been correctly established – seems almost obvious. And testimony could be collected in great abundance to prove how it has been constantly accessible to empirical observation.48 Objections or possible objections to this evidence are all based on misunderstandings. Since Schopenhauer, in the pages already cited, wishes to condemn history as futile and mistaken labour, after having excluded it from the domain of science, he also excludes it from that of art. ‘The material of art is the idea, that of science is the concept, so that both art and science have to do with what always is – and is in the same way; both have to do with what Plato clams to be the object of true knowledge. Not so for history … it does not deserve to be taken seriously by the human mind and to have so much hard work spent on it.’49 But this objection arises from one of the views about art that we have treated as wrong because Schopenhauer, on the fact of aesthetics, falls into rationalism or abstract idealism.50 That art represents the idea of things is not true – or rather it is true in a sense that can also be claimed for history.51 Droysen, on the other hand, counts this among the chief incompatibilities between art and history: namely, that art represents objects that are complete in every part, whereas the content of history is often fragmentary, uncertain, incomplete. But that would be just a defect of his-

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tory, not its nature; the historian aims to represent his object as fully as the artist, and if quite often he does not succeed in this, it is the result of external circumstances (lack of documents, unclarity, and so on) and not because the effort is impossible in itself. It would be odd to make the absence of history part of the nature of history! That would be like saying that error is a component of science because scientists are often in error. As for Droysen’s other observation, that the artist presents only the final product of his labours while the historian must put the work that got him to his results on display, we will have more to say later, noting for now that history is one thing and historical discussion or argument another.52 More popular is the objection that history deals not just with events and persons but also to a great extent with ideas, opinions, and the like, and that the history of mathematics – or Lecky’s book on the Origin of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe – is also history.53 In this is seen – I know not why – opposition to the procedure of art. Perhaps there is some topical limit on the content of art? Can the exposition of a series of thoughts not be a content of art? The psychological novel and the philosophical lyric exist, do they not? Think for a moment about a book treating the history of philosophical sciences in Italy as a psychological novel, for example, and the analogy will help remove prejudices that may still remain in your mind against the artistic nature of any sort of history. Truly, what psychological novel is more interesting than the history of philosophy? 4. Art, in the Strict Sense, and History But if history is art, the question will be what place it has in relation to other products of art. What relations of similarity and difference hold between works like Dante’s Comedy and Machiavelli’s History of Florence, between Faust and Mommsen’s Roman History? Here is my answer to this entirely legitimate question. Without addressing the many attempts at classifying the arts – Hegel’s historical-ideal version is famous, treating the arts as symbolic, classical, and Romantic54 – let me simply express my view that the only solid criterion for classifying the various arts is one that derives from the means that each art uses: the means that define a special field of representations for each one.55 According to this classification, doing history would be included in the class of arts of language – both those of prose and those of poetry, since examples of verse histories abound and are not at all unjustified historically or aesthetically. But neither should one forget – speaking with the rigour appropriate here – that the telling of history can

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also be expressed by means of the figurative arts, as I mentioned above, and in that sense history would sometimes enter into painting (portraiture, history painting) and into sculpture (monumental sculpture and so on). By this route, then, we do not get to a distinction between history and other products of art. It is clear – in the purely aesthetic sense, or as a mode of representation – that history does not constitute a genre but is a product that makes up a part of various genres, a content that can be expressed by various means. Hartmann strongly insists on a partition of the arts into the non-free (unfrei) and the free (frei). Included among the former are all that have as their aim not just the appearance of reality (Schein) but reality itself, exactly as it would be for historical narrative, rhetorical discourse, and, in short, all prose that sets a real goal for itself – and architecture too, which Hartmann declares not to be a free art because it pursues a utilitarian end external to aesthetics. But either I misunderstand or else this partition is scientifically baseless and, in a word, superficial. The arts that have a real goal, as arts, take into account just exactly the appearance of this goal, and only this, and for the purely aesthetic spectator this appearance is enough. A temple is a work of art in that it effectively represents a particular religious sentiment in the lines of its architecture; the aesthetic spectator is fixed on this relation, and so we can admire a Greek temple as much as a Gothic cathedral, an Arab Mosque as much as a baroque church, without being pagan and Christian at the same time, or Moslem and Jesuit. There may be no real sharing of any of these beliefs. The religious person, on the other hand, to the extent that his religious activity is in play, apperceives a temple simply as a means of expression for his real spiritual need and as an instrument of his worship. But how can an objective classification be based on this differing psychological perception? Even a love poem can be as useful for purely aesthetic contemplation as for the expression – from the lover’s perspective – of real feelings that fill the heart. Hence, neither from classifying the arts by their modes of expression, since history has no mode of expression of its own to determine its nature, nor from Hartmann’s classification, which must be decisively rejected, can we infer the relations between history and the other products of art.56 We must derive such a determination from an entirely different criterion, not the purely aesthetic criterion of the mode of representation, but the criterion of content, which is extraneous to aesthetics – or the material or topic or whatever else you want to call what history sets out to develop as compared to other products of art.

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And here we must deal briefly with another large problem – the content of art. In science the content is everything that exists: the ambition of science is to leave not a single manifestation of reality behind without bringing it under the category to which it belongs. Everything must be brought under concepts; this is the domain of science. But does the domain of art have the same extension? Can art represent everything? As a general principle, where there is a work of art, there is always something fully represented – abstractly speaking. But while the goals that science pursues are universal, art limits or circumscribes its task according to the various circumstances in which it develops – in life lived concretely.57 Now what is the principle of this limiting or circumscribing? This amounts to asking what the content of art is. On this point, theories endlessly various have been proposed by aestheticians or simply by connoisseurs. But most of them quickly collapse because they are tightly tied to those aesthetic doctrines that we have already mentioned and discarded as false. Thus, sensualist aesthetics must necessarily locate the content of art in objects that give pleasure.58 And rationalist aesthetics locates it in the moral ideal or in the representation of a type. We have seen that Schopenhauer, just as a result of this view, makes the idea the object of art, and Schiller had already said that it is the universal. But then no content of art exists for formalist aesthetics, since on this view the object of art is always a formal relation of pleasure.59 Those connoisseurs and popular critics who keep insisting that some one content is aesthetic, and another one non-aesthetic, are also harnessed (without realizing it) to these various views. From time to time, therefore, those problems that have no beginning or end come up in the domain of art, continuing for a while and then ceasing not because they have been resolved in any way but simply because it is annoying to air them without effect – like the one that plagued us in Italy for two or three years after the publication of Carducci’s Odi barbare (still lively and fresh) and Stecchetti’s Postuma (long dead and desiccated) – the so-called problem of idealism and verism.60 What should the content of art be? That question can be posed only by the aesthetics of concrete idealism, the aesthetics represented mainly by Hegel. The admirable criticism of De Sanctis, wholly inspired by idealist principles, is the best proof of that doctrine’s fertile truth. He once wrote that ‘the science (of art) was born on the day when content was not set aside and declared irrelevant … but assigned its place, treated as an antecedent or a given of the problem of art. Every science has its assumptions and antecedents. The assumption of aesthetics is abstract content (among others). And science begins when content lives and stirs in the

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artist’s brain, becoming form, which therefore is content itself insofar as it is art.’61 Now once content has been assigned its place as an antecedent of the aesthetic process, and when it has also been confirmed that it is not irrelevant, we must determine what it is to which it is not irrelevant since it certainly is irrelevant to the aesthetic process. Köstlin, a German aesthetician who wrote a treatise on aesthetics from an eclectic point of view, has a view about aesthetic content that to me seems the closest to the truth. According to Köstlin, aesthetic content is what is of interest: what interests humans as human, both from the theoretical and from the practical side, thinking along with feeling and will, what we know and do not know, what gives us joy and makes us sad – in short, the whole world of human interest. And the value of the aesthetic content is greater to the extent that interest in it is more general: hence, those contents that affect humans as human come first; next, those that affect them as belonging to a particular race, nation, or religion; then, those that interest people of a specific class, and so on down to what interests the person only as an individual.62 Except for some careless phrasing, this concept is perfectly correct. Without doubt, the content of art is reality in general in that it presents interests from various points of view – intellectual, moral, religious, political, and so on, including the aesthetic.63 If a content of art is of no interest in any way, the work that develops it can be aesthetically perfect, but it will be one that public opinion condemns summarily as cold and boring. Voltaire’s remark applies quite well to the content of art: ‘Every genre is good except the boring genre.’64 It is also evident that such interest cannot be constant, like that of the pure science that relates to the spirit as intellect.65 Instead, depending on complex human development, it varies in part with time, place, and other circumstances. We, as modern people, what different interests we bring to our thinking about works like Homer’s poems or Dante’s Comedy, compared to what their contemporaries brought to them! And how much less, or how different, from ours will be the interest that our descendants bring to their thinking about works like La Dame aux camélias or Rabagas!66 We understand, then, that in great artistic creations there should almost always be something that has interest for all times and in all circumstances because it is deeply human – not to say that the perfection of the representation also has its lasting appeal. In a certain sense, then, that sculpted line of Carducci’s is true: ‘Zeus dies and the poet’s hymn remains.’67 The content of art is classified according to the variety of interests

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that it presents. This is what distinguishes comedy from tragedy, figure painting from landscape, and so on; all these are not different forms, certainly, but different contents of art.68 And in this way the product of history is also distinguished from other products of art, which is the point I wanted to reach by my long discussion. History, as compared with other products of art, deals with what is of historical interest, not with what is possible but with what has really happened.69 And it relates to the complex of artistic production as the part to the whole, as the representation of what has really happened to that of the possible.70 Now in the current sense of the word, we call art only that activity which is directed at representing the possible. And for my part, I see no problem in accepting this use of the word ‘art,’ in the strict sense, as long as this goes along with the consciousness that history – the representation of what has really happened – is, at bottom, also essentially an artistic process and has an interest equally artistic. With that we come to distinguish history from art in the strict sense.71 Interest in history is so widespread, however, that it gives rise to enormously abundant productivity and employs a great many people. The material scope of historical production equals and perhaps surpasses that of the artistic. This is the source of the popular confusion that treats artistic activity and historical activity as two activities of equal importance, such that one cannot be subordinated to the other. But clearly, one is a question of scope, the other of nature. On the other hand, what is interesting historically often does not have broad human interest as well, and this produces another apparent conflict between the content of art and that of history – a conflict that does not exist when one gets to the bottom of it. I cite these popular confusions because they often appear even in works by serious scientists – not in their popular form, of course, but as psychological motives for theoretical mistakes.72 5. The Concept of History and Historical Studies The result of what has been said is that history may be defined as the type of artistic production that takes what has really happened as the object of its representation. From this definition it follows that historical accuracy is an absolute and indispensable duty of the author of history. Just as an artist may not lapse into the false, so the historian may not lapse into the imaginary. To achieve honesty and avoid falsity, the artist usually completes a series of preparatory works, generally summed up in what is called the spirit of observation, which often does its work unconsciously.73

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But in other artists the preparatory efforts are, in a straightforward and conscious way, special studies of psychology, society, anatomy, physiology, and so on. Likewise, before moving on to representation, before the narrative, the historian needs to check the material to be presented. His preparatory efforts are called research, criticism, interpretation, and historical understanding: they succeed to one degree or another, sometimes achieving their full effect and sometimes not. They produce an enormous amount of writing, and works of narrative history seem to be a small minority in comparison to them.74 Now these preparatory efforts, are they history? Just to state the question answers it: surely not. In current usage we call them works of history, but doing research to find out which German or Latin components contributed to the birth of the Italian commune or to establish the part that Mary Stuart played in Darnley’s murder, investigating the historical value of Tacitus or proving the inauthenticity of Matteo Spinelli’s Diurnali – these are not history, strictly speaking, just as the artist’s collection of notes and observations, or his palette, whatever precious ingredients it may contain, is not a work of art.75 The first condition for having real history (and thus a work of art) is the possibility of constructing a narrative. But constructing a complete narrative is something that seldom happens, and for this reason the definition of history that we have given represents an ideal that the historian can very rarely attain. In most cases, only preparatory studies or a fragmentary account can be offered, and these are constantly muddled by disagreements, doubts, and reservations.76 We can point to many pages of completed history but few of genuine history – and perhaps no extensive work.77 This lies in human imperfection and the limitations imposed on our actions by chance. But it cannot prevent our loudly proclaiming what the ideal of history must be, even though achieving it in full is plainly impossible. For we would have no need to distinguish ideal from real if the ideal were to coincide with reality. Not coinciding with reality deprives the ideal of none of its value, nor is any person exempt from making every effort to achieve the ideal, or, at least, to strive for it longingly. ‘God must write the real story,’ says Friedrich Schiller’s Don Carlos at a certain point, and Faust told the pedant Wagner that ‘the book of the past is sealed with seven seals.’78 Now and then we can break a seal and read a passage of that book which is never fully communicated to us. The ideal of art is likewise not easily attained, but the conditions required for it depend less on chance and external causes, which is why art (in the strict sense) leads to complete creations more often than history.79

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When some historians – and it is them that Droysen correctly treats as pseudo-historians, defining their works as rethorische Kunst – face the artistic need for complete creation, they fill the voids that remain in their knowledge of reality with imaginings that are not even conjectures, or at least are not presented as such. Renan often does this: from his books and those of other historians, the French especially – eloquent writers, to be sure, and very talented – one can take various typical examples of the invasion of history (the art of what really happened) by art (in the strict sense: representation of the possible). From what I have been saying, it is clear how misplaced are the fears of the corporation of historians (to use Buckle’s phrase): that affirming the artistic essence of history takes something away from its accuracy and rigour. As usual, I make Bernheim the spokesman for these fears: ‘It is only a traditional prejudice that makes one say that history is an art, or rather science and art at the same time, a prejudice that must be opposed with all our might because it damages the rigorously scientific practice of history.’80 Nothing of the kind! Asking whether history is science or art has, in this regard, no practical importance: historians must always complete all those efforts of preparation that Bernheim analyses so minutely and illustrates so learnedly in his valuable treatise. Debating the basis of morality – Hegel once said this, if I am not mistaken – does not mean that there is any doubt about keeping the Lord’s Ten Commandments. Likewise, defining the nature of a work of history does not amount to changing the procedures established by correct historical understanding.81 But in the end, can one deny that all the effort at preparation goes to produce narratives of what happened? And when it has been proved that narrative is not science but art, how is any harm done, may we ask, to the seriousness of history? This brings us to the end of our task, which was to prove that there might indeed be an internal reason for so often connecting the words ‘history’ and ‘art,’ and to show what the connection really is. This task is accomplished by bringing history under the general concept of art.

NOTES 1 Croce read this paper in the 5 March 1893 session of the Accademia Pontaniana; the text followed here is the first edition, Croce (1893). 2 [a] Germany possesses a very rich literature on historiography, like no other

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country. The book by the English historian, E.A. Freeman (1886), The Methods of Historical Study (London: Macmillan), is mediocre in every way, though it has been rather fashionable in recent years. [e] Influenced by Ranke, Edward Freeman (1823−92) was an ideologically liberal medievalist who looked for the Germanic roots of English liberty. [a] Johann Gustav Droysen (1882), Grundriß der Historik (3d ed. Leipzig): 81 ff; [e] Droysen (1808−84) wrote history with a political point, aiming his enormous History of Prussian Politics at the unification of Germany; his influential Grundriß first appeared in 1858 and grew through many editions – see Droysen (1977) – criticizing the prevailing orthodoxy, which was based on Ranke’s views, as philosophically naïve, and dismissing the fashionable positivism of Henry Buckle (see below) as morally bankrupt. [a] We note that Bernheim depends especially on a work by Heinrich Ullmann, ‘Über die wissenschaftliche Geschichtsdarstellung,’ in Von Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift, 4 (1885): 42−54; [e] Despite challenges from Droysen and later from Karl Lamprecht, Ranke’s views – cautious respect, not without theological commitments, for documentary evidence – became dogma for many German historians; in 1889 Ernst Bernheim restated the consensus in his Lehrbuch, which became the standard work. [a] Ernst Bernheim (1889), Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot): 81−90 (‘Das Verhältnis der Geschichte zur Kunst’). [a] Ibid.: 82: ‘That people often call history an art marks the peak of the conceptual confusion that dominates our subject.’ [a] Droysen, Grundriß (1882): 85; [e] Droysen (1977): 483. [a] I have not managed to see the work by Bruno Gebhardt (1885), Geschichtswerk und Kunstwerk: Eine Frage aus der Historik (Breslau: Preuss & Jünger), which Villari mentions briefly in his study, ‘La storia è una scienza?’ published in the Nuova Antologia, 1Feb., 16 April, 16 July (1891). Nor have I been able to make much use of this work of Villari’s (however much its title and opening words might seem to coincide with mine), because, among the various questions of historical method and philosophy of history that it deals with, there is barely a passing mention, here and there, of our problem – not to speak of purposeful discussion of it. [a] In Italy, Antonio Tari (d. 1884) dealt with aesthetics and was well acquainted with German academic ideas, and Vittorio Imbriani (d. 1885) produced some good writing, particularly a sharp, witty, and energetic critique of the aesthetics of the Abbate Fornari. A Hegelian aesthetician in Italy is Nicolò Gallo, author of two works on Idealism and Literature and on The Fine Arts, among others. I need not mention De Sanctis, enormously fertile

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Part II: Translations in aesthetic observation but not systematic, and, in any case, inspired as well by Hegelian aesthetics. Among professional philosophers, we owe to Masci a very laudable study on the Psychology of the Comic. Save for some insignificant omissions, this is what the recent literature on aesthetics (the part that can be taken seriously) boils down to in Italy. But anyone who wants a quick idea of the development of this science in Germany should look at the histories of aesthetics by Zimmermann, Lotze, Schasler, Neudecker, and Hartmann, along with the one just published by the Englishman Bernard Bosanquet. [e] Antonio Tari (1809−84), a friend of De Sanctis and the Spaventa brothers, wrote about philosophy, literature, and music. Father Vito Fornari (1821−1900), a highly placed Neapolitan academic, was active in politics and promoted national unity by way of linguistic unity. The prolific and tempestuous Vittorio Imbriani (1840−86) studied with De Sanctis; although reading Hegel converted him to a politics that put him to the right of the Destra storica, he founded an important journal with Spaventa and Fiorentino. Of the opposite political persuasion was Nicolò Gallo (1849−1907), who taught aesthetics in Rome and held high ministerial and elective posts. The Neo-Kantian Filippo Masci succeeded Fiorentino in Naples: see Fornari (1866), Gallo (1880), Imbriani (1872), (1907), Masci (1889), Tari (1863). For the histories of aesthetics mentioned by Croce, see also Bosanquet (1892), Hartmann (1886), Lotze (1864), Neudecker (1878), Schasler (1872), Zimmermann (1858); and for Hartmann see section 17 of the Introduction. 10 [a] Eduard von Hartmann, Ausgewählte Werke, III: Aesthetik, 1: Die deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1886): 107. 11 [a] Spencer, who will perhaps stand as the symbol of the philosophical mediocrity of our time, has downright childish theories and views about aesthetics. To show how thin his literary and philosophical education is, it suffices to say that he bases the explanation of aesthetic phenomena in great part on the concept of play, which he says that he saw attributed to some German author, ‘whose name I do not recall.’ The author is Friedrich Schiller! Writing a book about aesthetics, how does one manage not to know how much the concept of play (Spiel) occupied the thought of German philosophers at the beginning of the century? For an essay on positivist aesthetics, see Les Problèmes de l’ésthétique contemporaine (Paris: Alcan, 1891) by Guyau. [e] Dante, Vita Nuova, 2: ‘la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice li quali non sapeano che si chiamare’; ‘the glorious lady of my mind, called Beatrice by many who knew not what they called her’: ‘Beatrice’ means ‘she who blesses.’ See Schiller (1967) for the concept of play in The Aesthetic Education of Man.

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Croce, The Concept of Art 12 [a] A triad that has become a bit ridiculous, to tell the truth, ever since it provided Italian titles for several works by the splendid Conti; nonetheless, I take heart and mention it because I cannot resign myself to the fact that windy philosophers need to discredit even the True, Good, and Beautiful. [e] Augusto Conti (1822−1905), not to be confused with Auguste Comte, wrote on philosophy and education, locating the beautiful between the true and the good: see Conti (1872), (1876). 13 [e] For Herbart see the Introduction, section 14. 14 [a] One can get a good look at the controversy, particularly between Nahlowsky and Zimmermann, in the Zeitschrift für exacte Philosophie, 2 (1862): 309−58; 3 (1863): 384−440; 4 (1863): 26−63, 199−206, 300−12. [e] Robert Zimmermann (1825−1904), an Austrian, taught Herbartian philosophy at Prague and Vienna. Josef Nahlowsky (1812−85) was also a Herbartian: see Nahlowsky (1863), Zimmermann (1862−3). 15 [a] Zimmermann (1865), Allgemeine Aesthetik als Formwissenschaft (Vienna: Braumüller); [e] Zimmermann (1858). 16 [a] Attempts at conciliation between formalism and idealist aesthetics are those of Köstlin and Siebeck; [e] see Köstlin (1869), Siebeck (1875). 17 [a] Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik, p. 304: ‘Das verkünstelte Gebaüde eines völlig unfruchtbaren Scharfsinns’; also quite apropos are the observations (pp. 282−3) by which Hartmann means to put the public on guard against the growing ambiguity of the word ‘formalism,’ as if, by opposing idealism, formalism were defending the rights of aesthetic form against abstract content, or else the freedom of art against preconceptions about the value of content, whereas really it is just the reverse. While idealist aesthetics in Italy has produced the criticism of De Sanctis – the most effective declaration of the freedom of art known to me – the practical results of formalism would lead to a petty and academic art criticism. 18 [a] Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen. 19 [a] Ibid.: 72−208. 20 [e] Leibniz to Christian Goldbach, 17 April 1712, ‘Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi’: Leibniz (1734), I, 241. 21 [a] On this, see Hartmann’s acute discussion in the Philosophie des Schönen, pp. 82−6, and elsewhere. 22 [a] Leopardi, Aspasia; [e] Aspasia, a poetic name for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti, is a cycle of five poems written by Leopardi in the early 1830s to express his unrequited love. 23 [a] It helps to remember the poet’s lines: Nur durch das Morgenthor des Schönen Drangst du in der Erkenntniss Land.

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No appearances are neither beautiful nor ugly. But it is possible to leave aesthetics out when considering a given fact, particularly if interests of a different nature are salient for that fact; [e] Schiller, ‘Der Künstler,’ ll. 34−5. [a] In aesthetics, content and form are purely relative terms, as Hartmann (Philosophie des Schönen, p. 33) has proved; one and the same object can be related to a second in the relation of form to content, and to a third in that of content to form. [a] The saying, ‘not bad, for a hunchback,’ would then seem not so peculiar. In his essays on ‘Vito Fornari estetico’? Giornale napolitano di filosofia e lettere, 1872, Imbriani cites a passage from a German comedy in which a character sees an old woman and calls her ‘very beautiful.’ ‘Well, I may be too old,’ she replies, ‘and now I have all these wrinkles …’ ‘That’s exactly why you’re beautiful: because you are the perfect old woman, and the more wrinkles you have, the more beautiful you are.’ [a] In the essay by De Sanctis, ‘La Critica del Petrarca,’ Nuovi saggi critici (1872): 281; [e] Croce cites the 1879 edition. [e] In later editions, Croce changes storia in this sentence to storiografia; on the distinctions among history as past events, as an account of past events, and as a method of producing such an account, see the Introduction, section 14. [a] Bernheim, Lehrbuch, p. 4, ‘Begriff der Geschichtswissenschaft’: ‘Die Geschichte ist die Wissenschaft der Entwicklung der Menschen in ihrer Bethätigung als sociale Wesen.’ [a] Schopenhauer, Die Welt as Wille und Vorstellung, 3.38; [e] Schopenhauer (1859), II, 500−1. [a] Moritz Lazarus, Über die Ideen in der Geschichte: Rectoratsrede am 14 November 1863 in der Aula der Hochschule zu Bern (Berlin: Dümmler, 1872), first published in the Zeitschrift für Völkerspsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, of which Lazarus was one of the directors; [e] Lazarus (1824−1903), influenced by Herbart, was a proponent of comparative psychology (Völkerspsychologie); reacting against metaphysics as well as materialist positivism, he advocated a social and cultural perspective for psychology as a way out of the dead end of introspection; Lazarus (1865) is the first edition. [a] Lazarus, Ideen, pp. 21−3. [a] Antonio Labriola, I problemi della filosofia della storia (Rome, 1887): 45: ‘All the trends and all the scientific studies, which for some time have modernized the traditional writing of history, keep pushing it closer to a considered representation of causes operating individually and collectively in a particular period. As much as history uses science as support and presupposition, however, its function is still always narration and exposition.’

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Croce, The Concept of Art 33 [a] I read this in a review, published four or five years ago in Von Sybel’s Historische Zeitschrift, of Labriola’s work; [e] see n32 above. 34 [a] Wilhelm Wundt, ‘Über Ziele und Wege der Völkerpsychologie,’ Philosophische Studien 4 (1888): 4−5, has this to say about so-called natural descriptive sciences: ‘No scientific researcher today will any longer accept as correct the distinction between a merely descriptive treatment of a given fact and an explanatory account of the same thing. Zoology, botany, and mineralogy, no less than physics, chemistry, and physiology, want to explain the objects of their investigations, and, as much as possible, understand them in their causal relations. The difference lies much more in the fact that the former deal with knowledge of individual natural objects in their mutual dependency, and the latter with knowledge of universal processes of nature.’ 35 [e] in rerum natura: in nature. 36 [e] Don Abbondio, a village priest, is a leading character in I Promessi sposi (1825−42), the novel by Alessandro Manzoni (1785−1873) that established the Tuscan dialect as literary Italian, thus providing a linguistic basis for Italy’s eventual political unification. Manzoni became a major force in Italy’s cultural, religious, and political development. Don Abbondio, who naively and fearfully tolerates wrongdoing and thereby sets the novel on its course, is one of his most memorable characters. 37 [a] Melchiorre Delfico, Pensieri sulla storia e su la incertezza ed inutilità della medesima (3d ed.; Naples: Agnello Nobile, 1814); [e] Delfico (1744−1835), like Croce a southerner, lived long enough to see Italian philosophy move away from the sensism of Condillac and other thinkers of the French Enlightenment, but Delfico himself continued on the path towards materialism. His views on history, which included hostility to Roman law and civilization, were also uncompromising: he believed history to be useless and pernicious. 38 [a] Note the curious resemblance between the first pages of Henry Buckle’s History of Civilization in England and Delfico’s little work. [e] At the other extreme from Delfico, Buckle (1821−62), inspired by Comte, believed that history could derive scientific laws by observing the basic forces of nature and that the scope of such laws extends beyond politics to all aspects of the human condition: see Buckle (1857), I, 1−35. 39 [a] Cf. Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig: 1892), chap. 2, ‘Von den historischen Gesetzen,’ especially pp. 36−8, where he discusses the impossibility of establishing laws of complex events (‘Unmöglichkeit von Gesetzen über Gesammtzustände’); [e] The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1858−1918) wrote about social groups, modern city life, and money.

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Part II: Translations 40 [a] The same sense of scorn comes up in the recent book by Ludwig Gumplovicz, professor at the University of Prague, La Lutte des races: Recherches sociologiques, French trans. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1893): 165−7, 363−78; [e] Gumplovicz (1838−1909), a Polish Jew who taught at Graz in Austria, studied conflict between ethnic groups: see Gumplovicz (1883): 169−72, 366−76. 41 [a] Here it is useful to cite the words found in the introduction to one of the notable recent attempts at historical science, Hermann Paul, Principien der Sprachgeschichte (2d ed.; Halle: Niemeyer, 1886): p.1, saying that he wants to avoid the expression, philosophy of language, because ‘our unphilosophical age detects in it a mild case of metaphysical speculation … But in truth what we have in mind is no less philosophy than physics or psychology.’ Hegel identifies the two terms; see his Philosophie der Geschichte (Berlin, 1848), ‘Introduction,’ section C, pp. 11ff; [e] In later editions, Croce added this note on Buckle’s four laws: ‘What Buckle’s four famous laws were will be recalled: (1) the progress of the human race is the successive extension of the knowledge of the laws of facts; (2) every stage of progress is preceded by the spirit of scepticism; (3) scientific discoveries increase the effectiveness of intellectual powers and correspondingly diminish that of moral powers; (4) the chief enemy of the movement of progress is the defensive spirit. Laws like these (Droysen was right) are found by the dozen every day, and better than any other is this splendid example: ‘the measure of a people’s civilization is its consumption of soap.’’ [e] Hermann Paul (1846−1921) taught historical linguistics, grammar, and lexicography at Freiburg and Munich. 42 [a] See the valuable work by Labriola, I problemi della filosofia della storia, which is perhaps the only thing written in Italy on this topic in the sense stated above. Here I might mention a few previous Italian attempts at a science of history, like those by our Cataldo Jannelli, that refer again to Vico’s fertile views, but I plan to deal with them elsewhere when I have the opportunity. [e] Cataldo Jannelli was a classicist and Egyptologist who defended the usefulness of history in 1817 in a book that invoked Vico’s authority; Jannelli (1832) is a later edition published by Gian Domenico Romagnosi. 43 [e] In later editions, Croce replaced this paragraph, as follows: ‘Having first emerged as inquiry into the laws and meaning of history (Vico, Herder), it confined its speculations about idealist philosophy almost exclusively to the latter of these two problems, and it gets confused with the philosophical presentation of universal history. The classic work in the genre, and the mother of many others like it, is Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Fallen into disrepute and considered ‘quite dead,’ it has come to be restored in recent years as a treatment that covers a series of problems suggested by the

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critical examination of history and historical writing, such as those related to the cognitive development of the historical fact, to the real elements of history, and to the meaning and value of the course of history. And, while expressing my reservations about the possibility of giving life to a specific and coherent science that involves problems of a disparate nature, I have no doubt that the term philosophy – or rather, science, if I may – of history should be assigned only to inquiries of that kind.’ [e] Cesare Lombroso (1835−1909) began the social-scientific study of crime in 1876; when the word ‘criminology’ entered English in the 1890s, Italian sources were credited. [a] Vico said that ‘metaphysics (read here science in general) abstracts the mind from the senses; the poetic faculty must immerse the mind completely in the senses; metaphysics rises up above to universals; the poetic faculty must go down deep to particulars’; [e] Vico (1977): 563. [a] Lazarus, op. cit., especially pp. 15−20, where, among other things, he says that ‘the real historian’s task is to transform certain groups of representations into other representations, neither complete repetition and mere ordering, nor mere segregation and grouping of the material investigated, but free creation from different series of representations that contain the equivalent of the group from which its content has been formed’; cf. Bernheim, op. cit., chap. 6, ‘Representation,’ pp. 511−28. [e] Hamilton (1713) narrates the life of Anthony Hamilton’s brother-in-law, the Comte de Grammont, a nobleman exiled by Louis XIV to the court of Charles II. Sir Peter Lely (1618−80) was working for Charles I by 1647 and later became Charles II’s court painter. Pictures in the museum that opened in 1872 in Bethnal Green (Tower Hamlets) in East London are now in the National Portrait Gallery; London’s Hampton Court Palace is a public museum. (Croce could have seen them when he visited England as a young man.) Jacques-Louis David (1748−1825) became famous for stirring depictions of Roman and Greek heroes before moving on to revolutionary and Napoleonic subjects, long after the Jansenist Charles Rollin (1661−1741) had written his stiff and superficially learned but influential histories of Rome and the ancient world: see Rollin (1738−41). [a] In the work by Villari (La storia è una scienza? pp. 430−2) already cited, where problems are dealt with mostly – and purposely, I believe – from an empirical point of view, I find the following observations: ‘If, in fact, I read an accurate and lively description of an auto-da-fe in Spain or of one of those cruel massacres that took place in the prisons of Paris during the Reign of Terror, I admire the historian’s power and have no need to hear a moral or political disquisition from him. But then we ask again: What is the point

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of all this? What is the purpose of working so hard to summon from the grave persons and peoples who no longer exist?’ (At this point I would say with De Sanctis that anyone who asks this question is like those who want to know what good poetry is and what we learn from it.) Villari concludes with a question: ‘How can history, whose means are so different than those of poetry, ever produce effects on us that are so much alike?’ [e] In later editions, Croce adds the following: ‘Simmel, Geschichtsphilosophie, pp. 82−3, n 1, using a better method, continually makes use of comparisons with art; see also Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft under der Geschichte (Leipzig: Dunker and Humblot, 1883), I, 49−50, 114.’ [a] Schopenhauer, Welt, p. 503. [a] In fact, Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik, pp. 44−61, puts him in the section of his history of aesthetics that deals with abstract idealism. [a] If this claim means, for example, that the artist, presented with the raw material of his observations, completes a process of idealization, then the historian also completes this process. [a] Droysen, Grundriß (1882): 85; [e] Droysen (1977): 483−5. [a] William E.H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (London: Longman, 1865), often reprinted; [e] Lecky (1838−1903) was among the few who tried to emulate Buckle, first in his evolutionary intellectual histories of rationalism and morality, then in a more specialized but very extensive study of the eighteenth century, especially valuable for its treatment of Ireland. [a] Formalist aesthetics also preserves the partition of the classical and the romantic. [a] Chiefly on this point, Lessing’s Laokoon is a remarkably suggestive work; [e] Lessing (1766) argues that painting and poetry can be distinguished by their different objects, which are bodies for painting and actions for poetry; see also Croce (1956): 449−54. [e] This sentence is omitted in later editions. [e] The following sentence is added in later editions: ‘It is important for us to know the laws of reality, though it is not important – it is actually against our interests – to know all the facts, whatever they may be, of reality. [a] Here is a sample of this aesthetics: ‘These laws (the laws of art) direct it to please, to charm, to enchant, and in order to produce these happy effects, it is obliged to respect what people respect, to exalt fine sentiments, and condemn the base, as everyone does,’ and so on. I take this verbiage from a text on ‘La Moralité dans l’art’ in Constant Martha, La Délicatesse dans l’art (Paris: Hachette, 1884): 201; [e] see Martha (1897): 201.

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Croce, The Concept of Art 59 [a] This is the position of Formaesthetik (aesthetics of form) as against all the other aesthetic doctrines included under the term Gehaltsaesthetik (aesthetics of content). 60 [e] The poet and scholar Giosuè Carducci (1835−1907), who first published his Odi Barbare in 1877, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906. Orlindo Guerrini (1845−1916), whose Postuma also appeared in 1877 under the name of Lorenzo Stecchetti, was a follower of Carducci. These champions of realism or naturalism (verismo) in art opposed Manzoni’s influence, described as idealist. A major point of contention was Manzoni’s success in prescribing a single literary language for Italy, which supporters of verismo feared would obliterate regional (especially southern) dialects, the ‘real’ languages of the people: see Carducci (1877), Stecchetti (1877). 61 [a] De Sanctis, ‘L. Settembrini e i suoi critici,’ in Nuovi saggi critici (Naples: 1872): 241−3, in the note; one notes that the sense in which De Sanctis uses the word ‘form’ is significant, differing from ordinary usage and debatable in its appropriateness; cf. Hartmann’s correct observations in Die deutsche Aesthetik, pp. 311−12, and in Philosophie des Schönen, pp. 29−33. 62 [a] Karl Köstlin, Aesthetik (Tübingen, 1869), 1.2.2, pp. 53−62. 63 [a] I say aesthetic as well because it is very frequently the case that art is inspired by spectacles of natural beauty, and then the work of art is a beautiful object reproduced in a beautiful way. But the artistic process stands entirely on this second use of the adjective ‘beautiful.’ Art as art gains nothing from the content that is beautiful for reasons extraneous to art. For a different view, see Zumbini’s essay on Settembrini’s Storia letteraria in his Saggi critici (Naples: 1876): 300−20. 64 [a] In the ‘Preface’ to L’Enfant prodigue; [e] Voltaire (1738), sig. Aivr. 65 [e] Later editions add ‘and seeks total domination of reality.’ 66 [e] La Dame aux camélias, first an autobiographical novel (1848) and then a play (1852) by the younger Alexandre Dumas (1824−95), inspired Verdi’s La Traviata as well as much subsequent criticism; Rabagas (1872), a play by Victorien Sardou (1831−1908), has been less successful with posterity. 67 [a] His sonnet ‘A Dante.’; [e] Carducci (1871): 212. 68 [e] Later editions add ‘roughly distinguished and designated.’ 69 [a] On historical interest, see Labriola, I Problemi della filosofia della storia, pp. 8−9, and Dell’insegnamento della storia (Rome: Loescher, 1876). 70 [a] On differences between the historian’s procedure and the poet’s, see also Lazarus, Ideen, pp. 12−15. The poet and the historian, he says, both take the elements of their creations from what is given empirically. But while the poet is guided only by the principle of aesthetic connection, the historian is also subject to the principle of real causality. And we note that in

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suggesting these differences Lazarus is in some sense under the influence of formalist aesthetics. [a] Capuana, a contemporary Italian critic, while discussing the biography of Gavarni written by Goncourt, writes that ‘it reads as hungrily as a novel: perhaps it is the first sample of what the novel will be in the future, a simple biographical study based on the most intimate documents’: Studi di letteratura contemporanea, 2 series (Catania: Gianotta, 1882): 114. Realistic trends in the art of our times lead straight to the production of works of art that are also works of history, or generally of accurate reporting, at the same time. In the artistic period that we are living through, the real event is gaining ground on the ideal possibility. [e] Paul Gavarni (or Sulpice Chevalier, 1804−66) was a brilliant cartoonist and illustrator whose work in French magazines and novels (especially Balzac’s) became a powerful medium for social criticism. Edmond de Goncourt (1822−96) was a very influential critic and publisher. [e] This sentence is omitted in later editions. [a] On the psychology of the artist, see, in addition to Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen, ‘Die künstelerische Anlage,’ II.8.3, pp. 558−87, the recent work by G. Hirth, Physiologie de l’art (Paris: Alcan, 1892). [e] Through his magazine Jugend, the polycephalous Georg Hirth (1841−1916) promoted the Art Nouveau movement, but he was also close to Ernst Haeckel and prominent in the natural and social sciences: see Hirth (1891). [e] Later additions add a footnote: ‘However alike their methods may be, the difference of objects (the ideally possible for one, what really happened for the other) causes a special difficulty for the historian, different from the artist’s problems. The artist himself establishes the conditions of the reality that he depicts: a character motivated by purely selfish influences, for example. Given this starting-point, through all that follows he can make no change in the reality; he must respect psychological causality, and so on. By contrast, the historian does not establish the conditions of what he represents but must seek them out, and here lies his special difficulty. Given person A and fact B, he must depict them in their motivations, which are not given. From the hundred possible explanations for a given fact, the artist chooses what pleases him (or explains the fact according to the impressions that he gets from it) – what is true subjectively. The historian must choose only what is true – what is true objectively. Here is the source of what is called (with small accuracy) the freedom of the artist as compared to the historian.’ [a] We often use the term history books for works that are no more than learned and reasoned confessions of our ignorance of definite, specific his-

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Croce, The Concept of Art torical facts – ‘minutes of scarcity,’ as poor Vittorio Imbriani used to say; [e] For Imbriani, see nn9, 25 above. Cornelius Tacitus wrote the most important histories of imperial Rome. Communes were forms of civic government in medieval Italy. Matteo Spinelli was a chronicler of the Kingdom of Naples in the thirteenth century. Henry Stuart Darnley, Mary Stuart’s husband and the father of James I, was murdered in 1567 in a plot that involved her next husband, the Earl of Bothwell. 76 [e] Later editions insert the following sentence: ‘The historian watches with “a knitted brow,” as men at dusk beneath a new moon would watch one another, certainly not in the full light of the noonday sun, like the artist’; Dante, Inferno, 15.17−21: … e ciascuna ci riguardava come suol da sera guardare uno altro sotto nuova luna; e sì ver’ noi aguzzavan le ciglia come ’l vecchio sartor fa ne la cruna. Seeing Dante and Vergil, members of a group of souls look at them ‘as one man watches another at dusk beneath a new moon, knitting their brows at us like an old tailor threading a needle.’ 77 [a] Bernheim (Lehrbuch, pp. 84−7) agrees with the observation of this fact, but he explains it differently. A shrewd and learned friend of mine (a professor of philosophy, as it happens) also used to admit to me that he had yet to find a single work of history that satisfied him completely, having come to the conclusion that it is much easier to do philosophy of history than to do history. 78 [a] Goethe, Faust, I, 2.1.222−3: ‘Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln’; [e] Schiller, Don Carlos, 3.10: ‘Dass Menschen nur – nicht Wesen höhrer Art – die Weltgeschichte schreiben!’ 79 [a] On the other hand, artistic creations have their disadvantages when compared to products of history, and here some observations of Labriola (Dell’insegnamento della storia, pp. 43−4) on the educational effect of history are on target: ‘Situations,’ he says, ‘which as history develops are prepared

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Part II: Translations by the encounter of character with the larger or external course of events, are no less effective than poetry in shaping the active and felt participation of the spectator. In fact, history has an advantage over poetry – its ability to excite the emotions with clear, precise, and particular facts, while it is quite difficult for art not to lapse into abstract types, given the rare occasions when a writer reaches that level of perfection, which, in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, makes us admire the naturalness of a perfect psychological causality.’ 80 [a] Bernheim, Lehrbuch, p. 88: ‘… weil es den streng wissenschaftlichen Betrieb der Geschichte schädigt.’ 81 [a] Only on this definition of history (as a work of art) can we rigorously establish the historian’s obligation to make the object of his narrative a well determined, real process of facts, unless we want to end up with a mere enumeration of facts or a work whose only connections are purely chronological and external – a chronicle, in other words, or a handbook. But in practical terms, this is saying nothing new: we constantly use such a criterion to judge one or another work of history to be organic or inorganic, so the only issue is to show justification for this by deriving it from the very nature of history. On another occasion I shall return to this topic.

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16 Benedetto Croce

Logic as Science of the Pure Concept1

I THE PURE CONCEPT, INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT, AND LOGICAL SYNTHESIS A PRIORI 5. Critique of Divisions of the Concept and a Theory of Distinction and Definition Just because they are formations of different kinds, pure concepts and pseudo-concepts do not constitute divisions of the general concept of concept.2 Assuming that they do so would be a grave confusion of terms, not much different from Spinoza’s example of the person who divided the genus dog into the animal dog and the constellation dog, basing this on the fact that poets once said that the celestial dog also ‘barks and bites’ when the implacable sun burns the fields.3 And since we are in the domain of logic, it does no good to make another division of the concept that enjoyed much fame and authority in the past: namely, dividing it into obscure, confused, clear, distinct, and the like – according to different levels of perfection attained by the concept. Such a division can have rough empirical value, and in this sense it may be hard to reject it completely in ordinary discourse, but it has no logical and theoretical value. Obviously, the concept that we are talking about is the complete concept, certainly not the concept interrupted or gone astray along the way. Nonetheless, the aforementioned division has had great historical importance ever since people tried to use it to distinguish the concept, under the name of a clear and distinct thought, from an intuition, as a clear but confused thought, and then to distinguish both from a sensation, impression, or emotion, which was called obscure cognition. People tried, but they never got there; the problem was posed, but it was not solved because the solution came only when it

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was seen that in this case the issue is not three levels of thought, as absolute logicism supposed, but three forms of the Spirit: the forms of thinking or distinction; intuition or clarity; and practical activity or obscurity and naturalness. Logically, the concept does not give rise to distinctions because there exists only one form of the concept, not many. In our Logic, this conclusion is the analog of the one that we reached in the Aesthetic with the theory of the unicity of intuition or expression and the non-existence of special modes of expression (except in an empirical sense, where we are always allowed to establish as many modes or classes of whatever kind we like). When we distinguish forms of the Spirit, after dividing the two main forms, theoretical and practical, and then subdividing the theoretical into intuition and concept, we do not get another subdivision of theoretical forms: intuition and concept are both indivisible forms. The reason for this indivisibility is made clear only by the full development of the Philosophy of the Spirit. Here, by way of suggestion, we can only say that the division of intuition and concept has at its base the division of individual and universal. Since there is no medium quid or ulterius in this, no intermediary, or third or fourth form, and so on, there is likewise no subdivision:4 from the concept of individuality we move to each particular individuality, which is not a concept, and from the concept of the concept we move to the particular act of thinking, which is no longer the simple definition of logical form, but logical form itself made effective. Having ruled out any subdivision of the concept as logical form, we can refer the manifold of concepts only to the variety of objects that come to be thought in that form. The concept of goodness is not the concept of beauty, or rather, both concepts are a single act logically, but the aspect of reality that the first designates directly is not the aspect designated by the second. Still, in circumstances where the concept would have to supply the universal, it may be asked how we ever get so many universals, so many different forms of reality, so many distinct concepts (passion, will, morality, fantasy, thinking, and so on) by working out reality as universal through the concept. If this variety were not overcome and could not be overcome by the concept, we would have to conclude that the real universal is not attainable by thinking, and we would have to turn to scepticism or at least to that peculiar form of logical scepticism that makes an act of real life – a mysticism with no logical translation – out of the consciousness of unity. The distinction of concepts, deprived of unity, is apartness and atom-

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ism, and surely it would not be worth the trouble to leave the manifold of representations if we were then to fall back into the manifold of concepts. The one no less than the other would be subject to a progressus in infinitum.5 Who could ever say that the concepts discovered and listed were all the concepts? If there are ten of them, why could there not be twenty, a hundred, or a hundred thousand, if we took a closer look? For that matter, why will there not be as many concepts as representations – an infinity of them? With perfect coherence, Spinoza counted two attributes of substance – thinking and extension – without any intermediary between them, while acknowledging that the attributes of substance must be considered infinite in number, even though those are the two known to us.6 The concept needs and demands that this manifold be negated, then, and in return we affirm that the real is one because the concept by which we know it is one; the content of thinking is one because its form is one. But here is what happens when we meet this demand: we fall into another error because we throw away distinctions, and the unity obtained thereby is an empty unity, without organic character, a whole without parts, something simple beyond representations and therefore ineffable, and so we return to mysticism by another route. A whole is a whole only because, and insofar as, it has parts – indeed, it is parts. An organism is what it is because it has, and is, organs and functions. A unity is thinkable only insofar as it has distinctions in it and is the unity of the distinctions. Unity without distinctions is just as repugnant to thinking as distinction without unity. It follows from this that both are necessary and that the concept’s distinctions entail neither negating the concept nor that something falls outside the concept; rather, distinctions are the concept itself understood in its truth, the one-as-distinct, which is one only because it is distinct and distinct only because it is one. Unity and distinction are correlative and therefore inseparable. But distinct concepts, constituting unity by their distinction, cannot be infinite in number because otherwise they would be equated to representations, nor can they be numerically finite and yet located on the same plane and capable of being arranged in one grouping or another without altering their being. In other words, by way of example, the Beautiful, True, Useful, and Good do not constitute the first steps in a numerical series, nor may they be distributed arbitrarily by putting the Beautiful after the True, for instance, or the Good before the Useful, or the Useful before the True, and so on. Their arrangement is necessary because they imply one another reciprocally, meaning that we defi-

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nitely do not apply the determination of finite number to them because number is entirely incapable of expressing such a relation. Numbering means being presented with objects that are separate from one another, whereas in this case we are presented with concepts that are distinct but inseparable. The second of them is not just second but also first, in a certain sense, and the first is not only first but, in a certain sense, also second. When we deal with these concepts, we cannot avoid using numerical terms because of the needs of communication. We cannot avoid talking about ten categories of the intellect, for example, or three modes of the concept, or four forms the Spirit. But in this case, numbers are mere symbols, and beware of understanding the objects counted by them as if they were ten sheep, three cows, and four calves. This relation of distinct concepts in the unity formed by them can be compared to the spectacle of life, where every fact stands in relation to all other facts, and while the fact that comes later is different from the one that comes before, it is also the same. The reason is that the consequent fact contains the antecedent, just as the antecedent fact, in a certain sense, contained the consequent virtually and was what it was precisely because it was equipped with the ability to produce the consequent. We call this a history. Consequently – continuing the comparison in this terminology – we can call the relation of distinct concepts in the unity of the concept an ideal history, and people have called it that.7 We then call the logical theory of such an ideal history a theory of levels of the concept, just as real history is conceived as a series of levels of civilization. And since the theory of levels of the concept is the theory of distinction, and since distinction is not something different from unity, it is clear that such a theory can be separated from the general doctrine of the concept – being substantially identical with it – only for pedagogical convenience. Metaphors and comparisons (let me repeat) are metaphors and comparisons: as it always happens when we talk, the risk of misunderstanding noted above goes along with the usefulness of such devices for purposes of discussion. To avoid this risk, but without rejecting the benefits of those modes of expression, it will be well to insist on this: that the historical series wherein distinct concepts seem to be linked is ideal – eternal, beyond space and time – so it would be wrong to think that in some smaller fragment of reality, in some one of its more fleeting moments, one of its levels is to be found without the other, the first without the second, or the first and the second without the third. We must also take account here of the pedagogical convenience, which, with the aim of shedding light on the distinction, sometimes leads us to describe one

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level in relation to another as distinct entities – as if there were a practical person really existing alongside the theoretical person, or the poet alongside the philosopher, or the work of art standing on its own, apart from the work of reflection, and so on. Although a fact of history can, in some sense, be considered existentially distinct in time and space, the levels of the concept are not existentially (and temporally and spatially) distinct. The opposite error, but no less grave, would be to conceive of the levels of the concept as distinct only abstractly and thus to make abstract concepts out of distinct concepts. The abstract distinction is unreal, whereas the distinction that we are dealing with here is real. And (speaking here of the concept) its reality is just ideality, not abstraction. In each smaller fragment of life, in the so-called physical atom of the physicists or the psychic atom of the psychologists, we find the universal and thus all forms of the universal; we find the concept, and therefore all the distinct concepts. But each of them stands as distinct in that unity – in such a way that a human person is human insofar as he affirms all his actions and his whole humanity, and yet he cannot do so except by being specified as a scientist, politician, poet, and so on. The thinker cannot think reality except in its distinct features, and only in that way does he truly think it in its unity. A work of art and a work of philosophy, an act of thinking and an act of will, are surely not things that the hand can hold and the finger can point out. Only in a rough and practical sense can we say that this book is poetry and that one is philosophy, that this action is a theoretical act or a practical act, a utilitarian act or a moral act. We obviously understand that the book is also philosophy and that the act is indeed practical as well, just as the other one is useful and also moral and theoretical too – and likewise the reverse. But to be precise, except by thinking distinctly about its features, we cannot think this or that fact and recognize it as an affirmation of the whole Spirit. This is what establishes the possibility of a critique of art conducted on the rigorous criterion of aesthetics, for example, or of a moral judgment that deals purely with the individual’s moral action, and so on. Here too, then, in this case as in the one before, we need to be careful not to push the comparison with history too far by introducing into it divisions just as rigorous as those involved in the concept. If distinct concepts are not entities, entities are not distinct concepts: a fact cannot be located, in regard to another fact, in the relation that holds between one level of the concept and another, and this is precisely because all determinations of the concept are in every fact, and because one fact, in

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regard to another, is not a conceptual determination. Distinct concepts can be converted into simple abstract concepts, without doubt, but only when taken in an abstract way, detached from one another, lined up and coordinated by an active mental choice that also employs pure concepts of its own. In that case, distinct concepts change into pseudo-concepts, and the feature of abstraction belongs to the latter, not to distinct concepts as such, which, in their being distinct, are always a unified whole and therefore concrete. In works on logic we encounter other forms of concepts, like those called identical (which clearly they cannot be, except as synonyms or words); and dissimilar concepts (which are the same as distinct concepts insofar as they are in a relation which is not really that of distinction itself and hence is arbitrary, so that such concepts, presented without the required intermediaries, cannot be linked up and are dissimilar); and the double class of simple, primitive concepts along with the derived and composite (a division that does not occur with pure concepts, which are always simple and primitive, never composite and derived). But the distinction between concepts as universal, particular, and singular deserves some discussion. In this connection, our first observation has to be that concepts which are only universal or only particular or only singular or that lack any such determinations cannot be thought. Universality signifies just that the distinct concept as a whole is the sole concept of which there is a distinction and which is constituted from its distinctions. Particularity signifies that the distinct concept is in a determinate relation with another distinct concept. And singularity means that it is wholly itself in this particularity and universality. Hence, the distinct concept is always singular and therefore universal and particular. And the universal concept would be abstract if it were not altogether particular and singular. In every concept there is the concept as a whole and thus all other concepts, yet it is that determinate concept just the same. Beauty is spirit (universality), for example, theoretical spirit (particularity), and intuitive spirit (singularity), or rather it is all of spirit as intuition. As a result of the distinction into universal, particular, and singular, it is self-evident that inclusion and extension stand in inverse proportion, as they say, because this just repeats in a different form that the universal is universal, the particular particular, and the singular singular. The distinction of universality, particularity, and singularity is interesting because the doctrine of definition is based on it: we cannot define, or think, the concept except by thinking its singularity (originality or peculiarity), nor can this be done except by determining

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its particularity (relation with other distinct concepts) and universality (relation with the whole). Conversely, it is not possible to think universality without determining its particularity and singularity; otherwise, it would be empty universality. Distinct concepts are defined by means of the one concept, and the one by means of those that are distinct; when understood in this way, this doctrine of definition also reduces to that of the nature of the concept. But the theory of distinct concepts and their unity still seems to produce something irrational. If it is true that distinct concepts constitute an ideal history or series of levels, it is also true that there is a first and a last in this history or series; there is a concept a to open the series, and to close it let us posit the concept d. Now because the concept is unity in distinction and can be compared to an organism, it is necessary that it should have no other beginning but itself and that no one of its distinct terms should be an absolute beginning. In the organism, in fact, no member has priority over the others, and each one is reciprocally first and last. But it is true that the symbol of the linear series is inadequate to the concept, for which the circle works better, a and d functioning at various times as first and as last. As ideal eternal history, distinct concepts are an eternal cycle and recurrence, where a, b, c, d arises from d with no possibility of a halt or rest, and where each one – whether a or b or c or d – can be designated first or last at various times even though it cannot change function and position.8 By way of example, in the Philosophy of the Spirit one can say – and be equally right or wrong – that the Spirit’s final end or terminus is knowing or doing, art or philosophy, because in reality none of these forms in particular is the end, only the totality of them, or rather only the Spirit is the end of the Spirit. We thereby remove the reasonable difficulty that might still arise in this area. The difficulty is removed even more effectively, and the whole doctrine of the distinction and definition of pure concepts developed here is clarified, standing out in sharper outline, when we observe the alteration (which I will not call inversion or perversion) of this doctrine as reflected in the doctrine of pseudo-concepts. This doctrine has its own legitimacy and use for certain distinctions that the doctrine of pure concepts rejects as contrary to logic or without importance. For example, we understand how and why discussion of identical concepts will proceed there, enabling us, in the domain of will, to define one and the same thing, or one and the same non-thing, in a different way, thus giving rise to two or more concepts, which, in virtue of the identity of their content, are identical. The concepts of a figure

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that has three angles and of a figure that has three sides are identical concepts, both referring to the triangle; the concept of 3 x 4 and that of 6 x 2 are identical, both being definitions of the number 12; the concept of a domestic feline animal and that of a domestic animal that eats mice are identical, both being definitions of the cat. This also explains how and why that doctrine will talk about primary and derived, simple and composite concepts. By shaping certain concepts and using them to shape others, judgment comes to posit the first as simple and primitive with regard to the second, which are then considered composite or secondary. We have already shown that the arbitrary concept, as distinct from the pure concept, necessarily duplicates itself into the arbitrary doublet of the empirical and the vacuous, giving rise to formations of two different types, empirical concepts and abstract concepts. Empirical concepts have this feature, that in them unity is outside of distinction and distinction outside of unity. If this were not so, and the two determinations interpenetrated, those concepts would certainly be not arbitrary but necessary and true, as already shown. When the distinction has been located outside of unity, any division posited for it is arbitrary, just like concepts of the same kind. And any enumeration is arbitrary because such concepts can be multiplied to infinity. In place of distinctions of pure concepts, which are rationally determined and completely unified, pseudo-concepts present manifold groupings, formed arbitrarily, and sometimes also unified in a single group that embraces the knowable as a whole, but in a way that does not exclude other infinite modes. In these groupings, empirical concepts simulate the organization of pure concepts by reducing the particular to the universal – locating a certain number of concepts under another one. But we can by no means think of these subordinate concepts as actualizations of the basic concept, developing out of one another and returning into themselves. Thus we are forced to leave them juxtaposed to one another in simple coordination. The schema of subordination and coordination with its associated spatial symbol (the symbol of classification) – a straight line intersected in the centre and from above by another straight line perpendicular to it, with other perpendiculars descending from it and thus in parallel – provides, by contrasting with the circle, the clearest and most visual demonstration of the deep difference between the two ways of proceeding. It will always be impossible to arrange a nexus of pure concepts in that classificatory schema without falsifying them. And by analogy, it will always be impossible to transform empirical concepts into a series of levels without destroying them.

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As a consequence of that schema of classification, definition – which in pure concepts has the three moments of universality, particularity, and singularity – has only the two called genus and species in empirical concepts, and, as the little rule commands, we make the definition through a proximate genus and the specific difference.9 Actually, the purpose is to record and surely not to think and understand a determinate empirical formation; this is the consequence of locating it by indicating what stands above and what stands alongside it. Hence, the ‘five terms’ used since antiquity to better determine the object by defining it – genus, species, difference, property, and accident – are just arbitrary notions added to one another or subtleties and stupidities on which words should not be wasted.10 Just as it would be barbaric to apply the classificatory schema to pure concepts, it would also be barbaric in the opposite way to define pure concepts by way of features – by mechanical aggregates of properties. So if we forget what the real purpose of empirical concepts is, and if we are captured by the desire to develop them rationally and overcome the atomism of the classificatory schema and the extrinsic definition, we are led to refine them into abstract concepts in which that schema and that mode of definition are really overcome, so that the classification becomes a series (a numerical series, a series of geometrical forms, and so on) and the definition becomes genetic. And yet this improvement not only dissolves empirical concepts, and thus is a death (like the death that they meet in real knowledge, when we turn away from them and ascend to pure thinking) and no kind of improvement, it also substitutes emptiness for empiricism. The series and the genetic definition no doubt respond to needs of the practical spirit, but they provide no truth at all, as we know, not even the truth that may lie at the bottom of an empirical concept – or a mutilated and falsified representation. Here as elsewhere, then, empirical concepts and abstract concepts disclose their clashing one-sidedness and help us understand the value of the unity that they shatter; the value of the distinction that is not classification but a circle and a unity; the value of the definition that is not a mechanical aggregate of data from intuition; the value of the series that is a complete series; the value of the genesis that is not an abstract genesis but rather an ideal one. 6. Opposition and Principles of Logic If the character of distinct concepts – namely, unity in distinction and distinction in unity – seems to have been determined satisfactorily by

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what I have said above, and if I have removed the doubts about the unity that the concept affirms – not in spite of distinction but by way of it – then a new difficulty arises when we consider that set of concepts called opposites or contraries. That opposites are not distincts or simply reducible to them is clearly seen as soon as we recall examples of both. In the system of the Spirit, practical activity will be distinct in relation to the theoretical, and utilitarian as well as ethical activities will be sub-distinctions of practical activity. But the contrary of practical life is practical inactivity, the contrary of utility is harm, and the contrary of morality is immorality. Beauty, truth, utility, and the morally good will be distinct concepts, but we quickly realize that ugliness, falsity, uselessness, and wickedness cannot be added or inserted among them. And that is not all. Looking still more closely, we perceive that the reason why the second series cannot be added to the first, or mixed in with it, is that each contrary term already inheres in its own contrary and accompanies it, as darkness goes along with light. Beauty is what it is because it negates ugliness, good because it negates evil, and so on. The opposite is not positive but negative, and, as such, it goes along with the positive. This different nature of opposites in relation to distincts is also reflected in the logic of the empirical, in the theory of pseudo-concepts, because this logic, even though it reduces distinct concepts to species, nonetheless refuses to treat opposites in the same way. Hence, this logic will never say that the genus dog divides into species of living dogs and dead dogs, nor that the genus moral person is divided into species of moral and immoral persons. When divisions of this sort occur, a mistake has been made, and it is an error even within the compass of this logic because the species can never be a negation of the genus. Therefore, even empirical logic seems to confirm, in its own way, that opposite concepts are different from distinct concepts. Yet it is equally clear that we cannot be content to list opposite concepts alongside distinct concepts, since in this way we would be applying unphilosophical procedures in the field of philosophy, and we would fall into bad logic or empiricism in the philosophical theory of our Logic. If the unity of the concept is simultaneously its own self-distinction, how can that same unity ever have another type of division or self-distinction – which is self-opposition – parallel to it? If it is not conceivable to merge one into the other and make opposite concepts distinct or distinct concepts opposite, it is no less inconceivable to leave the distinct and the opposite concepts, unmediated and unjustified, within the unity of the concept.

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To solve this problem, it helps to start by digging deeper into the difference between the two orders of concepts. Distinct concepts are distinguishable in unity: reality is their unity and likewise their distinction. The human person is thinking and action, indivisible but distinguishable forms, such that insofar as we think, action is negated, and insofar as we act, thinking is negated. But opposites are not distinguishable in this way. The person who commits an evil action, if he really is doing something, surely does not commit an evil action but performs an action useful to him. The person who thinks a false thought, if he is accomplishing anything real, does not think the false thought – indeed, does not think at all – but rather goes on living and looking after his own convenience, or generally some benefit that he cares about at that instant. Thus we see that opposites, when taken as distinct moments, are no longer opposed but now distinct. And in that case they keep their negative labels only metaphorically, whereas strictly they deserve to be called positive. Because the inattentive eye does not see the treatment of opposition turning into the treatment of distinction, we must not mistake opposition for a distinction at the heart of the concept; in other words, we must resist any distinguishing of the opposition, declaring it merely abstract. So true is this that once opposite terms are taken as distinct, the one becomes the other and both evaporate into nothing. In that regard, disputes brought about by the opposition between being and non-being, and the unity of them both in becoming, are celebrated.11 It is known that being, thought of as pure being, has been recognized to be the same as non-being or nothing; and then that nothing, thought of as pure nothing, is the same as pure being. Accordingly, the truth has been found in neither of them but in the becoming where both exist – but as opposites and therefore indistinguishable. Becoming is being itself, which has non-being within itself and thus is also non-being. We cannot think of being in relation to non-being as we think about the form of the Spirit or of reality in relation to another form. In the latter case, there is unity in the distinction, in the former a restored or rectified unity, reasserted against emptiness – against the empty unity of mere being and mere non-being, or against the mere sum of being and non-being. The two moments must certainly be synthesized when our polemic turns against the abstract thinking that divides them. Taken in themselves, however, they are not two moments joined in a third, but only one moment, the third (and even in this case the number is a symbol), which is the indistinguishability of the moments. Thus it happens (let me say in passing) that Hegel, to whom we owe the polemic against emp-

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ty being, was not satisfied in this encounter either with the words, ‘unity’ and ‘identity,’ nor with ‘synthesis’ nor the other term, ‘triad,’ and he was happier to indicate opposition in unity as the objective ‘dialectic’ of the real.12 Still, no matter what word we prefer to use, the thing is what we have called it: the opposite is not the distinct of its opposite but is an abstraction from true reality. If this is how it is, the duality and parallelism of distinct concepts and opposite concepts no longer survive. Opposites are the concept itself – and thus the distincts themselves – each of them in itself insofar as it is a determination of the concept and insofar as it is conceived in its true reality. The reality whose concept is worked out by logical thinking is not immobile being or pure being but opposition; the forms of reality that the concept thinks in order to think reality in its full measure are in themselves opposed. Otherwise, they would not be forms of reality or would not exist at all. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’: beauty is what it is because it has ugliness in it, the true because it has the false in it, and the good it because it has evil in it: the way forward (as Jean Paul used to say) is a ‘continual decline.’13 If we take the negative term away, as is customary when proceeding abstractly, the positive also vanishes, but this is just because we have removed the positive itself along with the negative. When we talk about negative terms, or about non-values and therefore non-beings, as entities, in reality we are talking about entities by adding to the assertion of a fact the expression of a desire – namely, the desire for another existence to arise beyond that existence. ‘You are dishonest,’ meaning to say, ‘you are a person who sees to his pleasure’ (a theoretical judgment) ‘but you need to be (no longer a judgment, but the expression of desire) something more and bend yourself to the universal ends of reality.’ Consider this example, ‘You have written an ugly verse,’ as meaning that ‘you have seen to doing this quickly and taking a rest, meaning that you have performed an economical action’ (theoretical judgment), ‘but you also need to perform an aesthetic act’ (judgment no longer, but expression of desire). And so on with other examples. But each person has evil in him because he has good in him. Satan is not a creature extraneous to God, nor is Satan even God’s minister, but rather God himself. If God did not have Satan in him, he would be food without salt, an abstract ideal, a mere ought-to-be that is not, hence impotent and useless. It was not without profound meaning that the Italian poet who sang of Satan as ‘rebellion’ and ‘the avenging force of reason’ ended by exalting God as ‘the highest vision to which people ascend in the strength of their youth,’ and as ‘the sun of lofty minds and passionate

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hearts.’14 He corrected and integrated one abstraction by the other and thus unconsciously achieved truth in its fullness. Thinking, inasmuch as it is life as well (the life that is thinking and thus the life of life), and also reality (the reality that is thinking and thus the reality of reality), has opposition in it, and for this reason it is affirmation and negation at the same time. It affirms only by negating and negates only by affirming. But it affirms and negates only by distinguishing because thinking is distinction, and we can distinguish (truly distinguish, not make a rough separation as we usually do with pseudoconcepts) only by unifying. Anyone who thinks about his own nexus of affirmation/negation and his own nexus of unity/distinction has before him the problem of the nature of thinking – indeed, the nature of reality. And he ends up seeing that the two are not parallel or dissimilar but that they are unified by turns in unity/distinction, understood not as simple abstract possibility or desire or an ought-to-be but as effective reality. Now if we want to posit that thinking is of this nature in that it is effective reality under the form of law (a form that we know to be entirely one with the form of the concept, even though we often prefer to use it for pseudo-concepts), we could only say that the law of thinking is a law of unity and distinction, and therefore that it is expressed in this double formula, that A is A (unity) and A is not B (distinction). This double formula is precisely what we call the law or principle of identity and contradiction. It is quite wrong or rather quite misleading, mainly because it lets us suppose that the law or principle stands outside or above thinking as a control and guide, whereas the guide is thinking itself. Moreover, it has the additional defect of not being very clear about the unity of identity and distinction. But these faults may not be too great, either because misunderstandings can be clarified or for the different reason (which we will not tire of repeating) that all formulas – all words, in fact – provide some scope for misunderstanding. The fault is much more grievous when the principle of identity and contradiction is formulated and understood not to mean that A is not B but to mean that A is A alone and definitely not not-A, its opposite, as well. Understood in this way, it leads directly to placing the negative moment outside the positive, non-being outside of or confronting being, and then to the absurd conception of reality as immobile and empty being. Against this perversion of the principle of identity and contradiction, people have devised and enforced a different law or principle whose formula is A is at the same time not-A, or rather everything is contradicted

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in itself. This is a necessary and prudent reaction against the one-sided manner of interpreting the foregoing principle. But this in turn carries the defect of all reactions because it seems to rise up against the first law as an irreconcilable rival, destined to usurp its place. In the first formula is a duality of principles, which, as I have said, is logically insupportable. In the second is a flaw of the opposite kind, the total loss of the criterion of distinction. The consequence of the false extension of the principle of identity and contradiction is the false extension of the dialectical principle. To tell the truth, this false extension has also been manifest in a way that might be called arbitrary twice over – namely, in that we have engaged in giving dialectical treatment to empirical and abstract concepts where the dialectic is inapplicable because the anti-dialectical and the static are their very reason for being. This is why people have played the game of making a dialectic out of the vegetable negating the mineral, society negating the family, or even Rome negating Greece and Germany negating Rome, or the surface negating the line, time negating space, and the number two negating the number one. But this mistake is part of another, more general mistake that I shall deal with in its place when I discuss philosophism.15 At this point, it is important for us to mark only that false extension of the dialectic that tends to absorb distinct concepts into itself and thus destroy them by treating them as opposites. Distinct concepts, as such, are distinct and not opposite, and they cannot be opposites because they already take opposition into themselves. Aesthetic imagination has its opposite in itself, imaginative passivity, and it is the ugly; hence, it is not the opposite of thinking, which, in turn, has in itself its own opposite, logical passivity, anti-thinking, the false. As has been noted, to the extent that anyone who does not produce the beautiful does anything (and it is impossible for anyone not to do something), it is certain that he actually produces a different value – the useful, for example. And when someone who does not think does something, he too produces a different value, something imaginary, for example, by creating a work of art. But in this way we escape from those determinations considered in themselves, from the opposition that is in them, and that is those same determinations. And from considering actual opposition we pass on to considering distinction. When it is conceived as real, the opposite can only be the distinct. But the opposite is exactly the unreal in the real and definitely not a form or level of reality. Unless one distinct is opposed to another distinct, we shall say that we do not see how there is any pass-

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ing from one to the other. But this is a confusion between concept and fact, between ideal moments – eternal moments of the real, therefore – and existential manifestations of reality. Existentially, the poet does not become a philosopher except when something contradicting his poetry takes shape in his spirit, specifically when he feels dissatisfied with the particular and with the particular intuition. But he does not pass over into philosophy at that moment; he is already a philosopher because the passing, the actual being, and the coming-to-be are synonyms. In the same way, the poet does not pass from one intuition to another, from one work of art to another, unless a contradiction takes shape inside him, making the earlier work no longer satisfying for him. Then he passes on, or becomes a different poet and really is a different one. This passingover is the law of all life, and therefore it exists in all the existential and contingent determinations of each of life’s forms. From one verse of a poem we pass on to another because the first verse is both satisfying and not satisfying. Ideal moments, by contrast, do not pass into one another because they are in one another eternally, each one distinct and united with the other. On the other hand, the violent extension of the dialectic to the distincts and the unlawful perversion of them into opposites, motivated by a lofty but misguided yearning for unity, has been punished at the scene of the crime because the desired unity has not been attained. The nexus of the distincts is circular, and thus it is true unity. Extending the opposites to the forms of the Spirit and reality, however, would not produce the circle that is true infinity, but the progressus in infinitum that is false or bad infinity.16 In fact, if opposition determines the passage from one ideal level to another, from one form to another, if this is the sole character and supreme law of the real, by what right may we set down an ultimate form where that passage would no longer take place? The Spirit, to choose an example, moves from an impression or emotion and passes on dialectically to intuition, and, by a new dialectical passage, to logical thinking: by what right should it find rest in this at last? Why (following the lead of such philosophies) should the thinking of the Absolute or the Idea provide the terminus of life? In obedience to the eternal law of opposition, which is poorly placed among forms of the Spirit, it would be necessary for the thinking that negates the intuition to be negated in turn, and for the negation to be negated again, and so on to infinity. Actually, this infinite negating goes on, and it is life itself, viewed in representation. But precisely for this reason we do not escape from this bad infinity of representation except by the true infinity that posits the

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eternal at every instant, the first in the last and the last in the first – positing at every instant the unity that is distinction, in other words. It must be acknowledged that the false extension of the dialectic has produced per accidens the excellent result of showing that the manifold of defectively distinguished concepts is unstable, just as there is profit to be had from the devastation and disorder that this extension has wrought on age-old prejudices.17 But that mistaken dialectic has also promoted the habit of imprecision, negligence, and conceptual clumsiness, sometimes encouraging the fakery of the lightweight minds who have reduced philosophy to a dance and counter-dance of empty abstractions – even though this is per accidens in relation to the vigorous initial instinct of the polemic about dialectic. The form of the law given to the concept of the concept – an incorrect form wholly corrupted by the use made of it by proceeding empirically – has contributed to producing such a conclusion. When the law of identity and contradiction is posited, and when the law of opposition or dialectic is posited alongside it, a duality inevitably appears, since we do not notice that the two laws are nothing more than one-sided forms of an expression of the unique nature of the concept. We could see the real character of the concept expressed instead in a different law or principle, in the principle of sufficient reason, which ordinarily used to be referred to the concept of cause or to pseudo-concepts. However, both because of its inner tendency and also because of its historical origin, it is correct to refer it to the concept of an end or a reason. And it asserts that things cannot be called known by alleging just any cause whatever for them, that what must be produced instead is exactly that cause which is also the end and which is therefore the sufficient reason. And yet to seek out the sufficient reason of things, what else would one mean except to think them in their truth, conceive them in their universality, and posit the concept? In this lies logical thinking itself, as distinct from the representation or intuition that presents things but not reasons, the individual but not the universal. There is no point in dealing with other so-called principles of logic because either they are already in play implicitly or they are trivial and of no interest.

NOTES 1 We have used Croce (1920), the fourth edition of the Logic, whose original form in Croce (1905) was quite different; Croce (1917b), an older English

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2

3 4 5 6 7 8

translation by Douglas Ainslee, is based on the third edition of 1916; the new national edition by Cristina Farnetti is based on the seventh edition of 1947. [e] Croce (1920): 12−25, introduces some of the terminology used in these chapters: ‘The concept, then, is not a representation or a practical mixture or condensation of representations. It arises from representations as something implicit in them that must be made explicit, as a need or a problem whose premises are posited by representations, but the need is one that representations are not in a position to satisfy and cannot even formulate … The proven futility of attempts to do so confirms the need for the science of logic, whose object or problem is precisely that form of the Spirit, that aspect of the real, which is called the concept … Distinguishing the concept from representations has recognized what is legitimate in representation, however, and has assigned it the place of an elementary form of cognition, antecedent to logical form, in the system of the Spirit. Distinguishing the concept from states of mind, from movements of will, and from actions also means recognizing the legitimacy of the practical form of cognition … But by distinguishing the concept from fictions, it seems that these latter have not been recognized as legitimate … A true and proper concept, just because it is not a representation, cannot have a single element of representation as its content, nor can it refer to one particular representation or another, or to this or that group of representations … Completely different are fictive concepts or conceptual fictions because in them either the content is furnished by a group of representations, and even by a single representation, and therefore they are not super-representational, or else they actually have no representable content, and therefore they are not omni-representational … Now thinking that does not have anything real as its object is not thinking, and therefore those concepts are not concepts but conceptual fictions … ‘Conceptual fictions’ is a way of speaking, and no one wants to do battle over ways of speaking. For reasons of brevity as well, however, I will call them pseudo-concepts, and, to assure greater clarity, I will call true and proper concepts pure concepts … Pseudo-concepts, even though the term concept is part of their name, are not concepts and do not constitute a species of concepts.’ [e] Spinoza, Ethics 1, prop. 17, schol. [e]medium quid: something in between; ulterius: something farther on. [e]progressus in infinitum: infinite regress, but inverted. [e]Spinoza, Ethics, 1, def. 6, prop. 9, schol. [e] For ideal eternal history, see Fiorentino’s account of Vico in his first letter to Florenzi Waddington. [e] Like ideal eternal history, ‘eternal cycle and recurrence (corso e ricorso)’

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9 10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17

also comes from Croce’s reading of Vico, about whom he wrote a formative book, while compiling and updating a large bibliography; he saw Vico’s New Science as an avatar of his own Philosophy of the Spirit, of which the Logic is the second part: Croce (1911a), (1911b). [e] For moment as a term of art in Hegel and in Croce, see sections 1 and 4 of ‘What Is Living.’ [e] The ‘five terms’ or quinque voces that Croce lists are the topic of Porphyry’s Introduction, which was one of the first texts to be mastered by students of Aristotelian logic; the Introduction presents a scheme of classification whereby two species within the same genus are made distinct from one another by a difference, so that the difference rational makes humans distinct from other species within the genus animal. [e] For being and non-being in Hegel, see section 1 of Croce’s ‘What Is Living.’ [e] Again, on Hegel’s terminology, see especially section 1 of Croce’s ‘What Is Living.’ [e] Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.i.11; Richter (1903), 1.2.11. Johann Paul Richter (1763−1825), who became famous as Jean Paul, one of the great romantic novelists, first published Levana, or the Doctrine of Education in 1807; Richter (1814) is the second edition. [e] Carducci, ‘Inno a Satana,’ ll.156, 195−6; (1881): 127−37; (1894): 3. [e] Croce (1920): 271−2: ‘The concept is a logical synthesis a priori, a unity of subject and predicate, a unity in distinction and a distinction in unity … Representation without the concept is blind, pure representation, robbed of the light of logic, and it is not the subject of judgment; without representation, the concept is empty. In the act that is called error, where propositions expressing the truth are combined not at all according to their theoretical nexus but by the arbitrary choice of the person who does the combining, that unity can be broken up in a practical way. The first thing that happens, then, is that there is an empty concept: deprived of any internal rule, it fills up with a content that does not belong to it and can be had only by joining with the representation, and it gives itself a false subject … Because it abuses the logical component, we can call this type of error logicism or panlogism or even philosophism, since abuse of the logical element is identical to abuse of the philosophical element.’ [e] On Hegel’s bad infinity see section 3 of Croce’s ‘What Is Living.’ [e] per accidens: accidentally, in the technical sense of ‘accident,’ so ‘not substantially’ or ‘not essentially.’

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17 Benedetto Croce

What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel A Critical Study Followed by an Essay on Hegelian Bibliography1

Notice This little volume appears together with my translation of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences made for the series Classics of Modern Philosophy, published by the same press and edited by me and my friend, Professor Giovanni Gentile. According to the plan of that series, the introductions to each text are of a purely philological nature, excluding any discussion of a criticalphilosophical kind. But I have been unable to resist my desire to put into writing the critical-philosophical introduction to Hegel’s work that has taken shape in my mind – my views on the merits and demerits of Hegel’s philosophy. Naturally, since I had not the least intention of breaking my own rule, I am now publishing this text of mine not as an introduction but as a book standing on its own. This suffices to clarify the purpose, character, and limits of this work. In hopes that the translation of the Encyclopedia, along with these critical inquiries of mine, might help reawaken in Italy the study of a philosophical giant like Hegel, I have added to my text a bibliography of Hegel’s works and studies dealing with them. This grew out of a series of notes made originally for my own use, and it is certainly less than a complete bibliography of Hegel would require, though it is still something more than the bibliographical lists available up to now. Naples 6 March 1906

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1. The Dialectic or the Synthesis of Opposites Hegel is one of those philosophers who took philosophy itself, not just unmediated reality, as the object of his thought, thereby contributing to the establishment of a logic of philosophy. To me, in fact, it seems that the logic of philosophy (with the many results that come from it for solving particular problems and for thinking about life) was the mark at which he aimed his greatest mental effort. In this he found – or brought to completion and made effective – principles of great importance that had been unknown to previous philosophers or were scarcely mentioned by them and can therefore be considered real discoveries of his. This concept of a logic of philosophy is simple enough and should be accepted as incontrovertibly evident, yet it encounters a strange resistance – resistance to philosophy’s proceeding by its own method, in other words, with a theory that must be investigated and formulated. No one doubts that mathematics has a method of its own, studied in the logic of mathematics; that the natural sciences have their method, the source of the logic of observation, experiment, and abstraction; that there is a method of writing history and thus a logic of historical method; that for poetry and for art in general there is a logic of poetry and art, or aesthetics; that there is a method inherent in economic activity which appears later in reflective form in the science of economics; and, finally, that moral activity has its own method, presented in reflective form as ethics (or a logic of will, as it has sometimes been called). But then, moving on to philosophy, a great many people resist what follows: that philosophy too, once it exists, must have a method of its own, which must be defined. On the other hand, very few are surprised when treatises on logic, which give a great deal of space to discussions of mathematical, naturalistic, and historical disciplines, usually pay no special attention to the philosophical disciplines and often move right past them in silence. It is perfectly natural that anyone who rejects philosophy in general, whether from thoughtlessness or mental confusion or eccentricity, should reject a logic of philosophy since one cannot claim to accept the theory of something whose reality has been disallowed. There exists no philosophy, so there exists no logic of philosophy, and that’s the end of it; if this is good enough, enjoy it. But why have I just been talking about a strange spectacle? The reason is that philosophers themselves – or philosophizers, perhaps – too often seem to show themselves lacking any awareness of this ineluctable necessity. One of them asserts that philosophy must follow the abstract-deduc-

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tive method of mathematics; and another sees no way to save it except to stick firmly with the experimental method, dreaming and boasting of a philosophy studied in laboratories and clinics, an empirical metaphysics, and so forth. Finally (and this fashion is the most recent – newly on offer, if not new), the custom now is to recommend an individual and imaginary philosophy produced like art. Hence, all methods (from the compass to the scalpel and eventually the guitar!) seem good for philosophy – except the philosophical. To counter such views, one observation should suffice: namely, that if philosophy is to produce understanding and somehow be the reflective consciousness of art and history, of mathematics and inquiry into nature, of practical and moral activity, it is not clear how it could do so by conforming to the method of one of those particular topics. Looking at a poem, anyone who limits himself to applying the method of poetry will feel within himself the poet’s creation, one determinate work of art or another, but by this route he will not reach a philosophical understanding of poetry. Given a mathematical theory, anyone who limits himself to doing mathematics will be the disciple, the critic, the improver of that theory, but he will not have attained understanding of the nature of mathematical work. If philosophy’s object is not to produce or reproduce art and mathematics and various other human activities but to comprehend (understand) them all, this comprehending itself is an activity with its own method, ingrained or implied, and it is important to make it explicit. However that may be, there is no hope of being able to understand and evaluate Hegel’s work unless one always keeps firmly in mind the problem that I have identified as his chief problem and great problem – the problem central to the Phenomenology of Spirit and the new presentations of this work in the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. A complete account of Hegel’s thought, a deep and critical account, cannot be like almost all histories of philosophy or even the specialized monographs that deal with Hegel – the recent and very extensive treatment by Kuno Fischer, for example.2 It cannot be a summary repetition of the content of his books, awkwardly faithful down to section and chapter divisions. It should be devoted primarily and mainly to his position on the nature of philosophical inquiry and on the differences between such inquiry and other theoretical and non-theoretical forms. Above all, this account should clarify the threefold character assumed by philosophical thinking, according to Hegel, in relation to the three mental modes or attitudes with which it is usually most readily confused. Philosophical thinking for Hegel is (1) concept; (2) universal; and (3) concrete.

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Concept – meaning that it is not feeling or rapture or transcendental intuition or any such psychic state, non-logical and non-demonstrable. This establishes the difference between philosophy and doctrines of mysticism and direct perception. At best, these doctrines have negative value in that they recognize the impossibility of basing philosophy on the method of the empirical and natural sciences, sciences of the finite. They are profound, if you like, but theirs is an ‘empty profundity,’ and they certainly have no positive value. Against mysticism, mania, melancholy, eyes raised to heaven, necks bent, and hands wrung; against swooning, gnomic prophecy, and mystical initiatory formulas, Hegel becomes fiercely satirical, always insisting that philosophy must have a reasoned and intelligible form, that it must be ‘not esoteric but exoteric,’ not the property of a sect but of humanity.3 The philosophical concept is universal, certainly not a mere generality and not to be confused with general representations such as ‘house,’ ‘horse,’ or ‘blue.’ By a usage that Hegel terms ‘barbarous,’ however, these are ordinarily called concepts.4 This establishes the difference between philosophy and the empirical and natural sciences, which are satisfied with types, representative generalities, and aggregates of them. Finally, the philosophical universal is concrete, meaning that it does not consist of arbitrary abstractions; it is not a skeleton of reality but a grasping of it in all its fullness and richness. Philosophical abstractions are necessary, and therefore they are adequate to the real, not mutilating or falsifying it. This establishes the difference between philosophy and the mathematical disciplines. These do not justify their starting points but ‘command them.’ Hence, as Hegel says, one must obey the rule for drawing these lines or those lines correctly, while knowing nothing else except to have faith that this will be something ‘appropriate’ to the process of demonstration. The object of philosophy, by contrast, is what really is, and it must justify itself fully, with no assumption allowed inside itself or left outside itself.5 To elucidate this threefold difference whereby the true concept – the philosophical concept – appears to be logical, universal, and concrete, and to give a full account of it, one would need to pursue lesser issues connected with the first and fundamental problem. Some of these are of the greatest importance, such as reviving the ontological argument (defending St Anselm against Kant), the thesis that in the philosophical concept essence implies existence and is not detached from it as in representations of the particular;6

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such as a doctrine of judgment, which, when treated as the link between subject and predicate, is based on an unanalysed substrate and is thus recognized as unsuited to philosophy, whose true form is that of the syllogism, understood as the complete logical form that reconnects with itself; such as criticizing the theory that posits the concept as a complex of ‘features’ (which Hegel calls the true ‘feature’ of superficiality in ordinary logic);7 such as criticizing divisions by species and classes; such as proving the worthlessness (in our day this may be immediately therapeutic) of every ‘logical calculus’; and other doctrines, no less important. But my purpose in these pages is not to give a complete account of Hegel’s system, not even just his logical teaching. Instead, I shall concentrate all my attention on that part of his thought which is most characteristic, on new features of truth revealed by him, and thus also on errors that he could not eliminate and in which he was complicit, to some extent. Thus, leaving aside the various issues that I have just briefly noted (rebelling against them seems to me impossible, even granted that one must promote education by treating such problems as the philosophical alphabet, now often not learned), I come straight to the point that sparks all the debates and at which the sharp objections of opponents are aimed – Hegel’s treatment of the problem of opposites. If we want to understand the full seriousness and difficulty of this problem, we must have a clear sense of its terms. The philosophical concept – which is a concrete universal, as we have noted – as such, and inasmuch as it concretizes, does not exclude but actually includes distinctions in itself: the concept is the universal, distinct in itself, and it results from those distinctions. As empirical concepts are divided into classes and subclasses, in the same way this philosophical concept has its own particular forms. But rather than being the mechanical aggregate of them, it is the organism in which every form joins closely with others and with the whole. Imagination and understanding are particular philosophical concepts, for example, related to the concept of Spirit or spiritual activity. But they are not outside or beneath Spirit; in fact, they are the Spirit itself in those particular forms.8 One is not separate from the other, then, like two entities, each closed within itself and external to the other; instead, the one passes within the other. Hence, as people commonly say, imagination is the basis of understanding and indispensable to it inasmuch as it is distinct from understanding.

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Yet when our thinking investigates what is real, it faces not only distinct concepts but also opposed concepts that cannot simply be identified with the former nor treated as special cases of them, as a type of the distinct.9 The logical category of distinction is one thing, that of opposition another. Two distinct concepts are connected to one another, as has been said, even in being distinct, while two opposed concepts seem to exclude one another: where one appears, the other totally vanishes. A distinct concept is assumed and lives in the other that follows it in the order of ideas. An opposed concept is destroyed by its opposite: the saying that applies to it is ‘mors tua, vita mea.’10 Examples of distinct concepts are those of imagination and understanding, already mentioned, as well as others that could be added – law, morality, and so on. But examples of opposed concepts come from the many pairs of words that abound in our language, and they are certainly not happy, loving couples. They are antitheses of true and false, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, valued and unvalued, joy and sorrow, activity and passivity, positive and negative, life and death, being and nothing, and on and on. It is not possible to confuse the two series, the distinct and the opposite, which are so strikingly different. Now if distinction does not exclude the concrete unity of the philosophical concept but actually makes it possible, it seems that we cannot think the same about opposition. Opposition gives rise to deep cleavages in the core of the philosophical universal and of each of its particular forms, and to irresolvable dualisms as well. Instead of the concrete universal – the organic reality that thinking seeks – it seems to come up against two universals everywhere, one confronting the other, one threatening the other. This prevents philosophy from achieving its goal, and when an activity cannot achieve its goal, this shows that the goal set for it is absurd, and philosophy itself – all philosophy – is threatened with failure. This reality of this need has caused the human mind to be always troubled by the problem of opposites but without always giving a clear account of its trouble. One solution to which people have constantly clung over the centuries has been to exclude opposition from the philosophical concept by claiming that the dangerous logical category of opposites or contraries does not exist. The facts actually showed the reverse, if truth were told, but facts met with denial, and only one of the two terms was accepted while the other was declared an illusion – or else one term was set apart from the other by an insensible and merely numerical difference, which amounts to the same thing. The logical doc-

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trine of opposites thus constituted is part of the philosophical systems of sensism, empiricism, materialism, mechanism, and whatever else one might call them. Depending on what one likes, thinking and truth have thus become either a secretion from the brain or an effect of association and habit, while virtue has become a mirage of egoism, beauty a distillate of sensuality, the ideal some vague dream of pleasure or caprice, and more of the same. Against this first logical doctrine another one has shown strength over the centuries, setting up the category of opposition as fundamental. It is the doctrine found in the various dualist systems that reassert the antithesis whisked away by the sleight of hand of those who advocate the first system. These systems emphasize both terms, being and non-being, good and evil, true and false, ideal and real, the terms of one series exactly contrasted with those of the other. Against the first doctrine, the dualist view undoubtedly has force, but only polemical force, for denying the denial made by the other position. Intrinsically, the one offers as little satisfaction as the other because where the first sacrifices opposition to unity, the second sacrifices unity to opposition. For thinking, both these sacrifices turn out to be so impossible that proponents of one doctrine seem to keep being converted, more or less consciously, into proponents of the other. Advocates of unity covertly introduce the duality of opposites, calling it a duality of reality and illusion, but an illusion they could dispense with no more than reality, so they often end up saying that in the illusion lies the impulse to live. All advocates of opposition accept some sort of identity or unity of opposites, inaccessible to the human mind because of its imperfection, but needed to conceive of reality. In this way, both sides get tangled up in contradictions and end up openly acknowledging that the problem they set for themselves has not been solved and remains a problem. The reason is that ‘necessary illusion’ and ‘necessary imperfection of the human mind’ are just noises, no matter how hard we try to give them meaning. Accidental and relative illusions, individual and relative imperfections are all we know. A reality beyond reality, a mind beyond the human mind is not conceivable and cannot be a term of comparison. Both reality and mind show us unity as well as opposition. When advocates of unity accept one and advocates of opposition accept the other, they are right in what they accept and wrong in what they deny – as Leibniz said about philosophical systems.11 Hegel never wearied of marvelling at the manly perseverance of every type of materialist, sensist, and monist in asserting the unity of the real. In the dualist types, given the

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historical circumstances in which his thought developed, Hegel found less to marvel at; in fact, he never passed up a chance to register his dislike of them. He never forgot, however, that consciousness of opposition is just as invincible and justified as consciousness of unity. The situation seems hopeless, then, but hopelessness is also hopeless, one might say, since the decision to call the problem insoluble would cause us to think whether, by thinking it, we had already resolved the problem on the side of thinking, which is the side of hope. A neutral observer who looks at the history of philosophy sees that a restoration of dualism follows every acceptance of monism, and vice versa. Each lacks the power to stifle the other, but each has enough power to keep the other compliant temporarily. It almost appears that when people have had enough monist uniformity, they divert themselves with dualist variety, and when they tire of dualism, they plunge back into monism, as the two alternating processes balance each other in a healthy way. With every epidemic of materialism, the neutral observer smiles and says, ‘Wait! Spiritualism will be here any moment now.’ And while spiritualism is celebrating its greatest triumphs, the observer smiles in the same way and says, ‘Wait! Materialism will be right back.’ But the observer’s smile is forced and fleeting because his situation is not really a happy one. Tossed from one extreme to the other as if a higher and irresistible force were acting on him, he gets no rest. And yet, amidst the difficulties that I have tried to illuminate, in all their harshness, deep in our hearts there is a constant conviction that this irresistible dualism, and this unsolvable dilemma may, in the end, be resisted and solved, that the thinking of unity is not incompatible with that of opposition, and that opposition can and must be thought in the form of the concept, which is the highest unity. Naive thinking – which is usually called non-philosophical and might better be called summarily or incipiently philosophical – is not perplexed by difficulty. It thinks unity and opposition at the same time. The saying that applies to it is definitely not ‘mors tua, vita mea,’ but ‘concordia discors.’12 It recognizes that life is struggle but also harmony; that virtue is a battle against ourselves but is also ourselves; that once an opposition has been overcome, a new opposition arises from the very core of unity, and then a new overcoming followed by a new opposition, and so on, which is just how life works. Naive thinking does not recognize exclusive systems. Proverbial wisdom runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds, admonishing us with optimistic and pessimistic remarks denied and then affirmed in turn. What is missing from naive thinking, from incipient philosophy? Nothing, apparently. Therefore, amidst the smoke and dust of learned

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combat, we always long for good sense, for the truth that all of us can find in ourselves directly, without the exertions, subtleties and exaggerations of professional philosophers. But our longing is sterile. The battle has been joined, and without victory there is no returning to peace. Naive thinking (this is its defect) is in no position to justify its own claims. At every objection, it wavers, falls into confusion, and contradicts itself. Its truths are not complete truths because they are placed next to one another but not connected, and the juxtaposition is not systematic. Contradictions, doubts, and a painful awareness of antitheses are welcome. War is welcome if it is needed to acquire the truth that is complete and sure of itself. This truth, though its level of elaboration is very different from what comes out of ordinary naive thinking, cannot really be unlike it in substance. And when a philosophy stands in contrast to naive consciousness, it is a sure sign of trouble. Indeed, when people see plain and conclusive statements of philosophical truth resulting from centuries of effort, this is the very reason why we often see them shrugging their shoulders and remarking that the vaunted discovery is something quite easy that everybody knows. Exactly the same thing happens with the most inspired works of art, which develop so simply and naturally that everyone has the illusion of having made such things or being able to make them. If naive thinking gives us hope and a sign of compatibility between unity and opposition, another fact is right in front of us, offering a rough model of these benefits. Alongside the philosopher stands the poet. The poet also seeks the truth; the poet also thirsts for the real. Like the philosopher, he too rejects arbitrary abstractions while reaching for the living and concrete. He too abhors the muffled delusions of mystics and sentimentalists because he says what he feels and makes it ring in our ears, clear and silvery, in words of beauty. But the poet is not doomed to failure. He contemplates the reality that is torn apart by oppositions and makes it vibrant with opposition, yet one and undivided. Can the philosopher not do the same? Is philosophy not a way of contemplating, like poetry? Since the philosophical concept is completely analogous to aesthetic expression, why must it lack the perfection that belongs to the aesthetic, the power to resolve and represent unity in opposition? Philosophy is contemplating the universal, obviously, and hence it is thinking, while poetry is contemplating the individual, and hence it is intuition and imagination. But why can the philosophical universal not be both different and the same, discord and concord, discrete and continuous, precise and fluid all at once, like aesthetic expression? When the mind

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makes its leap from contemplating the singular to contemplating the All, why should reality have to lose its own character? Does the One not live in us like the singular? And at this point Hegel shouts his joyous cry, his cry of discovery – Eureka! – his principle that resolves the problem of opposites, a very simple principle, seeming so obvious that it deserves to be put with the others symbolized by the egg of Columbus. Opposites are not an illusion, and unity is not an illusion. Opposites are opposed to one another, but they are not opposed to unity because true and concrete unity is just the unity or synthesis of opposites: it is not immobility, it is movement; it is not stasis, it is development. The philosophical concept is a concrete universal, and therefore it is a thinking of reality as both united and divided at once. Only in this way does philosophical truth correspond to poetic truth, and the pulse of thinking to the pulse in things. This is the only possible solution, in fact, and as such it does not reject the two that came before it, those that I have called monism and dualism of opposites. Instead, it justifies both by treating them as truths that are one-sided, fragments of truth that need to be integrated in a third truth, where the first, the second, and also the third fade away as all three are fused in the sole truth. And this alone is true: that unity does not confront opposition but contains it in itself, that without opposition reality would not be reality because it would not be development and life. Unity is positive, opposition negative, but the negative is also positive – positive in being negative – and, if that were not so, we would not grasp the fullness of the positive. If the analogy between poetry and philosophy has been unsatisfactory, if the concrete concept, corresponding to intuition as the logical form of development – as its poetic form – has seemed not clear enough, now that we take our comparisons and metaphors more freely from the natural sciences, one might say (sacrificing exact analogy for apt comparison) that the concrete universal, along with its synthesis of opposites, gets at life and not at life’s cadaver. It offers a physiology of the real, not an anatomy. Hegel calls his doctrine of opposites the dialectic, rejecting other formulas of unity and coincidence of opposites as likely to cause confusion because they emphasize unity but not opposition along with it. The two abstract components, or rather the opposites taken by themselves, in their apartness, he calls moments, taking the image from moments of the lever. The third term, synthesis, is also sometimes called a moment. He uses the word ‘resolve’ or ‘overcome’ (aufheben) to express the relation of the first two moments to the third. Hegel notes the implication that the two moments

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are negated insofar as they are taken as separate, while in synthesis they are preserved. In relation to the first term, the second takes the form of negation, and in relation to the second, the third is a negation of the negation, or absolute negativity that then becomes absolute affirmation. If for the sake of exposition we apply numerical symbols to this logical relation, the dialectic can be called a triad or trinity because it turns out to be composed of three terms. But Hegel never stops warning about the external and arbitrary character of this numerical symbolism, which is quite unfit to express the theoretical truth. Strictly speaking, in the dialectical triad it is not really three concepts that are thought but only one, the concrete universal, in its deep structure. Moreover, since we must first of all posit opposition of terms in order to achieve this synthesis, if we call the activity that posits opposition understanding, and reason the activity that provides the synthesis, it is clear that understanding is necessary to reason, that it is a moment of reason and external to it. And this is actually how Hegel sometimes treats it. Anyone who does not rise to the way of thinking the opposites that I have just described can make no philosophical claim that does not contradict itself and change to its contrary, as I noted in reviewing the antitheses of monism and dualism. We can see this in the first triad of Hegel’s Logic – the triad that has all the others in it and which, as we know, is made up of the terms being, nothing, and becoming. Without nothing, what is being? What is pure being, indeterminate, unqualified, indistinct, unutterable, being as universal, and not this or that particular being? How does it differ from nothing? On the other hand, what is nothing without being, nothing conceived in itself, with no determination or qualification, nothing in general, not the non-being of this or that particular thing? How does it differ from being? When someone uses one of these two terms by itself, the result is like using the other by itself, since the one has meaning only in or through the other. Someone who uses the true without the false, then, makes the true into something not thought – since thinking is struggling against the false – and therefore something not true. Likewise, for someone who uses good without evil, the good becomes something not willed – because willing the good is rejecting evil – and therefore something not good. Outside of synthesis, the two terms used abstractly become confused with one another as they trade roles. There is truth only in the third term – for the first triad, in becoming. This, as Hegel said, is ‘the first concrete concept.’13 And yet this mistake, which comes of using the opposites outside of synthesis, keeps recurring. We must always respond to it with the objec-

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tion that shows – as we did just now – that the opposites cannot be thought outside of synthesis. This objection is the dialectic that might be called subjective or negative. But it must not be confused with the true and proper content of this theory, with the objective or positive dialectic that could also be identified as the logical theory of development. In the negative dialectic, the outcome is not synthesis but the annihilation of two opposed terms, one as a result of the other. Therefore, like the word ‘dialectic’ itself, the terminology that we described above also acquires a somewhat different meaning. The sense of understanding is meant to be derogatory and pejorative, since it is no longer a moment intrinsic to reason and inseparable from it but rather an affirmation of separate opposites that claims to stand on its own as the final truth. This is abstract understanding, the eternal enemy of philosophical theorizing – basically, reason itself failing in its own work. ‘Understanding is not to blame if we go no farther; it is a subjective powerlessness of reason that lets that determination stand in that way.’14 The triad itself surrenders its place to a quartet of terms, two affirmations and two negations. Reason steps in as negative reason and brings confusion into the abode of understanding. Although it clears the way for the positive theory by this negation and makes it necessary, it does not produce and posit it. Confusion between the merely negative side of Hegel’s dialectic and its positive content has given rise to an objection against the Hegelian theory of opposites, and this is a warhorse often mounted by Hegel’s enemies. Goldbridle and Bayard are rather old and worn out, and I fail to see how anyone can still stay in the saddle.15 They ask: if being and nothing are identical (as Hegel proves or thinks he proves), how can they constitute becoming, which (on Hegel’s theory) must be a synthesis of opposites, certainly not of items that are identical and thus unproductive of synthesis? A = A remains A and does not become B. And the answer is: being is identical with nothing only when being and nothing are badly thought, or, indeed, when they are not thought; only then does it happen that one is the same as the other, not as A = A but as 0 = 0. In thinking that thinks being and nothing truly, they are not identical but decisively opposed, brawling with one another. And this brawl (which is also a bonding because the two wrestlers have to put their arms around one another in order to wrestle) is becoming. This is certainly not a concept added to or derived from the two prior ones as if they were apart from it. It is a unique concept that has two abstractions outside it, two unreal wraiths – being and nothing as separate and hence as united not by conflict but by their shared emptiness.

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Another objection, seemingly triumphant again, is the observation that the concrete universal, with its synthesis of opposites sealing its concrete character, is not a purely logical concept because it implicitly introduces a sensible or intuitive component when it represents movement or development.16 Sensible or intuitive? In philosophical terms, that would mean singular, individual, historical. Please, what is the singular, individual, historical component that we can either point out, or take away, in Hegel’s concept of the universal, in the way that we can either locate, or take away, the singular, individual, historical component in the empirical concept of the oak, the whale, or feudal government? Movement or development is nothing singular and contingent; it is a universal. It is nothing sensible; it is a thought, a concept, and precisely the true concept of the reality. And the logical theory of this concept is the concrete universal, a synthesis of opposites. But what if one wished to apply the indicated criticism to the character that the concept has in Hegel’s logic, to its not being something empty and indifferent, not just a receptacle ready to receive any content at all, but rather the ideal form of reality itself? What if the meaning of ‘logical’ were only an abstraction that cannot be conceived, the abstraction that works ‘on command,’ as in mathematics? And what if the meaning of ‘intuitive’ were the speculative concept? Then the objection would not demonstrate Hegel’s mistake but celebrate his glory – his glory having been to destroy that false conception of logical form as arbitrary abstraction and to give the logical concept a character of concreteness that can also be called ‘intuitive’ to signify (as I have done above) that Philosophy springs from the heart of godlike Poetry, ‘matre pulchra filia pulchrior.’17 Philosophy, thus seen as poetry’s friend and relative, enters the state now usually called ‘Dionysian,’ following Nietzsche’s fashionable phrasing, and this is enough to scare off the faint-hearted.18 Without realizing it, however, even these thinkers are in the same condition as long as they keep philosophizing. Thus, when faced with the dialectic of being and non-being, our Rosmini exclaimed in horror: ‘Even if it were as true as it is false that being can negate itself, this question would always come back into play: what is it to have moved to self-negation? What reason could we find for this whim whereby being would negate itself, not recognize itself, and make this mad attempt to annihilate itself, in short? Hegel’s system does nothing less than make being go mad, introducing madness into each and every thing. In this way he claims to give things their life, movement, process, and becoming. But I have never heard of such

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an enterprise anywhere, whose effect is to make everything, even being itself, go mad.’19 Rosmini probably did not recall that Hegel himself (with more style, to tell the truth) gave the very same account in the Phenomenology. After describing the movement of reality, the rise and fall that is never itself born and never dies, these were his concluding words: ‘Truth is a Bacchic frenzy, and there is no part of it that is not intoxicated. Likewise, since each part immediately dissolves when it withdraws from the others, this frenzy is also rest, simple and limpid.’20 Reality seems mad because it is life, and philosophy seems mad because it shatters abstractions and lives that life by thinking. This madness is the highest wisdom, then. The real and non-metaphorical madmen are those crazed by the empty words of semi-philosophy. They confuse constructs with reality and fail to rise to that heaven whence their effort might be revealed to them for what it really is. In fact, seeing heaven high above them and out of reach, they are ready to call it a madhouse. Another manifestation of the same irrational fear is the outcry that Hegel’s view about logic deprives mankind of the very basis or rule of thinking, the principle of identity and contradiction. The evidence is Hegel’s frequent outbursts against that principle, as well as his declaration that it must be replaced by the contrary principle, that everything contradicts itself. But this is not exactly how things really are. Hegel does not deny the principle of identity. Otherwise, he would have to admit that his theory of logic is both true and not true, for example, both true and false, and that being and nothing can be thought in the synthesis and also outside of synthesis, each by itself. His whole argument, his whole philosophy would then no longer have meaning; it would lack a serious basis, though it takes little for us to see that it is very serious. Rather than destroying the principle of identity, Hegel gives it new strength, gives it power, makes it what it really ought to be and what it is not in ordinary thinking. Ordinary thinking, semi-philosophy, leaves reality divided into two pieces, as we have seen. Now it is one of them, now the other, and when it is one, it is not the other. And yet, in this effort to exclude, the one passes into the other and together they are reduced to nothing. We claim to justify these contradictions, which actually cannot be thought, and dress them up by adducing the principle of identity. If we examine only Hegel’s words, we can say that he distrusts the principle of identity. But if we look deeper, we notice that what he distrusts is just the false application of the principle of identity, the application made of it by the purveyors of abstraction who preserve unity by eliminating opposition or preserve opposition by eliminating unity.

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As Hegel says, this is the principle of identity as ‘the law of the abstract understanding.’21 The false application occurs because we do not want to acknowledge that opposition or contradiction is no defect, no blemish, no disease in things that can be removed from them – nor is it our own subjective error. Rather, it is the true being of things: all things in themselves are contradictory, and thinking is the thinking of contradiction. This discovery serves to put the principle of identity on a real, solid basis, triumphing over opposition by thinking it, grasping it in its unity. Opposition thought is opposition overcome, overcome precisely in virtue of the principle of identity. Opposition disregarded or unity disregarded is what seems to be obedience to that principle but is actually its real contradiction. The difference between Hegel’s way of thinking and the ordinary kind is the same that distinguishes a person who confronts and conquers an enemy from someone who closes his eyes to avoid seeing the enemy: this person believes he eliminates the enemy, and then he is eliminated by him. ‘Speculative thinking is thought establishing what thinking does, opposition, and, in opposition, thinking itself; it is definitely not what happens in representative thinking, in letting oneself be dominated by opposition and thereby having one’s own determinations resolved only in other determinations or in none.’22 Reality is a nexus of opposites, and it does not come apart and dissipate by reason of opposition; in fact, reality originates eternally in and from opposition. And thinking, as the supreme reality, the reality of reality, does not come apart and dissipate but grasps unity in opposition and synthesizes it logically. Like all assertions of truth, Hegel’s dialectic does not come to dethrone the old truths but to enrich and consolidate them. The concrete universal – unity in distinction and opposition – is the true and complete principle of identity. It does not allow the principle of older systems to exist apart from it, either as ally or as rival, having absorbed that principle and transformed it into its own life’s blood. 2. Clarifications about the History of the Dialectic Some historians of philosophy have had the view that the problem of opposites is the whole problem of philosophy, and so at times the history of the various attempts to solve it has been taken as the entire history of philosophy: the former story has been told to tell the latter. But the dialectic is not even all of logic, much less all philosophy. It is a very important part of logic, however, and perhaps its crowning achievement. The reason for the confusion may already be apparent from what I

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have said above: it is the inner bond that lies between the logical problem of opposites and the great debates between monists and dualists, materialists and spiritualists. This makes up most of the content of studies of philosophy and histories of philosophy, even though such debates do not represent philosophy’s primary and basic task, which is better expressed by ‘Know thyself.’ But that deceptive appearance will also vanish when we reflect that it is one thing to think logically, another to construct the theory of logic logically, one thing to think dialectically, another to have a logical conception of dialectical thought. If this were not so, the Hegelian solution would already be perfectly clear in the many philosophers who have, in fact, thought dialectically about reality, or at least in all cases where they have thought about it in this way. Every problem of philosophy refers to all the others, no doubt, and all the others can be found implicit in each one. Solutions true or false for one contain solutions true or false for all. But if it is impossible to keep histories of particular philosophical problems completely isolated from one another, it is still true that these problems are distinct, and we must not put the different parts of the organism together helter-skelter if we are not to lose any idea of the organism itself. Attention to this distinction is needed to set exact limits of inquiry into the historical development of the dialectical doctrine of opposites, and, subsequently, into the special value and originality of Hegel’s thought. This is research that may not yet have been done as it should have been, within the exact limits set for it. Moreover, since students of philosophy, on the whole, have not been convinced that the theory is important or correct, the interest required to construct its history, as well as a guiding criterion, have been lacking. The best that has been put together on the subject is found in Hegel’s own books, especially his History of Philosophy.23 It will be useful to offer a quick summary here of these scattered references, with additions and comments as needed. Was Hegel the first to formulate the logical principle of the dialectic and of development? Or did he have predecessors, and who were they? Through what forms and approaches did this principle pass before reaching its final state in Hegel? The doctrine of dialectic is a product of mature thinking, a result of long philosophical incubation. We find the difficulties that arise from the asserting of opposites first noted in ancient Greece, in Zeno of Elea’s denial of the reality of movement. Movement is the same thing as development but in a form more accessible to reflection. Zeno put great emphasis on these difficulties and resolved the conflict by denying the

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reality of movement (using arguments from the contradiction between space and time, from the arrow, from Achilles and the tortoise, and others). Movement is an illusion of the senses; being or reality is one and unmoving.24 In opposition to Zeno, Heraclitus made movement or becoming into the true reality. The depth of his feeling for reality as contrariety and development shows in his sayings: ‘Being and non-being are the same’; ‘Everything is and also is not’; ‘Everything flows.’ It shows in his metaphors: Things are a river; Opposition within opposition is like sweet and bitter in honey, like the bow and the lyre. It shows in his cosmological notions about war and peace, discord and harmony.25 Hegel said that Heraclitus made no claim that he did not incorporate into his own logic.26 But notice that Hegel gave these claims a much more decidedly logical meaning than they had by themselves, just by incorporating them into his theory. As we have them handed down to us, their naive and serene vision of the truth doubtlessly demands our admiration, but we must not make too much of it, or else we run the risk of falsifying history by turning a pre-Socratic into a post-Kantian. The same must be said of Plato’s dialectic in the Parmenides, Sophist, and Philebus, dialogues whose interpretation and placement in history are quite controversial. Hegel thought of them as containing the essence of Platonic philosophy – the effort to move from the still abstract universal to the concrete universal, to posit the speculative form of the concept as unity in diversity. These dialogues raise questions about the One and the many, identity and non-identity, rest and movement, birth and death, being and non-being, finite and infinite, limited and unlimited. And the Parmenides concludes that the One is and is not, is itself and the other, and that all things, in regard to themselves and to others, are and are not, are apparent and not apparent. All this shows Plato wrestling with the problem but ends with a result of a negative kind. As Hegel warned, in any case, we find the dialectic in Plato, but not full consciousness of the nature of the dialectic.27 The power of Plato’s theoretical treatment is greatly superior to the arguments of the Sophists or the later tropes of the Sceptics, but it does not attain the level of a theory of logic. As for Aristotle, his logical consciousness is in conflict with his theoretical consciousness. His logic is merely cerebral; his metaphysics, on the other hand, investigates the categories. In the teachings of Philo the Jew and the Gnostics, where true reality, absolute being, is considered beyond the reach of thought, as the God beyond description, the inscrutable, the abyss where everything is negat-

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ed, there we find only the need, or rather the awareness of impotence and evidence of what is lacking.28 The same in Plotinus, for whom all predicates fall short of the Absolute because each expresses a determination. The idea of the trinity or triad, already mentioned by Plato, develops in Proclus.29 This idea, along with the conception of the Absolute as Spirit, is the great step forward in philosophy implied by Christianity. When the modern world began, Cusanus was the heir of Neoplatonic and mystical traditions and the thinker who most vigorously expressed the human spirit’s need to get away from dualisms and conflicts by rising to that simplicity where opposites coincide. Cusanus was the first to notice that this coincidence of opposites is antithetical to the purely abstract logic of Aristotle, who conceived of contrariety as complete difference.30 Aristotle did not accept that in unity there could be contraries, and in each thing he saw the privation of its opposite. Against this view, Cusanus maintained that unity comes before duality and that opposites coincide before they divide. But he thinks of the nexus of opposites as a simple coincidence that humans cannot grasp either by sense or by reason or by intellect, which are the three forms of the human mind. The nexus remains a mere limit. Of God, where all oppositions converge, the only knowledge possible is an incomprehensible comprehension, a learned ignorance.31 With Giordano Bruno, who declares himself a disciple of the ‘divine Cusanus,’ that idea seems to acquire a more positive function.32 He too celebrates the coincidence of opposites as the outstanding principle of a philosophy that has been forgotten and needs to be revived. He provides an eloquent account of the unification of contraries, of the greatest circle and the straight line, the acute angle and the obtuse, of heat and cold, corruption and generation, love and hate, poison and antidote, spherical and plane, concave and convex, anger and patience, humility and pride, greed and generosity. Echoing Cusanus, he writes these memorable words: Anyone who wants to know nature’s greatest secrets should look at the minima and maxima of contraries and opposites and think about them. There is deep magic in knowing how to draw out the contrary after locating the point of union. This is where poor Aristotle was heading with his notion of positing privation, conjoined with a particular disposition, as the ancestor, parent, and mother of form, but he could not reach his goal. He could not get there because he planted his foot in the genus of opposition and stayed stuck there in such a way that he did not move down to the species of

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From Bruno’s naturalist perspective, the principle of the coincidence of opposites becomes a sort of aesthetic principle of thought: We delight in colour and especially one that includes all colours, not a single colour defined in one way or another. We delight in sound but not in a single sound, rather the inclusive sound that comes from the harmony of many sounds. We delight in a sensible but especially the sensible that comprehends in itself all sensibles, the knowable that comprehends every knowable, the apprehensible that embraces all that can be apprehended, the one being that completes all, and, above all, the One that is itself the All.33

No longer a limitation, the principle has already become a power of the human mind, yet still not a rigorously logical power. It lacks justification in a theory of the concept. The philosopher of Germany, Jakob Böhme, also strongly asserts the unity of opposites.34 He sets up antitheses in a strict way, says Hegel, but he does not let this strictness stop him, and he sets up a unity. ‘Yes’ makes no sense to him without ‘No.’ God, the One, is unknowable in himself, and in order for him to be known, a distinction is necessary, the Father duplicated in the Son. Böhme sees the triad in all things and deepens the understanding of the Christian Trinity. But he does not manage to put his thoughts in a form appropriate for thinking.35 The philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, having developed under the influence of the mathematical science of nature, was in no position to put the problem into this form appropriate to thinking. For Descartes, thought and extension are united in God in a way that we cannot comprehend. For Spinoza, this happens in substance: the ‘mode,’ the third term after substance and attribute, does not contribute to a dialectical synthesis. Leibniz founders on the problem of evil and achieves a feeble philosophical optimism. The popular philosophy of the eighteenth century resolves all antitheses in God, who thus becomes a complex of contradictions, the problem of problems. Only in a loner do we find hints and seeds of the dialectical solution. This is the philosopher of Italy, Giambattista Vico.36 He not only thinks de facto about life and history in a dialectical way, he is also driven by an aversion for Aristotelian logic and for the logic of Cartesian mathematics

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and physics. On the one hand, he establishes a logic of imagination (a poetic logic) and of history (a logic of authority); on the other, he grants the importance of the inductive logic of observation and experience as the prelude to a more concrete logic. Another loner, close to Vico in many ways, was Johann Georg Hamann, a person who combined all extremes at a high level, according to Jacobi. As a young man, he showed himself to be unsatisfied with the principles of identity and reason and attracted by the coincidence of opposites. Hamann had encountered this principle in Bruno’s On the Threefold Minimum and Measure, and he kept it ‘for years in his brain without being able to forget or to understand it.’ And yet it seemed to him ‘the only reason that accounts for all contradictions and shows the right way to sort them out and resolve them,’ which should have put an end to all the quarrels of the advocates of abstraction.37 News of this principle passed from Hamann to Jacobi, who uncovered the passages related to it in Bruno’s works. But Jacobi’s theory of direct knowledge put him in an impossible situation, and even though he was aware of the gap, he was unable to fill it with logical thinking. To put the problem of opposites in a genuinely logical position and avoid the mystical and agnostic solution (which was no solution at all), what he needed was for the Kantian revolution to be completed. But Hamann regarded Kant’s whole Critique of Pure Reason as much less important than Bruno’s single statement about the principle of the coincidence of opposites. Yet it was precisely in this Critique that Kant became the true author of the new coincidence of opposites, the new dialectic – the logical theory of the dialectic. Granted, even Kant lived under the rule of intellectualism and the ideal of a mathematical science of nature – like his immediate predecessors, from Descartes to Leibniz and Hume. From this came his agnosticism, the phantom of the thing-in-itself, the abstraction of the categorical imperative, and the servility towards traditional logic. At the same time, however, he maintains the distinction between understanding and reason and makes it more effective. In the Critique of Judgment, he heralds a way of thinking reality that is no longer merely mechanical nor even the external finality found in the eighteenth century but rather an internal finality. He catches a glimpse of the idea beyond the abstract concept. Even better, Kant puts the problem of opposites on a new course with his antinomies. True, they appear to be insoluble, but in such a way that the human mind’s entanglement in them is necessary. And what is most important – Kant’s true glory – is his discovery of the synthetic a priori. But what is this if not ‘a primordial synthesis of opposites,’ as Hegel not-

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ed?38 In Kant this synthesis does not attain its full meaning, its development in the triad of the dialectic. Once made public, however, it could not be long before synthesis revealed all the riches contained in it. A priori synthesis causes transcendental logic to emerge alongside the old logic, at first paralleling the latter but in the end forcing its dissolution. The form of the threefold is also a major issue for Kant, who still treats it as something extrinsic yet uses it persistently, as if by some presentiment of its imminent and better destiny. What philosophy’s mission had to be after Kant now seems clear to us: developing the a priori synthesis, creating the new philosophical logic, and solving the problem of opposites by eliminating the dualisms that Kant left intact or actually made more powerful. In Fichte there is little more than there was in Kant, but he certainly makes it all simpler and more transparent. The thing in itself is rejected, while, at the same time, Fichte’s I still keeps its subjective sense and does not achieve a true unity of subject and object, so that Fichte does not succeed in justifying nature against Spirit, and, like Kant, ends up with faith and moral abstractions. The idea of a new logic works out better because philosophy is conceived as a theory of science. The form of the threefold acquires a fundamental position and is characterized as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Schelling takes another step forward when he becomes convinced that we can philosophize only by using the principle of the identity of opposites, and he conceives of the Absolute as that identity of opposites. But for Schelling the Absolute is something neutral between subject and object with merely quantitative differences. It is not yet subject and Spirit. And his gnoseology lacks a logic because for him aesthetic contemplation is the instrument of philosophy.39 This is the failing that Schelling could never overcome, and the consequences for him were so serious that they caused what has been called his second phase, the metaphysics of the irrational. As we know, Hegel came before the world of philosophy later than Schelling, his younger contemporary – and we can call Hegel his disciple. But where Schelling’s journey ended was for Hegel part of the voyage, and Schelling’s last period, where the decay began, was a juvenile phase for Hegel. For some time, even Hegel recognized no other instrument for philosophy than aesthetic contemplation: the only intuition was intellectual intuition, and the only philosophical system was the work of art. In the first sketch of his system that survives, he too put religion, not philosophy, at the apex of spiritual development.40 But Hegel’s deeply logical mind eventually led him to see that phi-

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losophy can have no other form than thinking, as specifically different from imagination and intuition. This thinking was obviously not the old logico-naturalist kind; after Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, that was no longer acceptable. The intellectualism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been fatally wounded. There had to be a form of logic to preserve and strengthen philosophy’s recent victories, a form of logic that would be the form of the wholly real. Everything was pushing Hegel’s inquiry in this direction: his admiration for the harmony of the Greek world; his participation in the Romantic movement, so rich in antitheses; his theological studies, whereby the Christian idea of the Trinity, worn out or made vacuous by Protestant rationalism, seemed to him compelled to find its refuge and true meaning in the new philosophy; his theoretical studies on synthesis and Kant’s antinomies. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he distanced himself from the philosophical movements to which he had belonged until then, and he published his principle for solving the problem of opposites. It is no longer simply their coinciding in some third term, unknown or unthinkable; no longer immobile unity; no longer Schelling’s intuition, but unity and diversity together, movement and dialectic. The preface to the Phenomenology has been described as ‘Hegel’s farewell to Romanticism.’41 But the truth is that Romanticism was saved for philosophy only by way of that distancing. Only a Romantic who had in some sense overcome Romanticism could harvest its philosophical fruit.42 The logic of the dialectic is therefore an original discovery by Hegel, as compared not only to those who came long before him, but also those who were close to him. If proof of this were wanted, look how Hegel conducted himself with these later figures. Having rejected Fichte, Kant would also have rejected Hegel, and more emphatically, because his philosophy did not contain the conditions needed to understand Hegel and thus really criticize him. But Hegel, who had the resolve to battle the false tendencies and features of Kant’s philosophy, along with all the old rubbish scattered behind it, was also the one who showed all of what Kant had to offer that was truly new and productive – so much so that it could be said that no one except Hegel has understood Kant.43 Schelling always remained deaf and hostile to his former friend’s conception. During the half-century that he had still to live, he stubbornly opposed his own system, outdated and gone from bad to worse, to Hegel’s. Sometimes (as in the famous preface to Cousin’s Fragments), while violently rejecting Hegel’s philosophy, Schelling also complains that he was robbed, though he never managed to state clearly what the

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other person robbed him of, nor even where his opponent had gone wrong.44 Hegel, on the other hand, continued to honour Schelling as the ‘father of the new philosophy,’ recognizing that glimmer of the dialectic that he had in him and always lucidly describing his strengths and weaknesses.45 If a point of view shows itself more advanced by including views that are less advanced, if evidence of a theory’s truth comes from its ability to provide both justification for truths discovered by others and an account of their mistakes, such evidence was also not lacking in Hegel’s theory. Kant, who did not fully understand himself, fell into the hands of neo-Kantians who turned away from his transcendental logic to a purely naturalist logic. Schelling, who did not fully understand himself, ended up ingloriously as the second Schelling. But through Hegel, in that great mind of his, both ended up with him as their spiritual son – a nobler end than providing exercises for schoolchildren or living on alone in their misunderstanding of themselves. 3. The Dialectic and the Conception of Reality To think dialectically and to think about the logical theory of the dialectic are therefore two distinct mental acts. Nonetheless, it is evident that the second thinking reinforces the first, giving it consciousness of itself and clearing from its path the obstacles that arise from false ideas about the nature of philosophical truth. This is exactly what happens in Hegel, who was not only the great theorist of that dialectical form of thinking but also the most effective dialectical thinker to appear on the stage of history. Treated dialectically by Hegel, the ordinary conception of reality is modified in several ways and totally changes its appearance. All dualities, all splits, all gaps – all those gashes and wounds that make reality appear to be torn, so to speak, by the activity of the abstract intellect – all these are filled, closed, and healed, and the whole of reality becomes unified, a compact unity (gediegene Einheit).46 The coherence of the organism reasserts itself; blood and life circulate again within it. We must notice the disappearance, first of all, of a series of dualisms that are not truly of opposites and not even of distincts. They are false opposites and false distincts – terms that can be thought neither as constituent components of the concept as universal nor as its particular forms, the simple reason being that they do not exist as thus formulated. Hegel (who, while criticizing them, still now and then mentions this difference that separates them from the others) gives an excellent defini-

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tion of their origin, which is in the bizarre dream-scenes of abstraction. They are dualities of terms that emerge from the empirical sciences, from perceptual and nomothetic consciousness, and from the sciences of the phenomenon. Precisely because these sciences turn on the phenomenon, when they strive to rise to the universal they are forced to break reality up into appearance and essence, external and internal, accident and substance, manifestation and force, finite and infinite, many and one, sensible and suprasensible, matter and Spirit, and other such terms. If these terms were truly distinct (or even if they denoted true distincts), they would give rise to the problem of the connection of distincts in the concrete concept.47 If they were true opposites, really opposites (or if they denoted true and real opposites), they would give rise to the problem of the synthesis of opposites. Since this is not what they are, however, they take on the appearance of distincts and opposites only through the arbitrary abstraction of empiricists, naturalists, and mathematicians. Criticizing them, then, which results from a negative dialectic, is done on a principle different from the one that governs the positive dialectic. In fact, these terms cannot be thought. And every attempt to resolve the duality by seizing on one or the other of two terms distinguished in this way turns into the contrary of that term. Materialism preserves the phenomenon, the matter, the finite, the sensible, the external, and so on. But since by its nature each term is constituted in a way that calls up its other, in that finite term we see the infinite rising up again and taking on the form of a quantitative infinite – of something finite from which arises something finite, then another finite, and yet another, on to infinity. This is what Hegel calls false or ‘bad infinity.’48 Supernaturalism preserves the second term as the sole reality. But essence apart from appearance, internal apart from external, infinite apart from finite turn into something inscrutable and unknowable. And next we get the thing in itself, which would better be called vacuity in itself – the great mystery which (says Hegel) is the easiest thing to know because the thing in itself, rather than being apart from thinking, is a product of thinking itself, of that thinking that has been forced into pure abstraction and that makes empty self-identity its object. The thing in itself, by reason of its nothingness, leaves only the phenomenon, the finite, and the external as real and thinkable – and it really is finite and external in being a phenomenon. The positive correction is provided by the concrete concept, by the feature that belongs properly to the Hegelian concept and that differentiates it from naturalist and mathematical abstractions. The real is nei-

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ther the one nor the other of those terms and is not their sum. The real is the concrete concept that fills the void of the thing in itself and cancels the distance that used to separate this thing from the phenomenon. It is the Absolute, which is no longer a parallelism of attributes or a neutrality towards them but a new prominence and significance given to one of the terms, which, by dint of this new significance, absorbs the other into itself and merges with it. Substance thus becomes subject; the Absolute determines itself as Spirit and Idea; and materialism is overcome. Moreover, reality is no longer something internal in relation to the external. In keeping with Goethe’s remark, which Hegel accepts and makes his own, nature has no kernel or shell; it is all one piece.49 The One is not beyond the many; it is the many. The Spirit is not beyond body; it is the body. And supernaturalism is overcome.50 This destruction of the falsely distinct and opposite, all of which can be summed up and represented by the duality of essence and appearance, is accompanied by the properly dialectical treatment (positive dialectic) of true opposites, which can all be represented and summarized in the duality and antithesis of being and non-being. The dualism is based on real opposition because it would never enter anyone’s mind to deny the reality of the evil, the false, the ugly, the irrational, and death, along with the antithesis between all these terms and the good, the true, the beautiful, the rational, and life. Nor does Hegel deny it. Because of his logical theory, however, which turns the thinking of opposites into the very conception of reality as development, he cannot treat the negative term, the side of not-being, as something that stands confronting the other and detached from it. If there were no negative term, there would be no development. Reality, and the positive term along with it, would go away. The negative is the mainspring of development; opposition is the very soul of the real. The lack of any contact with error is not thinking and is not truth but is really the absence of thinking and therefore of truth. Innocence is a feature not of acting but of not acting. Whoever makes anything makes mistakes. Whoever does anything comes to grips with evil. True happiness – human or rather manly happiness – is not bliss without feeling any pain, the bliss approximated only by stupidity and foolishness. Conditions for bliss of this kind do not exist in the history of the world, which (says Hegel) ‘shows us blank pages’ where conflict is lacking.51 If this is true (as doubtless it is, in keeping with deep and widespread human opinion expressed in the many aphorisms which at times seem to be Hegel’s phrases), the connection between the ideal and the real,

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between the rational and the real, cannot be understood as those words are meant in the philosophy of the schools: namely, as conflict between a rational that is not real and a real that is not rational. ‘What is real is rational, and what is rational is real.’52 Idea and fact are the same. In the domain of scientific thought, for example, what do we call ‘rational’? Thinking itself. An irrational thought is not thought; as thought, it is unreal. What do we call rational in the domain of products of art? The work of art itself. An effect of art, if it is ugly, is not an effect of art. It is certainly not a reality of art that then acquires the feature of ugliness. It is artistic unreality. What is called ‘irrational,’ then, is the unreal, and cannot be considered a species or class of real objects. The unreal also has its reality, no doubt, but this is the reality of unreality – the reality of non-being in the dialectical triad, the reality of the nothing that is not real but is the goad of the real, the mainspring of development. Standing on the aforesaid teaching that identifies the rational and the real, those who have spoken of an optimism in Hegel’s conception of reality and life have grossly misunderstood him. Hegel eliminates neither the evil nor the ugly nor the false nor the useless. Nothing would be more alien to his dramatic, and, in a certain sense, tragic conception of reality. He wants instead to understand the function of evil and error. And to understand this function is certainly not to deny it as evil and error but rather to affirm it as such, not closing one’s eyes to the sad spectacle or distorting it with childish teleological justifications (of external finality), as used to be done in the eighteenth century (as Bernardin de St Pierre used do, for example).53 But the correct point at the bottom of this claim for Hegel’s supposed optimism is that he cannot be called pessimistic either, because pessimism is the negation of the positive term in the dyad of opposites, as optimism is the negation of the negative. And besides, have there ever been consistent pessimists or optimists, or can there ever be? No more than there have been consistent monists and dualists. Every optimist always has a pessimistic side, while every pessimist proposes a procedure for liberation from evil and error, meaning that he also has his optimist side. Good and evil are opposite and correlative terms; asserting one does not deny the other.54 Hegel, who denies both, preserves both in the dialectical synthesis. He truly stands on high, beyond pessimism and beyond optimism, on that philosophical Olympus where there is no weeping and no laughing because laughter and weeping have become objects before the Spirit, and their agitation is overcome in the serenity of thinking. The fact – reality – is always rational and ideal, always truth, always wis-

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dom and moral goodness. The proviso is that the fact be truly fact, the reality truly reality. What is illogical, stupid, ugly, shameful, or fanciful is not a fact but the absence of the fact, the void, non-being – at most it is the need to be true, the goad to reality, certainly not reality. Hegel never dreamt of accepting what is mistaken and distorted and justifying it as fact. Is this perhaps a justification for treating it, as he treats it, as something unreal and vacuous? According to the old saying, nature abhors a vacuum. But surely the one that abhors the vacuum is the human because the vacuum is the death of his activity, of his being human. But if the justification of evil is not to be found in Hegel’s philosophy, which justifies only the function of evil, it is nonetheless true that Hegel warned against the glibness and superficiality that typically despairs of what actually was and is as irrational, even though, precisely because of its actuality, it cannot be considered irrational. Hegel is the great enemy of life’s discontents, of sensitive souls, perpetual declaimers, and agitators in the name of reason and virtue, and (to be historically specific and give an example) the enemy of the Faustian attitude that proclaims theory to be grey and the tree of life green, rebelling against the laws of custom and existence, scorning truth and science, and, instead of being possessed by the heavenly Spirit, falling into the power of the earthly. Hegel is the enemy of the Encyclopedic humanitarianism and Jacobinism that sets its own delicate heart above hard reality, seeing tyrannies everywhere, and swindles by despots and priests. He is the enemy of Kantian abstraction, of a duty that keeps itself beyond human feeling. Hegel hates that virtue which is always in conflict with the world’s movement, which digs up stones to collide with, which never knows exactly what it wants, but, yes, has a big brain – swollen big – and, if it is seriously involved with anything, it is to admire itself for its own incomparable and affecting perfection. Hegel hates the Sollen, the Ought-to-be, the impotence of the ideal that always ought to be and is not, never finding any reality adequate since all reality is adequate to the ideal instead. The destiny of this Ought-to-be is to become tedious, as all the finest words (Justice, Virtue, Morality, Liberty, and so on) become tedious when they remain mere words, ringing out thunderously and sterile where others act and do not fear to stain the purity of the Idea by betraying it in the deed. In the conflict between this Ought-to-be, this vainglorious virtue, and the movement of the world, the world’s movement always wins. Here is the reason. Either the movement of the world does not change, and the claims

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of virtue are revealed to be arbitrary and absurd, meaning that they are not really virtuous; they remain, at best, good intentions, excellent intentions, and yet ‘the laurels of good intentions are dry leaves that have never turned green.’55 Or else virtue attains its end and becomes part of the world’s movement, in which case it is certainly not the movement of the world that perishes but virtue – virtue detached from the deed, unless it might wish to keep on living in order to hold a grudge against its ideal, because it is guilty of becoming real! The illusion arises from the conflict, which is certainly real, but certainly not a conflict of the individual with the world – rather a conflict of the world with itself, the world that makes itself. ‘Everyone wants to be better than his own world, and believes himself to be so; but whoever is better only shows that his own world is better than other worlds.’56 So what is this aversion for fact felt by messengers of the Ideal, felt by devotees of the universal against individuality? Individuality is nothing but the vehicle of universality, its actualization. Nothing can be realized unless it becomes a human passion: nothing great is done without passion.57 And passion is human activity directed to particular interests and purposes. Particular interest is so much the vehicle of the universal that people realize the universal by pursuing their own purposes. They make a slave of another person, for example, and in each of them, out of the conflict between slave and master, arises the true idea of liberty and humanity. With their activity they overcome their conscious intentions and follow immanent intentions, intentions of reason, which takes advantage of them: this is the ‘cunning of reason’ (die List der Vernunft).58 We must not understand this in a transcendental way. The ‘cunning of reason’ is the fanciful phrase that denotes the rationality of everything that humans actually do (any human act at all), with or without reflective consciousness. In this way, the artist creates the work of art but gives no account of the labour completed. Although no account is given, the artist’s labour is not therefore irrational, obedient as it is to the supreme rationality of genius. Thus, the good and naively heroic soul believes that it simply follows the impulse of its own individual feeling. It has no consciousness of its action, such as the observer and the historian have, but this makes it no less good or heroic. Great men make their individual passion into their particular interest, actually willing reason – what is of substance in the needs of their time and people. They are the ‘business agents’ of the World Spirit.59 And, just for this reason, those who judge them superficially end up perceiving only shabby motives in them. They stop at the individual side of their activ-

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ity, as needful as it is: for the saying is correct, that ‘no one is a hero to his valet.’ As Hegel observes (and Goethe enjoys repeating the witty phrase), it works out this way not because the great man is not a great man, but because the valet is a valet.60 For the same reason, what great men ordinarily get from their contemporaries is not praise and thanks, nor do they find satisfaction in the public opinion of posterity. What they get is not praise but immortal glory, by living in the Spirit of the very people who fight them and yet are completely full of them. This Hegelian way of looking at life, expressed in terms of current politics, has been judged to belong to the conservative spirit. It is called this because, just as Rousseau was the philosopher of the French revolution, Hegel likewise was the philosopher of the Restoration – in particular, the Prussian Restoration – the philosopher of the governing Privy Council and the ruling state bureaucracy.61 Without starting to investigate whether there is more or less factual truth in these claims, however, it is useful to observe that one must not confuse this Hegel, the historical individual, who acted in certain given circumstances related to social and political problems of his time and people – the Hegel who is within the competence of the biographer and the political historian – with Hegel the philosopher, who alone is of concern to the historian of philosophy. If one can extract a political attitude from this and define it historically, it shows that this is not pure philosophical truth. Philosophy (as Hegel again observes) should not be mixed with things that do not concern it. Plato therefore might well spare himself the trouble of giving advice to nurses on how to hold babies in their arms, and Fichte too might forbear ‘designing’ the model of a police passport so that, according to him, it ought to be supplied with a picture of the bearer and not just his distinguishing features.62 So philosophical was Hegel’s conception of life that conservatism, revolution, and reaction each finds its justification in it, depending on events. On this point both Engels the socialist and Treitschke the conservative historian are in agreement.63 Both recognize that the formula identifying the rational with the real could be invoked, at one time or another, by all political parties and points of view, which thus differ not at all in the formula that they share but in deciding what is the real rational and what is irrational and unreal. Every time a political party has readied itself for war against some institution or social class, it has declared the enemy irrational, not endowed with real, solid existence, and this has put the party in line with Hegelian philosophy! In the revolutions of the nineteenth century, and especially in 1848,

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all the factions of the Hegelian school participated in various ways; it was even two Hegelians who wrote the mighty Communist Manifesto in that year.64 But the formula that they all shared was no empty label. The meaning it stood for was that the Jacobinism and simpliste attitude of the Age of Enlightenment were now finished, and that all people, all parties, had learned from Hegel what the true direction of politics was. The same Hegel, from his early days, examined conditions in Germany and defined it as an ‘abstract state’ (ein Gedankenstaat), causing one critic to recall the Secretary of Florence with his profound analysis of actual conditions in Italy during the Renaissance.65 Both Cavour and Bismarck seemed to appear as splendid examples of Hegelian theory – men in whom the rational and the real were always conjoined and merged, not alienated from one another in the painful and infertile disagreement that marks the minds of ideologues and dreamers.66 The result to which this mediation of opposites led, when combined with the destruction of the distincts and opposites, was the exaltation of history. History, the life of the human race, facts that develop in time: these cease to be conceived as something separate and extraneous in relation to the essence of things, to the idea, or – worse yet – as a diminution and defilement of the idea. That was how history appeared in the various dualist systems, not to speak of materialism, which, in denying every value, could not even accept the value of history. And deep disagreement arose between historians and philosophers, a reciprocal failure of understanding. This is not the place to review the oldest forms of this disagreement, like the philosophy of Descartes, the ultimate antihistoricism, and Spinozism (Oriental pantheism, as Hegel called it, adding that it was wrong to treat it as atheism and would better be called acosmism), and all the sensism and intellectualism of the eighteenth century.67 And yet history has no place among Hegel’s own contemporaries – Herbart’s system, for example, which is absolutely devoid of the idea of development. Nor is there a place for history in the system of Schopenhauer, for whom the life of the human race presents no problems of progress, nor again in the positivist systems of Comte and Spencer.68 In Hegel’s system, by contrast, where infinite and finite merge into one, where good and evil constitute a single process, history is the very reality of the Idea, and apart from historical development the Spirit is nothing. In this system, then, every fact, just because it is fact, is a fact of the Idea and belongs to the concrete organism of the Idea. For Hegel, all history becomes sacred history. One can also speak of general agreement on this point because the

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great works of history that we owe to Hegel’s influence have always been emphasized and made objects of admiration: histories of religions, of languages, of literature, of law, of economics, and of philosophy. A too simple conception of the matter, however, has caused Hegel’s effect on the study of history to be treated almost as an accident, owing simply to the personality of the master, who pursued historical knowledge ardently and was firmly in command of it. Moreover, this effect seemed to be a strict consequence neither of the greatly contested dialectical principle that resolved the opposites and false opposites nor of Hegelian logic in its most characteristic form. While the promotion of historical studies was accepted as a great benefit, its true cause was rejected: while the consequence was accepted, its premise was denied – the sole premise on which it could be and was based. The sacred character that history acquires is one aspect of the feature of immanence that belongs to Hegelian thought, one aspect of its denial of all transcendence. It was a mistake, certainly, to blame or praise it for naturalism and materialism. If a philosophy, a philosophy of activity, a philosophy whose principle is the Spirit and the Idea, uncovers the genesis of those illusions, how could it ever be naturalist or materialist? But if these words of blame or praise were meant to underline an anti-religious character, there was something correct in the observation. Hegel’s is a philosophy (the only philosophy, I would say) that is radically irreligious because it is not content to set itself against religion or set itself to one side; it absorbs religion within itself and takes its place. Also, and for the same reason but from a different perspective, Hegel’s can be called the only supremely religious philosophy because its aim is to satisfy the need for religion, which is the highest human need, in a rational way. It leaves nothing outside of reason, nothing left over: ‘The questions to which philosophy does not respond have their answer in the fact that they should not be asked.’69 In the logical doctrine of this philosophy, then, and in the actual thinking that conforms to it, lies the unbeatable strength, unexhausted fertility, and perpetual youthfulness of Hegelian philosophy – the strength, fertility, and youthfulness that spring back all the livelier in our day, with the new exuberance of neurotic mysticism and insincere religiosity in which we participate; with the new anti-historical barbarism presented to us by positivism; and with the new Jacobinism that often results from this. Whoever is conscious of human dignity, the dignity of thinking, cannot be satisfied with any solution to these conflicts and dualisms other than the dialectical solution, achieved by the genius of Hegel.

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In this respect, the philosopher who can be set alongside Hegel better than any other is Giambattista Vico. I have already mentioned him as a precursor of the concrete theory of logic, working like Hegel at aesthetics, a pre-Romantic where Hegel was a Romantic, and resembling Hegel more closely in his actual dialectical thinking.70 Vico’s attitude to religion is certainly less radical than Hegel’s. Although from a biographical point of view Hegel was a rather dubious Christian and not very explicit in clarifying his position towards the Church, Vico, seen through his biography, was a completely sincere Catholic who had no doubts. All of Vico’s thinking, however, is not only anti-Catholic but anti-religious. The reason is his naturalist explanation for the formation of myths and religions. And if his refusal to use this principle when facing Hebrew history and religion was subjectively the timidity of a believer, objectively it acquires the value of unconscious irony, like Machiavelli’s knowing irony, when he refused to investigate how states so badly governed by the Pope might be maintained, because (he said) ‘they are ruled by higher causes, where the human mind cannot reach.’71 Vico shows that the true is convertible with the made, and that only the person who has made a thing can really understand it. He therefore credits humans with full understanding of the human world, because it is their product, and he refers understanding of the remaining natural world to God because He only is the one who made it and has knowledge of it. The latter is also a limitation that unfortunately creates an obstacle to the revolutionary principle announced by Vico, which, once established for the human world, should necessarily extend to the whole of reality. So deeply irreligious was the whole gnoseology of this devout Catholic that, immediately after his death, stories were told that he had to hide part of his thinking in his books because of restrictions received from churchmen. In Vico rationalists saw their master, while zealous Catholics criticized him as the first source of the whole anti-religious movement of the period after his own time.72 But when we set this religious issue aside, the similarities between Vico and Hegel are much more obvious. Just as Hegel opposed the anti-historicism of Enlightenment encyclopedists and fought against it, so Vico opposed the anti-historicism of Descartes and his school. He showed that philosophers and philologists both had missed half the point, the former because they did not certify their reasons with the authority of philologists, the latter because they did not take the trouble to verify their authority with the reasons of philosophers. As Hegel opposed utopians, preachers of abstraction, and advocates of sentiment and enjoyment, so

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Vico rejected Stoics and Epicureans alike, accepting only those whom he called ‘political philosophers.’73 Vico scorned those sages who forgot the struggles and pains of real life and dictated ‘guides for living that were as impossible or dangerous for the human condition as it was to regulate the duties of life by the pleasure of the senses,’ people who established laws and founded republics ‘resting in the shade,’ states that ‘existed nowhere but in the minds of the learned.’74 He certainly understood that ‘governments must conform to the nature of the people governed,’ and that ‘native customs, especially those of natural liberty, do not change all at once but by degree and over a long time.’75 No less than Hegel, Vico had the concept of the cunning of reason, and he called it Divine Providence, ‘which from the passions of people entirely concerned with what is useful to them privately, passions that would cause them to live like wild animals in the wilderness, has made the civil orders by which they live in human society.’76 What difference does it make that people are not conscious of their doing this? The fact is not thereby less rational. ‘Homo non intelligendo fit omnia … because, when he understands, man explains his intention and understands things, but, when he does not understand, he makes these things out of himself and then he becomes what he turns himself into.’77 ‘And should we not say,’ Vico exclaims elsewhere, that this is the counsel of a superhuman wisdom, which, without force of law … but by making use of the same human customs whose use is as free of all force as the freedom whereby humans celebrate their nature … rules and guides that nature divinely? Humans themselves have made this world of nations … but it is beyond doubt that this world has arisen from an intent that often differs from, at times completely opposes, and is always higher than the particular ends that people have aimed at. In order to preserve human life on this earth, that higher intent has always made use of these narrow ends and turned them into means that serve broader ends. Accordingly, humans wish to exercise their animal lust and abandon their offspring, and out of this they make chaste marriages, whence families arise. Fathers wish to exercise paternal power over their dependents without restraint, whence cities arise. Ruling orders of nobles wish to abuse the liberty of lordship that they have over the people, and they become servants of laws that make popular liberty. Free people wish to be released from the control of their laws, and they become subjects of monarchs. Monarchs wish to secure themselves by debasing their subjects with every dissolute vice, and they dispose them to put up with enslavement to stronger nations.

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The concepts – often the same metaphors, images and turns of phrase – are Hegel’s, which is all the more remarkable in that the German philosopher (it least in the period when he was thinking his philosophy through and writing The Phenomenology of Spirit) seems not to have known the other phenomenology that had been thought through a century earlier in Naples under the title of the New Science. It almost seems that the soul of the Italian Catholic philosopher had migrated into the German to reappear, more mature and conscious, a century later. 4. The Nexus of Distincts and the False Application of the Dialectical Form Now how did it ever happen that this philosophical thinking, so deeply grounded in logic, so rich in irresistible truth, so harmonized and in sympathy with the concrete, with passion, with imagination and history, how did it happen that this thinking seemed instead to be, and hence has been condemned as, abstract, intellectualist, full of caprices and devices, in contradiction to history, nature, and poetry – in short, actually the opposite of what it wanted to be? How can one explain the violent reaction against it – a successful and decisive reaction, evidently – since explaining all of this only by adventitious motives, by ignorance and lack of intelligence, would be not thoughtful (and not very Hegelian)? And why, on the other hand, was this philosophical thinking ever invoked to support trends of the most different kind, precisely those that Hegel had meant to combat and overcome – materialism and theism? Why is it that I, for example (allow me a personal recollection that may not involve a merely personal issue), I who am writing and have just now interpreted Hegel’s doctrine of the synthesis of opposites and the resulting conception of reality as both one and various, commenting on this in such a strong spirit of agreement, why, during several years of my intellectual life, did I feel strong revulsion for Hegel’s system, especially as presented in the Encyclopedia, with its three-part division of logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of

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Spirit, and as I saw it interpreted and recommended by Hegelians? Why even now, reading those works again, do I feel the old Adam, the old repugnance, rising up in me now and then? We must look for the deep cause of all this, which is to say that after identifying the healthy part of the system, we must uncover the unhealthy part; that after explaining what is living in Hegel’s system, we must expose what is dead in it, the unburied bones that encumber the very life of what is living. We must not be too kind-hearted or content with a concession often made by Hegelians of the strict observance, which consists in admitting that Hegel could have made mistakes and that he was mistaken in many claims about historical, scientific, and mathematical matters, both because of the state of knowledge in his day and also because of the limitations of his own education: hence, this whole part of the system is certainly to be revised and corrected, even remade from top to bottom, by taking account of the progress that has occurred in those special branches of learning. Only the historical and scientific Hegel would be defective and superseded, in other words, meaning that the philosopher, who never bases his own true findings on empirical data, would remain untouched. Opponents, quite correctly, cannot be satisfied with this concession. What excites aversion for Hegel’s system is certainly not the quality or quantity of learning contained in it (highly admirable learning, even with its deficiencies and obsolete content), but precisely the philosophy. I refused earlier to treat the influence of Hegel’s thought on the study of history as something independent and separate from the actual principles of the system. Now, for the same reason, I cannot bring myself to treat the cause of his errors as independent of his philosophical principles. What have seemed to be his historical and scientific errors are at bottom, or for the most part, philosophical errors because they were shaped by a thought that he had, by his way of conceiving of history and natural science. Hegel is all one piece, and it is to his credit that his errors, taken together, cannot be explained as an accidental series of inconsistencies and inadvertencies. The problem, then, is to discover what might have been the philosophical error or errors (or the basic mistake and others derived from it) that combined and blended in Hegel’s thinking with his immortal discovery. This may give us the reason for the reaction against the Hegelian system, inasmuch as that reaction was not the usual resistance encountered by all original truths but clearly had a rational character. And since, in keeping with what we have already noted, the logic of philosophy formed the

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special field of Hegel’s intellectual activity, the presumption is that the cause of error is to be found in that area – namely, in an error of logical theory. As far as method is concerned, anti-Hegelian criticism has therefore been correct in generally ignoring the system’s particulars and details, attacking the principle of the synthesis of opposites itself and trying to prove it wrong either because the two primary terms are not opposite or because their synthesis is not logical or because it destroys the principle of identity and contradiction and so on. But in substance, as we have seen, none of those objections is well founded. And any other objection that happens to be devised shows itself to be unfounded, for the principle triumphantly resists and will resist all revision and every assault. The upshot is that Hegel’s mistake is indeed to be found in his logic, but, as far as I can see, in a different part of his logic. Starting with a quick look at Hegel’s various teachings, I barely mentioned the problem of distincts – or what naturalistic logic would call the theory of classification – because it was important to get straight to the problem of dialectic.79 It is appropriate now to deal with this issue more closely. Here, in my firm opinion, is the location of the logical mistake, pregnant with consequences, that Hegel made. Just as the philosophical concept, the universal-concrete or Idea, is a synthesis of opposites, so is it also a synthesis of distincts. We talk about the Spirit, for example, or about spiritual activity in general, but we also constantly talk about particular forms of this spiritual activity. And while treating them all as constitutive of humanity (a gap in any of them offends us and makes us seek a remedy, and its total or near absence horrifies us as absurd or monstrous), we are also watchful and jealous lest one form be confused with another. This is why we disapprove of anyone who judges art by moral criteria or morality by artistic criteria or science by utilitarian criteria, and so on. Should the distinction be entirely forgotten, a glance at life would surely remind us of it – life, which shows us the spheres of economic, scientific, ethical, and artistic activity as somehow distinct even on the surface, and makes a single person appear specified now as a poet, now as a businessman, now as a statesman, now as a philosopher. And philosophy itself would remind us of this since philosophy can explain itself only as specified in aesthetics, logic, ethics, and the like. All are philosophy, but each of them is still a philosophy distinct from another philosophy. These distincts, of which we have given examples and which are unity and distinction together, constitute a nexus or a rhythm that would be

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poorly expressed in the ordinary theory of classification.80 Hegel saw this quite clearly, and he never stopped fighting against the schema of empirical classification, with its concepts conceived as subordinate and coordinate, when it was transposed into philosophy. A concept stands at the base of ordinary classification; then another concept, extraneous to the first, is introduced, and this is taken to be the basis of division, like a knife cutting a cake (the first concept) into a number of pieces that remain separate from one another. Use a procedure that gives a result like this, and goodbye to the unity of the universal. Reality breaks into various components, extraneous and indifferent to one another. This makes philosophy, the thinking of unity, impossible. Hegel’s abhorrence of this classifying method, in fact, caused him to discard the notion of faculties of the soul, which Kant still held on to – and to discard it before Herbart, who was wrongly celebrated as the inventor of this criticism.81 In the words of a work written in 1802, Hegel rejected as false the psychology ‘that represents the Spirit as a sack full of faculties.’ This view he repeats in different forms and on different occasions, as in the Encyclopedia (¶379, cf. 445), and in all his other books: ‘the sense we have of the Spirit’s living unity is opposed in itself to the fragmenting of the Spirit into various forces, faculties or activities, whatever they may be, conceived independently of one another.’82 Notice that Hegel, always ‘sollicitus servandi unitatem spiritus,’ could make this criticism with far more justice and far more consistency than Herbart, who never managed to harmonize his refutation of the faculties of the soul with his atomist metaphysics or with an ethics and aesthetics consisting of catalogues of ideas, each divided from the others, each unrelated to the others.83 But so it goes: according to authors of psychology textbooks and histories of philosophy, Herbart passes for a revolutionary in dealing with the mind, while Hegel is essentially a reactionary who would have preserved the scholastic divisions. If distinct concepts cannot be posited separately and must be posited as unified in their distinctiveness, the logical theory of distincts will not be the theory of classification but the theory of implication. The concept will not be cut into pieces by an extraneous force but will divide on its own by internal movement, and in these self-distinctions it will be preserved as one. One distinct will stand in relation to another distinct not as something neutral but as a lower level stands in relation to a higher, or the reverse. The classification of reality must be replaced by the notion of levels of the Spirit, or, in general, of reality. The theory of classification must be replaced by the theory of levels.84 On this path Hegel’s thinking

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began its journey, the only path suited to the principle from which it moved, the concrete universal. The theory of levels runs through all his books, although there is no place where he argues and explains it fully and explicitly. In this theory he also had forerunners whom we should investigate. Here too the philosopher perhaps closest to him is Vico, who never made distinctions about the Spirit, languages, governments, laws, customs, and religions except as a sequence of levels. Spirit is ‘sense,’ ‘imagination,’ and ‘mind’; languages are ‘divine mental language,’ ‘heroic’ language, and the language of ‘articulate speech’; governments are ‘theocratic,’ ‘aristocratic,’ and ‘democratic’; laws are ‘divine’ law established by the gods, ‘heroic’ established by force, and ‘human’ established by fully developed human reason; and so on. Therefore Vico also conceived of philosophy not as a series of separate compartments but as ‘ideal eternal history, whereupon particular histories run their course in time.’85 Though Hegel may not have known Vico, there were other influences pushing him towards the solution at which he always aimed. Despite the poverty of its categories and assumptions, even the sensism of the eighteenth century, especially Condillac’s doctrine, certainly seemed valuable to him inasmuch as it included the attempt to make intelligible, by demonstrating their genesis, the variety of activities in the Spirit’s unity.86 He criticizes Kant, who had simply enumerated faculties and categories by making tables, and follows this with high praise for Fichte, who had confirmed the need for the ‘deduction’ of the categories. But Hegel’s real and authentic precedent was Schelling’s system of identity, with its method of potentializing whereby reality developed as a series of potencies or levels.87 ‘The subject-object,’ – in his retort to Hegel, Schelling himself recollected his own youthful notion in this way – ‘in virtue of its nature, objectifies itself, but it returns victorious from all objectivity and shows itself at a higher power of subjectivity every time until, having exhausted all its virtuality, it appears as subject, triumphant over all.’88 What does the theory of levels mean? What are its terms? How do they relate? What is the difference between this theory and that of opposites in regard to terms and relations? In the theory of levels, every concept – let it be concept a – is distinct and at the same time united with concept b at the next higher level. Hence, even though a is posited without b, b cannot be posited without a. Choosing for the relation of two concepts an example that I have studied at length elsewhere, that of art and philosophy (or, as others like to put it, poetry and prose, language and logic, intuition and concept, and

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so on), one sees how an impenetrable enigma and a headache for empirical and classificatory logic is easily resolved in speculative logic thanks to the theory of levels.89 It is not possible to posit art and philosophy as two distinct and coordinate species of one genus – cognitive form, for example – to which both are subordinate in such a way that the presence of one excludes the other, as happens with parts of the same order. Proof of this are the many distinctions that have been given, and continue to be given, between poetry and prose, all of them completely empty, based on arbitrary features. But the knot is untied when the relation is understood as one of distinction and unity together. Poetry can exist without prose, but does not exclude it, while prose can never exist without poetry. Art does not exclude philosophy, but philosophy absolutely includes art. In fact, no philosophy exists except in the words, images, metaphors, figures of speech, and symbols that are its artistic side. So real and indispensable are they that, where they are absent, philosophy itself would be absent since philosophy unexpressed is not conceivable. A person thinks by speaking. The same demonstration can be made by taking other dyads of philosophical concepts: the passage from law to morality, for example, or the passage from perceptual consciousness to nomothetic consciousness. The real, which is one, divides within itself, grows upon itself, if we talk like Aristotle, or, if we talk like Vico, reality runs the course of its ideal history.90 At the final level, which combines all prior levels in itself, reality joins up with itself, entirely developed or wholly unfolded. Should we move now from the relation between levels a and b (art and philosophy in the example chosen) to the relation between opposites in the synthesis, a, b, and g (being, non-being, and becoming in the example), we will be able to see the logical difference between the two relations: a and b are two concepts, the second of which would be arbitrary and abstract without the first, although, in its nexus with the first, the second is as real and concrete as the first; a and b apart from g, by contrast, are not two concepts but two abstractions: the only concrete concept is g, becoming. If we apply arithmetic symbols to each nexus, in the first we have a dyad, in the second a unity – or, if we prefer, a triad that is a triunity. If we want to say that the synthesis of opposites and the nexus of levels are both (objective) dialectic, we must then not lose sight of the fact that one dialectic works differently than the other. If our wish is to apply Hegelian designations of moments and overcoming – abolishing and preserving at the same time – to one nexus as well as the other, we will need to notice

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that these designations take on a different meaning in each nexus. In the theory of levels, in fact, the two moments are both concrete, as has been noted. In the synthesis of opposites, both are abstract – pure being and non-being. In the nexus of levels, a is overcome in b, abolished as independent but preserved as dependent. The Spirit, passing from art to philosophy, negates art and at the same time preserves it as an expressive form of philosophy. In the nexus of opposites objectively considered, both a and b, which are distinct from one another, are abolished and preserved, but only metaphorically, because they never exist distinctly as a and b. These are deep differences that make it impermissible to treat each nexus in the same way. The true is not in the same relation to the false as it is to the good. The beautiful is not in the same relation to the ugly as it is to philosophical truth. Life without death and death without life are two opposed falsities whose corresponding truth is life, which is the nexus of life and death, of itself and its opposite. But truth without goodness and goodness without truth are not two falsities that are annulled in a third term. They are false conceptions that are resolved in a nexus of levels wherein truth and goodness are distinct and united at the same time. Goodness without truth is impossible in that it is impossible to will the good without thinking. Truth without goodness is possible only in the sense that it coincides with the philosophical thesis of the precedence of the theoretical spirit over the practical, with the theorems of the autonomy of art and the autonomy of science. Since it is a concrete concept, or rather since it presents the concrete concept in one of its particularizations, a is doubtless also a synthesis of affirmation and negation, of being and non-being. Thus, always coming back to the same example, artistic imagination lives as imagination, and therefore it is concrete. It is activity affirming itself against passivity, beauty affirming itself against ugliness. And, as a consequence, being and non-being are particularized as truth and falsity, beauty and ugliness, goodness and wickedness, and so on. But this conflict does not take place at one level in relation to another since those levels, considered in their distinctiveness, are the concept of the Spirit in its determinations, certainly not the universal concept of the Spirit considered in its deep structure as the synthesis of opposites. The organism is the struggle of life against death. But parts of the organism do not thereby struggle against one another, hand against foot or eye against hand! The Spirit is development; the Spirit is history; and thus it is being and non-being together – becoming. But the Spirit sub specie aeterni, which philosophy

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deals with, is ideal eternal history and extra-temporal.91 It is the series of eternal forms of that being-born and dying, which, as Hegel said, is never itself born and never dies.92 This point is essential. If it is ignored, misunderstanding occurs, as the witty Lotze once noted: When the servant removes the master’s boots, it does not follow that the concept of the servant removes boots for the concept of the master!93 As soon as we state that Spirit is not content with art, and that, because of this discontent, it is driven to raise itself to philosophy, the statement is correct, except that we must not let ourselves be misled by metaphors. The Spirit that is no longer content with artistic contemplation is no longer the spirit of art, which has already been left behind to become incipient philosophical spirit. In the same way, the Spirit that feels itself not content with philosophical universality and thirsts for insight and life is already philosophical spirit no longer but aesthetic spirit, a given aesthetic spirit that begins to fall in love with various visions and a particular insight. As in the second case, likewise in the first: the antithesis does not arise in the heart of the level left behind. Just as philosophy does not contradict itself as philosophy, so art does not contradict itself as art. And everyone knows the complete contentment, the deep and untroubled pleasure, that the work of art causes us to enjoy. The individual spirit passes from art to philosophy and then back again from philosophy to art in the same way that it passes from one form of art to another or from one problem of philosophy to another: namely, not through contradictions intrinsic to each of these forms in its distinctiveness, but through the contradiction which itself is inherent in the real, which is becoming. Universal Spirit passes from a to b and from b to a through no necessity other than that of its own eternal nature, which is to be art and philosophy together, or theory and praxis, or as otherwise determined. So true is this that if the ideal passage had been caused by a contradiction that would be revealed to be intrinsic to a particular level, it would no longer be possible to return to that level, once it was recognized as contradictory: to return there would be a degeneration or a regression. And who would ever dare treat reading or writing poetry – immersing oneself, after doing philosophy, in the aesthetic contemplation of a painting or a piece of music – as degenerate or regressive? Who would ever judge one or the other of the essential forms of the human spirit to be mistaken and contradictory? That passing of ideal history is not a passing, or, better, it is an eternal passing, which, under the optic of eternity, is a being. Hegel did not make the most important distinction between the the-

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ory of opposites and the theory of distincts, which I have attempted to clarify. He conceived the nexus of levels dialectically, in the manner of the dialectic of opposites. And he applied to this nexus the triadic form that belongs to the synthesis of opposites. The theory of distincts and the theory of opposites became one and the same for him. Moreover, it was almost inevitable that this should happen because of the peculiar psychological state in which a person finds himself when he has discovered a great and deep truth (in this case, the synthesis of opposites). He is so tyrannized by his own discovery, so drunk on the new wine of that truth, that he sees it right in front of him everywhere, and he is drawn to conceive everything according to the new form. The relations, which are both strict and subtle, that connect the theory of distincts with that of opposites and connect both with the theory of the universal concrete and the Idea, also made it almost inevitable that this would happen. Just as in the theory of opposites, so also in the theory of levels – as we have seen – there are different moments that are overcome or eliminated, and, at the same time, preserved. There is also unity and distinction in the theory of levels, just as there is in the theory of opposites. Making out these differences was reserved for a later historical era, by which time the new wine was seasoned and aged.94 At every step in Hegel’s system, where the relation of distinct concepts is always presented as a relation of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, we find proofs, so to speak, of the distinction that was not made, or rather of the muddle that was made.95 Thus, there is natural soul (thesis), sensitive soul (antithesis), and real soul (synthesis) in his anthropology; theoretical spirit (thesis), practical spirit (antithesis), and free spirit (synthesis) in his psychology, and also intuition (thesis), representation (antithesis), and ethics (synthesis); or, likewise, in this last area, family (thesis), civil society (antithesis), and state (synthesis);96 in the sphere of absolute Spirit, art (thesis), religion (antithesis), and philosophy (synthesis); or concept (thesis), judgment (antithesis), and syllogism (synthesis) in the sphere of subjective logic; and in the logic of the Idea, life (thesis), cognition (antithesis), and absolute Idea (synthesis). And so on. This is the first case of that abuse of the triadic form in Hegel’s system that has so greatly offended and still offends people, and it was fair to call it out as an abuse. For who will ever be persuaded that religion is the non-being of art and that art and religion are two abstractions that possess truth only in philosophy, the synthesis of both? Why suppose that practical spirit is the negation of the theoretical and that representation is the negation of intuition, with civil society negating the family and

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morality negating right? Why conclude that each of these concepts is unthinkable apart from their synthesis – free spirit, thinking, ethics, and the state – in the same way as being and non-being, which are untrue except in becoming? Sometimes Hegel does not keep faith with triadic form, of course; in certain propositions written when he was young, he had already stated that ‘quadratum est lex naturae, triangulum mentis.’97 But more often, in the midst of particular developments, he mitigated the mistakes of the triadic form, though there is no particular determination that could eliminate the basic assumption of division. At other times, the triadic form almost seems to be a way of using an image to explain thoughts that do not get their rich truth from that form. But accepting that interpretation would amount to discrediting the logical value of the triadic form, which is just the value that it preserves most fully in the dialectic or synthesis of opposites. And besides, to undertake a defense of Hegel’s claims with external arguments would be behaving like a lawyer who wants to win by cleverness rather than truth, or, worse, like a swindler who puts good gold coins in front of us in order to slip bad metal in amidst the confusion. The mistake is not one that might be corrected along the way, nor is it a mistake in wording. It is a substantial mistake, which, as minor it might seem in the summary version that I have given (namely, a confusion between the theory of distincts and the theory of opposites), produces the most serious consequences – those being (unless I have misunderstood) that it is the source of everything philosophically wrong in Hegel’s system. It will be useful now to examine it piece by piece. 5. The Metamorphosis of Mistakes into Particular Concepts and Levels of Truth (The Structure of the Logic) Since Hegel’s thought is vigorous and systematic, of course, applying the dialectic of opposites to the relation of distincts was a process carried out with all logical rigour, as one might expect. The results should have been two, as indeed they were. On the one hand, items that are philosophical mistakes came to acquire the value of partial or particular concepts, of distinct concepts. On the other hand, those that really are distinct concepts were devalued as mere attempts at the truth, incomplete and imperfect truths, meaning that they took on the appearance of philosophical mistakes. The first of these results determined the structure of the logic, which exists more than embryonically in The Phenomenology

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of Spirit and is then set forth systematically in the great Science of Logic (1812−1816) and in the small Logic of the Encyclopedia (1817, 1827, 1830).98 The second result determined the character of Hegel’s aesthetics and gave rise to the two philosophical sciences of history and nature. What these three sciences are can be seen mainly in the Encyclopedia and in the posthumously published courses of lectures. To start with the first point, when opposites and distincts are confused, abstract moments of the concept (a synthesis of opposites, in its concreteness and truth) are naturally treated as taking on the same functions that lower distinct concepts have in relation to the higher. In relation to becoming, for example, being and nothing are two abstractions, but by analogy they become two levels, like levels in a series of distincts – intuition, thinking, and practical activity, for example, where the two concepts of intuition and thinking have this relation to the third level of practical activity. But when each of those two abstractions, being and nothing, is taken separately by itself, what are they except two falsities or mistakes? According to Hegel, in fact, the first corresponds to the view of the Eleatics or similar philosophical movements that treat the Absolute simply as being and God as nothing other than the whole of all reality, the Most Real. The second abstraction corresponds to the Buddhist view that treats Nothing as the foundation of things, as the true Absolute. These are two opposing philosophical mistakes, therefore, and yet they are also alike since both profess to think of supreme reality as the indeterminate and abstract. And what are intuition and thinking, on the other hand, if not two truths? The first term includes all of mankind’s imaginative activity, and, in its theoretical guise, this gives rise to a particular philosophical science, to aesthetics. The second stands at the head of all human scientific activity, and, in its theoretical guise, this gives rise to the science of science, to logic. These two are not unreal abstractions, then, but two real and concrete concepts. On that assumption, the result is clear. By confusing the dialectic of opposites with the nexus of distincts, by making the opposites, taken abstractly, fulfill the same functions as distinct concepts, those mistakes are turned into truths – particular truths, truths of lower levels of the Spirit, but still functions or categories that are needed. And when these mistakes have been baptized as truths of a certain type, there is no longer any impediment to treating all mistakes – error in general – as special cases of truth. In that way, the phenomenology of error takes on the appearance of an ideal history of truth. This baptism, this transfigura-

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tion, has appeared, and to many will still appear, as the recognition of a deep and important truth. Do we not often speak, even in ordinary language, of productive mistakes, of mistakes that open the way to truth? Do we not say that the human race has learned more from various mistakes than from many truths? The Eleatics were wrong to conceive of the Absolute simply as being, but that mistake of theirs also confirms a completely solid, yet partial, truth: that even the Absolute is being. Descartes and Spinoza were wrong to claim a parallelism of spirit and body, of thought and extension. But if, by means of that mistake, the distinction between the two terms had not been fixed and emphasized, how would it have been possible to conceive of their concrete unity? Kant was mistaken in presenting the antinomies as insoluble, but that led him to recognize the need for the antinomies, the bases of the dialectic. Schelling was mistaken in conceiving of the Absolute as mere identity, but that mistake of his was the bridge needed to pass over to a conception of the Absolute as unity in opposition and distinction. Without the Platonic transcendence of ideas, how would the merely logical concept of Socrates have changed into the Aristotelian composite? Without Hume’s sceptical denial, how would Kant’s synthetic a priori ever have emerged? Whoever claims that truth is born without error, claims there is a child without a father. Whoever despises error, despises truth itself, which is incomprehensible without those previous mistakes, which therefore persist as eternal aspects of truth. Here too, however, my advice is to analyse the real issue and not let ourselves be misled by metaphors. If there is something in a mistake that gives rise to its being designated a productive mistake, a fertile mistake, and the like, then it is a not a mistake, but a truth. Dealing with some doctrine globally, we declare it to be mistaken, but when we deal with it in more detail, it comes apart into a series of assertions of which some are true and others false. Productivity and fertility lie in the true claims, surely not in the false, which cannot even be called assertions. In the Eleatic doctrine, then, the assertion that the Absolute is being is true, but the assertion that it is only being is false. Even in the supreme realization of its truth, that ‘the Absolute is the Spirit,’ the Absolute is being, even though it is no longer mere being.99 Likewise, the distinction between spirit and body and between thought and extension in the Cartesian and Spinozan parallelism is correct, at least in a certain sense, but how this distinction is produced remains to be explained. The false explanation is the hasty metaphysical theorizing that explains those two

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terms by making them into two manifestations of God or two attributes of substance, thereby converting the problem into a solution. Likewise again, the truth in Platonic transcendentalism is the value given to the Idea as something no longer merely subjective but real as well. The falsity is the detaching of ideas from real things, putting them in a world that we cannot succeed in thinking about, and, by that act of imagining, confusing them once again with real and finite things. What is false in each of these doctrines is what stimulates progress, assuredly. It is non-being, a necessary moment of development. Without doubt, without contradiction, without perplexity and dissatisfaction, we would not go forward. Man would not win the truth because he would cease thinking – he would cease to be altogether, in fact. By now the issue is well known to us. It is the principle of the synthesis of opposites, which was explained above and fully accepted. But that principle, while it asserts the synthesis of being and non-being, does not thereby get the power to change non-being into being, darkness into light, a stimulus to progress into progress, error into partial truth or a level of truth. The error that is preserved in truth as a level or a particular aspect of it is that aspect of truth contained in the doctrines that we designate as mistaken. This great measure of truth is the real subject of the history of the sciences, while error as error is the hemisphere of darkness which the light of truth has not yet illuminated. We produce the history of progressive enlightenment, not of the darkness, which has no history because it accompanies all history. Therefore, the transmutation of mistakes into truths (the prime consequence of the application, that Hegel let himself fall into, of the dialectic of opposites to the nexus of distincts) is false, as the application from which it results is false. If these clarifications that I have offered, these canons of judgment that I have settled on, are correct, we are now in a position to give an account of the problem and the structure of Hegel’s Logic – not, of course, an account of the principle behind Hegel’s logical teachings (the concrete concept) and its various particular points (the theory of opposites, of distinct, and so on) that have already been discussed in the preceding chapters. Our account is of the particular thought that moved Hegel to conceive a basic science that he named Logic or a Science of Logic, developing it in three sections: a logic of Being, a logic of Essence, and a logic of the Concept. It is a science which, not without reason, has seemed strange and obscure, rigorous in appearance but actually arbitrary at every step, something incomprehensible because it provides no sure point of purchase or support.

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The problem of Hegel’s Logic (as it follows from the main body of that book) is to examine the various definitions of the Absolute, to make a critique of all forms of philosophy in order to demonstrate, by way of their difficulties and contradictions, the truth of that philosophy which treats the Absolute as Spirit or Idea. At the same time, this critique shows that aspects of truth revealed by various philosophies find their justification in this position, and that this philosophy is therefore the product of all the efforts of human thought, just as it was what those efforts aspired to. In the Logic, then, all these pass before us, indicated sometimes by name, sometimes by allusions and references: Oriental emanationism, Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Eleaticism, Heracliteanism, Democritean atomism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, the doctrines of pantheists, sceptics, and Gnostics, of Christianity, St Anselm, and scholasticism, and then the doctrines of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Herder, and other philosophical points of view. In the words of an English writer, who means something rather different from what I intend, this is the ‘pathology of thinking.’100 This is the polemic through which every philosophy, disagreeing to some extent with other philosophies and hostile to them, asserts and maintains its life against them. This polemic, if we have a correct view of it, can proceed in two different ways, one of which assumes the other as its basis. The various philosophies with their partially mistaken viewpoints can be studied in their individuality, in the particular form adopted by them in different thinkers at different times, in chronological order: the result is the history of philosophy, which, like any real history, is history and critique at the same time. Or else the objects of study are the general possibilities of philosophical error and the persistent sources of those mistakes that arise from confusing philosophy with various other activities of the human spirit.101 In the latter case, the polemic against error is philosophy itself, the whole system, since the reasons behind mistakes become clear only when the system as a whole has been developed. While for reasons of presentation a polemic against error can be located sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end of a philosophical theory, the polemic is logically inseparable from the philosophy itself: as Bacon said, just as the straight line measures both itself and the curve, so is ‘verum index sui et falsi.’102 Or, as we commonly say, every assertion is at the same time a negation. This critique, which is the system as a whole, is then the real basis of the other critique that is the history of philosophy.

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With the affirmative propositions of his own philosophy, Hegel did a magnificent job of criticizing philosophical mistakes. This is certainly true within the limits of his system, at least up to the point where the errors of the system itself prevented him from seeing farther into the mistakes of others. In any case, he did this with a grandeur and richness beyond the scope of any other philosopher except Aristotle. For the earlier development of Greek thought, Aristotle stands just where Hegel stands for all the philosophy that arose since the Greek era, and also since the Oriental era, up to his own time. This is why Hegel’s Logic has often been compared to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and placed alongside it.103 This is also why Hegel reached heights in his History of Philosophy never before attained and rarely since – so much that he is considered the true founder of the history of philosophy, no longer understood as literary history or as a collection of learned information but as internal history, as the account that philosophy itself gives of its own origin in time, as the grand autobiography of philosophical thinking. However, by reason of the confusion created between the dialectic and the nexus of distincts, along with the resulting concept of mistakes as particular truths, Hegel was not happy with the two types of polemic mentioned above. He attempted a third way, which is the one made concrete in the structure of the Logic. Mistakes are treated there as distinct concepts, as categories, and the project is to deduce or develop mistakes in the way that categories, or distinct concepts, are deduced and developed. In this logic the method that belongs to truth is applied to nontruth. In this desperate effort, this forced and spasmodic attempt at the impossible, what was bound to happen? ‘S’il est difficile, c’est fait; s’il est impossible, on le fera,’ said a courtier-minister of the ancien régime. And by an act of will he did the impossible, leading the state into ruin and provoking the Revolution.104 In a similar way, the will reigns supreme in the structure of the logic that Hegel constructed. He starts with the starting point. Hegel always gave himself great trouble about this problem of the starting point, likewise the problem of how to provide an introduction to philosophy (the dispute about the place of the Phenomenology in his system is well known – a meaningless dispute). And yet he himself recognizes full well that philosophy is a ‘circle,’ and by that statement he implicitly declares that an obligatory point of departure is impossible. We enter the circle at any point, and philosophy also at any point.105 Either we start with the concept of the Spirit in general and then proceed by determinations: starting with the simplest concept, and proceeding by sequential complications; or with the most complex

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concept, proceeding by decomposition; or with some intermediate concept, going back and forth. Or else we start with some philosophical problem or inquiry or critique of mistakes, moving up from those issues to a complete system. And thus everyone starts to philosophize, and this is the reality: each one has his own first, tÕ prîton prÕj ¹m©j, and as far as learning is concerned there is no prîton fÚsei.106 Choosing one starting point rather than another is, at most, a question of pedagogical convenience. On the other hand, if the problem of the starting point has no meaning for philosophy, it is still true that philosophy, objectively considered, has its own first, its own prîton fÚsei – a first that is also last, the first that is a circle, and, for example, in Hegel’s philosophy, is the Spirit or the Idea. But in the Logic, inasmuch as it is an inquiry into a series of mistakes, how can we ever conceive of a first that is first by necessity, prîton fÚsei? Hegel started with pure being, with an inquiry into philosophical systems that define the Absolute as simple being, and he tried repeatedly to justify this starting point, but in vain. It was a starting point like any other, as justified as any other, but unjustifiable when it claims to be justified as the only starting point. Why not start with philosophies that locate the root of things in one or another of the cosmic elements, in the water of Thales or the air of Anaximenes? Why not begin with sensist philosophies for which the Absolute is the relative and reality is the phenomenon? Or make it pure being: but an inquiry starting there has a ‘commanded’ first principle like the one posited in mathematical disciplines.107 Otherwise, the route followed has a purely biographical, autobiographical, or aesthetic meaning. In fact, the Phenomenology, starting with the certitude of the senses, and the Logic, starting with pure being, take a route that here and there reminds us of a philosophical novel of some sort – Émile or the voyage of the Irishman searching for the best religion.108 When the starting point is arbitrary, the rest is arbitrary. Without resorting to the remedy of learning Hegel’s Logic by rote, keeping it in mind is not easy. It lacks parts that generate one another necessarily. Triads follow on triads, but does one triad connect with another triadically, as the method would suggest? It seems not. After the first triad of being, non-being, and becoming comes the category of determinate being (Daseyn). But because the connection was there, determinate being should arise as the antithesis of becoming, as the not-becoming of becoming. But Hegel said instead that determinate being corresponds to the pure being of the preceding sphere.109 Accordingly, one critic has interpreted the series of triads in Hegel’s logic not

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as a great unbroken chain but as a single fundamental triad into which other triads are inserted, and still others could be inserted, in addition to those that Hegel listed, those that he stopped with as if he were giving examples. On that interpretation, however, the necessary ascent by levels from pure being to Idea (which was the design of the Logic) is declared to be an illusion. In other words, that book is treated as a miscellany of criticisms aimed at assertions of abstract terms that are resolved in dialectical syntheses. And one must add that the criticisms concern not only abstract opposites but also false opposites. Hence, it was not altogether wrong to note a certain alteration of method in the Logic as it moves up from the first categories to the last. The content of the critique clearly changes as it passes from errors concerning being to those that refer to essence and the concept. Thus, Hegel himself says that ‘in being, there is another and a passing-over into another; in essence, the appearing in the opposite; and in the concept, the distinction of the singular from universality, which continues as such in what is distinct from it and is also in a relation of identity with the distinct.’110 While there is no necessary connection among the parts of Hegel’s Logic, it does nonetheless show the effects of tendencies befitting the thought-content that has been forced into those schemata as if they were the bed of Procrustes. That content, as I have already said, could be developed only in the form of an exposition of a complete philosophical system (in this case, as a philosophy of Spirit) or in the form of a history of philosophy. The treatment in the Logic approximates one type in some places, the other type in other places. There is an attempt at a history of philosophy, for example, in the order of the first categories, where Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Democritus appear in succession. And then Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant appear in other sections. The first part of the doctrine of the concept contains the critique of the Aristotelian analytic, and the second part contains the critique of Leibniz’s monadology. A stronger tendency is for the Logic to turn itself into a philosophy (theoretical, not empirical) of the Spirit, of various cognitive and practical forms in their necessary linkage. Thus, the gnoseology of the arithmetic process appears in the doctrine of being (the section on quantity), and the gnoseology of the natural sciences in the doctrine of essence. The concepts of the mechanical and chemical are clarified in one part of the sections that deal with objectivity. In the doctrine of the concept (first part) is the logic of the concept, of judgment, and of the syllogism; and then (in the third part)

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comes the more properly philosophical logic. And in sections dealing with teleology and life there is a sketch of a philosophy of nature. Practical philosophy comes into view in sections on the will (the section on the Idea). Finally, ethics is not entirely excluded. In the compendium of logic found in the Propaedeutic of 1808−1812, the category of the Beautiful is connected with the category of Life.111 Accordingly, keeping the various parts of Hegel’s system distinct from one another is a hopeless enterprise: the Logic anticipates the Philosophy of Spirit, which takes up the themes of the Logic; the Philosophy of Nature develops the doctrines of being and essence; the parts of the Logic related to mechanics, chemistry, and life anticipate the Philosophy of Nature; and the Phenomenology of the Spirit contains an early sketch of the whole system (if we do not take account of the System of Ethical Life that Hegel did not publish and which was the earliest sketch).112 Concrete content taken from the history of philosophy and to a greater extent from the philosophy of Spirit, along with a forced, arbitrary ordering imposed by the false notion of an a priori deduction of mistakes: this is what Hegel’s Logic looks like to me. The ordering spoils the content. In saying this and thereby reconfirming the condemnation of the Hegelian claim embodied in the Logic, my intent is not to condemn to death and to oblivion that richest of all books that carry this title but rather to provide favourable conditions for it to live and to exercise its deep influence on our minds. Anyone who picks up Hegel’s Logic with the intention of understanding what ties it together, and, above all, the reason behind its opening, will soon be forced to put the book down with no hope of understanding it, convinced that what lies before him is a heap of meaningless abstractions. But if, like the dog in Rabelais, a ‘philosophy beast,’ this person does not leave the bone alone but bites into it, in this place or that, grinding, chewing, and sucking on it, he will eventually be feeding on a large piece of marrow.113 Hegel – and Hegel scholars, following his lead – have persistently pointed to the doorway that leads into the Logic: pure being, from which we must pass eventually through the vestibules and up the stairways of nothing, becoming, determinate being, something, limit, change, being per se, and so on and so forth, in order to reach the inner sanctum of the Goddess or the Idea. But anyone who knocks stubbornly at this door, believing the false directions which say that there must be no other door and no other stairway, will find no way to gain entrance to the palace. When that door is said to be the only one, it is a closed door – a fake

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door, in fact. Take the palace by assault from all sides. Only in that way will you get inside, penetrating to the sanctuary of the Goddess. And it may be that by doing so you will see the bright face of the Goddess with a kindly smile, gazing at the saintly simplicity of her many worshipers.114 6. The Metamorphosis of Particular Concepts into Philosophical Mistakes, 1: Art and Language (Aesthetics) The second result, the other repercussion of confusing the synthesis of opposites with the relation between distincts, was no less serious. Because of this confusion, Hegel deprived himself of any way to recognize the autonomy of various forms of the Spirit and to accord them their own fair value. Once Hegel had confused the mistake with the particular truth, once philosophical mistakes had become particular truths, particular truths also had to be made equivalent to mistakes and to become philosophical mistakes, losing all their intrinsic worth, held up to the norm of theoretical truth, and treated as nothing but incomplete forms of philosophy. Hegel therefore did not succeed in recognizing the true character either of the aesthetic function or the historiographical or natural-scientific function – neither that of art nor of history nor of the physical and natural sciences, in other words. There is no doubt that Hegel’s pages on aesthetics are enlivened by great artistic feeling. The tendency to make art a highly important element of human life, a way of knowing and spiritual ascent, dominates all his writing about it. These pages carry us far above and beyond the vulgar view that makes art a superfluous accident of real life – fun, amusement, a pastime, or else a mere pedagogical device, empirical and subsidiary. Because of the constant contact with taste and with works of art involved in Hegel’s aesthetic theorizing, and because of the new dignity that it recognizes in artistic activity, this theory powerfully influenced public opinion and gave a strong stimulus to the study of aesthetic problems. And this is an advantage that it shares in part with all the aesthetic theories of the Romantic period (the great period of ferment and renewal for the philosophy of art and for literary and artistic criticism and historiography), though in part the advantage is peculiar to it because of the abundance of ideas, judgments, and problems that it offers. But the elements of truth plentifully scattered throughout Hegel’s aesthetics are either too general or merely incidental, diverging internally from the basic concept of art that Hegel accepts and which is mistaken. It is mistaken for this reason: Hegel was stuck on his notion that every

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form of the Spirit (except the final and supreme form) is only a provisional and contradictory way of grasping the Absolute; therefore, he could not find that primal and natural theoretical form which is the lyric poetry or music of the Spirit, the form in which there is nothing philosophically contradictory because the philosophical problem simply does not arise there, where only the condition of that problem is present. This is the territory of intuition, of pure fantasy, of language in its essential character as picture, music, or song – the true territory of art. When Hegel starts his meditation on the phases of the Spirit, he finds himself already at the point where he has left that territory behind without realizing that he has passed beyond it. The Phenomenology takes its start from the certainty of the senses, the simplest form of all for Hegel, the form in which, he says, our stance towards reality is direct or receptive, without changing anything in reality and holding off on any employment of concepts. It is not hard for Hegel to show that contemplation of this kind, which seems the richest and truest, is actually the poorest and most abstract. The thing exists now, and a moment later it is no more. This thing is here, and right away there is something else here. The only thing left is the abstract this, here, now; the rest disappears. But the certainty of the senses of which Hegel speaks is not the first theoretical form. It is not genuine sensible certainty, a‡sqhsij pure and simple.115 It is not, as Hegel believes, direct cognition. It is already mixed with intellectual reflection. It already contains the question about what is truly real. The first reflection on sensible cognition has been substituted for genuine certainty of the senses (which exists in aesthetic contemplation, where there is no subject/object distinction, no comparing one thing with another, no placement in the spatio-temporal series), and naturally this first reflection seems imperfect and must be overcome. Hegel says many times that ‘the subject without predicate is what is, in the phenomenon, the thing without property, the thing-in-itself, a base that is empty and undetermined. It is the concept in itself, which acquires difference and determination only by way of the predicate.’116 But art is precisely subject-without-predicate, and it is entirely different from the nullity and emptiness of the thing-in-itself and the thing-without-property. Art is intuition and there are no intellectual referents. It is the tremor that a poem communicates to us, through which the vision of a reality opens to us. We can never put it in intellectual terms, and we possess it only by singing or reciting it. Since Hegel does not reach the territory of aesthetic activity and does not get from there to the truly primordial theoretical form, he does not

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succeed in accounting for language, which, in his eyes, also becomes an organized contradiction. For Hegel language is actually an act of the memory that he calls ‘reproductive’ because it produces ‘signs.’ And the sign is defined explicitly as a direct intuition that represents a content ‘completely different from its own content.’117 By the mediation of language, the understanding makes its representation manifest in an external element, and so the form of language is intellectual. It is the product of logical instinct that is then theorized in grammar. Language wants to express the individual through this logical form that it has, but it cannot do so: ‘You want to say this piece of paper on which I am writing, or, rather, have written, this one, but you do not say it. What you say is a universal, the this.’ According to Hegel, language thus contradicts itself: believing that it expresses the individual, it always expresses the universal instead.118 In making this point, Hegel seems to repeat the scholastic ‘omne individuum ineffabile,’ but we must substitute the opposite claim – ‘solum individuum effabile’ (or we must correct the first maxim with an addition, ‘logicis modis ineffabile’).119 How could anyone ever really suppose that a human activity like language does not attain its end, that it aims for an absurd goal, living in delusion and unable to escape? Language at its root is poetry and art. Through language, through artistic expression, humans grasp individual reality, that particular shading intuited by the spirit and obviously not rendered in terms of concepts, but rather as sounds, tones, colours, lines, and so on. Language, understood in its true nature and in its true and full extension, is therefore adequate to reality. The illusion of inadequacy arises as soon as we say that language is a fragment of itself, abstracted from the whole. Thus, the page – this page of which I am speaking – is certainly not just what the words ‘this page’ express if the words are ripped out of context and made abstract. Rather, this page is what lies before my eyes – or better, my spirit as a whole. And, to the extent that the mind represents it, the mind can also render it, even externally, by sound, by colour, and so on. If I say ‘this exact page,’ it is because I have it in front of me and show it to others. The words that come out of my mouth get their full meaning from the whole psychological situation in which I find myself, and thus from the attitude, intonation, and gesture with which I pronounce them. If we abstract the words from that particular situation, they will certainly seem inadequate to that particular, but they will be inadequate because we have made them so, by mutilating them. But Hegel (who did not have a precise idea of the aesthetic state as a primitive state of the spirit) could not fully comprehend language and was bound to treat it in

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this mutilated and intellectualized way, therefore declaring it contradictory. In the Aesthetics, when he leaves the language of prose to deal with poetic language, he falls back into the old rhetoric again, having made some effort to escape from it. Even poetic language remains for him a mere ‘sign’ and is essentially different from the lines and colours of sculpture and painting and the tones of music.120 His mistaken logical theory about distinct concepts therefore blinds Hegel to the true place of aesthetic activity, suggesting to him a philosophy of language that leads necessarily to treating language as a mistake. But it is not only language that gets treated this way. Art, not located in its true place, presses on Hegel’s mind. Not knowing what to make of it, he moves it to a place where it does not belong, where – like language, already arbitrarily detached from the aesthetic function with which it essentially coincides – art too ends up seeming just incomplete and mistaken. Hegel could not let this pass in silence or ascribe little importance to it – as many naturalist and positivist philosophers have done. His era would not permit this – nor the particular disposition of his mind where artistic interests played so large a part. The position that he took was basically that of his era. Aesthetic activity – which Kant studied in the third Critique, along with teleological judgment, as one of the modes of representing nature when the mechanical conception of the exact sciences has been superseded; which Schiller pointed to as the territory of reconciliation in the conflict between necessity and freedom; which Schelling made a true organ of the Absolute; which Schopenhauer later had to treat in the same way as liberation of the Will and contemplation of the Ideas – this activity that the whole Romantic period sometimes put in place of religion and philosophy, sometimes putting it above them, and sometimes below, this activity also became for Hegel a mode of apprehending the Absolute. In the Phenomenology, he makes aesthetics into a form of religion higher than the merely natural religion that worships material objects, fetishes, and so on, precisely because it is a way of worshipping the Spirit as subject. In the Encyclopedia, in a somewhat different way, he makes it into the religion of beauty, a first level in relation to the revealed religion and inferior to it, just as the religion of beauty itself is in turn inferior to philosophy. Accordingly, in the lectures on Aesthetics, the history of poetry and art poses as a history of philosophy, religion, and mankind’s moral life – a history of human ideals in which the individuality of artists, or aesthetic form proper, becomes second class and gets only incidental attention. If the notion of art working on the same problem addressed by religion and philosophy is common to Hegel’s time, what is peculiar to Hegel is

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the relation that he establishes among those three forms, the distinctive character that he assigns to art vis-à-vis religion and philosophy. Unlike others, Hegel could not make aesthetic activity a complement of philosophical activity, something that has its own way of solving problems left unsolved by philosophy – much less make it an activity higher than philosophy. The logic that he took for granted was bound to lead him to the usual dialectical solution, applied to distinct concepts: artistic activity is distinct from philosophy only by being incomplete, only because it grasps the Absolute in a direct and sensible form, whereas philosophy grasps it in the pure element of thought. Logically this means that art is not at all distinct, and that, for Hegel, it is basically reduced to a philosophical mistake, to bad philosophy. Philosophy, by tackling the same problem addressed by that other effort and handling it in a complete way, is the true art. That this is what Hegel really thinks is confirmed by the fact that he does not repudiate the ultimate consequence of this theory: when philosophy is fully developed, art must disappear because it is superfluous. Art must die; indeed, it is quite dead already. It may be a mistake, but the mistake is not necessary and eternal. The story of art as told by Hegel aims to show the gradual dissolution of the form of art which, in modern times, is no longer part of our true and paramount interest. It is the past or a survival of the past. This grandiose paradox sheds light on Hegel’s aesthetic mistake in all its contours. Better than any other example, perhaps, it clarifies the mistake in his actual logical assumption. Some have said in Hegel’s defence that the death of art that he describes is that eternal dying which is an eternal rebirth, which we see in the human spirit whenever it passes from poetry to philosophy, rising from intuition to the universal as the world of intuitions fades before our eyes. Against this mitigating interpretation, however, stands the fact that Hegel speaks of a death of art that is definitely not a perpetual renewal but an event that really happens and has happened – a death of art in the world of history. Hence, this is entirely in keeping with his treating levels of reality as if they were a series of opposites, crudely abstracted and set apart. Once he had applied dialectic in this way, Hegel had no choice: either he had to suppress art by means of that grandiose paradox or preserve it by a no less grandiose inconsistency. This explains why it is not wrong to perceive Hegel’s system (whose principle of the concrete concept, as well as the dialectic annexed to it, are plainly aesthetic in their inspiration) as a cold intellectualism, incompatible with artistic consciousness. And the negation of art makes itself felt when the system does no good for all those philosophical prob-

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lems where the concept of art comes in as a given that is more strictly necessary. Hegel is usually considered an enemy of formal Aristotelian logic. To be more precise, however, one should say that he was the enemy of classificatory and naturalist logic, or, better yet, that he limited himself to revealing that classificatory and naturalist logic is not enough to make the logic of philosophy work. I have already recognized his achievement in doing this, which was all that he could have meant by stating polemically that ‘Aristotle is the author of the intellectual logic [of the abstract intellect] whose forms deal only with the relation that finite things have to one another, so that the truth cannot be conceived in these forms.’121 But the method of classifying is not what is truly characteristic of the logic of Aristotle and the schools. The tendency to classify is also found in Baconian or inductive logic. The characteristic of Aristotelian logic is its syllogistic, or rather its verbalism – the confusion between logical thinking and speech that it comes up against, and the pretense of establishing logical forms by maintaining verbal forms. Hegel did not and could not criticize this mistake because he lacked the very tool of criticism that only a good philosophy of language can provide. He tries to distinguish between a proposition and a logical judgment, of course, but he does not manage to produce good reasons for this distinction. He says that a proposition (‘It’s hot,’ for example) becomes a judgment only when it responds to the doubt that can arise about the truth of the claim. The precise distinction was not accessible to him, the one that consists in recognizing that the simple proposition is just speech itself, language as a pure aesthetic act, exempt from logic, even though it is a vehicle that logical thought needs. As a result, he not only preserves the three-part division of concept, logical judgment, and syllogism; he also does his best to distinguish and define new categories of judgments and syllogisms. Traces of old treatises on formalist logic, including the division between a theory of elementary forms and a theory of methods, definition, division, demonstration, and proof, are preserved everywhere in his logic.122 7. The Metamorphosis of Particular Concepts into Philosophical Mistakes, 2: History (The Idea of a Philosophy of History) One might say that Hegel’s failure to understand the autonomy of art also prevented him from understanding the autonomy of history (of historiography).123 But the truth is that Hegel could not do justice to this

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second function for the same reason he could not do so for the first: namely, because of the aforesaid metamorphosis that he brought about, turning particular concepts into philosophical mistakes. From a logical point of view, the two mistakes have the same source. Psychologically, it is likely that the first smoothed the way for the second, as it is also psychologically likely that Hegel’s notion of religion contributed something to producing the first mistake. Thinking of religion as an imaginary and more or less incomplete form of philosophy was bound to lead him to assign art an analogous position in relation to philosophy. Unlike art, history assumes philosophical thinking as its condition. But like art, history has its proper content in the intuitive component. History therefore is always narrative, never theory and system, although it has theory and system at its foundation. This is why historians train themselves, on the one hand, to study documents scrupulously, and, on the other, to form clear ideas about reality and life, especially those aspects of life that they want to treat historically. This is why it has seemed that history can do no less than science and yet always remains a work of art.124 If all works of history are reduced to their simplest expression, which is the historical judgment or proposition asserting that ‘something happened’ (Caesar was killed, for example, or Alaric destroyed Rome, Dante wrote the Comedy, and so on), one sees by analysing these statements that each is made up of intuitive components functioning as subjects and logical components functioning as predicates. The first will be Caesar, Rome, Dante, the Comedy, and so on, and the second will be the concepts of killing, destroying, artistic composition, and other such things. The result of the gnoseology of history that this suggests is that any progress in philosophical thinking translates into progress in historical knowledge.125 We certainly get a much more precise understanding of the historical facts about Dante’s producing his poem, for example, once we have a better sense of what poetry and artistic creation are. But another result is a foolish pretense: wishing to reduce those historical assertions to philosophical assertions by absorbing the fact, in its wholeness and integrity, into a mere condition of the fact.126 History can give rise to conceptual science of an empirical kind, as when we pass from history to a sociology that proceeds by types and classes. But for this very reason, history is not absorbed into that conceptual science, of which it continues to be the basis and presupposition. Conversely, history can give rise to a philosophy whenever we pass from the historical treatment of the particular to theoretical issues that lie at

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the base of that treatment. But for this very reason, it is not absorbed into that philosophy, which is its basis and presupposition. A philosophy of history, understood not as a return to that pure philosophy but as a history at the second level – as a history that is philosophy while continuing to be history, a system while continuing to be an application of the system, universal and logical while dealing with the individual and intuitive – is a contradiction in terms.127 What does it mean to posit this notion of a philosophy of history, this history at the second level? Nothing more nor less than the annihilation of history. This second level, this putative philosophical treatment of historical narrative, this philosophical history, would then be the real history in relation to which the history of historians would be revealed as mistaken because it is constructed by a method that does not lead to the truth, or – amounting to the same thing – does not lead to the whole truth. When the second form appears, the first would dissolve; or rather, it would dissolve just because it would no longer be a form but something formless. The notion of a philosophy of history is the denial of autonomy to historiography for the good of pure philosophy. Every time someone makes this demand, we seem to hear bells tolling the death knell of the history of historians. These historians are usually docile when notified of progress in science or philosophy that might clarify some part of their narrative work. But they rise up in violence whenever anyone talks to them about a philosophy of history, some vaguely speculative method of understanding history, whenever anyone tries to persuade them to turn over the work to which they have devoted themselves entirely, whose every line and shadow is dear to them, to put it into the hands of philosophers for revision and completion. And the rebellion is reasonable. It would be like telling a painter or a musician who had finished a painting or a partita to turn it over to philosophers in order to raise it to the second power by inserting philosophical brushstrokes and philosophical chords. Hegel had to posit, and he did posit, the notion of a philosophy of history, and he had to negate, as he did negate, the history of historians. This was required by his logical presupposition. He divided philosophy into the pure or formal (which should have been logic and was metaphysics as well) and the applied and concrete. This constituted the two philosophies of Nature and Spirit, and a philosophy of history reappeared in the second of these. The three together made up the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.128 In that way, Hegel took over the traditional scholastic division of philosophy into rational and real philosophy – and

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definitely not as a mere phrase or external schema since it also implies the need for philosophical treatment of contingent facts of nature and human history. Given the clarifications that I have offered above, every history, in some sense, might be termed concrete philosophy or applied philosophy. But the meaning of these words was not as innocent for Hegel as for us. For him they implied sharply distinguishing the history included in the philosophical encyclopedia from all the other histories that constitute the work of historians. In his lectures on the philosophy of history, he makes the distinction with the utmost clarity: on one side are primary historiography and reflective historiography (the second divided into general, pragmatic, critical, and conceptual); on the other side are philosophical historiography and philosophy of history. There can be no doubt that this philosophical historiography must have a method of its own, different from the method of ordinary historiography, because Hegel restores the feature of a priori construction to it. It is true that by doing so he does not seem to be pointing to a distinctive feature, only the need for a better developed a priori. And then he immediately notes that ordinary historians also make a priori histories, starting with certain representations and thoughts of theirs that are clearly defective and arbitrary and yet are a priori nonetheless. In that case, however, the a priori that Hegel introduces is not the logical element, an interpretation of intuitive data that he has already recognized as indispensable for any historical effort. Instead, it is history good and proper, needing only to be dressed up with names and dates. ‘As it approaches history, the only thought that philosophy brings with it,’ writes Hegel, ‘is the simple thought of reason, that reason rules the world, and that therefore there is also rational movement in world-history.’129 But the issue is larger than that, or rather, these words acquire their meaning when we see him sketching, a priori, reason’s necessary movement in the world of history. ‘The history of the world is progress in the consciousness of liberty.’130 Its various moments and levels are the different national spirits (Volksgeister), the different peoples, each destined to represent a single level and play a single part in the total activity.131 Before investigating the facts that are given, Hegel already knows what they must be. He knows them in advance, as philosophical truths are known, truths that the Spirit finds in its universal being and does not infer from contingent facts as if they were a summary of them. In what is perhaps his greatest historical work, the History of Philosophy, he knows a priori that the history of philosophy and the system of philosophy are identical. History deals with the same development represented in the

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system as ‘pure in the element of thought, free from historical externalities.’132 And in history the system gets the supplement of those externalities (names and dates). The first phases of Greek thought are the first categories of metaphysics, and they follow the same order that they have in metaphysics. Against my interpretation of Hegel’s theory of the philosophy of history, one might cite several statements that the same author makes about the great respect that we owe to factual data. But then we must see what weight can be given to those statements. ‘That there is rational movement in world-history,’ he says, ‘means that it results from the consideration of history itself: … this must be a result; one must take history as it is, proceeding historically and empirically.’133 The accidental is extraneous to philosophy, and elsewhere he says that history ‘must bring the universal down into empirical individuality and actual reality … The Idea is its own essence, but the appearing of the Idea is in the accidental and the sphere of the will.’134 Good. But if the accidental and individual are really extraneous to philosophy, if it is not possible to know them except empirically, one cannot make philosophy out of history – only history and precisely that. And if one makes a philosophy of history, then the accidental and individual, the historical and empirical method, are disallowed and rejected. There is no way out of the dilemma. To recommend taking account of the facts or even to recognize that the study of documents is the indispensable starting point for history – these are just words if, through the principles that have been taken on, we do not know what use to make of those facts and those documents. Hegel’s students, thinking that they could keep both the goat and the cabbages by preserving the speculative method in history along with the philological method, have saved neither the one nor the other. Since the method is intrinsic to the function, it is childish to claim that the same function works by two different methods: doubling the method means doubling the function. It is worse than childish to make the two methods alternate and support one another by turns, as if they were two persons, two friends, or partners in business. At one moment, Hegel seems to understand his a priori schema as nothing more than a crude anticipation of what actual history produces. ‘We can believe that in the levels of the Idea philosophy must have a different ordering than the order that belongs to those concepts that are products in time,’ he writes in the History of Philosophy, ‘but in the whole (im Ganzen) the ordering is the same.’135 At another moment, Hegel tempers his assertion so that almost nothing is left of it. Thus,

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in asserting the identity of the philosophical system with the history of philosophy, he notes that ‘the philosophy that comes last in time is also the result of all that precedes it and must contain the principles of it all. Therefore – provided that it really is a philosophy – it is the best developed, the richest and the most concrete.’136 Since a philosophical system that constitutes a regression can appear last in time, the inserted proviso ends up asserting tautologically that the best developed, richest, and most concrete philosophy is obviously not the last in time but what is really philosophy. What to conclude from all that? That Hegel had never thought of an a priori philosophy of history whose idea is still closely connected with his dialectical treatment of distincts? No: but that the mistake is a contradiction, and that Hegel’s mistaken thesis of a philosophy of history (an ideal history, not eternal but in time) is also shown to be wrong by the unintended contradictions that Hegel ends up in. Surely we cannot conclude that his confessions suffice to cleanse the mistaken thesis of its defects and turn it into a true one. It is not just a logical inference, strict and inescapable, that a philosophy of history thus conceived cannot tolerate the company of history, properly so-called, and negates it; we also see this clearly enough from several of Hegel’s observations. Certainly the very fact that he defines the philosophy of history as ‘the thoughtful contemplation of history’ (noting right away that thinking alone distinguishes the human from the animal) confirms that history as such either is not thinking or is incomplete thinking.137 And the attitude of hostility and contempt that he has for professional historians is also significant, almost as if a philosopher of art were fighting with professional poets and painters! But notice especially what he says about the factual material that the historian must develop. According to Hegel, only those facts that represent the movement of the Spirit, the history of the State, have value for history. The particular facts left over are a superfluous mass, and the result of collecting them faithfully is to submerge and obscure the objects worthy of history. The essential character of the Spirit and its time is always contained in great events. Therefore, it was good judgment that led us to consign similar representations of the particular to novels (like the famous works of Walter Scott and others). It is good taste that makes us connect depictions of particular and unessential life with the equally unessential material that the novel takes from private actions and subjective passions. In the interest of so-called truth, to mix

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Anyone who thinks about these words will find there the straightforward and pernicious distinction between facts and facts – historical facts and unhistorical facts, essential facts and unessential facts – that we have often seen reappearing among Hegel’s students. Start with Eduard Gans, who, in the very act of publishing the lectures by his teacher on the philosophy of history, repeated that this discipline would lose dignity if it had to busy itself with the micro-study of facts. Hence, it has to show the need not for all facts but only for the great epochs of history and great groups of people, leaving the remainder to merely narrative history.139 Move on from Gans to that Italian Hegelian who had to maintain some years ago, in a well-known polemic, that documents were needed to identify the prisons in which Tommaso Campanella stayed or how many days and hours he suffered torture, but not to determine the historical meaning of his thinking and activity. This second finding would be deduced a priori from the idea of the Renaissance, the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Reformation, and the Council of Trent!140 By such distinctions, even when used to save one class of facts as necessary for real history, all the facts, and the very notion of fact, are discarded as useless. For what other reason might facts a, b, c, d, and e be unessential and superfluous except that they are individual and contingent? And are not facts f, g, h, i, k, and l equally contingent and individual, facts that these people want to declare essential and indispensable? If it is a contingent fact that Napoleon suffered from stomach cancer, will not 18 Brumaire and the Battle of Waterloo also be contingent?141 Will the whole Age of Revolution and Empire not be contingent? Proceeding in this way (since individuality and contingency extend to all the facts), the whole history of the world will be contingent. By the same token, if the French Revolution, 18 Brumaire, and the Battle of Waterloo were necessary facts, it is not clear how to deny necessity to the Bonaparte who was an actor in the drama, or to the Bonaparte who actually existed in reality, with his mental and physical strengths and weaknesses, with

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his youthful resistance to fatigue that enabled him to stay on a horse for whole days and seated at his desk for whole nights – and with his stomach disease when he was older. Since reality has neither kernel nor shell and is of one piece, since the internal and the external are a single whole (and it is Hegel who taught us this), thus the mass of facts is a solid mass, not split between an essential nucleus and a non-essential shell, between inwardly necessary facts and superfluous externalities.142 When these distinctions are used in ordinary language, we always take them to refer to particular historical representations. In relation to their meaning, and only in relation to that particular meaning, certain masses of facts seem superfluous. The distinction is so plainly relative that, by changing points of view, we pass from one meaning to another: what was superfluous before becomes necessary, and what was necessary before becomes superfluous. In the passage cited, however, it is also notable that Hegel refers those facts that seem to him unhistorical (which we say are all the facts) to the novel – an art form. And since art for him was a mere phenomenon that philosophy dissolves and displaces, this is another way to reveal the negation that Hegelian philosophy makes out of history. A strange fate! That very philosophy which, by the force of one of its logical doctrines, had so effectively vindicated the value of history, of res gestae, that same philosophy, as the result of another of its logical teachings, then found it impossible to recognize the value of historia rerum gestarum and hence of the same res gestae.143 Starved for history, fed by history, Hegel’s philosophy then produced propaganda for fasting, but gave no good account of this. And the contradiction was obvious in the light of day, in the sight of everyone, because from Hegel’s school came a series of great writers of history, and then from the same school came the most brash and comical belittlers of history and facts that the world has ever seen. 8. The Metamorphosis of Particular Concepts into Philosophical Mistakes, 3: Nature (The Idea of a Philosophy of Nature) To understand the real limits, the real character, of the natural and mathematical sciences was certainly a harder job. From the Renaissance onward, there had been a continuing enlargement of what has been called experimental and mathematical science, the exact science of nature that became more and more dominant in thought and life. Philosophical theorizing bowed before exact science or felt its imprint in one way or

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another, as we see in many parts of the systems of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The philosophical sensism and materialism of the eighteenth century were the final result of this domination by the naturalist ideal. True, when Hegel’s mind was developing, a movement of reaction and doubt had already begun. Leaving Vico aside – though he must be mentioned here again – all across Germany it was being made clear that the exact science of nature is inadequate for getting at true reality, the foundation of things. Philosophers like Kant, fully equipped with mathematics and empirical information, analysed the methods of the exact sciences and drew their conclusions, proclaiming that scientific knowledge is limited and referring essential problems to practical reason and to aesthetic and theological intuition. Other philosophers, like Jacobi, studied Spinoza’s philosophy, the most remarkable monument to exact science as applied to theoretical problems, and they showed that the method of the finite sciences provides no way out of the finite. Such philosophers therefore declared that God, the infinite, and morality are the province of sentiment and direct perception.144 Poets, artists, and writers in the period of Sturm und Drang felt the cold emptiness of Enlightenment intellectualism, and, like Goethe, they aspired to a vision of nature fully ensouled but revealed only to those who had contemplated it with a sympathetic heart.145 Hegel too welcomed this critical heritage and brought it to its fullest expression by establishing that philosophical method is different from that of the mathematical and natural-scientific disciplines – as I have already mentioned. Even though this whole movement seems so hostile to the ideal of the exact sciences, that same ideal still makes itself felt everywhere, showing its strength and bringing its weight to bear. If Kant denies that it is possible for exact science to solve the essential problems, for example, it is also clear to him that the only science that humans can attain is just this exact science. And the solutions that he proposes by using another method have no cognitive or intellectual value for him, meaning that they have no real value. If Jacobi criticizes the method of the finite sciences as far as knowing God is concerned, it is no less certain that the only form of knowledge for him is that of the finite sciences: nothing else is knowledge because it does not translate into a form of thinking. It is sentiment. In Hegel and in Schelling, Hegel’s immediate predecessor, the situation would seem to be different because both took real knowledge to come from intellectual intuition and the Idea. Looking farther into this, however, we find in them the same preconception (which might be

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called the modern preconception par excellence) in favour of the exact sciences, except that in Schelling and Hegel this prejudice appears in a new form. Instead of excluding the exact sciences from philosophy and treating philosophy as incapable of scientific precision, they treat the exact sciences as not scientific enough and include them in philosophy, by means of which the exact science of nature is supposed to become truly just that. Kant and Jacobi, each in his own way, had made the exact sciences into a non-philosophy and philosophy into a non-science. Schelling and Hegel make the exact sciences a semi-philosophy and make philosophy the real science. These are two different solutions to the same problem, and they take the same things as given, chief among them the conviction that the exact sciences have theoretical value or that their concepts are more or less complete logical constructs. Now to reach a definitive settlement of the conflict between exact science and philosophy, to establish the rights of each party definitively, a completely different procedure had to be followed. As long as naturalist method and philosophical method were considered two approaches to scientific truth, fighting was inevitable for the reason already mentioned – that a particular function has only one method in it, its own, and there is only one method of scientific truth. Hence, once science was taken to be the primary method, the secondary method was invalidated and had to go. Philosophy had to be excluded. Conversely, once the only approach to truth was taken to be theoretical, the other remained a mere attempt, crude and contradictory, at the primary method, and the other had to fall before the fully developed theoretical method. The mathematical and natural-scientific disciplines had to be replaced by philosophy, once it was established that they were a mediocre philosophy that could not prevail alongside the right kind. Kant’s way out, and Jacobi’s, on the other hand – relegating philosophy to practical reason or sentiment, to the non-theoretical – was foreclosed from then on, once it was shown that thinking had the capacity to solve the problems of reality and once philosophical logic was discovered. The only way left open then was to relegate exact science, the mathematical and scientific disciplines, to the non-theoretical or practical. This approach has been tried up to our own time, and it seems to me that it would always have to seem not only the more productive but also necessary.146 It cannot be said that Hegel had no sense of the practical nature of the scientific and mathematical disciplines. His books are full of analyses and observations that could be transplanted without revision into books

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on the most up-to-date gnoseologies of those fields. Read his pages on the concept of law in the empirical sciences. Such a law, he says, is just the stable image of an unstable appearance. And in passing from more particular laws to the more general, in reducing them to unity, we run into tautologies by which the intellect does not express the reality of things, only its own necessity. The postulate that velocities in uniformly accelerated motion are proportional to time: what is this but simply the definition of that same uniformly accelerated motion? And what are all those excogitations by physicists but claims that correspond neither to empirical reality nor to the philosophical concept – like the pores that they talk about but do not show up in experience, for instance?147 Speaking of centrifugal and centripetal forces, Hegel observes that they are a metaphysical monster that is simply assumed while any intellectual examination of them is forbidden, whence it happens that these forces wax and wane in mysterious ways as each loses or gains the upper hand.148 What is unthinkable, because it is false, they call thinkable in the exact sciences. ‘It is certainly “thinkable,” as they say, that motion uniformly increasing and decreasing goes in circles, but this “thinkability” is only an abstract capacity for representation that neglects the determinate character of its object and therefore is not just superficial but false.’149 In the same way, the only thing that they call irrational in mathematics is the real and the rational that enters into it. Beyond these and many other similar observations that are abundantly present in the Phenomenology, the Logic, and the Philosophy of Nature, the terms intellectual fictions (Verstandesfiktionen) and arbitrary (willkürlich) conceptions come up frequently in Hegel’s writings to designate constructs of the abstract intellect and of the scientific and mathematical disciplines.150 Both the fictional and the arbitrary refer specifically to voluntary and practical activity. And since those arbitrary items have a history in time and are products of the noblest efforts, and since they are surrounded by esteem and indeed by enthusiasm for the usefulness of the results achieved, it must have been clear that one could not have been talking about the arbitrary in a pejorative sense or about practical deeds done in the service of whims and evil passions, but rather about the arbitrary that is justified by reason, meaning legitimate practical actions. There is a case, however, in which Hegel shows explicitly that he recognizes the non-scientific and yet legitimate character of those constructs, as they are and as they must remain. This happens when he raises the question – which he answers in the negative – of the possibility of a philo-

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sophical mathematics: ‘a science that knows through concepts what ordinary mathematical science deduces from presumptive determinations by the method of understanding.’ ‘Mathematics,’ he says, ‘is the science of finite determinations of magnitude; it must stay within finitude and operate there without going farther. Hence, it is essentially a science of the understanding. Since it has the capacity to be that in a complete way, it is best to preserve the advantage that it has over other sciences of the same sort rather than upsetting things by mixing in empirical aims or the concept, which is heterogeneous to it’ (Encyclopedia ¶259).151 In the previous edition, he wrote that ‘if we wanted to provide a philosophical treatment of configurations of space or unity, those things would lose their meaning and their particular form. A philosophy of such things would become something logical, or something belonging to some other concrete philosophical science wherein a more concrete meaning was attributed to concepts.’152 Moreover, Hegel understood that ‘arithmetic does not contemplate numbers and their figures but operates (operiert) with them because number is an inert and neutral determination that must be set in motion and put into a relation from the outside.’153 Once granted a form of activity that operates with what is given by thinking but does not think it, it should not have been hard to extend the observation and find a correct theory of the true character of the sciences by connecting this notion with findings scattered in various places about the non-theoretical procedure of the natural and mathematical disciplines. Hegel also had quite clearly in mind a non-metaphysical, purely gnoseological concept of nature, or rather of naturalist method – a method that applies not only to the lower manifestations of reality so-called (to the three kingdoms) but to all others as well (to the globus intellectualis).154 Thus, he treated the theory of the external right of States proposed by Hugo Grotius as something analogous to Newton’s natural philosophy.155 Aristotelian logic seemed to him nothing more than a naturalist science of thinking in which forms were described and arranged side by side as one does in natural history with the unicorn, the mammoth, beetles, and mollusks. In ethics, the doctrine of virtues (Tugendlehre) suggested the same connection to him.156 Here too he should have managed to see that the content of the so-called natural sciences is surely not part of reality but a way of dealing with reality as whole – a way that emerges and persists alongside the philosophical way precisely because, when kept within its own limits, it causes philosophy no competition. Another observation characteristic of Hegel, which would lead to the

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same result, is his quite insistent claim that nature, unlike mankind, has no history. But if all reality is movement and development, how could we ever conceive of a part of reality that is not in the process of becoming, along with everything else? The truth, however, is that what has no history is nature in the naturalist sense – namely, nature stiff and mummified in abstract schemata and concepts – another reason that must lead to regarding those schemata and concepts as not destined to get at the real reality. An English critic has noted appropriately that – in the Philosophy of Spirit – the philosophy of history, or the account of universal political history, corresponds to the section on objective spirit, just as the histories of art, religion, and philosophy, also given special treatment by Hegel, correspond to the section on Absolute Spirit, which includes the three spheres of art, religion, and philosophy. In that philosophy of Spirit, then, only the section on subjective spirit – on psychology – has no historical discussion corresponding to it. Man, when treated psychologically, has no history.157 But why? Just because psychology is a naturalist science and is afflicted with the same historical sterility recognized in nature generally. Despite all these suggestions, however, despite these favourable conditions, despite these partial and more or less conscious confessions, Hegel did not come to the conclusion that seems right to me. He did not proclaim the philosophical neutrality of the scientific and mathematical disciplines and their full autonomy. Instead, he turned to the solution already adopted by Schelling when he had planned a philosophy of nature. The reason is clear enough. He was pushed to that conclusion by his logical presupposition. Since – in his mind – art and history were cast as philosophical mistakes, one to be corrected by pure philosophy, the other by the planned philosophy of history, then, by analogy, the scientific and mathematical disciplines could not remain independent as practical schematizations of the data of experience. They had to be treated as attempts at philosophy and partial mistakes, to be corrected by a philosophy of nature. ‘This antithesis of physics and the philosophy of nature,’ he says, is surely not between a not-thinking about nature and a thinking about it. Philosophy of nature simply means a thoughtful contemplation of nature. Ordinary physics also does this because its determinations of forces, laws, and so on are thoughts, except that in physics those thoughts are formal and intellectual. The only point of the philosophy of nature is to posit, in place of the cat-

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Hegel certainly sees that there are purely artificial classifications in the natural sciences aimed only at providing clear and simple information by way of subjective cognition. But he believes that they can be replaced by ‘natural’ classifications. And a start on such classifications seems to emerge for him from research on comparative anatomy, on the division of animals into vertebrates and invertebrates, of plants into mono- and dicotyledons, and so on.160 He often talks about an ‘instinct of reason,’ supposedly manifest in the theories of physicists and scientists, that should somehow anticipate the theoretical concept.161 Against Locke’s naturalist and mathematical nominalism, he uses this to defend the real existence of natural kinds and mathematical concepts. He also uses it to preserve an unshaken faith in the ‘eternal laws of nature.’162 One remark suffices to show that this amphibian position is untenable. A person who wishes to apply philosophy to historical facts has no choice but to narrate history, which, in order to be history, must still be illuminated in some way by philosophy. Then, should desire for a philosophical system seize that person while engaged in history, all he can do is abandon the history and return to pure philosophy. In the same way, anyone troubled by the need for philosophy when engaged in natural science has only two ways to satisfy it, depending on what the need is, whether for an applied philosophy or for a pure philosophy. In the first case, he must pass from the scientific and mathematical disciplines, and from their abstract and arbitrary concepts, to the historical view of things natural and human. In the second case, he must turn to philosophy, pure and simple. But a philosophy of nature, a philosophy that should have the natural sciences as its basis, is another contradiction in terms, as the philosophy of history is in a different sense. The reason is that a philosophy of nature implies philosophical thinking about those arbitrary concepts that philosophy itself does not recognize, and, as a result, has no grip on them, whether to affirm or deny them. Hegel repeatedly called attention to the difference between his philosophy of nature and Schelling’s, criticizing the latter as based on the analogy between organic and inorganic, on the comparison of one natural sphere with another, and as developed by applying a schema established

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in advance. But Hegel’s philosophy of nature also can develop only by way of analogy, except that the analogy is supplied in it by forms of the concept – meaning judgment, the syllogism, dialectical opposites, and the like. Hence, the discrepancy between the two philosophies, between mother and daughter, seems of little moment to me. Nor do I think it fitting to have praised Hegel’s natural philosophy as foreshadowing Darwin’s discoveries because of its concept of becoming and evolution.163 In Hegel’s philosophy of nature, the evolution and dialectic of concepts is purely ideal, leaving natural species untouched and actually confirming that they are fixed. In the old philosophy of nature and also in the new, it was an improper representation to treat progress and the passage from one natural form or sphere to a higher one as a product supplied by external reality – as a product which, however, in order to be made more luminous, has been pushed into the darkness of the past. The externality by which nature allows differences to be separate from one another and to appear as neutral states of affairs belongs precisely to nature. But the dialectical concept that directs progress through its levels works within them. Representations that are cloudy, and, in the end, derived from the senses – like plants and animals emerging from the water and animal organisms better developed from lower organisms and so on – must be completely excluded from philosophical consideration.164

This is straightforward anti-Darwinism, as we might have expected from Hegel since he recognizes no historicity in nature. In describing the false idea of a philosophy of nature and condemning the account of it that Hegel proposes to give, there is certainly no need to implicate in our verdict the whole book that bears that title. The devil, then, is not as ugly as advertised. That book by Hegel (usually in the comments that follow its sections, which are the bulk of it) also contains a host of quite correct criticisms, which, at first glance, seem to be aimed at mathematicians, physicists, and scientists. In fact, those criticisms are aimed at the metaphysics that those scientists mix into their subjects or incorrectly extract from them. In other words, the criticisms are aimed at the ‘ineffable metaphysics’ (as Hegel calls it) that transforms naturalist and mathematical abstractions – forces, pores, atoms, and so on – into reality.165 In this whole game, Hegel has good cards to play, and we can only grant him our lively agreement. This polemic is also the only just part of Hegel’s violent invectives

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against Newton, or rather against the pernicious metaphysics that Newton (despite his having warned physics to ‘beware of metaphysics!’) introduced or suggested.166 Otherwise, Hegel’s invectives document the hostility towards scientists and mathematicians that the notion of a philosophy of nature carried with it, just as the notion of a philosophy of history already implied a certain hostility towards professional historians. As I have said, the hostility did not grow out of contempt for those disciplines – indeed, it was too much affection, too much of the lofty and philosophical in Hegel’s views about them that made him a harsh judge of the experts in those fields. But his bête noire still had to be the greatest representative of modern exact science. From his dissertation On the Orbits of the Planets through the final edition of the Encyclopedia, Hegel aims criticisms, accusations, and sarcastic remarks at Newton. In the dissertation, he deplores ‘illam autem quae a Newtone incepta est, mathematices et physices confusionem.’ Referring to the tale of the apple, he remarks jokingly that this fruit was fatal to the human race three times, causing Adam’s fall, Troy’s destruction, and, finally, by dropping upon Newton’s head, the ruination of natural philosophy.167 Newton did the most (he says this in a summary in the History of Philosophy) to introduce reflective determinations of forces into science, substituting laws of force for laws of phenomena. In physics and optics he made bad observations and even worse arguments. He moved from experience to general points of view, which he then took as foundational and constructed each of his facts with them. That is the nature of Newton’s theories. In the use of concepts, he was a barbarian, and he never realized that he was applying determinations of thinking. He handled concepts as one handles stones and pieces of wood. The experiments and arguments in the Optics, held up as the most exalted example of such activities in the study of nature, should serve instead as an example of how one should not experiment or reason. Nature stands in contrast to those fictitious experiences, and nature is far superior to the feeble idea of her that would be produced by anyone who put confidence in them.168 Outbursts of this kind against Newton went as far as to charge bad faith: Newton was supposed to have knowingly altered the results of certain experiments. This kept causing great scandal and has been very harshly criticized. Suppose the ingredient of passion played some small part in this. And suppose we refuse to excuse Hegel by recalling that he was at one with certain distinguished contemporaries – Goethe most of

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all – in making these criticisms and even in the violence of his language. Still, when one evaluates the substance of it, both the part of the polemic that is just and the part that is unjust and exaggerated, it is clear that it is simply a logical consequence of Hegel’s philosophical position. In the philosophy of nature, as in the philosophy of history, Hegel also never dared commit himself to declaring the empirical and positive method completely mistaken and fully replaceable by the theoretical method. For him, when empirical sciences construct their laws and concepts, they come up against (entgegenarbeiten) the labour of the philosopher, offering material that is ready-made and half-developed.169 And Hegel urged an accord between physics and philosophy, as we have seen. Declarations of the same sort have been repeated by students of Hegel – Michelet, Rosenkranz, and Vera. The last of these compares physicists to day labourers and the philosopher to the architect, saying that ‘la physique rassemble et prépare les matériaux que la philosophie vient ensuite marquer de sa forme.’170 These are just phrases aimed at the physicists, however, – rash and passionate, but devoid of any content. The choices, in fact, are two. In one case, we suppose that the empirical method is in a position to posit certain laws, certain types, and certain concepts – certain truths, in short – and then we can never manage to understand why other laws, types, truths, and concepts, along with the whole system of them, should not follow from the same method. For the same activity that posits the first naturalist concept thereby shows the capacity to posit the others and the whole, just as the poetic activity that shapes the first verse is the same one that completes the whole poem. In the other case, we suppose that the empirical method is incapable of any truth, however minimal. And in that event the theoretical method not only has no need of the other but cannot derive any benefit from it. Paying lip service to physics and the empirical method is not serious, and rightly this has satisfied no one. By treating the exact sciences as a semi-philosophy, Hegel completely rejected them and absorbed them into philosophy, which thus took on all their rights and all their duties. Having thereby put so big a burden on philosophy’s shoulders, he could not then legitimately lighten it by trying to turn part of it over again to the empirical sciences, which for him were eliminated and nonexistent forevermore. All rights and all duties: from then on it was up to philosophy and not empirical science to prove and justify the existence of this or that particular fact of nature. It was up to philosophy to discover stars, physical forces, chemical structures, physiological elements, and unknown species of animals and plants.

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Now it seems we would have to agree that Krug – the poor devil – was a simple messenger of common sense when he demanded that Schelling’s natural philosophy should deduce the moon and its various features, or a rose, a horse, or a dog, or even just the quill with which he, Krug, was writing at that moment.171 From his first writings to his last, Hegel mocked him, presenting him as a figure of fun, and perhaps that is what he was. But that does not deny that Hegel’s reply to Krug’s objection is, beneath its seeming nonchalance, clumsy and ambiguous. In one sense, Hegel seemed to be saying that things of that kind, individual facts (and all facts are individual), have nothing to do with philosophy. In another sense, however, he was saying that the deduction is quite possible, though science now has tasks far more urgent than the deduction of Herr Krug’s writing quill.172 Salvatore Tommasi, the famous Neapolitan physiologist and physician, showed how right Krug was when he replied, with some annoyance, to De Meis the Hegelian, who kept insisting on some unknown theory of physiology and pathology. Tommasi said that he would be ready to pay attention to the method recommended to him when a medical discovery had been made by using it – an immediate cure for pneumonia, for example.173 Therefore, the attempt to hang on to the coattails of the empirical sciences after having turned them loose only means that we have new proof that Hegel’s thesis is false, as we said above in the case of history (and the basis of the natural sciences is historical). The point is certainly not to cleanse the thesis of its falsity and render it true. But the analogy does not stop there. Because Hegel had no hope of ever being able to rationalize all of history, as required by his notion of a philosophy of history, he ended up by arbitrarily excising one part of the historical facts that he found more perplexing than others and consigning them to the novel. He did the same for the natural sciences when faced with so many classes and species of natural facts, with reality’s infinite appearances, with things that are called rare cases, exceptions, extraordinary entities. What he discovered is delicious – ‘the impotence of nature’ (die Ohnmacht der Natur): nature is weak, she swoons, she faints away from the harsh task of actualizing the rationality of the concept.174 However, just as we did not let ourselves be persuaded to throw away one part of the facts in the field of history, having learned from Hegel himself that the fact is sacred, so also, having learned from him that there is reason in the world, it will not behoove us to believe that a part of reality is in rebellion or inert in the face of reason. What is called here ‘the impotence of nature’ is clearly nothing but the impotence of the

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philosophy of nature devised by Schelling and Hegel to keep faith with their own project. 9. The Construction of False Sciences and the Application of the Dialectic to the Individual and the Empirical Hegel might have just proposed the idea of a philosophy of history and a philosophy of nature, admiring them, promoting them, and defending them but doing nothing else. A person can announce a project and still lack the commitment to carry it out. This often happens, especially when the project is risky. Systems and books that go no farther than introductions and preliminaries are not hard to find, even in contemporary literature and among those announced with the greatest fanfare. It would be almost worth the trouble to make a cautionary catalogue. But Hegel did not leave the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature as ideas in the air. He made a real product of each of them. In the process of getting it done, he had to force himself to treat individual facts and empirical concepts as particular philosophical concepts. And since he had already applied the dialectic to these items, treating individual facts and empirical concepts dialectically had to be his procedure. This is the second great abuse of his dialectical discovery that Hegel committed.175 To get to this point and put ourselves in a position to give the correct formulation and origin of this second abuse, it was indispensable for us to have gone through the first one and to have run though its multiple consequences. Some of them – namely, denying autonomy to history and the positive sciences – lead in turn to the second abuse. Without following that path through all its twists and turns, we would not comprehend how Hegel could ever have arrived at so strange a thought. By following that path, while acquiring full knowledge of the facts, we also somehow develop a feeling of admiration for the ingenuity that exists in that tight knot of error – for the method in that madness, as Polonius would have said.176 The second abuse is the more commonly known, and it has done more than anything else to give Hegelian philosophy a bad reputation. If the first abuse caused damage to certain parts of philosophy, the second struck or threatened historical studies and the positive sciences. Both reacted vigorously in self-defense. But we must not neglect certain observations about this matter. As people gained awareness of the error in the method that Hegel championed and tried to apply, this caused a general condemnation and implicated all his books on the history of civilization and art, on philosophy

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and religion, and on various scientific disciplines. If the method is wrong (says a simple-minded argument), what good can there be in the results? What guarantee? From start to finish, those books will be a science and history of sophisms. The result is not just that experts on scientific issues never ask about the Philosophy of Nature or look at it, interest being so small that we have even seen translators leave it out of their versions of the Encyclopedia.177 What is more, Hegel’s discussions of an historical nature are viewed with distrust, almost a fear of contagious contamination. But like all books, these need to be examined as finished products and in detail because in his writing Hegel was able to operate – and on many occasions actually did operate – contrary to his program or independently of it. Goethe’s case is similar. Competent critics say that in his optics he decided to employ methods completely alien to physics, and these attracted the unanimous disapproval of experts on the topic. But in other areas of natural science – anatomy and botany, for example – he made real, proper discoveries.178 In general, the value of books about the philosophy of nature by Schelling, Hegel, and their students increases as we go from more abstract topics to the more concrete, from physics to physiology, from the so-called inorganic world to the organic. The reason is clear: the usefulness of mathematical method decreases for more concrete topics. In any case, in the positive part of his writing about nature Hegel apparently did not achieve important results or make original observations (like those found in the works of Treviranus, Oken, and others), and perhaps the best he has to offer is always about psychology and anthropology, subjects that he knew better personally.179 As a writer of history, however, he is on a par with the greatest historians of the nineteenth century, which – thanks in part to Hegel – turned out to be the Age of History. The history of philosophy, as already mentioned, can be thought of almost as his own creation. He gave original and completely accurate characterizations of the PreSocratics (notably Parmenides, Heraclitus, and the Sophists), Socrates himself, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Sceptics, the Neoplatonists and Christianity, and, in modern times, English empirical philosophy, the critical-theoretical period from Kant to Schelling, and Jacobi along with the sentimentalists and mystics. In his study of ancient philosophy, he gave a correct account of the profound difference between antiquity and modernity in the way that they pose problems and understand them. And he saw the error of extracting propositions from history in terms of current philosophy, as Brucker and Tiedemann were wont to do.180 His

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political history offers ample and illuminating views of the character of the great historical eras and the connections between them – Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and the French Revolution. The history of literature and the arts mixed in with his lectures on aesthetics contains views and judgments that have all become popular: on the Homeric epic, ancient tragedy, Shakespearean theatre, Italian painting in the Renaissance, and Dutch painting, for example. Truly, anyone who makes a special study of the historical ideas that developed in the course of the nineteenth century and entered into our cultural heritage would be amazed at how many go back to Hegel as the original source or took their definitive form from Hegel, even though the writers who popularized them (Taine, for example) have often repeated these ideas without any understanding of their source or with poor understanding.181 Moreover, it would be shabby criticism to accuse Hegel of historical mistakes by using research and discoveries that came after him, which has often been done. (Sometimes objections have been based on dubious discoveries, as when a complaint was lodged against him for not taking account of ‘matriarchy’ or for not divining sociological theories on the origin of art from labour economics and industrial design!) No historian, however great, would pass that test – not Thucydides or Polybius or Machiavelli, not even a Niebuhr or a Mommsen.182 It would also be petty to make too heavy and personal a charge against him of certain political and national prejudices that appear in his historical compositions, no more nor less than in those of so many other historians, philosophers, and journalists, from Gioberti’s Italian ‘primacy’ to the contemporary Germanic lunacies of Mr. Chamberlain and Herr Woltmann.183 Even within the confines of historical mistakes that were consequences of philosophical mistakes, we have to distinguish those that grow out of incorrect philosophical concepts that Hegel often shares with other philosophers and with the philosophy of his time (for example, dealing with the history of poetry and art on the basis of a concept of art, which, in substance, is religion or philosophy, and also, generally, the claim to construct or reconstruct the course of history theoretically) from those related to his dialectic, the only mistakes of interest for our current inquiry. Given these reservations, it is nonetheless clear that we encounter examples of a dialectical treatment of the individual and the empirical in Hegel’s books, and this suffices to explain and partly justify the violent reaction of historians and scientists against the dialectic itself. In the historical writings we encounter fewer such examples, for rea-

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sons already given; in fact, the history of philosophy can be considered almost entirely free of them. But the universal history developed by Hegel is conceived triadically as the Oriental world, the Classical world, and the Germanic world: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which, for better or worse, are made concrete in this formula – that the Oriental world knew and knows that only one person is free; the Graeco-Roman world that some are free; and the Germanic world that all are free. Hence, the characteristic of the first is despotism, of the second democracy and aristocracy, and of the third monarchy.184 To set this triad up, Hegel is forced to suppress a great deal in the history about space and time. As for space, he simply eliminates a fifth of the world. Australia and the other islands between Asia and America seem to him still afflicted by ‘physical immaturity.’ He sees America itself as only an appendage to European civilization, and he refuses to take the very ancient civilizations of Mexico and Peru into consideration because, based on the information we have about them, it seems that ‘they were absolutely natural and had to perish with the approach of the Spirit.’185 And as for time, he holds that history starts only when there are historians, whence the German word Geschichte or the Italian storia correctly signify both history a parte subjecti and history a parte objecti. It is possible for peoples to live a long time without a State, but that life, which is their prehistory, has nothing to do with history.186 Referring to such limitations of space and time, in the last years of his life Hegel wrote in his notebook that ‘the same division holds in universal history that was in use among the Greeks – Greeks and barbarians.’187 In that way, he sought to adapt to his dialectic the universal history portrayed in books by historians. And he deceived himself that in the individual he had found a starting point that had the precision of the first term of the dialectical triad: this would be the spiritual Orient, where the sun of history rises. But the triad won so laboriously totters with every specific development, as Hegel keeps on trying. If we stop at what first meets the eye, the fundamental triad itself expands into a tetrad of the Oriental world, the Greek world, the Roman world, and the Germanic world. And in the Orient, China and India are immediately sacrificed to Persia, which for Hegel is the first truly historical nation. Likewise, the history of art gives rise to a triad of Oriental or Symbolic art, Greek or Classical art, and Christian or Romantic art – not a very solid triad even in its formulation, derived from the disequilibrium between content and form whose synthesis would then surely lie not in the third term but in the second. Hegel seems also to accept a fourth artistic period after the

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Romantic, which here again would transmute the triad into a tetrad, unless we want to say that the last phase is art’s cessation in philosophy.188 The history of religions is organized in three phases: natural religion; the religion of consciousness divided against itself; and the religion of transition to the religion of liberty. The two last phases are also determined triadically: the religion of division becomes religions of measure (Chinese), fantasy (Indian), and internality (Buddhist); the religion of transition becomes religions of nature, spiritual liberty, and absoluteness or absolute religion. These are subdivided into new triads: the religion of nature into those of light (Persian), pain (Syrian), and mystery (Egyptian); the religion of spiritual liberty into those of the sublime (Jewish), beauty (Greek), and intellect or finality (Roman). The absolute religion would then be Christianity. But the three parts of the world give us one of the strangest examples of the dialectical construction of the individual. As mentioned, Hegel got rid of the other two parts that did not seem mature to him, either physically or spiritually. The ‘new world’ shows an incompletely developed division between a northern and a southern part, in the manner of a magnet. But in the old world the division into three parts was complete. The first of these, Africa (the region of metal, the lunar element, hardened by heat, where man is compressed within himself and dull) is the mute spirit that does not attain knowledge. Asia, the second, is cometary Bacchic dissipation, the land of formless and indeterminate breeding that cannot master itself. Europe, the third, represents consciousness and constitutes the rational part of the earth, with its equilibrium of rivers, valleys, and mountains – and the centre of Europe is Germany!189 Dialectical construction is rampant in the Philosophy of Nature, or rather in the field of empirical concepts. In its positive part, that book is basically just a compendium of scientific and mathematical subjects, divided into three sections: (1) geometry and mechanics; (2) astronomy, physics, and chemistry; (3) mineralogy, botany, zoology, geology, and physiology. This compendium of varied information is organized as the fundamental triad of mechanics, physics, and organic physics, and the whole thing is subdivided into smaller triads. Never mind that in universal history the point of convergence and the final result is the Germanic spirit, just as in Hegel’s conception of cosmology Earth is the centre of the universe (which must then be Germany, at least according to the words cited above).190 This only shows yet again how a lofty philosophical mind can succumb here and there to sentiment and prejudice. Look instead at some examples of the dialectic of the geometer and

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the physicist. In addition to three dimensions of space, Hegel posits three dimensions of time – past, present, and future. But while he observes that the three dimensions of time are not differentiated in nature existentially, he seems to admit that the three dimensions of space are differentiated existentially. These three would be based on the nature of the concept, in any case, even though (he says) the determinations of the concept, in that first form of externality – abstract quantity – are only superficial and give rise to completely empty differences. They are superficial; they are empty; they are arbitrary. And yet Hegel nonetheless deduces them dialectically. The point is the negation of space, but it is an essentially spatial negation and so it is a line. And the negation of the negation is the surface!191 The deduction of the celestial bodies proceeds. The central body is the thesis; the Moon and the comets are bodies of the antithesis; the synthesis, the body of the concrete totality, is the planet.192 Magnetism is the proof ad oculos of the dialectical concept in nature, of the complete syllogism.193 The poles are the sensibly existent extremities of a real line; as poles, however, they have no sensible and mechanical reality, only ideal reality, and they are completely inseparable. The neutral point in which they have their substance is the unity wherein they exist as determinations of the concept, such that they get meaning and existence only in that unity, and polarity is only the relation of those moments. Through the necessity of the dialectical form, Hegel combats the identification of magnetism, electricity, and chemistry that physical science seeks to produce. He wants the three facts to be one and distinct at the same time.194 He would be equally opposed to the physiologists who abolish the clear distinction between the animal cell and the plant cell or who treat life as sown all around us. The three ‘kingdoms of nature’ correspond too well to his triadism for him not to feel obliged to preserve them by treating them dialectically as geological, vegetable and animal nature. In the first, life posits its own condition for itself; in the second, the individual is still external to its parts, which are themselves individuals; in the third, parts exist essentially as parts of the individual, which therefore is a subject.195 The dialectic continues through each of these forms of nature. In the plant the process divides into three syllogisms – the process of formation, the process of opposition to inorganic nature, and the process of reproduction, unifying the two first processes.196 The dialectical construction of the five senses is more laborious because they are five and not three. But Hegel is not stymied. For him the senses are five, and still they are three. The first is that of the mechan-

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ical sphere, of weight, cohesion, and their transformation – the sense of touch. The second is … two senses in the antithesis: one is particularized airiness; and one includes both the concrete neutrality of water and its antithesis, the resolution of concrete neutrality – smell and taste. The third is the sense of ideality, which is also double: a sense of ideality as manifestation of the external through the external, of light in general, and, more precisely, of light that becomes determinate in the concrete externality of colour; also a sense of the manifestation of internality, made known as such in its externalization, which is tone; which is to say – sight and hearing!197 Other examples of this dialectic of the empirical are found abundantly in what for us is also a philosophy of nature (in a gnoseological sense), a philosophy of the empirical – scattered through the aesthetics, the logic, and the philosophy of Spirit. In the aesthetics, the system of the arts is developed triadically: architecture, the first of them, sets up the temple of God; sculpture, the second, sets up God himself; the third expresses the sentiments of the faithful with colours, tones, and words, and subdivides into painting, music, and poetry. The labour of condensing into three what is empirically determined by another number (five arts into three, five senses into three) is spared him in the field of poetry by rhetoric, from which Hegel is happy to take the threefold division of lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry – as he had taken the three kingdoms of nature from empirical science. In logic, the classification of judgments, using a new terminology, is roughly like Kant’s, whose basis is a tetrad: the judgment of quality becomes that of existence; the judgment of quantity that of reflection; the judgment of relation that of necessity; and the judgment of modality that of the concept, and their triadic subdivisions are preserved. The syllogism (which is synthesis in relation to judgment as antithesis, or the restoration of the concept in judgment and thus the unity and truth of both) is also developed triadically as a syllogism of determinate being, a syllogism of reflection, and a syllogism of necessity. In the philosophy of Spirit, Hegel knows full well that psychology cannot serve as a basis for philosophy, but he still treats it dialectically. Subjective spirit develops as the three levels of anthropology, phenomenology of the Spirit and psychology. The first includes the natural, the sentient, and the real soul; the second includes consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason; and the third includes the theoretical, the practical, and the free spirit. Objective spirit has three moments of law, morality, and ethics. The moments of law are property, contract, and right against wrong.

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Ethics divides into family, civil society, and state. Finally, the state divides into internal law, external law, and (by an odd leap) universal history. Hegelian dialectic has been caricatured many times. But no caricature could equal what the author himself did unconsciously when he tried to think of Africa, Asia, and Europe, or the hand, nose, and ear, or family patrimony, paternal power, and testament in the same rhythm of thought that he used for being, nothing, and becoming. It seems at times that Hegel was not yet in full possession of his thought, so much did he need help from mythology – just as Plato (on an apt reading from Hegel himself), when he was unsuccessful in using thought to master certain difficult problems which in his day were still not ripe, substituted an imagined solution for one that was thought out, the myth for the concept. 10. Dualism Not Overcome The panlogicism that has already been identified in Hegel’s system is just the complex of mistakes that arise from the false application of the dialectic – mistakes that I have described above and analysed piece by piece.198 Panlogicism is the substitution of philosophical thinking for all other processes of the Spirit, which must all take on logical (philosophical) form and vanish. But it was a mistake to treat panlogicism as the basic feature of the system when it was actually only the diseased growth that came out of it. Furthermore, one must not take even Hegel’s identification of logic with metaphysics to be proof of panlogicism, seeing that logic is also metaphysics for him. What Hegel called logic has nothing in common with the logic of the schools (nor, generally speaking, with a science of logic as a particular philosophical science). It was the doctrine of the categories of which logic in the strict sense was only one category or only one group. And those categories included the whole of the Spirit and the whole of reality. Hence, it is clear that the identification of logic and metaphysics, of logic and philosophy, amounted basically to identifying metaphysics with metaphysics, philosophy with philosophy. True, this metaphysics and philosophy of his develops panlogistically, in part. But that is a separate issue. The mistake applies just to the use of the principle, not the principle in itself. A dualism more or less disguised – the other charge still lodged against Hegel’s system – would seem to be incompatible with the accusation of panlogicism. But it is not incompatible. Since error can never

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be asserted with the full coherence of truth, the panlogical mistake converts to its contrary, and this is dualism. The locus of this conversion is the philosophy of nature, where, as has been shown, the old concept of nature, as provided by the physical and natural sciences, appears to be completely solid and sustained. This was the concept on which Hegel conferred philosophical value, by making it the thinking of a reality that stands facing, or stands behind, the concept of the reality of the Spirit. The critical point of the conversion – the revelation of the dualism that emerges at the very moment when we seek to disguise it – is the famous passage from Idea to Nature on which Hegel expressed himself so briefly and obscurely, and on which his disciples spent so many words but shed no light: The Idea that is for itself, treated in this way as unity with itself, is intuiting. But, as intuition, the Idea is posited in the one-sided determination of immediacy or negation by means of extrinsic reflection. The absolute freedom of the Idea, however, is that it does not just pass over into life, nor allow life to appear in it just as finite cognition, but that, in its own absolute truth, it resolves to release freely out of itself the moment of its particularity or its initial determination or being-other – the immediate Idea as its reflection, as Nature.199

That conversion and that passage are so dangerous that many interpretations of Hegelian thought have been proposed (and others might be proposed) to avoid the danger, to remove the dualism, and preserve the system’s original theme, which is absolute idealism, the substance as subject. But none of those interpretations seems to conform to the philosopher’s genuine thinking. Thus, it might be convenient to claim that the passage from Idea to Nature is nothing more for Hegel than the passage from philosophy to experience, from philosophy to natural science, whose existence and independence alongside philosophy Hegel would never have thought to deny. In that way, Hegel’s system would become a philosophy of mind or Spirit in general, external to experience but not unfriendly to it – not to observation and research into natural and historical particulars. But this hermeneutic clashes with the simple realization that Hegel does not pass from philosophy to the (empirical) science of nature but from logic or philosophy in general to the philosophy of nature. Hence, he understands nature not as the empirical in relation to the theoretical, but as a theoretical concept with rights equal to any other.

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Another interpretation encounters the same problem: the one that decrees that there is no passage, either logical or temporal, between Idea and Nature because the Idea, already being Nature, does not become Nature. The individual is the universal, and the universal is the individual. This would be a way to avoid dualism, no doubt, because in philosophy we take nothing into consideration but the universal. The individual (which, philosophically speaking, is the universal itself) as individual is developed by intuition, a sphere of the Spirit that precedes the sphere of philosophy and is its condition. But Hegel had no intention of abandoning the individual to the poets and historians. He made philosophy out of the individual when he engaged in philosophy of nature and history. To interpret him in the way proposed, we would need to cut not just a few incidental and irrelevant pages out of the system but to amputate whole parts and entire books, which to the author, at least, seemed to be vital organs. One could devise a third interpretation by basing it on one meaning of the word ‘nature,’ of which there are also traces in Hegel – nature understood as the negative moment of the Spirit, passivity in contrast to activity, the mechanical in contrast to the teleological, the non-being that is opposed to being. In that case, Spirit and Nature would be not two distinct concepts – concepts of two realities or of two forms of reality – but a single concept of the single reality that is the synthesis of opposites, dialectic and development. Unity would be saved. The Idea, which is alienated from itself as Nature, by turning to itself in the Spirit would be the Spirit itself, understood in its concreteness, which includes the negative moment. Our Spaventa came close to this interpretation when he wrote that ‘the Logos in itself is not reality, then, except insofar as it is logic, Spirit as the thinking of thinking – pure thinking. Nature fixed as nature does not suffice by itself, and so it not only presupposes the Logos ideally but also has the Absolute Spirit as its real principle just because it has a real Absolute as its end.’200

However, besides this meaning of the word ‘nature’ – equivalent to negation and non-being – and besides its meaning as individual and as the material of intuition, there is in Hegel a nature understood as reality, as the other of Spirit, tÕ ›teron kaq¶aÙtÕ, the other in itself.201 Were this not so, in fact, Hegel would never have been able to think of constructing a philosophy of the negative, of non-being, of pure abstraction. And

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yet he actually does construct a philosophy of nature whose object is then understood as something positive. Finally, there has been an effort to interpret Hegel’s three-part division of Logos, Nature and Spirit as if Nature and Spirit were just concrete Spirit itself, divided into two parts only empirically. And the Logos would serve to signify the true reality that is in both, their identity in apparent division, the Spirit in its universality, which is not the one that appears only in the world called social or human when that world is empirically detached from the rest. But it would be impossible to eliminate the deep distinction that Hegel posits between Nature and Spirit and which is affirmed by the distinction between an unconscious and a conscious logical form. Panpsychism was far from Hegel’s intentions: for him, thinking was proper to the human and alien to the animal. In Nature there is no thinking, only determinations of thinking, which is a different matter. Yes, there is an intelligence, but – as Schelling said and Hegel agreed – it is petrified. Therefore, Hegel also maintained that in Nature the forms of the Spirit are not already resolved into one another as they are in conscious spirit; they have the standing of separate existences. Matter and motion, for example, exist in the solar system as facts; the determinations of the senses exist as qualities of bodies and also, in a more separate sense, as elements, and so on (Enc. ¶380). The dialectical nature of the concept exists as a natural fact in the positive and negative poles of the magnet.202 It might be a correct thought to make Nature and Spirit into a single series as two things only roughly distinct, as the civilized human is distinct from the savage, but this is completely foreign to Hegel’s intent. His distinction between Nature and Spirit is qualitative, whatever may be said to the contrary – assuming that the difference between unconscious and conscious beings, between things and thinkers, is qualitative. In Hegel’s genuine thought as derived from his philosophy of nature, Spirit and Nature are two realities, then, one confronting the other, one grounding the other, but, in any case, one distinct from the other. Therefore, he resorted to a third term, to the Logos: the need to overcome dualism forced him to try to overcome it with the triadic form that had done him such superb service in overcoming the dualism of opposites.203 Since Nature and Spirit are not opposites in his thinking, however, they are not two abstractions but two concrete realities, and the triadic form was inapplicable. Also not applicable was the form of critique that he had used, again with wonderful results, for concepts of reflection in the doctrine of

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essence. As he understood them, Nature and Spirit were not concepts of reflection, poorly distinguished, but two clearly distinct concepts of determinate character. The Logos, the third term, comes first in his triad, as the thesis. But in the second term, the antithesis, we know what the content is, since it is just the ensemble of mathematical, physical, and scientific theories. And the content of the third term, the synthesis, is psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the philosophies of law, art, religion, and the Absolute Spirit or Idea. But the first term or thesis, the Logos, does not have a content of its own, so it borrows one from the other two, especially from the latter, while blending this into a polemic against inadequate philosophies. For anyone who actually separates it from Nature and Spirit and looks it in the face, that Logos reveals itself as nothing but the dark bottom of the old metaphysics: God, in whom the two substances of Descartes were joined; the substantia sive Deus that supported Spinoza’s two attributes of thinking and extension; and later still Schelling’s Absolute, the indifference of Nature and Spirit; or the blind (but not too blind) Will of Schopenhauer, from which nature and consciousness arise; or else the unconscious of Eduard von Hartmann, which also, quite logically, gives rise to consciousness.204 Hegel had rebuked Schelling for conceiving of the Absolute as substance and not subject. But then his Logos is a subject that cannot be thought as subject or rather cannot be thought at all. It is, as Hegel himself says, ‘God in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and the finite spirit.’205 And we can certainly think of God in Nature and in the finite spirit, Deus in nobis et nos, but certainly not God beyond or before Nature and man.206 The expedient of the triad and the term Logos to which Hegel resorted show that he was always in the grip of dualism, which he always valiantly battles but never escapes. In this dualism that was not overcome, that entangles Hegel’s absolute idealism because of the serious logical mistake that he made, in this lies the reason for the division of the Hegelian school into a Right and a Left, the latter finally being pushed to the extreme Left. The Right Wing interpreted Hegel theistically. Hegel’s subject, the Logos, became the personal God. And Hegelian philosophy’s relation to Christianity did not stop with recognizing the large component of philosophy included in Christian theology but also acknowledged substantial agreement in other respects. The Left Wing opposed any transcendence and any concept of a personal God. Emphasizing the system’s feature of immanence, the Left went so far as to sympathize with philosophical materialism because even that philosophy, in its way, has an immanent and

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non-transcendent character. It would not be possible to decide which of the two interpretations was more faithful to Hegel’s thinking since both were based on Hegelian teachings, and they were opposed and hostile to one another just because those doctrines themselves were contradictory. 11. The Criticism and Continuation of Hegel’s Thought: Conclusion With the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy that I have given in this essay, I have also set out the task which, in my view, should devolve on the critics and continuators who confront it. It has been necessary to preserve the living part of the philosophy, meaning the new concept of the concept, the concrete universal, along with the dialectic of opposites and the theory of levels of reality; to reject, on the basis of that new concept and its development, all panlogicism and any speculative construction of the individual and empirical, of history and nature; to recognize the autonomy of the various forms of the Spirit, even in their necessary connection and unity; and finally, to reduce all philosophy to a pure philosophy of the Spirit (or a metaphysical logic, if one preferred to give it that name). It has been necessary to pull Hegelian thought ‘out of the sheath of its limbs’ – fake limbs clumsily stuck on to it – permitting it to grow limbs of its own in response to the nature of the primitive seed.207 Hegel’s school totally failed in this task. As indicated, it was divided into Right and Left and subdivided into secondary factions on the question of what emphasis to give to tendencies in the system towards transcendence or immanence. But the school was completely united in preserving and enlarging the system’s dialectical muddle, the confusion between a dialectic of opposites and a dialectic of distincts, a dialectic of the Absolute and a dialectic of the contingent. Michelet, for example, as editor of the Philosophy of Nature, played at correcting some details dialectically – such as the place that belongs to a fifth of the world in the dialectic of geography mentioned above, supposing, as he did, that the islands of Oceania represent the ultimate future of the human race, the final development of democratic ‘self-government.’ And to those whose vision of dialectical modes of reasoning was unclear, Michelet replied that the dialectical method, like artistic creation, makes

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no claims on universal acceptance but must remain ‘a special talent of the favourite of the gods.’208 This really paid small honour to the master, who had maintained, quite insistently and with a deep sense of humanity, that philosophy must be not esoteric but exoteric.209 Rosenkranz was another great representative of the Right. His Aesthetic of the Ugly construed all the terms of the crudest and most vulgar psychology in a way that I shall limit myself to calling ‘bizarre.’210 He also proposed reorganizations and corrections for the philosophy of nature: the place of the fixed stars, for example, which Hegel had lowered in favour of the planets and the Earth; the division between physics and astronomy, which Hegel had wrongly mixed up; or the transfer of the process of crystallization from the physical to the organic, and so on. On the other hand, he never abandoned the Hegelian assumption of a philosophy of nature. Indeed, where Hegel had perhaps got a glimmer of the truth by declaring a dialectical construction of mathematics impossible, Rosenkranz was ready to overrule him, exclaiming that ‘this cannot be allowed. If the dialectic is the universal method, why does mathematics need to stay excluded from it?’ Vera, an Italian champion of these orthodox Hegelians, kept up their acts of prowess against Newton, insisting that natural science is done by three methods – experimental, mathematical, and theoretical, the last being the crown. Among other things, he wrote that ‘nous disons qu’il y a un air, une lumière, et même un temps et un espace apparents et qui sont sentis, et un air, une lumière, etc., qui n’apparaissent point et qui sont simplement pensés.’211 Moving from extreme Right to extreme Left, let us linger a moment with Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s friend and collaborator and a writer who even in Italy has become very popular and much discussed in recent times. We can see how he liquidated philosophy by reducing it to the positive sciences, salvaging only its ‘doctrine of thought and some of its laws, formal logic (!), and the dialectic.’ This dialectic, which was ‘just the science of the general laws of the movement and development of human societies and thought,’ Engels illustrated with the following examples. A barley grain, planted in the ground, sprouts, and by becoming a plant it is negated; but other seeds come from the plant – a negation of the negation. The egg is negated when the butterfly emerges from it, but the butterfly produces the egg all over again – a negation of the negation. In arithmetic, a is negated by -a, but by negating the negation we get -a x -a = a2 – the first a raised to the next power. In history, civilization begins with common ownership of the land. Private property negates primitive communism. And socialism will cause the negation of

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the negation by reproducing primitive communism, but raised to a higher power. In the history of philosophy, the first moment is the original materialism, negated by idealism, which in dialectical materialism then undergoes the negation of negation. The fact that we can negate a grain of barley by eating it or an insect by trampling it, or the positive quantity a by cancelling it, Engels added, is no objection because the negation must be such as to render the negation of negation possible: otherwise, he says innocently, there would be no dialectical process!212 Who will tell the sad story of the dialectical method among Hegel’s students, where there is an abundance of savoury detail? One student made dialectic out of Spirit as the male principle, Nature as the female principle, and History as their nuptial union.213 Another located the category of being in the Oriental world, the category of essence in the Classical world, and the category of the concept in the Modern world. For yet another student, antiquity was the realm of art, the modern world of philosophy and the future would belong to morality. In antiquity, moreover, Athens was made to correspond to dynamic electricity, Sparta to static electricity, Macedonia to electromagnetism, Persia to light, and Rome to expanding and absorbent heat.214 In books by viri, both illustres and obscuri, we encounter a profusion of such stupidities, which does not mean that the obscure men are the least significant.215 The best of Hegel’s school were those who did not feel themselves in a position to surpass Hegel, or did not think the times ripe for such a thing, and limited themselves to preserving the teachings of the master as a sacred trust, emphasizing the deep passages of truth in them, and, as if they had an instinct for the truth, declining to push the thornier parts (philosophy of nature, philosophy of history) without explicitly rejecting them. They also demonstrated their cautious and critical temper by reconnecting Hegel in a certain way with his Kantian foundations and by making the need for a transition from Kant to Hegel the constant object of their scrutiny. Such scholars were Kuno Fischer in Germany, to whom we owe a lucid restatement of Hegelian logic;216 Bertrando Spaventa in Italy; Stirling in great Britain;217 and a few students educated in those three countries. Spaventa did not surpass or transform Hegel, but he clearly foresaw that this needed to be done and had to happen. On this point, he noted that ‘in philosophers, in real philosophers, there is always something underneath, something more than themselves of which they are not aware. And this is the seed of a new life. To repeat philosophers mechanically is to smother this seed, preventing it from developing and becoming a new and more complete system.’218

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As far as Hegel’s opponents are concerned, they too never did their duty. Clearly, if they had done it, they would have been not opponents but disciples and continuators of his thinking. While his followers kept the dialectic completely intact to the bitter end, with all its confusions and false applications, the opponents rejected the whole thing. Therefore they fell into an opposite, yet similar, error. We may leave the bizarre Schopenhauer aside; he spewed insults at Hegel but talked hearsay without understanding anything precisely.219 What he spits out never really goes beyond the generic or anecdotal. Herbart was more balanced and at least recognized in Hegel ‘one of those rare people born to theorize.’ He concluded that Hegelian philosophy, because of its great emphasis on the contradictions of which reality shows itself to be full when it is present to thought, made the best introduction to metaphysics!220 But whoever reads the refutations of Hegelian dialectic by Trendelenburg in Germany, Rosmini in Italy, and Janet in France (naming only the most important) cannot help feeling struck by a sense of distrust.221 For when we perceive that a critic is doing his job too easily, it emerges from his own words of scorn and condemnation that there is something much deeper in the question that the critic could not get at. Those clever debunkers have brought difficulties to light, no doubt – sometimes even mistakes. But they do not show the mistakes in their real origin, as deriving from the exaggeration of a great and novel truth. ‘Refuting a philosophy,’ to use Hegel’s exact words, ‘only means overcoming its limits and diminishing its determinate principle until it becomes an ideal moment.’222 Hegel’s philosophical opponents were soon followed, however, by barbarian opponents in the new generations that came of age after 1848. What they loathed in Hegel was just philosophy itself, which he represented in all its majestic harshness: philosophy, heartless and without pity for the weak-minded and careless; philosophy, not appeased by treats of sentiment and fantasy nor by quick meals of semi-science. For those people, Hegel was the unavenged ghost of the theoretical need in the human spirit, and here was a ghost apparently ready to undertake its own vendettas at any given moment. Hence the fierce hatred of Hegel, a hatred blended of remorse and fear, and certainly not motivated by awareness of mistakes in the system. Hegel had observed that philosophy after Fichte became too refined and could no longer mean anything to polite society and the educated public, as it did in the eighteenth century before Kant.223 But positivist decadence reduced thinkers to so low a level that they no longer distin-

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guished between the concept and sensation, between theory and experience. Given this loss of the most elementary distinctions, and given Hegel’s assumption that elementary philosophical problems are identified and solved, how could anyone ever have discussed him, with his thought turning on advanced and more subtle problems, living and breathing on the highest peaks? For his critics to look at Hegel in such conditions was the same as uncovering the sad consciousness of powerlessness, with its agitations and irritations, and with fierce condemnations of the joys that they were not allowed to taste. In our day, fortunately, intellectual attitudes have changed for the better. Things are now more favourable to philosophy in general, more favourable to Hegel himself. We are now at the point of possessing a philosophy of art and language, a theory of history, and a gnoseology of the mathematical and scientific disciplines that make it impossible for the mistakes that entangled Hegel to emerge again. In particular, the old concept of nature, inherited from the science and philosophy of the seventeenth century, is in disarray. Every day it becomes clearer that nature, in its concept, is a product of human praxis. Only when people forget how they got here do they find something facing them from outside that somehow frightens them because it looks like an impenetrable mystery. On the other hand, a kind of philosophical Romanticism that is being reborn everywhere is a condition (though nothing more than a condition) for a clear understanding of Hegel and all the philosophers of his period. And people are sighing once again for mysticism and direct perception in the manner of Jacobi. Once again they are positing Schelling’s old ideal of an aesthetic contemplation that gives what (natural) science cannot give to the Spirit that thirsts for truth and concreteness. Bergson, one of the writers who belong to this movement, thus advocates an intuitive knowledge ‘qui s’installe dans le mouvement et adopte la vie même des choses’ as a metaphysics of the Absolute.224 Was this not precisely Hegel’s demand? Was this not his point of departure – finding a mental form that would be as mobile as movement, that would share in the life of things, that would feel ‘the pulse of reality’ and mentally reproduce the rhythm of development without shattering, rigidifying, or falsifying it?225 For Hegel this view was only a point of departure, however, certainly not a conclusion, as it was for the writer just mentioned and for others of his inclination. It would have been futile to ask Hegel to renounce thinking. His supreme achievement, his deathless discovery, is having demonstrated that the need for concrete knowledge is satisfied in the form of thinking. Hence the need to study Hegel critically, to isolate the

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living and vital components from the dead. Modern consciousness can neither wholly accept Hegel nor wholly reject him, as used to be done fifty years ago. As far as Hegel is concerned, modern thought finds itself in the position of the Roman poet towards his lady: nec tecum vivere possum nec sine te.226 It seems that this critical revision of Hegel cannot now be had from his native Germany. So much has she forgotten her great son that his works are no longer even reprinted, and judgments of him are frequently expressed that astonish us in this remote margin of Italy – we who have never managed to forget him completely and have to some extent made him one of us, reconnecting him with Bruno of Nola and Vico of Naples as our brother. Rather more important for Hegel studies than German efforts are those that have been going on for more than thirty years in England, where Stirling’s work has proved fertile and where Hegel is clearly explained, truthfully interpreted and criticized with respect and intellectual freedom. In return, the mighty spirit of George Hegel has awakened English thinkers to the life of theory for the first time – they who have been the world’s suppliers of empirical philosophy for centuries, seemingly unable even in the nineteenth century to produce any philosophers better than Stuart Mill and Spencer.227 If anyone were to ask me now, after all that I have said, whether one ought to be ‘Hegelian’ or not, whether I am ‘Hegelian,’ I might excuse myself from answering. However, I wish to add the desired response here, as a kind of corollary. I am, and I believe one ought to be, Hegelian, but in the same sense whereby anyone in our day who has a philosophical mind and education also is – and feels – Eleatic, Heraclitean, Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist, Cartesian, Spinozist, Leibnizian, Viconian, Kantian, and so on. This is the sense in which no thinker and no historical movement of thought can have passed by without bearing fruit, without providing some component of truth that becomes part, consciously or not, of living modern thought. No prudent person will want to be Hegelian if it means being a slavishly literal disciple who professes to accept the master’s every word, or else a religious cultist who thinks it sinful to disagree – nor will I. In short, Hegel too found his piece of the truth, and one must recognize and validate this piece. And that’s all. If this does not happen now, never mind. ‘The Idea is in no hurry,’ as Hegel used to say.228 We will have to arrive at the same truth, at one time or another, by a different route. And without having help directly from Hegel, but looking back on the history

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of thought, we will then be obliged to proclaim him, with many exclamations of wonder, our precursor. Although I may feel too pressed to mention something that one would be happy to take for granted, nonetheless, in order to decide whether to accept or reject the doctrines that Hegel proposes, the first condition is to read his books, thereby ending the spectacle, somewhere between comical and revolting, of indicting and insulting a philosopher whom we do not know, stupidly battling a silly scarecrow fashioned by our own imagination under the utterly ignoble rule of mental laziness.

NOTES 1 We have used the first edition, Croce (1907), but see also Croce (2006), the new Edizio nazionale by Alessandro Savorelli and Claudio Cesa, based on the 1948 edition but with variants from the 1907, 1913, and 1927 versions; another recent edition by Giuseppe Gembillo in Croce (1995) also reflects the many stylistic and some substantive changes that Croce made after 1907. The bibliography that Croce mentions is omitted here. 2 The prolific Kuno Fischer (1824−1907), who taught philosophy and its history at Heidelberg, Berlin, and Jena, was still a major figure when Croce was writing this essay. Fischer (1849) addressed Croce’s special interest of aesthetics, but he was best known for his history of modern philosophy and his interpretations of Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, see Fischer (1901), and for logic and metaphysics, Fischer (1852) and its second edition (1865). 3 Hegel (1986a), 3.20; (1977):7−8; Croce used Hegel (1832−45); see his ‘Saggio di una bibliografia hegeliana,’ in Croce (1907): 215−20. Although his habits were too mandarin to bother with references for quotations from Hegel or other sources, we will identify them when we can – along with some other passages without quotation-marks. Our references will usually be keyed to an accessible English version as well as the Suhrkamp Werke, and we have greatly benefited from the notes in Croce (2006). 4 Hegel (1986a), 6.291−3, 342−3; (1969): 614−15, 656−7. 5 [a] See especially the introduction to the Phenomenology and the preliminaries to the Encyclopedia; [e] Hegel (1986a), 3.43−4; 8.311−15; (1977): 25; (1991): 239−42. 6 In his Proslogion, Anselm argued that God’s existence is proved simply by understanding the proposition that ‘God is that than which nothing greater can be thought,’ but many other philosophers have rejected Anselm’s ontological proof – including Kant in the first Critique.

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Part II: Translations 7 Hegel (1986a), 6. 288−92; 8.315−16; (1969): 612−15; (1991): 242−3. 8 ‘Spirit’ is the usual English translation of Hegel’s Geist, though the German word means ‘mind’ as well, one of many senses of the term that enters Hegel’s use of it. These senses are not meant to be distinct: each is understood as a determination (Bestimmung), qualification or fulfillment of Spirit, which in itself is just pure, undetermined activity that develops by reflecting on itself and hence has an irreducibly mental character. The God that has these properties is Absolute Spirit. In this essay, Croce uses spirito or Spirito most often in a Hegelian sense, but sometimes he means just ‘mind.’ We will sometimes capitalize Spirit, especially when Croce seems to have in mind Hegel’s undetermined or Absolute Spirit. On this and other points of Hegelian terminology, see Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 9 The distinction between opposito and distinto is the crux of Croce’s essay. Both words often appear as substantives, often in the plural, but only the former comes naturally into English as a plural: ‘opposites,’ yes; ‘distincts,’ no. Nonetheless, we have usually avoided devices like ‘the distinct’ for distinti, translating it as ‘distincts.’ An opposite (Gegensatz) for Hegel (a) is opposed only to one thing; (b) is bound to that single opposite; and (c) becomes that opposite – relatively, for example: when I stand at your left but you stand at my right, the left/right opposition can change if you circle around counterclockwise to my left, thus putting me at your right. The dialectic is the process whereby opposites unify in mutual negation, but not everything should operate dialectically if being an opposite is a criterion for entering that process. Since whatever does not fall under identity (Identität) falls under distinction (Unterschied), which is any quantitative or qualitative difference, most distinct items will not be opposites, in the strict sense. The continuous and comprehensive character of the dialectic also muddies the waters. Croce’s main point, echoed by other critics, is that Hegel abuses the dialectic by applying it to what is merely distinct and not opposite. 10 Your death is my life. 11 Leibniz (1887): 607. 12 ‘Unharmonious harmony,’ as in Horace, Epistles 1.12.19; Lucan, Civil War 1.98; in the next chapter Croce discusses Nicholas of Cusa (1401−64), or Cusanus, who was a famous proponent of the ‘coincidence of opposites,’ another kind of concordia discors. See also the note above for ‘mors tua, vita mea.’ 13 Hegel (1986a), 8.192; (1991): 144, where Hegel has Gedanke (‘thought’) rather than Begriff (‘concept’): ‘Becoming is the first concrete thought and hence the first concept, whereas being and nothing, in contrast, are empty abstractions.’

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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel 14 [a] Wissenschaft der Logik, II, 48; [e] Hegel (1986a), 6.287; (1969): 611. 15 Brigliadoro and Baiardo are warhorses ridden by the knights of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. 16 Trendelenburg (1840), chap. 3. 17 ‘From a fair mother a daughter fairer still,’ Horace, Odes, 1.16.1. 18 The Dionysian and Apollonian are opposing forces in Nietzsche (1872). 19 [a] Saggio storico-critico sulle categorie e la dialettica, opera postuma (Torino: 1883): 371; [e] the second half of this large work is an attack on Hegel. 20 [a] Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke (1832), II, 36−7; [e] Hegel (1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8. 21 Hegel (1986a), 8.237; (1991): 180. 22 [a] Wissenschaft der Logik, II, 67−8; [e] Hegel (1986a), 6.76; (1969): 440−1. 23 [a] See also the historical introduction to Kuno Fischer, Logik und Metaphysik (2d ed., 1865) and Bertrando Spaventa, Prolusione e introduzione alle lezioni di filosofia (Naples: 1862). For the immediate antecedents of Hegel’s dialectic and the various phases of its development, see especially Aloys Schmid, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Hegelschen Logik (Regensburg: 1858); [e] Fischer (1865); Spaventa (1862); Schmid (1858); Hegel (1986a): 18−20. 24 Hegel (1986a), 18.305−19; (1995), I, 267−78. 25 For the fragments and testimonia mentioned here (none of them now securely attributed to Heraclitus, not even the famous ‘everything flows’), see Hegel (1986a), 18.323−36; (1995), I, 282−93. 26 Hegel (1986a), 18.320; (1995), I, 279. 27 Hegel (1986a), 19.62, 79−82; (1995), II, 49−50, 56−60; Plato, Parmenides 166C. 28 Philo Judaeus (fl. c. 40 CE) wrote allegorical philosophy based on Biblical themes; like their early Christian contemporaries, the Gnostics focused on the problem of salvation, describing the process of the fall and redemption in an exuberant mythology. 29 The ancient Neoplatonic tradition began with Plotinus in the third century CE; Proclus, his greatest successor, lived in the fifth century. 30 [a] ¹ ™nantiÒthj ™stˆ diafor¦ tšleioj; Arist. Meta. 1055b16: [e] ‘contrariety is complete difference’; on Cusanus, see the note in chap. 1. 31 [a] On Cusanus, see Fiorentino, Il risorgimento filosofico nel Quattrocento (Naples: 1885), chap. 2; [e] learned ignorance was another paradoxical theme of great interest to Cusanus. 32 Bruno, De la causa, principio e uno, in Bruno (1907), I, 252. A learned and creative Dominican, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600. He was the first great philosopher to write extensively in the Italian vernacular. For Spaventa and other Italian Hegelians, Bruno was a major inspiration, and his persecu-

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33 34

35 36 37

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tion by the Church was a lively item in Italian politics when Croce was growing up. [a] Bruno, De la causa, principio e uno, dialogue 5, near the end; Dialoghi metafisici, ed. Gentile (Bari: Laterza, 1907): 255−7; [e] Bruno (1907). The German mystic, Jakob Böhme (1575−1625), had great influence in the seventeenth century, especially because of his Trinitarian theology; Hegel considered him a pivotal figure in the history of German thought. Hegel (1986a) 20.96−8, 113−19; Hegel (1995), III, 194−5, 211−16. For Vico see the Introduction, section 13, and Fiorentino’s letters to Florenzi Waddington. [a] For Hamann see Hegel, Vermischte Schriften, II, 36−7, 87−8, and what I have said about him in La Critica, 4 (1906): 67-84. [e] For Hamann see the note in Fiorentino’s second letter to Florenzi Waddington; an idiosyncratic critic of such Enlightenment heroes as Lessing and Kant, he fascinated the Romantics of Hegel’s generation. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743−1819) began as an admirer of Kant but changed his mind in reaction to the first Critique. His views on Spinoza, publicized in the debate about pantheism that also involved Lessing and Mendelssohn, were particularly controversial. [e] Hegel (1986a), 11.328−9, where the reference is to ‘Brunos Schrift De Uno,’ which would seem to be De la causa, principio et uno, the text cited above. Hegel (1986a), 6.260−1; (1969): 588−9, where Hegel, speaking about Kant’s ‘synthetic judgments a priori,’ says that such a judgment is an ‘original synthesis of apperception.’ Hegel did not use the thesis/antithesis/synthesis relation to describe his own dialectic, but he did apply it to Kant: Inwood (1992): 12, 81−2. In later versions of this essay, Croce often replaces ‘antithesis’ with ‘antinomy,’ ‘conflict,’ and other words. Gnoseology is epistemology, more or less: in Croce’s context it is the part of philosophy that addresses the Erkenntnisproblem, the problem of cognition or knowledge. Rosenkranz (1844): 94−9. Haym (1857): 215. [a] See my note on ‘Definitions of Romanticism’ in La Critica, 4 (1906): 241−5. [a] ‘For my part, I have to declare that, so far as it has been given me to see, I have no evidence that any man has thoroughly understood Kant except Hegel, or that this latter himself remains aught else than a problem whose solution has been arrogated, but never effected,’ in James H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (London: 1865), I, 14. [e] Against the advice of J.S. Mill, Stirling won the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in 1868, three years

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45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

54

after publishing his Secret of Hegel, which finally transported post-Kantian idealism across the Channel. Despite the priority of Stirling’s book and Croce’s high opinion of him (see below, chapter 11), T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, F.H. Bradley, J.M.E McTaggart, and other neo-Hegelian idealists of his period are now more prominent in the Anglo-American canon. Hegel knew Schelling since 1790, when they and Hölderlin were seminary students at Tübingen. Their paths often crossed, eventually as lifelong rivals. Hegel’s first book, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy (1801), is only one indication of Schelling’s early influence on Hegel. Their friendship ended in 1807, however, when Hegel called Schelling’s version of the Absolute ‘the night in which all cows are black’ in the preface to the Phenomenology. Later, after Hegel died in 1831 and Schelling replaced him in Berlin ten years afterward, Schelling’s official duty was to ‘stamp out the dragon seed of Hegelian philosophy.’ Meanwhile, the philosophical impresario Victor Cousin (1792−1867) had opened an important channel to France and the rest of Latin Europe for post-Kantian German philosophy. He met Hegel, and eventually Schelling, on his first trip to Germany in 1817, but his interest in German thought endangered his career in France, even before his arrest in 1824 on another trip to Germany. His Fragments philosophiques first appeared in 1826: Hegel (1986a), 3.21; Cousin (1834); Pinkard (2000): 21−2, 57, 98, 256−8, 381−3, 524−7. Hegel (1986a), 20.424: ‘Schelling in neueren Zeiten der Urheber der Naturphilosophie geworden ist.’ Hegel (1986a), 5.227; (1969): 199. [a] This and other such qualifications are made advisable by the large number of meanings that these words have had in philosophical language. Hegel (1986a), 5.276; (1991): 239. Hegel (1986a) 8.274−9; (1991): 209−13, citing Goethe (1817−23), 1.3.204; see also the lyrics translated in Goethe (1883): 254−5. [a] For the critique of these concepts, see especially the doctrine of essence that constitutes the second section of the Logic; [e] Hegel (1986a), 8.231306; (1991): 175−235. Hegel, Philosophy of History, pp. 26-7 (Werke, 12.42). [a] Preface to The Philosophy of Right; cf. Encyclopedia, ¶6 [e] Hegel (1986a), 7.24, 8.47−9; (1896): xxvii; (1991): 28−30. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737−1814) was a naturalist, moralist, and, most famously, a novelist, whose Paul et Virginie (1771) reflected Rousseau’s ideas about an uncorrupted nature: see Bernardin de SaintPierre (1784), (1788), (1840): 42 ff. In later editions, ‘the affirmation of one affirms the other.’

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Part II: Translations 55 Hegel (1986a),7.236; (1896): 120. 56 [a] In the ‘Aphorisms’ found in the appendix to Johann Carl Friedrich Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Leben: Supplement zu Hegel’s Werken (Berlin, 1844): 550; for the satire on Sollen, see especially the Phenomenology, the section on reason, B, and the introduction to the Philosophy of History. [e] Hegel (1986a) 2.555; 3.191−2, 314; 12.20, 50-1; (1956): 9-10, 34-5; (1977): 151, 255-6. 57 Hegel (1986a), 12.37; (1956): 23. 58 Hegel (1986a), 12.48; (1956): 32−3. 59 Hegel (1986a), 12.45; (1956): 31: ‘die Geschäftsführer des Weltgeistes.’ 60 Hegel (1986a),12.46−7; (1956): 31−2; Goethe (1872): 202; Fischer (1901): 410−11 61 Like the early Romantics with whom he spent his youth, Hegel was dazzled by the French Revolution and by its prophets, especially Rousseau. From early in his career, however, critics saw Hegel as a willing tool of the Prussian establishment, and, later, the Restoration. Although the criticism was too simple, it was not baseless. In the new Prussian University of Berlin, Hegel himself became a state institution. Moreover, the most accessible part of his thought was a philosophy of history grounded in the proposition that the real is the rational – an easy mark for cynics. For the story of Hegel’s involvement in German politics, see especially Pinkard (2000). 62 Hegel (1986a), 7.24−5; (1896): xxviii; Plato, Republic, 460C-D. 63 [a] H. Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (1885), III, 720−1; Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Stuttgart: 1888). [e] Heinrich von Treitschke (1834−96) was the official and partisan voice of Prussian history when Croce was a young man; his nationalism was extreme and anti-Semitic; for Engels in Italy see section 14 of the Introduction. 64 Marx and Engels (1848). 65 [a] cf. Kuno Fischer, Hegels Leben und Werke, p. 59; [e] Hegel (1986a) 1.507−8, 554−7; Rosenkranz (1844): 242−3; Pinkard (2000), Hegel, pp. 145−53: ‘the Secretary of Florence’ to whom Croce alludes was Machiavelli, also discussed by Hegel in the early work cited here. Croce has ‘Rinascimento’ here for ‘Renaissance.’ 66 Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810−61) was the primary architect of Italy’s unification, just as Otto von Bismarck (1815−98) was Germany’s first chancellor and the founder of her modern empire. Bismarck became prime minister of Prussia in 1862, the year after Cavour died. 67 Hegel (1986a), 8.296; (1991): 226. 68 For Comte, Spencer, and Herbart, see the Introduction, sections 11, 13−15.

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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel 69 [a] In the ‘Aphorisms’ cited above, p. 543; [e] Hegel (1986a), 2.546. 70 [a] For Vico’s historical position and its relation to German philosophy, see B. Spaventa, op. cit., part 6, pp. 83−102, and also the historical section of my Aesthetic, chap. 5; [e] Croce (1956): 155−474; Spaventa (1862). 71 Machiavelli (1990): 129. 72 [a] See my ‘Bibliografia vichiana’ (Naples: 1904): 91−5. 73 Vico (1977): 176. 74 Vico (1835-7), V, 235. 75 Vico (1977): 206. 76 Vico (1977): 176−7. 77 Vico (1977): 284−5: ‘Man becomes all things by not understanding.’ 78 [a] The passages from Vico are in his Opere, ed. Ferrari, V, 96−8, 117, 136, 143, 146−7, 183, 571−2; VI, 235; [e] Vico (1977): 705−6; Vico (1835−7). 79 Later versions have ‘I am talking about what is theoretically distinct, and certainly not about naturalist classifications.’ 80 Later versions have ‘the theory of classification, whether we call it naturalist or intellectualist.’ 81 For Herbart see section 14 of the Introduction. 82 [a] Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie, in Werke, XVI, 130; [e] Hegel (1986a), 2.271; 10.13, 241-2; (1971): 4−5, 188−90. 83 Ephes. 4:3: ‘anxious to preserve the unity of the spirit.’ 84 Later versions have ‘The classificatory schema must be replaced by the schema of levels.’ 85 Vico (1977): 91, 169, 179, 206, 219, 245, 275; (1975): 169. 86 For Condillac see section 2 of the Introduction. 87 Hegel (1986a), 20.437−49; (1995), III, 528−40: Croce’s ‘levels’ (gradi) are derived from Hegel’s criticisms of Schelling’s view of nature as a hierarchy of levels (Stufen) or potencies (Potenzen); see also Inwood (1992): 194−5. 88 [a] In the preface to Cousin’s Fragments; [e] Cousin (1834): xviii. 89 [a] In my Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, cited above; [e] Croce (1956). 90 Arist. De anima 417b. 91 Spinoza, Ethics 2, prop. 44, corr; 5, prop. 29, schol.; prop. 30, 36: ‘under the aspect of the eternal.’ 92 Hegel (1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8 93 Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817−1881), who taught mainly at Leipzig and Göttingen, was an idealist philosopher who tried to accommodate the findings of the natural sciences; later versions add that Lotze was ‘perhaps remembering a passage of the Parmenides.’ 94 Croce in later editions adds this note: ‘In my Logic (1.1.5−6), I have shown

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how the two distinct series of the distinct and the opposite are unified at a higher level so that opposition is produced as an aspect of distinction itself and of its dialectic; but for the criticism developed here, the distinction between the two series is enough.’ See Croce (1920): 46−67. While Croce’s criticism may be fair to some Hegelians, it is less just to Hegel himself, who was more cautious about the thesis/antithesis/synthesis relation. Later versions have ‘and also intuition (thesis), representation (antithesis), and thought (synthesis); right (thesis), morality (antithesis), and ethics (synthesis) in his practical philosophy, or also in same area family (thesis), civil society (antithesis), and state (synthesis).’ Hegel (1986a) 2.532: ‘The square is nature’s law; the triangle is the mind’s’; see also Rosenkranz (1844): 158. The Phenomenology was published in 1807; for the chronology of Hegel’s life and works, see Pinkard (2000): 745−9. Hegel (1986a), 10.29; (1971): 18. Croce may be thinking of Maudsley (1890), whose author was an important psychiatrist, but another possibility is the closing lines of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler, which appeared four years before Croce finished this essay, though Butler’s phrase is ‘College of Spiritual Pathology’: see Butler (1903): 423−4. [a] For a discussion of this issue, see my Lineamenti di logica, chapter 7, ‘The Theory of Error’; [e] Croce (1905); see also the third part, pp. 251−322, of Croce (1920), titled ‘Forms of Error and the Search for Truth.’ ‘Truth is the index of itself and of the false’ comes not from Bacon but from a letter by Spinoza (76.7), cited by Jacobi (2004): 33, and then by Hegel (1986a), 16.62. [a] ‘It is the only metaphysics that exists, along with Aristotle’s’: H. Taine, in a letter of 1851, for which see Sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris: Hachette, 1902), I, 162−3, cf. 145. [e] Having started with Spinoza and Hegel, the polycephalous Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine (1828−93) eventually became famous as a philosophical positivist, not to mention his great Origines de la France contemporaine (1876−93). Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, finance minister under Louis XVI just before the French Revolution, made this improvident remark to MarieAntoinette as she was about to buy another castle, according to Michelet (1847), I, cvi. Hegel (1986a), 8.60. ‘First for us’ and ‘first by nature: Arist. Post. An. 71b29−72a1.

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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel 107 See chapter 1 on ‘commanded’ first principles in mathematical demonstration. 108 Rousseau’s Émile, depicting his ideal of natural education, appeared in 1762. Thomas Moore (1779−1852) was an enormously popular Irish poet, songwriter, and social critic whose Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion seeks but does not find grounds for converting from the Catholic to the Protestant faith – even though Moore’s personal commitment to Catholicism was less than consistent. Moore’s Travels were translated into several languages, including Italian: see Moore (1833), (1850); Rousseau (1762). 109 Hegel (1986a), 5.117; (1969): 110. 110 Hegel (1986a), 8.391; (1991): 306. 111 [a] Philosophische Propädeutik, ed. Rosenkranz, 2.10 in Werke, XVIII, 120; [e] Hegel (1986a), 4.288. 112 The Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit are the second and third parts of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences in Outline, following the Logic (Hegel [1986]: 8−10). The purpose of the Encyclopedia was mainly pedagogic, to provide an outline for students who would hear Hegel’s lectures. For English versions, see Hegel (1970), (1971), (1991), all of which contain both the numbered sections of the Encyclopedia and the additional Anmerkungen and posthumous Zusätze; for an English version of the original 1817 text of the whole Encyclopedia without these additions, see Hegel (1990); and Pinkard (2000): 169−80, 745−9 for the chronology of the works and the unpublished System of Ethical Life. 113 François Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1973): 39; Plato, Republic, 376A-C. 114 For sancta simplicitas, see Jerome, Letter 57 (Migne, Patrologia latina, 22.579), where the phrase is used positively, as it was later in the hagiography of St Francis of Assisi and his followers. Croce may have known it from the opening of a prayer ascribed to Francis: ‘Hail, Queen Wisdom, may the Lord save you and your little sister, saintly and pure Simplicity’: see Papini (1825): 86. Always the ironist, however, he also probably knew the story about John Hus, the executed heretic, who was said to have used the same words when he saw an old peasant coming to put wood on the pyre under his feet. 115 a‡sqhsij here means ‘sensation.’ 116 Hegel (1986a), 6.306; (1969): 628. 117 Hegel (1986a), 10.270−83; (1971): 212−23. 118 Hegel (1986a), 3.90−1; (1977): 65−6. 119 ‘Every individual cannot be spoken about,’ ‘only an individual can be

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123 124 125

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spoken about’ ‘… cannot be spoken about by using logical methods’: for the usual form of the maxim, omne individuum est incommunicabile, whose point is more metaphysical than linguistic, see Aquinas, Summa theologica 1.13.9, but Croce may have known it from Goethe, who used ‘individuum est ineffabile’ in a letter to the Swiss poet, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741−1801), whose ideas about physiognomy were very influential: see Goethe (1962−7), I, 325. Hegel (1986a), 15.222−37; (1975): 961−70. [a] Geschichte der Philosophie2, II, 365-8; [e] Hegel (1986a), 19.241; (1995), II, 223. Later editions: ‘As a result, he not only preserves the three-part division of concept, logical judgment, and syllogism, and the division between elementary forms and methodology, between definition, division, demonstration, and proof; he also makes an effort to distinguish and define new classes of judgments and syllogisms.’ For various senses of ‘history’ and ‘historiography’ (storia, storiografia), see sections 14 and 17 of the Introduction. See Croce’s conclusion in his ‘Concept of Art.’ [a] Developed at length in my Lineamenti di logica, chap. 4, ‘The Concept and Historical Representation’; [e] see also Croce (1920), part 2, chaps. 3, 4. Later editions: ‘But it also follows that it would be a silly pretense to reduce those historical claims to abstract philosophical claims by absorbing the act in its totality into a mere condition.’ Later editions: ‘A philosophy of history, understood not as the elaboration of this abstract philosophy but as a history at the second level, a history derived from that abstract philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.’ On the Encyclopedia, see n112 above. Hegel (1986a), 12.20; (1956): 9. Hegel (1986a), 12.32: ‘Die Weltgeschichte ist der Fortschritt im Bewußtsein der Freiheit’; (1956): 19. Hegel (1986a), 12.73; (1956): 53. Hegel (1986a), 18.49; (1995), I, 30. Hegel (1986a), 12.21−2; (1956): 10. Hegel (1986a), 8.61−2; (1991): 40 Hegel (1986a), 18.59; cf. (1995), I, 39−40. Hegel (1986a), 8.58−9; (1991): 37−8 Hegel (1986a), 12.19−20; (1956): 8. Hegel (1986a), 10.350−1; (1971): 279−80. Eduard Gans (1798−1839), who prepared the first edition of Hegel’s

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lectures on the philosophy of history in 1837, was a lawyer excluded from the Berlin law faculty by royal edict in 1822 because he was a Jew. In 1825 Gans converted and was admitted, having meanwhile convinced Hegel to launch the Jahrbücher für wissentschaftliche Kritik: see Hegel (1848): v−xx; Pinkard (2000): 530−41. Croce alludes to the long-running polemic that began in 1872 when Spaventa attacked a book about Bruno by Domenico Berti as positivist: ‘Berti seems very learned, with a great store of facts and citations. But he lacks Spirit, and if that word is too risky, let me just say understanding of Bruno’s era.’ The controversy eventually involved Fiorentino, Angelo Camillo De Meis, Felice Tocco, Augusto Vera, Luigi Amabile, and many others, including Raffaele Mariano, a student of Vera who attacked Amabile’s studies of Campanella’s imprisonment and trial; see Berti (1868); Spaventa (1972a), II, 72−105; Mariano (1889); Malusa (1977): 86, 99−106, 160−5, 204−12, 247−69, 329−62; Tessitore (1997): 225−7. 9 November 1799, in the reformed calendar of the French Revolution was 18 Brumaire, the day on which Napoleon ended the government of the Directory and began his rule as consul; the date of Napoleon’s final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo was 18 June 1815. Napoleon, in Hegel’s view, was one of those exceptional ‘world-historical’ people who can see where the Spirit is heading. Hegel (1986a) 8.274−9; (1991): 209−13, citing Goethe (1817−23), 1.3.204, as in n49 above. The Latin phrases mean ‘deeds done’ and ‘history of deeds done’: Hegel (1986a), 12.83; (1956): 61. Jacobi (2004): 89−91. ‘Storm and Stress’ is the name of a German literary and cultural movement of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and other admirers of Rousseau rejected current literary conventions in favour of his idealization of nature. [a] I have clarified the relation of the pure concept of philosophy to the practical concept or the pseudo-concept of the natural and mathematical sciences in the Lineamenti di logica cited above, chapter 5, ‘The Concept and the Natural and Mathematical Disciplines’; please forgive these citations of my own work, which are needed to explain the brevity of certain expositions and the meaning of various references. [e] See also Croce (1920): 214−50. Hegel (1986a), 9.159−60; (1970): 159−60: in discussing specific gravity, Hegel says that physicists assume the existence of pores to explain how different volumes of matter can have the same weight.

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Part II: Translations 148 Hegel (1986a), 9.90−91; (1970): 69−70. 149 Hegel (1986a), 9.91−2; (1970): 70. 150 Hegel (1986a), 3.41, 48, 5.71−2, 9.90−1; (1969): 72; (1970): 69; (1977): 23−4. 151 Hegel (1986a), 9.52−3; (1970): 38. 152 Hegel (1986a), 9.55; (1970): 40. 153 Hegel (1986a), 5.235; (1969): 205. 154 Hegel (1986a), 9.340; (1970): 275: Hegel’s three kingdoms are the mineral, vegetable, and animal, leading up to the sphere of the intellect discussed in the third part of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Spirit. The phrase ‘globus intellectualis’ comes from Bacon, but Croce could also have known it from Kuno Fischer and other contemporary sources: see Bacon (1960): 81; Fischer (1857): 46. 155 Hegel (1986a), 8.49−51; (1991): 31−2: Grotius (see the notes to Fiorentino’s first letter to Florenzi Waddington) was the architect of modern international law, which he derived from natural law; Hegel’s point is that his legal theory should be called ‘philosophy’ only in the secondary sense applicable to Newton’s physics. 156 Hegel (1986a), 19.241−2, 276−80; cf. (1995), II, 223, 257−60. 157 [a] MacKintosh, Hegel and Hegelianism, p. 236; [e] MacKintosh (1903). 158 Hegel (1986a), 20. 444; cf. (1995), III, 535−6. 159 Hegel (1986a), 9.15; (1970): 6. 160 Hegel (1986a), 9.500−2; (1970): 415−17. 161 Hegel (1986a), 3.187−98; (1977): 147−57 162 Hegel (1986a) 9.27−8; (1970): 17−18. 163 The evolution or development (Entwicklung) of the Spirit is so central to Hegel’s philosophy that it was natural for Marx and others to see him as a forerunner of Darwin, a role better suited to Schelling and Goethe. In the broadest sense, however, Hegel shared the Romantic fascination with organic development, and Darwin himself saw the Romantics in the background of his own ideas: Richards (2002): 210−11. 164 Hegel (1986a), 9.31−2; (1970): 20. 165 Hegel (1986a), 9.88; (1970): 67. 166 Hegel (1986a), 9.68−71, 20.231; (1970): 52−3; (1995), III, 322−3. 167 [a] ‘… universae generis humani, deinde Trojae miseriae principiis pomum adfuisse, malum etiam scientiis philosophicis omen,’ in Werke, XVI, 17; [e] The story of the Judgment of Paris and the Apple of Discord explains the start of the Trojan War; Hegel, (1986b): 114. 168 Hegel (1986a), 9.246−7, 20.231−2; (1970): 198−9; (1995), III, 323. 169 Hegel (1986a), 8.57−8; (1991): 37.

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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel 170 Karl-Ludwig Michelet (1801−93) took over Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of right in 1830, and in 1847 he edited the Philosophy of Nature; Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz (1805−79), who taught philosophy at Königsberg, was his teacher’s first biographer; Vera (see sections 10, 14−15 of the Introduction), who studied with Cousin, translated the Encyclopedia into French. Croce, who was Spaventa’s cousin, may have resented Vera’s hostility towards this other Hegelian Neapolitan: see Hegel (1863), I, vii; Pinkard (2000): 11, 652; Gentile (2003): 261−73. 171 Wilhelm Krug (1770−1842), Kant’s successor at Königsberg, also taught philosophy at Leipzig: see Krug (1801): 31; Pinkard (2000): 613. 172 [a] See an article of 1802 in Werke, XVI, 57−9: [e] Hegel (1986a), 2.164−5, 188−207; 9.35; (1970): 23, where Hegel remarked that ‘it was in this … quite naïve sense that Herr Krug once challenged the Philosophy of Nature to perform the feat of deducing only his pen … giving him hope that his pen would have the glory of being deduced, if ever philosophy should advance so far.’ 173 Tommasi (see section 11 of the Introduction) was a physician and biologist with a serious interest in philosophy; as a professor of medicine in Naples, his positivism included criticism of De Meis, a colleague whose idealism Tommasi had shared as a young man: see Tommasi (1868), (1877); Gentile (1957): 29−52. 174 Hegel (1986a), 8.84−5, 9.34−6; (1970): 22−4; (1991): 58−9. 175 For the first abuse, see chapter 4 of Croce’s essay. 176 Hamlet, II, ii, 223−224. 177 Hegel (1874). 178 [a] See the two discussions by Helmholtz, Über Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten and Goethes Vorahnungen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen, in Vorträge und Reden (Braunschweig: 1896), I, 1−24, 333−65. [e] Helmholtz (1896): for a current re-evaluation of Goethe’s work in biology, see Richards (2002): 325−508, which points out that Helmholtz, at the peak of his influence, praised Goethe not only for his biological achievement but also for his criticism of Newton’s optics. 179 [a] Also relevant is a note by Engels in the Antidühring, 3d ed., pp. xv−xvi, that emphasizes some of Hegel’s accomplishments in physics and natural history. [e] Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776−1837) published six volumes on Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur beginning in 1802, successfully promoting the term ‘biology’ after it had been in use for several decades; Lorenz Oken (1799−1851) was a physician and anatomist but also a follower of Fichte and Schelling; Goethe wrongly disputed his priority in understanding the nature of the bones of the skull: Richards

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181 182

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184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193

(2002), p. 4, n8; pp. 491−502; Treviranus (1802−22); Oken (1805); Engels (1894). Johann Jacob Brucker (1696−1770) published his Historia critica philosophiae, the first large and comprehensive work of its kind, in 1742−4; another work on the same scale, Der Geist der speculativen Philosophie by Dieterich Tiedemann (1748−1804), appeared in the 1790s, when its author was attacking Kant. Both Brucker and Tiedemann were important sources for Hegel, who thought of Brucker as a Wolffian and expressed contempt for Tiedemann: see Brucker (1742−67); Tiedemann (1791−7). For Taine see n103 above. Barthold Niebuhr (1776−1831) was the first great expert on Rome among the Berlin historians who first made the study of the past dynamic, comprehensive, and therefore relevant not only to contemporary life but also to Hegel’s theorizing; for Mommsen see Croce’s ‘Concept of Art’ and Labriola’s ‘Materialism,’ with the notes to the latter; also Breisach (1994): 229−32, 237, 264. The racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855−1927) was a serious student of Goethe and Kant as well as an ardent Wagnerian. In Der historische Materialismus: Darstellung und Kritik der Marxistischen Weltanschauung (Düsseldorf, 1900) and other works, the Neo-Kantian Ludwig Woltmann (1871−1907) discussed racism along with Marxism. Hegel bears some responsibility for these and later developments, having written of the world-historical hero (Werke, 12.49), for example, that ‘so great a figure must trample many a guiltless blossom, crushing many things that stand in his path.’ For Hegel’s views on the exclusion of whole cultures from history (and hence from genuine humanity) and on the Germanic Volk as the culmination of history, see Croce’s exposition below: also Chamberlain (1911); Woltmann (1900), (1903). Hegel (1986a), 12.134; (1956): 104. Hegel (1986a), 12.107−8; (1956): 81. Hegel (1986a), 12.84−6; (1956): 61−3; the Latin phrases mean ‘on the part of the subject’ and ‘on the part of the object,’ (objektiv, subjektiv). [a] Aphorismen aus dem Berliner Periode, in Rosenkranz, p. 559; [e] Hegel (1986a), 11.561. Hegel (1986a) 13.106−14, 390−2; (1975): 75−81, 300−2. [a] Naturphilosophie, 340; [e] Hegel (1986a), 9.343−51; (1970): 278−85. For Germany as the centre, see n189 above. Hegel (1986a), 9.44−56; (1970): 30−40. Hegel (1986a), 9.126−33; (1970): 99−105. ad oculos: ‘for the eyes.’

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200 201 202 203

204 205 206 207

Hegel (1986a), 9.202−17; (1970): 162−75. Hegel (1986a), 9.337−43, 380−93; (1970): 272−8, 322−36. Hegel (1986a), 9.394−411; (1970): 322−36. Hegel (1986a), 9. 465−8; (1970): 382−5. Because of the work of Hermann Cohen, a prominent Neo-Kantian, panlogicism (panlogismo) was a prominent topic when Croce wrote this essay; Cohen’s Logik der reinen Erkenntnis, one of three works meant to logicize Kant’s three Critiques, appeared in 1902. Over the next three decades, Cohen’s student, Ernst Cassirer, developed his teacher’s ideas in an effort to extend logic to all human experience; in the spirit of Cohen’s books, Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a critique of culture. Meanwhile, Bertrand Russell had responded to the work of Gottlob Frege with a different logicist project – less familiar to Croce – that Rudolf Carnap eventually reconnected with the Neo-Kantian debates. On this important moment in the development of modern philosophy, see Friedman (2000); also Cohen (1902). This is the last paragraph (244) of the Encyclopedia Logic, meant to lead to the second part of the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of Nature: Hegel (1986a), 8.393; (1991): 307. [a] Principi di etica, pp. 53−4; [e] Spaventa (1972a), I, 666. Literally, ‘the other according to itself’ or ‘per se’; cf. Arist. Top. 110b16−24. Hegel (1986a), 8.81, 9.24−7, 10.16−17, 20.424−36; (1970): 13−17; (1971): 7−8; (1991): 56; (1995), III, 516−27; Schelling (1907), II, 14−15. For logical, metaphysical, and religious senses of Logos (Wort) in Hegel, see Hegel (1986a), 3.559, 5.29−30, 17.234; (1969): 38−40; (1977): 465: if a self-externalizing Logos is immanent in the God who creates the world, it will be a bridge from Spirit to Nature. Spinoza, Ethics, prop. 6 and 11; for Hartmann, see section 17 of the Introduction and Croce’s ‘Concept of Art.’ Hegel (1986a), 5.44; (1969): 50. ‘God [is] in us and is us’: cf. I John 4:16 (Vulgate). Dante, Paradiso, 1.19−21: Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue sì come quando Marsïa traesti de la vagina de le membra sue. Enter my heart, and breathe there as your breathed when you pulled Marsyas out of the sheath of his limbs.

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208 209 210 211 212

213 214

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218 219 220 221

Praying for inspiration at the start of the Paradiso, Dante mentions Marsyas, flayed by Apollo when the arrogant mortal challenged the god to a music contest and lost; his prayer is to sing as sweetly as Apollo sang in defeating Marsyas. Croce’s point, as he opens the last chapter of his essay, is not only to put himself in Dante’s company but also to claim that he has been forced to strip Hegel’s philosophy of its false integuments. Michelet (1859−60), (1861): for Karl Michelet see n170 above, and J.N. Findlay in his ‘Foreword’ to Hegel (1970): v−ix. Hegel (1986a), 3.20; (1977): 7−8; and chapter 1 above. For Rosenkranz, see n170 above, and Croce (1956): 346−9, 359, on his Aesthetic of the Ugly: Rosenkranz (1853). Vera (1863−6), I, 30−1, 149. [a] Antidühring, introduction, pp. 9−11, 137−46 on the negation of negation; an Italian version of this passage is also found in the appendix to Labriola’s book, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia (Rome: 1897: 169−78. [e] Engels (1894); Labriola (1898). Doergens (1872), (1878). [a] These examples taken from C. Kapp, A. von Cieszkowski, and others appear in Paul Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels und der Hegelianer, pp. 29, 62; for other characteristic examples, see the historical section of my Estetica, chap. 13; [e] Cieskowski (1838); Barth (1890); Croce (1902). The Letters of Obscure Men, written by Johannes Jäger and Ulrich von Hutten to mock the enemies of Johannes Reuchlin, a Christian Hebraist, first appeared anonymously in 1515; they are a savage satire against bigoted pedantry. Illustres is the opposite of obscuri. [a] See Fischer’s Logik und Metaphysik (1852), particularly the second edition of 1865; [e] Fischer (1865). [a] J.H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (London, 1865), I, xi, 317: ‘That secret may be indicated at shortest thus: as Aristotle – with considerable assistance from Plato – made explicit the abstract universal that was implicit in Socrates, so Hegel – with less considerable assistance from Fichte and Schelling – made explicit the concrete universal that was implicit in Kant’; for Stirling see n43 above. [a] Prolusione e introduzione cited above, pp. 182−3; [e] Spaventa (1862). [a] This is also the view of the anti-Hegelian R. Haym in his essay on Schopenhauer, reprinted in his Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1903): 390−1. [a] See the review of the Encyclopedia in his Werke, ed. Hartenstein, XII, 670, 685; [e] Herbart (1852). Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802−72), who taught at Berlin, was Cohen’s teacher and Fischer’s passionate opponent; Paul Janet (1823−99)

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222 223 224 225 226 227 228

taught at the Sorbonne from 1864 until his death: Trendelenburg (1840); Janet (1861); Rosmini (1883b). [a] Encyclopedia, ¶ 86; [e] Hegel (1986a), 8.184−5; (1991): 138. [a] Geschichte der Philosophie (2d. ed), III, 577−8; [e] Hegel (1986a), 20.414; (1995), III, 504−5. [a] ‘Introduction à la métaphysique,’ Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 11, 29; [e] Bergson (1903). Hegel (1986a) 18.47; (1995), I, 28; Michelet (1871): 129. Martial, Epigrams, 12.46. For Croce’s low opinion of Spencer, see his ‘Concept of Art.’ Hegel (1986a), 18.55: ‘Was die Langsamkeit des Weltgeistes betrifft, so ist zu bedenken, daß er nicht pressiert ist, nicht zu eilen und Zeit genug hat’; Hegel (1995), I, 36.

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18 Giovanni Gentile

The Philosophy of Praxis1

1. The Philosophical Studies of Karl Marx In the preface to his Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx remembered waiting with Engels in Brussels in 1845 to take final action on their plan to define the state of their views – especially in relation to the materialist conception of history, as Engels later noted – as against the ideological theories of classical German philosophy: to settle accounts, so to speak, with previous philosophical thinking on ‘the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy.’2 The result of this would be a manuscript for two large octavo volumes. Sent to a printer in Westphalia, it remained in the shop until circumstances no longer prevented its publication. ‘We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice,’ Marx concluded, ‘all the more willingly because we had already reached our goal, which was to understand ourselves.’3 Friedrich Engels, referring to a long review that he had written two years earlier on a study of Feuerbach, mentioned in 1888 that he had picked up those old papers of 1845−6 and looked at them again. Engels said that ‘the section on Feuerbach in the manuscript is not finished. The finished part is an exposition of the materialist conception of history, which only shows how incomplete our understanding of economic history was at the time.’4 This is valuable information on the studies that the two socialist writers were working on around 1845. In my opinion, it can give a reliable answer to that quite unsettling question that has been debated with much passion – though perhaps not as much accuracy – in the recent literature on historical materialism, even in Italy: whether the vexed materialist conception of history arose in the minds of Marx and his Metrodorus with all the hallmarks of a philosophical theory, internally coor-

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dinated with a special new system of philosophy in the true and genuine sense.5 It would be useful to publish this manuscript, because, more than any other work by Marx, it would support historical reconstruction of the origin and development of his thought. From the testimony of one of the two authors, we also know that – for better or for worse – the manuscript expressed the new concept of history that then had to be perfected and formulated in the Manifesto and advocated more thoughtfully again in the Critique of Political Economy. This conception was expressed with the aim of getting oriented among the various directions of contemporary philosophy and thereby working out a nucleus of guiding principles that would be a sort of skeleton for the new system. Marx tells us that this work clarified his own philosophical thinking, and Engels adds that their new historical insight was already stated there. Putting these two pieces of testimony together, it seems there can be no doubt about the scope of the notion of historical materialism already present in Marx’s thinking in ’45. Now I also agree with Croce that in dealing with Marx’s writings, more than those of any other thinker, ‘the interpreter must proceed with weights on his feet, working through them case by case, book by book, proposition by proposition, relating these various productions to one another, to be sure, but also taking account of the different times and circumstances in which they were produced, the fleeting impressions, the mental and literary habits, requiring the interpreter to be resigned to acknowledging uncertainty and incompleteness where these exist, while resisting the temptation to correct and complete as he sees fit.’6 While gladly accepting these prudent warnings, I believe an irrefutable conclusion follows from the new information cited, and that this must be the point of departure for our inquiry. For that purpose, it is useful to state right away that at this time and in this case the task is not to ask what may be critically acceptable in the end for historical materialism – a question of great importance, but essentially a critical question and therefore entirely extraneous to the history of Marx’s thinking, which, in any event, that question must follow and not precede. Instead, the task is to study how Marx really conceived of this theory that he put at the service of a social doctrine of immense importance. And if both Marx and Engels – referring to a work so voluminous, written as the theory was emerging in their minds and maturing – if both stated explicitly that it took shape as a philosophical system (indeed, out of their opposition to systems then current), it would not then be shrewd and prudent for

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a critical interpreter to cast doubt on the philosophical scope that the authors themselves actually attributed to historical materialism from the start. This is not a case of unconscious thinking, where one needs to be wary about committing trust; we are dealing with deep mental effort taking shape in a process of writing at length, enough to produce two printed volumes. I agree entirely with Labriola, then, when he supports Georges Sorel’s notion of putting the general problem of philosophy back into play as he worries that ‘historical materialism may seem to be feeding on air as long as it stands opposed to other philosophies not in harmony with it, yet has still not found a way to develop a philosophy of its own, one built into its assumptions and immanent in its premises.’7 Therefore, Labriola thinks he should work out the concept of this philosophy – in fact, the concept of historical materialism in Marx’s own thought. In effect, this is what he has tried to do in his letters to Sorel, attempting at the same time to locate Marxism’s direction among today’s trends in philosophy. But since there are many, even Iliacos intra muros, who believe that Labriola has widened the circle of the materialist theory of history contrary to Marx’s understanding and with no solid basis, it will help to bring forward the evidence for what Marx himself really thought.8 2. Marx’s Critique of Feuerbach Friedrich Engels, in an appendix to his study of Feuerbach, has published eleven theses or fragments on that philosopher written in January 1845, by Marx in Brussels and found by Engels in an old notebook belonging to his friend. ‘These are notes for a work in progress,’ he writes, ‘certainly not meant for publication but priceless as the first document in which the productive seed of the new view of the world (der neuen Weltanschauung) was planted.’ These notes by Marx refer to Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity.9 They show us how the disciple had evolved in relation to the master, and therefore they also reveal the historical relations between Marxism and the degenerate Hegelianism of the Left, represented especially by Feuerbach. It will be useful, then, to review the features of that philosophy briefly, using the work just cited. Hegel thought that philosophy and faith can and must proceed in harmony; they have the same content in different forms. It has often been observed that in this way Hegel ended up contradicting one of the basic principles of his logic, which is that form and content are always perfectly parallel. The criticism is unjust because Hegel certainly did not

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deny the transformation of content into different forms, nor, therefore, did he hold that content and form in philosophy and content and form in religion went hand in hand and were perfectly correlated. I maintain that he did not deny the diversity of concrete contents as realized in two different forms, but that he affirmed the identity of abstract content when treated as transcendentally separate both from the philosophical form and from the religious form.10 According to Hegel, moreover, ‘the form of feeling (that belongs to religion) is the most inadequate form for spiritual content. In its truth, that content, God himself, exists only in thinking and as thinking.’11 In the Essence of Christianity (1841), in any case, Feuerbach opposes his teacher’s view, maintaining that philosophy and religion are diametrically opposed, like sickness and health, the one being a product of thinking, the other of imagination or feeling. Faith and science cannot agree to a friendly settlement, then. Hegel had said that man recognizes himself in his God. One should say instead that God is recognized in man. In other words, man certainly does not want to understand himself in religion, not even to understand himself incompletely (by representing himself). He wishes instead to satisfy himself in his physical needs. For man, what really is his own individual essence? It is the continuing satisfaction of his own organic needs. And he wants to find this again in God. The feeling of egotism, unsatisfied that real life is finite, pushes man to exalt himself as an infinite power, which, in its divinity, has the omnipotence that can satisfy all his needs. Through religion, then, man does not recognize himself as spirit, as absolute, as universal in God. What is absolute, spiritual, and universal must instead be recognized in a particular individual, which, as a physical organism, lives through the incessant satisfying of its physical needs. The truth of the individual is not in the universal, then; the truth of the universal is in the individual. Matter does not affirm itself in spirit, but spirit in matter: Hegelian idealism upside down. And since the root of religion is to be sought in the human being as a physical individual, theology is turned into anthropology, which is essentially materialist. The needs that stimulate fantasies about the deification of human powers raised to infinity are physical needs, and the very essence of man thus comes to be determined as purely physical and organic. The critique of religion, therefore, is based on materialism. In fact, in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, 1843), Feuerbach teaches that true philosophy can only be empirical, having sensible reality as its object.12 The deepest and most

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important truths are learned only by way of the senses. Philosophy must not treat man as thinking or reasoning but as what he is in reality, a concrete, sensible, living being – a body. The I is just the body, exactly. Philosophy itself, in that man is its object, turns out to be a physiological anthropology. According to Feuerbach, then, religion – and like religion, all facts about human life and society treated as lofty and nobler – is a product of man as an organic body that lives by the continuing satisfaction of its needs. The outcome of this philosophy is obvious.13 For all of history there can be no explanation except the materialist one. Search out and study the needs of the human body in its actual existence and you will have the reason for all human actions, small or large, individual or social. This means that one seeks the explanation of individual acts in the immediate physical needs of the individual as such, while the explanation of social acts must arise, on the other hand, from the analysis of the individual’s needs as a member of society – of one particular society, in fact. And if Feuerbach formulated his materialism in a typical concluding remark by saying that man is no more or less than what he eats (der Mensch sei nur das, was er esse), and if the explanation of man’s activity as a pure and simple individual is thus to be provided only by the needs of his stomach, the explanation of his historical actions can come from no other source than his economic needs.14 This is how historical materialism emerged by clear and plain logic from Feuerbach’s materialism. It would seem, then, that there is no other philosophy but materialism that is immanent in the materialist conception of history. But let us see what observations Marx made about this philosophy as he was preparing to write about his own philosophical orientation in 1845. For this purpose, let me provide the best translations I can of the fragments printed by Engels.15 1 The chief defect of all materialism in the past – including Feuerbach’s – is that the object (Gegenstand) of thought, reality, the sensible, has been conceived only in the form of an object or of an intuition, certainly not as a sensory human activity, as a praxis, and subjectively. Thus it happened that out of opposition to materialism idealism developed the aspect of activity– but only in the abstract, because idealism naturally knows nothing about real sensory activity. Feuerbach wanted sensible objects to be really distinct from the intelligible but he did not conceive of human activity itself as objective activity.16 Therefore, in the Essence of Christianity he treats only the

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2

3

4

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6

theoretical content as clearly human, while praxis gets conceived and established only in filthy Jewish forms. Therefore he does not understand the meaning that the ‘revolutionaries’ give to practical-critical activity. The question that asks whether human thought attains objective truth is not a theoretical question but a practical question. In praxis, man can test the truth of his own thinking – its reality and power (Macht), its objectivity (Diesseitigkeit). Isolated from praxis, any discussion of the reality or unreality of thinking is a purely scholastic question. The materialist doctrine that humans are the product of environment and education, varying as environment and education vary, forgets that it is just humans who change the environment, and that the teacher himself must be taught. Of necessity, then, this doctrine leads to dividing society into two parts, one of them conceived as standing above the other (in Robert Owen, for example). The convergence of environmental variation with human activity can be conceived and understood rationally only as praxis overthrown.17 From the fact of spontaneous religious projection (Selbstentfremdung), Feuerbach arrives at a doubling of the world into a religious world of representation and a real world. And this is his task: to reduce the religious world to its substrate. It escapes him, however, that when this task is complete, the main thing still remains to be done. Still to be explained is the very fact that the substrate of this religious world raises itself on high and sets itself up among peoples as an independent realm of its own, and this can be explained only by the doubling that the substrate does to itself and also by the self-contradiction that it gets into. It must therefore be understood first in its contradictory character, and then by the resolution of this same contradiction it is subverted in practice.18 Thus, for example, after the mystery of the Holy Family is unveiled by the earthly family, the latter must be criticized in theory and overthrown in practice.19 Not content with abstract thought, Feuerbach appeals to sensory intuition, but he does not conceive of the sensory as a practical, human-sensory activity. Feuerbach reduces the essence of religion to man’s own essence. But there is no human essence as an abstraction inhering in the particular individual. In its reality, it is nothing but the totality of social relations. Never getting to the criticism of this real essence, Feuerbach is therefore forced, in the first place, to abstract from the historical

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7

8

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process, set up religious feeling on its own, and present an individual human to us as an abstract-isolate; meanwhile, in the second place, the human essence for him can be understood only as a ‘species’ (Gattung), as a mute, unexplicated universal, which links the many individuals together only naturally. Feuerbach, therefore, does not see that ‘religious feeling’ is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual that he analyses really belongs to a particular social form. Social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries that push theory into mysticism find their rational explanation in human praxis and in the understanding of this praxis. The highest level attained by intuitionist materialism – the materialism that does not conceive of the sensory as practical activity – is the intuition of particular individuals in bourgeois society. The point of view of the old materialism is bourgeois society; the point of view of the new materialism is human society or humanity as a social grouping. Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the point to is to change it.20

In these thoughts, faithfully translated, it is not hard to discern the plan for a whole new theoretical system with its history geared to a prior philosophy and with clear hints of a practical program following from it logically: the whole skeleton, in short, of that philosophy that is supposed to be immanent and inherent in the materialist conception of history – in the foundation of communist doctrine, in other words. Along the general lines of these thoughts, I shall do my best to produce a sketch of the new way of philosophizing from which Marx concluded that he would overtake his teacher. 3. A Sketch of the Philosophy of Praxis The keystone of this new philosophical construct is in the concept of praxis. As Marx himself knew very well, the concept was new to materialism, but to idealism it was as old as idealism itself – actually born along with it at the same time, certainly since Socrates and his subjectivism. Socrates could not conceive of a truth that was already well formed and transmittable by tradition or teaching. Instead, he thought that all truth is the final outcome of an original labour of inquiry in which the master can only be a companion or collaborator for the disciple who longs for

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the truth – hence the famous comparison of his art to the midwifery of his mother, Phenarete. He was not the one who produced knowledge in the minds of his disciples; he only helped them shape themselves to make this knowledge – helped them in praxis, as Marx would say. Hence, knowledge certainly implied productive activity for Socrates; it was a subjective construct, an ongoing and progressive praxis. Nor did Plato let this exceedingly important doctrine pass him by. He defined it better, in fact, and developed it in his dialectic of ideas, all supplied by creative energy and now brought back anew in the so-called idea-forces. And until Hegel there was no idealist who did not understood knowledge, more or less adequately, as the product and work of the human spirit – with the exception of a few proponents of intellectual intuition. Our Vico, customarily reputed to be the only founder of the philosophy of history, had deep insight into this problem. The whole reason for his implacable criticism of Descartes was in this concept of cognition as praxis. The philosopher of Naples could not forgive Descartes for positing direct consciousness of thought (cogito ergo sum) as the point of departure and foundation of science. When we do science, according to Vico, we must justify the fact of consciousness itself by reconstructing its emergence and development, not beginning with the mere fact, but, as we now say, starting with the explanation of the fact itself and making it again for ourselves. Verum et factum convertuntur, and truth thus reveals itself when we make it. Since this is the result, not the given, of scientific research, science cannot proceed by analysis, as Descartes claims – an analysis that would assume that it had the concept of the truth present to it to be analysed – but rather by synthesis, which is the productive activity of the mind. Hence the inestimable value of the brilliant insights, the happy intuitions that somehow create what can be known rather than making what is so hard to attain.21 Making is the indispensable condition of knowing, according to Vico. Hence the certainty of mathematics – on this he agreed with Descartes – where the objects of our knowledge are not given but constructed. These principles, already expressed and developed in his work De antiquissima italorum sapientia (1710), then had to be admirably applied in his New Science to construct his historical philosophy.22 And really, if what can be known is one’s own work, Vico thinks that the natural world must be entrusted to the knowledge possessed by God, who is its only maker. But the historical world, a product of human activity, is the object of which humans can acquire knowledge because they have made it. For Vico, however, this human activity is an activity of the human mind, which is

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the reason for his notion that history has to be explained entirely by considering and studying the modifications of the mind and thinking them through. In Marx, the principle of activity changes – or so he thought: instead of modifications of the mind, the needs of the individual as a social being are the root of history. But the notion of praxis that Vico invoked remains the same. That notion admits no criticism or correction. Labriola puts it very well when, referring to it, he writes that ‘to think is to produce. To learn is to produce by reproducing. We understand well only what we ourselves are capable of producing – by thinking, working, trying and trying again, always in virtue of powers that are our own in the social context and from the perspective in which we find ourselves.’23 Why do we establish laboratories if not to remake nature (something that Vico did not attend to, nor could he) and make progress in the science of nature? What is an experiment but a redoing of what nature does, doing it over in conditions that assist nature and that make observation reliable? Clearly, this making or remaking is not always a material or causal making; more often, in fact, it is simply making or remaking by thinking. But might the material and causal making or remaking not also help us understand the fact simply by its mechanism, or perhaps by our thinking through each part of the mechanism, piece by piece? The answer is easy for anyone who recognizes that the mind has no eyes or hands or tools, except metaphorically, and that one can follow the mechanics of external making only through a sequence of representations. This original activity that must be developed as a result of science is quite evident, for example, in a calculation of arithmetic. You have the factors, and you want the product. This product is not something that you glimpse by intuition; it is the result of an operation that you must perform. And what is said of this product of arithmetic is to be said of every product of knowing, of all knowledge. It is not given but must be attained by a laborious act of the mind. Knowledge given is not true knowledge, if it is not understood, unless it is reconstructed, and then it is no longer given but a product or a reproduction, which is the same. Might science generally be had at one stroke, just by looking around and taking everything in with a penetrating glance? Remaking is easier than making, surely, and reading a scientific book is a much simpler thing than writing one. But if our spirit wants to prosper, even in reading it cannot remain inert and passive. In fact, it must stay with the author’s spirit every step of the way and thereby develop an energy of its own – its own making. Language already shows traces of this enormously impor-

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tant notion of the knowing or understanding that is a making. The Latin word for ‘easy,’ facilis (which survives in all the romance languages), comes from the verb facere, and therefore it would mean ‘what can be done’ etymologically, whereas in Latin and all the romance languages it also means ‘what can be known or understood.’ Hence, making an action happen is do-able, but is also do-able to know a truth or understand a theorem.24 This notion that knowledge goes along step-by-step with activity, with praxis, is the heart of Froebel’s pedagogic method. ‘His point of departure was the making that precedes knowing, and knowledge is nothing more than the genetic development of the same making.’25 Froebel did not derive that principle from a materialist philosophy, however. It has been noted, in fact, that ‘thun (making/doing), as well as the genetischentwickelnd (genetic-developmental) method so much promoted by Froebel, readily call to mind that doctrine (of Fichte’s) which attempted to derive all our science from the primitive making of the I.’26 Marx wants to move this principle over from abstract idealism into concrete materialism. In his judgment, the neglect of this principle until his time was a most serious failure – indeed, the chief failure. And the need asserted by him demonstrates the theoretical power, the philosophical acuity of his intellect. In the final analysis, what charge did he truly bring against materialism regarding the theory of knowledge? This one: believing the object, the sensible intuition, the external reality, to be a given rather than a product, in such a way that thinking, the human subject, while entering into a relation with it, would have to limit itself just to looking – merely mirroring, in fact – and remaining in a state of pure passivity. Briefly, then, Marx charged that the materialists, Feuerbach among them, conceived of the subject and object of knowledge in an abstract and therefore a false situation. In that situation, the object would have been opposed to the subject, lacking any intrinsic relation with it – this thing that the subject encountered, saw and knew accidentally. Without its object, however, this subject is a subject of what? And of what is this object an object, lacking its subject? Subject and object are two correlative terms, one following necessarily after the other. Hence, subject and object are not independent of one another. They are inseparably bound to one another, in fact, so that their actual reality comes from their mutual linkage within the organism in which and through which they find the completion that they need and outside of which they are just abstractions. The life of the subject lies in its intrinsic relation with the object, and vice versa. Cut this

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relation off, and you will no longer have life, only death, no longer two real objects of making and knowing, but two abstract objects. One must conceive of them, then, as they really are, in their mutual relation. And what is this relation? Its nature is clarified by what has been said about the activity that is proper to knowing. When the object is known, it is made, it is constructed. And when an object is made or constructed, it is known. This is to say that the object is a product of the subject, and since there is no subject without an object, one must add that the subject itself is made or constructed as the object is gradually made or constructed, so that the moments of the subject’s progressive formation correspond to various moments in the progressive formation of the object. They say that someone who has not known much has not developed his ideas or thinking very much. And as what he knows (the object) gradually increases, there is a corresponding increase in the power of his comprehension and understanding (the subject). Knowledge, then, is a development that continues. Since in essence it is only a relation between two correlative terms, it is equivalent to a progressive development of these two terms in parallel. But the root, the enduring cause of this development lies in the activity, in the making of the subject that shapes itself by shaping the object: crescit et concrescit; p…dosij ™f'aÙtw×Ä (Aristotle).27 But when materialism says that the Spirit is a tabula rasa on which images of the external world are inscribed, one by one, by the instrumentality of the senses, from one perspective one thinks of this table, perfectly blank, ready to receive images from the external world. From the other perspective, one thinks of objects in this world, perfectly formed and complete in themselves, such that, if their job is putting images on that table, they put them there, but if not, they remain just as they are, losing nothing of what they are, just as they would have gained nothing by delivering the images. This is the abstract position of materialism, which does not stand up to the most elementary criticism. Who inscribes the images on the tabula rasa? Is it the subject that forms them or the object? And if subject and object exist without these images – a product of the relation that they can enter into – if they thus exist independently of one another, what is a subject as pure subject, and what is an object as pure object? There is no way for materialism to answer these questions without contradicting its assumptions, since, as we know, an abstraction can accept no determination unless it is conceived in conditions wherein and whereby it is concrete – without ceasing to be and being negated as an abstraction.

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In that position, nonetheless, there is a real legitimate need – the so-called objectivity of knowledge that requires the object to be a pure object, with no mixture of subjectivity. If knowledge acquires value from the object that puts us in possession of knowledge, it no longer keeps this value when the object is altered by the influence or contact of the subject, which must be the principle of knowing as opposed to the known. From this comes the theory of intuitions, pure visions that make the sensible image pass from external objects into our minds without the least modification. For this reason, a pure object and intuition are features of the objectivism – idealist or materialist – to which Marx wishes to oppose his subjectivism. Until now, he says in Fragment 1, reality has been conceived as object or intuition, not as human activity, not as praxis, not subjectively.28 According to him, then, reality is a subjective product of mankind, but a product of sensory activity (sinnliche Thätigkeit), not of thinking, as Hegel and other idealists believed. Turn back to Hegel from Feuerbach, then, for Hegel certainly understood knowledge to be a continuous producing, a making that never stops, a praxis that originates. But transfer this principle of his from an abstract, idealist notion of the Spirit to real, concrete, sensory human activity. Idealism certainly did not deny sensation, yet it did not recognize it as such, only as a moment of the thinking that is not active or productive as sensation but as thinking. Now what has Feuerbach done in his Essence of Christianity? He has distinguished the filthy Jewish forms of Christianity from its theoretical content.29 The former are a product of praxis, the latter a pure product of human thinking – an absolute duality between fact and theory, praxis and knowledge, though they are really one and the same. In short, Feuerbach was not self-consistent: he gave a materialist explanation for the practical part of the history of Christianity, but he stopped short at the ideology, the theoretical part, the final fortress of idealism that stood opposed to him and that he did not seize. On this point, facing the same problem, Labriola makes the following observation: It is the difficulty of understanding how all ideologies arise from the material ground of life that gives force to the arguments of those who deny the possibility of a complete genetic (materialist) explanation of Christianity. In general it is true that religious phenomenology or psychology – say what one likes – raises large questions here and brings up some rather obscure issues of its own … But is it possible that this psychological difficulty is a privilege of Christian beliefs? Does this not happen in the formation of all

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And every day do we still not see these cathedrals rising out of interests, out of material needs? These practical interests, these material needs have as their object the sensible reality that they strive to capture and make. But their object is not really distinct and separate from the object of thinking – as Feuerbach believes and supposes it to be (sinnliche, von den Gedankenobiekten wirklich unterschiedene Obiekte) – because the materialism, if things were like that, would not be able to explain all of mankind’s activity.31 Such activity can appear to be double in nature, practical and theoretical, to someone who has not grasped the notion of knowing as making. But when the making is united with the knowing, the objects that belong to knowing are also the objects of making, and vice versa, so that finally there is just a single class of objects related to praxis (which is making and knowing together) and produced just by it. And if materialism is good enough to explain objects that are made, it must also be good enough to explain objects that are known, which are basically identical in nature with the former objects. Instead, Feuerbach explains his doctrinal constructions by the abstract activity of the Spirit – for him, the real human activity – and so he leaps back into the idealism that he wished so firmly to deny. Also according to Feuerbach, human activity is therefore not properly objective (gegenständliche Thätigkeit).32 It does not produce objects

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opposed to man, only objects that are, so to speak, subjective – cognitions, not facts. And with respect to cognition, the true objects – sensible reality – remain absolutely extraneous to thinking and independent of it. Inconsistency is Feuerbach’s leading error, introducing a duality into the very heart of materialism, which is essentially a monist philosophy, when he was unable to recognize the productive character of the sensory activity that shapes all reality. Therefore, we need to complete the materialist intuition with the very fertile concept of practical-critical energy, the energy that unfolds as it produces and simultaneously knows what it produces– the new concept of the ‘revolutionaries’ …33 9. A Critique of the Philosophy of Praxis … We may define the philosophy of praxis sketched by Marx in the fragments of 1845 as a materialist monism that differs from any system like it in its concept of praxis applied to matter. But now the time has come to look a little closer at this construct and, first of all, to see how solid its foundations are. How does Marx understand his matter? As praxis, he answers, which leads to historical materialism, meaning a system that does not conceive of matter as fixed and stable, but as being made continuously, continuously in becoming. But where is the principle of activity? Praxis in Marx is synonymous with human sensory activity (menschliche sinnliche Thätigkeit).34 The activity of matter thus resides in man. Sensibility is just practical activity, human-sensory activity.35 Hegel used to say that the Idea, the Spirit, is hard-working, and that its dialectical development is the reason behind the becoming of reality.36 Marx does nothing more than to substitute body for the Spirit, sense for the Idea, and for the products of the Spirit that constitute true reality for Hegel (and for Marx become ideologies) he substitutes the economic facts that are the products of mankind’s sensory activity as it seeks to satisfy all those material needs to which Feuerbach had reduced man’s essence. But Marx preserves all the rest of Hegel’s conception. And the substitution of body for the Spirit and sense for the Idea was natural and necessary: Feuerbach had done the same. As soon as the first level of phenomenology becomes sensible consciousness – or sense, if you like – and then all the higher levels develop from it, sense becomes man’s real activity. And to sense one must ascribe the rights usurped by abstract thought.

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From this, someone else could say that since the adult comes from the infant, it is not the adult who works and wages war and does science and so on, but the infant, in the final analysis. If this person were asked to point the wonder-working infant out to us, he might find himself in a real fix, but no worse than Marx’s in showing how sense might really be the principle of reality, understood as he means it. Who can deny any longer that the real and true Demiurge of sensible reality is our sensory activity? It is not a vibration in the ether that appears to the eyes; it is colour; and colour is therefore the sensible reality. But it is clear that this reality is not given to the sense, since apart from us there is only the vibration of the ether; the reality is produced by the sense. Just as Plato’s Demiurge does not create ex nihilo, however, but has matter there at hand and opposed to him, and then molds it in various sensible forms in imitation of the eternal ideas, so also sense does not create colour but transforms what is given externally (a vibration in the ether) into a visual sensation. The only given is utterly unlike sensation, but the sensation is impossible without the given. So then, what supplies this given? The external world, replies the psychologist, and for psychology this reply is good enough. But when Marx opposes his sense, body, and matter to Hegel’s Idea and Spirit, it is no longer a question of psychology or phenomenology but something different. In Hegel’s terminology, it is a question of logic – meaning metaphysics. In a psychological sense, one can also say that sense creates sensation because psychologically there is nothing beyond the colour, and the vibrations in the ether are a purely physical fact. But when we move on from a particular treatment of psychic phenomena to a general treatment of reality, we see immediately that before the colour and beyond it there is the vibration in the ether. And who causes the vibration to be there? God, replies the spiritualist; matter, the materialist. But given what has been said, it is obvious that this matter is something beyond human sensory activity; it would need to be fashioned, as Marx would say, or constructed in its own way. The question is scholastic, Marx will say. As such, vibrations in the ether are purely an abstraction, something that does not exist (as far as humans are concerned). Vibrations in the ether exist only as colours. But this answer brings us back to phenomenology again, though it is Hegel’s logic that the author means to oppose. It is metaphysical materialism that he believes he is rectifying with his dynamic concept of matter. And in this domain, the relative – the as far as we are concerned – must give way to the absolute, as the a posteriori becomes a priori.

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In idealism, this progress from a posteriori to a priori is understood – as far as universal reality and the absolute are concerned. Knowledge is established by synthetic a priori judgments, said Kant, by experience (synthesis) which is posited, fixed, and recognized as a priori. In order for a concept to take shape, the given in sensible experience must be presented to the category, a native function of my understanding. The genesis of every concept is necessarily empirical, a posteriori. But once a universal concept – a law – has been formed, this concept and this law are a priori, and as such they govern reality. Now if we do not attain the universality of the law, of the concept, if we remain in the particular of sensible intuition, we clearly do not leave the a posteriori, the domain where there exists only what is given by experience. But experience always assumes a stimulus, and hence matter, as its unfailing antecedent. Matter thus escapes the creative activity of sense and cannot be regulated by it; in fact, matter influences sense and regulates it in certain ways. (The varying velocity of vibrations in the ether produces variation in colours, for example.) Idealism observes that concepts or rational laws govern reality. Therefore, there are no chemical substances that evade the mathematical relations of the formulas that apply to them; nor is there any wolf or horse that is not a quadruped or a mammal, with the required features of the relevant concept; nor does water exist that falls to a certain temperature without freezing, according to a law known experimentally. Reality itself is to be thought of as constructed by reason, which reveals itself there immanently, and reality is thus to be conceived as essentially rational. Clearly, the reason to which reality conforms can certainly not be Hegel’s, much less mine or Tom’s or Harry’s. Yet it is important to note that all nature is written in mathematical characters; that the mind can read these characters; and that these characters, being mathematical, are mental or intelligible by their nature, since mathematics is only a construction of the intellect. The mathematics of nature is just its rationality – the Reason or Idea, whichever you like, immanent in it and in reality in general. As the Reason that belongs to reality, the passage from a posteriori to a priori is therefore understood in idealism, but in Marx’s materialism it is absolutely inconceivable. The only way out would be to deny everything that transcends sensible reality, and this would be the genuine character of materialism. But the very assertion of this sensible reality as matter, pure and simple, immediately transcends sense. Besides, if nothing is real but the sensible and material, all the criticism that Marx directed

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against earlier materialist conceptions of society is completely demolished. As we have seen, he opposes the nominalist intuition that sees in society only individuals who, even when they are able to agree, are always essentially independent of one another, standing by themselves. Marx correctly observes that this is an abstraction because society is what is original, and so individuals are only parts of a single whole and organically connected. But what sensible reality is there in society except individuals as such? Society, their organism, is an ethical bond; it is mind and rationality. With good reason, then, the consistent materialists – Epicurus, Hobbes, and the French materialists of the previous century – denied that society is a necessary and original fact. Organism and society imply a relation, and that relation is nowhere to be touched, seen, or heard: sensibles are only the terms of the relation. If you form a concept of the terms together with their relation, you rise from sense to intellect, not by denying sense but by making an a priori – or necessary, if you like – synthesis of sense and intellect. Marx therefore had a reason not to isolate individuals and abstract them from their relations. This reason, as we have shown, was in the concept of praxis as immanent in sensible reality. Praxis means a relation between subject and object – thus neither the individual subject nor the individual object as such and simpliciter, but the one as necessarily related to the other, and vice versa: thus, to put it another way, the identity of opposites – once again. Not teachers on one side (as I have said) and on the other side those who are taught, but teachers who are taught, and, as teachers, those who are taught.37 As we have seen, Marx used the concept of praxis itself to reject naturalism.38 And in the spirit of the master, our Labriola puts it nicely: ‘All the people now living on the surface of the earth and all those who lived here in the past make up a quite considerable object of observation, having been here for a good stretch from the moment when life ceased to be purely animal.’39 This denial of naturalism is another blow against the materialist view that the only reality is the sensible. The purely animal life is precisely the life of sense, lived amidst sensible things, and it ceases only when one asserts that there is something more than mere sense. The moment when it ceases, in fact, the moment to which Labriola himself refers, is the moment of society’s origin, and hence, as we have already said, of the asserting of the mental (by which sense is already overcome). Materialism can see only the animal (naturalism) in mankind, but, by his concept of praxis, Marx is forced to see something more than the

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purely animal in mankind, and precisely what he sees there is … mankind, meaning the animal, yes, but the animal that is by nature political, according to Aristotle’s old dictum.40 What materialism is this, then? Like any materialism, it wants to recognize as real only what is sensible, but this sensible, which for any other materialism is static, is in this case dynamic, in a perpetual becoming, which is why it is called historical materialism. But here we have a materialism which, if it is to be historical, is forced to deny its own basis – that there is no other reality beyond the sensible – in order to construct its theory. It thus rejects the essential features of every materialist position, of the atomist conception of society for example, and naturalism itself. In short, this is a materialism that to be historical can no longer be materialism. A deep, internal, and incurable contradiction afflicts it. And in truth, did Hegel not say that the Spirit is history?41 Spirit, not matter? Can history be transported from the Spirit to matter, as Marx claims? The materialism of the previous century, which was really the sincere expression of the most anti-historical of all eras, did not think so – and with good reason. The materialism of that period believed in matter as such, and matter as such is always self-identical: it never changes. It takes different forms that change and vary continuously, but in all its forms it remains the same constantly. Take a piece of clay and first make a little bottle. Then you can reshape it and make a flask out of it. But bottle or flask, the clay is always clay, and, as such, it cannot be said to change. And where there is no change, there is no history. If you want to look at the various forms, you no longer have clay, pure and simple, in front of you, but clay and your hand that shapes it – clay and praxis. In this way, if it is not the matter as such that you want to look at but its ever-changing forms – its history – you will have both the matter and the praxis that makes the matter exist in all its forms. But if you accept praxis, you transcend sensible reality, as we have seen. This is what materialists of the previous century did not wish to transcend, and therefore they stayed content with matter as such, always self-identical, without history. This is why they were convinced that the world was and always will be the same, and that to have deep knowledge of any entity one must study it not in its history but rather in its natural directness – hence also the return to nature that characterizes every intellectual product of the previous century, including political economy, according to the Physiocrats.42 When this notion is carried over into law, one can understand how the special insight of the eighteenth-century philosophers could have set up the explosion of the great Revolution.

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A revolution is a really a negation of history, a denial of value to what history has consecrated as human society’s natural movement and development, reducing historical facts to accidental – and thus arbitrarily changeable – modifications of a nature that is perpetually self-identical. Historical materialism, by contrast, means to proclaim that history is the only true mistress of all us humans and that we are as history lives us, as Labriola says.43 Then the canon of a new philosophy claims that while philosophers up to now have sought only to interpret the world, the point is to change it (verändern) – change the history of which all reality consists, in other words, according to the new materialists.44 This means that this unique reality that is history, whose essence is determined by dialectically necessary development, becomes unreal all at once by the very fact that its own development must either stop or change paths. How so, and why? Through the theories of philosophers – historical materialists excepted! Those much-derided ideologies would all at once become the mainspring of history! The truth is that philosophy is the only means of changing the world that philosophers have at their disposal. Have we not come back to Plato’s notion of ideas as movers and creators of universal reality? The root of the contradiction that comes up at every turn in Marx’s materialism is the total lack of any critique bearing on the concept of praxis as applied to sensible reality or to matter, which for him are equivalent. Marx seems not at all concerned to see how praxis might be coupled with matter as the sole reality, though the whole previous history of philosophy ought to have warned him that the two principles cannot be reconciled – that form (praxis) with that content (matter). Matter of itself is inert and therefore always equal to itself. What is the source of the energy that makes it come to be incessantly? One might say there is a dynamis immanent in it, but this dynamis that transforms matter step-by-step in a dialectical and determinate development of its nature is a rational dynamis, and reason is the Spirit. Beyond matter, therefore, the Spirit is always present as primitive, and the conclusion we reach is a more or less Platonic dualism, not a materialist monism. Pure materialists contemporary with Marx himself – Büchner, for example – resorted to the option of accepting force and matter as primitives, but they were careful to keep force far removed from any views about teleology.45 In fact, they adopted an almost relentless critique of any teleology as one of idealism’s basic theories (now emphatically confirmed by the idealist – or telistic, as they call it – trend in England and America). Karl Marx, born an idealist, and, during the period when his think-

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ing took shape, having become so deeply familiar with Fichte’s philosophy first and then Hegel’s, did not approach Feuerbach’s materialism by forgetting everything he had learned and was second nature to his thinking. He could not forget that there is no object without a subject that constructs it, nor could he forget that everything is in perpetual becoming, that everything is history.46 Yes, he learned that this subject is not the Spirit, an ideal activity, but sense, a material activity, and that this Everything (which is always becoming) is not the Spirit, not the Idea, but Matter. In this way, he thought that he was travelling along the road that led from Kant and Fichte to Hegel, from idealist transcendence to immanence, as it were, thus assuming that he was always moving farther from the abstract and closer to the concrete. But on the problem of the abstract and concrete, how could he not take account of Hegel’s stunning critique of the abstract intellect? Yes to matter, then, but matter along with praxis (the subjective object). Yes to matter, but matter in continuous becoming. In this way, he came to grasp ‘the fairest flower’ of idealism and of materialism, the flower of concrete reality and of concrete conceptions always replacing abstractions, both Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s. Yes to materialism, but historical materialism. Except that the irony of logic answered the best intentions of his realism with a gross contradiction as the result, which I hope will be clear from now on to attentive readers of these pages – a contradiction between content and form, analogous to what we have already pointed out in criticizing historical materialism as a simple philosophy of history. To conclude, then, I will say that an eclecticism with contradictory ingredients is the general character of this philosophy of Marx. And if some of his current disciples do not know what to make of it, perhaps they are not far wrong. At its basis there are many fertile ideas, and taken separately they deserve careful consideration. But in isolation they do not belong to Marx, as has been shown, and therefore they cannot justify the term ‘Marxism’ that has been synonymous for some time with a philosophy that is purely realistic. The truth is that science is not concerned with names, and if any of the most important Hegelian ideas can penetrate people’s thoughts if Marx’s name gets used as a charm, then good luck to ‘Marxism’ too!

NOTES 1 The first edition is Gentile (1899b), which we have used here.

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Part II: Translations 2 [a] L. Feuerbach, etc, preface, p. 3; [e] Engels (1888). 3 [a] Zur Kritik, p. 6; cf. A. Labriola, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, lettere a Sorel (Rome: Loescher, 1898): 74 ff.; this volume with the addition of some notes has also recently been published in French under the title Socialisme et philosophie (Paris: Giard et Brière, 1899); [e] Marx (1897), (1977), preface; Labriola (1898), (1899). 4 [a] Op. cit., p. iv; [e] Engels (1888). 5 Metrodorus of Lampsacus (331−278 BCE) was the most important follower of Epicurus, and the earlier Metrodorus of Chios was a pupil of Democritus; Marx wrote his dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus. 6 [a] ‘Per l’interpretazione e la critica di alcuni concetti del Marxismo: Memoria letta all’Accademia Pontaniana della tornata del 21 novembre 1897,’ (Naples), translated in Devenir Social, 4 (1898): 22. 7 [a] Op cit., letter 5, p. 58 (p. 75 of the French translation); [e] Labriola (1898). 8 Horace, Epistles, 1.2.16: Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra; ‘There is wrongdoing inside and outside the walls of Troy.’ 9 [a] Op cit., p. iv; [e] Engels (1888); Feuerbach (1841). 10 [a] Hegel in fact writes that ‘the content of consciousness, whatever it may be, must be determined as feeling, intuition, image, representation, purpose, obligation, and so on, as a thought and a notion. Sentiment, notion, image, and so on are, in this sense, different forms of one and the same content, which stays the same, whatever the feeling, intuition, representation, wish … or thought … In one of these forms, or in a collection of several of them, the content is the object of consciousness. But into that objectivity of the content are added the determinabilities of those forms, whence it happens that some particular object appears according to each of those forms, and the content, which in itself is the same, can appear to be differentiated.’ Logic, ¶ 3 of the introduction, which I cite in the translation of Vera (2d ed.; Paris: Baillière, 1874), which is only one I have and does not suffer, as far as I know, from errors of inaccuracy. [e] Hegel (1874b); (1986a), 8.44; (1991): 26. 11 [a] Logic, ¶ 19, Zusatz 2; [e] Hegel (1986a), 8.70; (1991): 47. 12 Feuerbach (1843). 13 [a] See the Grundriss by Ueberweg and Heinze, 8th ed., part 3, vol. 2, pp. 148−51; cf. F.A. Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus (3d ed., Iserlohn, 1876), II, 73−80; [e] Ueberweg (1894−8); cf. Lange (2d ed., 1866). 14 ‘Man is only what he eats,’ cited in Ueberweg (1894−8), 3.2.150. 15 Although Marx wrote his famous Theses in 1845, they were not known until

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16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

more than four decades later as an appendix to the book that Engels published on Feuerbach in 1888: Engels (1888), Appendix, pp. 59−62; Gentile refers to the Theses as ‘Fragments.’ [a] Namely, as an activity that makes, posits and creates the sensible object (gegenständliche Thätigkeit). Where Marx has ‘revolutionary praxis (revolutionäre Praxis),’ Gentile has ‘praxis rovesciata’ in this and later editions: Turi (1998): 924. Where Marx has ‘understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice (praktisch revolutioniert),’ Gentile has ‘praticamente scalzato.’ [a] Showing, in other words, that the holy family is nothing but a duplication and a hypostasis of the earthly family; [e] Gentile has ‘praticamente rovesciata’ again where Marx has ‘eliminated in practice (praktisch vernichtet).’ [a] See Engels, Feuerbach, Appendix, pp. 59−62; [e] Engels (1888). Gentile alludes to Gioberti on creation: see section 8 of the Introduction. [a] There are also hints of this in the inaugural oration published the year before: De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. On this doctrine of Vico’s, see two articles by Professor Tocco: ‘Descartes jugé par Vico,’ Revue de metaphysique et de morale, (1896): 568−72; and ‘Rassegna filosofica,’ Rivista d’Italia, (1898): 762−3; also the study, ‘Kant in Italien,’ by Karl Werner, Denkschrift der philosophishe-historische Classe der königliche Akademie der Wissenschaftlehre (Vienna, 1881), section VII, pp. 350 ff., which cites all earlier bibliography. [e] Vico (1990). [a] Op. cit. p. 43 (pp. 55−6 of the French translation); [e] Labriola (1898). The verb facere, ‘to do,’ is cognate with the adjective facilis (facile in Italian), ‘easy.’ [a] F. Fiorentino, ‘F. Froebel,’ Giornale napoletano di filosofia e letteratura, (1878): 220. [e] Friedrich Froebel (1782−1852) was a pioneer of modern educational methods, especially for very young children. [a] Ibid. The Greek phrase, ‘growth within itself,’ does not occur in Aristotle; the Latin means ‘increases and grows.’ By ‘Fragments’ Gentile means the Theses on Feuerbach. ‘Filthy’ (schmutzig) is Marx’s word in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. [a] Op. cit., pp. 123−5 (pp. 163−6 in the French translation). Note that in the end Professor Labriola then reproduces the position for which Marx had already criticized Feuerbach: he reduces the history of primitive Christianity to the history of two independent processes, each of them autonomous – the history of doctrine (an ideological process); and the history of the church (an economic process, p. 127). He warns, however, that doctrine

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

is not ‘the most primitive formation’ but a transformation or a derivative in new form of components pre-existing in Christianity. [e] Labriola (1898); the French means ‘exactly as with us.’ See the first Thesis, above: ‘Feuerbach wanted sensible objects to be really distinct from the intelligible.’ The first Thesis: ‘Feuerbach … did not conceive of human activity itself as objective activity.’ The revolutionaries mentioned in the first thesis. [a] See fragment 1. [a] See fragment 5. Hegel (1986a), 3.18: ‘Der Geist … ist er nie in Ruhe, sondern in immer fortschreitender Bewegung begriffen’; (1977): 6. See the third Thesis on Feuerbach. [a] Cf. my Critique, above pp. 19 ff.; [e] the first part of the book that also contains Gentile (1899b) is the ‘Critique of Historical Materialism’ that had been Gentile’s secondary thesis at the Normale. [a] Historical Materialism, p. 27; [e] Labriola (1976b): 546. Aristotle, Politics, 1253a2. Hegel (1986a), 12.96−7; (1956): 72. The Physiocrats, a school of economists in Enlightenment France, taught that wealth derives from labour, especially agricultural labour. [a] L’Università e la libertà della scienza, Rome, 1897, p. 33. [e] The famous phrase ‘vissuti dalla storia’ occurs in Labriola (1898): 5: ‘we are, as it were, lived by history, and our personal contribution to history, however indispensable it may be, is always a tiny item in the crossing of forces that are combined, completed, and merged with one another’; see also Labriola (1976c). [a] See Marx’s last Fragment on Feuerbach. Ludwig Büchner (1824−99) was a physician and philosopher whose rigorous materialism caused his dismissal from the University of Tübingen. For senza un oggetto, reading senza un soggetto, as in later editions.

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19 Giovanni Gentile

The Rebirth of Idealism Inaugural Lecture for an Open Course on Theoretical Philosophy Read in the Royal University of Naples, 28 February 19031

Gentlemen: No one could begin teaching theoretical philosophy in this university without thinking of the man who taught that course here, as a regular professor, for more than two decades, from 23 November 1861 until 17 February 1883, which was the last day of his life. During that period, when all our fields of study were reinvigorated and our whole intellectual culture was reformed, he was the master of philosophical learning not only in Naples but all over Italy. He attracted to his Chair the best minds that were then developing, those that felt themselves born to do philosophy. In their thinking he planted the fertile seed of his own thought, spreading the light of knowledge around him, and kindling great passion for investigating and understanding life’s greatest problems. In this Chair, then, my first thought turns back to Bertrando Spaventa, the founder of true academic philosophy in contemporary Italy. But at this moment, alongside his austere and inspiring image, also beside me is the dear and kindly image of the person who first told me Spaventa’s name, first opening my mind, which longed for the truth, to the thinking of the one who had so much truth to communicate. And as he spoke to me – charmed as he was by the magic of that man, who bound to his own spirit the spirit of anyone who could hear and follow him – he also drew me into that charmed circle, making me part of the small but privileged family of thinkers of which Spaventa was the honoured and beloved chief. My thoughts today turn to those sweet years, still near but seemingly far away already, sweet years that flew by me in joyous freedom, when, day after day, Donato Jaja initiated me into the mysteries of the hard thinking that disdained anything easy – that had been fully illuminated here in Spaventa’s school and then defended against

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doctrines opposed to it. With his apostle’s enthusiasm, my teacher there taught it to me.2 And it seemed to me that he had put a sacred torch into my hands. As I begin, then, please permit me to send greetings to my valiant Pisan teacher. Please also permit me to tell you candidly that as I enter this temple of science today, I feel emotion like that of a pilgrim, who, having arrived before the Sepulcher by the faith that brought him there, surely finds no tomb but rather the very beginning of what life is for him. In the glorious halls of this academy, I see the spirit of the philosopher living, the one I did not know but whose disciple used to speak to me. And from his presence, I take the auspices of my teaching, and, I hope, the strength to continue it. I tell you what I believe, gentlemen, that such thinking can still be auspicious and give no one cause to accuse us of taking a position that has already been superseded and abandoned for some time. It is not abandoned and has not been superseded, neither for some time nor for a short time. This way of thinking is alive and well. The only criticism of it has been based on utterly false interpretations or else has been aimed at one of its less important and essential points. A doctrine is overcome not by words but by reasons, and reasons capable of overcoming our doctrine have been announced many times – indeed, too many times – yet they are nowhere in sight. It is been said that our doctrine was dead and buried, but to me it seems livelier after death than before. All around I see contemporary consciousness – in art, politics, religious attitudes, the special sciences, and philosophy – openly declaring itself dissatisfied with the forms that always seemed to constitute the naturalism of the second half of the century that just ended. In various ways, contemporary thought also suggests the Spirit’s revenge – the revenge that necessarily had to come, sooner or later, in reaction to the petty naturalist trend that brought so much discomfort to the cultivated souls of our fathers. Already I hear people enthusiastically proclaiming the rebirth of idealism. And given the difficulties that the new idealists are struggling against, battling among themselves and against the better founded and less contestable notions of naturalist doctrines, I can only take great comfort in reflecting on the weighty words used by Spaventa, back in 1874, to close his critique of Darwinian transformism: ‘And if what I say is true, it can be granted that Hegelian metaphysics, far from being outdated from now on, is like a prophecy – namely, the organism of the science of modern experience and the expected rectification of it.’3

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If idealism seemed to be superseded, this did not happen by a chance mistake or an arbitrary error made by thinkers who did not want to attend conscientiously to the data of the perennial problem. Like every fact of history, this overcoming happened by an ideal necessity from which individuals have not been exempted and which, in philosophy, determines a perpetual alternating succession of general intuitions out of which the history of human thinking is woven sequentially. This is never a stable and fixed intuition of truth: it is a continuous process and a development from one level to another, determined and regulated by a law. It might have seemed that people’s minds had been worn out by the strenuous and difficult intellectual effort actually spent on idealism in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the truth is that once a form of idealism was determined – since this always means reducing or concentrating the world within the sphere of the ideal, with the spiritual subject somehow withdrawing into itself – then, once this form was complete and wholly withdrawn into itself, it was inevitable that the Spirit again began to be alienated from itself and to turn towards the nature that stands eternally before it, beguiling and enchanting it with enormous charms and awful mysteries. This was inevitable because it is the Spirit’s nature: to flow perpetually beyond itself, into the object that is then destined to become part of it, or rather to be transformed into a subject and in the end to generate anew the craving for external reality. It is an eternal Tantalus, his hand reaching eternally for the sweet apples of the real – not that he never gets any, but that he never gets enough to satisfy his unsatisfiable need. That would be the Spirit’s last day, if it ever attained the final object, and, after that object too entered the subject’s closed circle and was immediately assimilated into it, it made a desert of reality, making any further inquiry, any new understanding, useless and impossible, and hence ending all the Spirit’s activity and all its life. But the Spirit is immortal in its infinite development and can never exhaust its inborn energy. Thus, once reality has been shut within itself by an idealist view of the world, it soon comes back to flow out again into external nature with the fury of a bacchant.4 And there it roams about, unmindful of itself, striving to identify and confound itself, in fact, with that same nature, silent yet living. Look at German materialism, which splits off from the Hegelian Left and raises the banner of force and matter. Look at transformist naturalism, which, while declaring its wish to derive nature’s higher forms from the lower, aims only to reduce the former to the latter. In lower forms as such, even though they are leavings from the seed of higher forms – the

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seed that might be the seed of a final cause – materialism seeks the root of those higher forms.5 It levels everything to make it fit within a single boundary, not by raising nature to the Spirit but by bringing the Spirit down to nature, while also trying to avoid any aprioricity in accounting for all of the Spirit’s deeds, even the highest. And in the very heart of naturalism, look at the physiology that had its glory days in the same period, by labouring to extract life – nature’s highest form – from physico-chemical forces, which are the lowest, or else by a new and more miraculous alchemy, to get blood from the turnip, amidst the general revulsion for the pestiferous Spirit that materialist philosophy inspired. Look at psychology, at first reduced to mechanics only metaphorically, and then, by every expedient, from the most clever to the most naive, compelled by good sense to lie in the Procrustean bed that was at first physiological and then physical as well, producing experiments, measurements, and laboratories, and then the famous enigma of psychology without a soul – a bitter joke, it seemed, up until the most recent theory of feelings as bodily facts! Look at historical, and, in general, philosophical positivism, with its firm intent to see nothing in the Spirit but the fated reflex of the ambient physical fact. This reduces history to an intricate puppet-show, directed not by the Providence that Vico taught to us, which is Mind exulting in time, but by the ineluctable influence of the physical nature around us and by our own physiology or pathology. Positivism also reduces history to the piteous duty of gathering up, one by one, the minute facts that the Spirit throws off here and there as it passes along the avenues of time and space, without ever wondering or seeking to know who has thrown them – sometimes actually declaring that asking would be useless, perhaps out of fear that the detested Spirit, with its Medusa’s face, might be seen rising up before us again, in thought and in person, just because we speak its name. In general, positivism also views the world not as a hierarchical system of values but as a disorderly mass of phenomena with no origin and no end, either thrown out helter-skelter or else ordered by a determinism that makes them all the same by eliminating differences of level and kind. The ethical is then explained by the useful, right by force, cognition by the mechanics of representations, and these by sensations as such. In their turn, sensations are understood as subjective appearances of the physical event, and art itself is reduced to the play of physiology or just to pleasure. Religion comes down to fear, and everything in the Spirit is explained as a derivative of nature. And the experimental sciences? They are arrogant about the differenc-

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es between them, scornful of a principle that might join them all in the unity of the mind, and tolerant only of one philosophy that limits itself to the modest and uncompensated employment of recording results achieved by each of them in a file of numbered cards – or, even better, to be made the boss of a communications office on the understanding that everyone employed in this office should repeat what is transmitted as faithfully as a phonograph or a typewriter, with never a mistake of pronunciation or orthography. This is to stick to external appearances, where only nature’s disconnected parts are in view, and not ever ending up worried about the soul inside all those parts – which are not as disconnected as they seem – or about the Spirit that intus alit! 6 Art itself, having been made naturalist, verist, and realist over the course of three decades, has seemed not to know that at nature’s head or summit, in the truest part of the true and in the most real of the real – if we may call it that – there was also the Spirit, of which only various deceptive appearances and some false and distorted manifestations had been seen for a long time.7 And need I mention here the sympathies widely encountered by Nietzsche’s egoist philosophy, intent on subjugating the human world to that same law of the strongest that Darwin pointed out in nature?8 And at last socialism, which in every era had been an idealist utopia (just think of Plato’s Republic) carrying within it the light and heat of the deepest idealist aspirations, has chosen in our day to set aside all moral grounding and meaning. It has insisted on the thesis that the social question is not a question of morality and hence depends not on human will but on the ineluctable forces of social life that determine willing itself. In the end, it is a natural problem, and once the data have been set, the conditions and determinants of the solution have also been set. Thus, even socialism has thought it best to take a seat at the banquet of the sciences, accompanied by materialist philosophy, next to that famous historical materialism which is a contradiction in terms.9 What a magnificent, mindless dance these fair bacchants have danced through the crags and vales of measureless nature – and all of them daughters of human thinking! An old Silenus spotted them from a hill, gazing astonished in voluptuous delight of eye and mind.10 He alone was concerned to warn them now and then to be careful not to break their necks in their dizzy and dangerous dance: Neo-Kantianism, so-called, that deferential – indeed, obsequious – devout and passive admirer of all the experimental sciences, in its absolute inertia and impotence, has done and could do nothing but preach that we should not forget

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(as we continue with the only useful research, the experimental) the problem of knowledge, which is the prior question, thus here and there contradicting another of the mindless bacchants, who, for their part, do not know what to make of the old Silenus and his stale warnings.11 The party has continued without interruption, never beclouded by the least shadow of melancholy nor by any inkling that at some point it might be a good time to stop. But one fine day, a few years ago, a bizarre and peevish spirit came forth to shout at science’s failure, reproaching it with its very proud promises of natural solutions to the great problems of mankind’s origin and destiny, to which religion offers a supernatural solution.12 He shouted that the promises had never been kept and could never have been kept, and that it was necessary to drop the pretense of a substitute for religion, of knocking down the great human idealities (which cannot be reduced to a mechanical explanation), and of staying within a modest range of particular questions and theorizing about second causes. It looked like a scandal. Advocates and admirers of the sciences rebelled at the verdict, which was thought to be false or exaggerated: it was said to be false that the sciences had solved none of the problems of origin, and an exaggeration that the notion of evolution had produced nothing about the origin of mankind. There was protest about the independence of reason. Many fine things were said, and many truly stirring articles were written for periodicals. But that bizarre and peevish spirit did not go silent as a result. In fact, as if to take advantage of the moment, many who had seemed weak because of their long silence took heart, whether they were mystics – like the creator of the scandal – or of a different disposition. And they joined with him to extend the action to naturalism, positivism, and historicism. So it came to be sung in songs of every key that materialism, for reasons quite unlike those of the Neo-Kantians, is real philosophical naïveté; that naturalism does not provide an account of thinking and its attributes; that positivism, with its levelling determinism, destroys all values, all differences; and all of them strain their eyes to stay sightless. Physiologists no longer hesitated to profess vitalism – just calling it neo-vitalism to make it all new, as we think that a new collar freshens up an old overcoat.13 Psychologists began to be persuaded that experimental methods were unproductive in their research specialty, and Neo-Kantians were moved to assert the need for a metaphysics, at least for normative purposes. New life almost stirred in that neo-critical thought, which, even though it had survived in France for fifty years, went almost unnoticed up to now or was

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treated as negligible. And special attention was paid to an idealism called critical or non-determinist because of its critical opposition to determinism. Other forms of telistic idealism have come to us from America, with a sense of modernity that has made them newsworthy and respectable. The critical study of Hegel has also been renewed in England, producing a sort of neo-Hegelianism.14 The concept of philosophy as an autonomous science of values, or of the Spirit, and no longer a compilation or revision of corollaries of the special sciences, has started to spread in Germany.15 In Italy, too, old convictions have been shaken. Thinkers are no longer satisfied with minute explorations of the particulars of nature and history. They are looking for truths of substance. People sense the void at the bottom of every particular taken just as is. They see that if nature is a monotonous and colourless succession of forms, even nature is unlovable, and that history is miserable when reduced to a graveyard through which art, science, virtue, and law roam like useless phantoms, silent and ethereal. What people are looking for and what they want is unity, the animating idea of nature and history. They are looking for the fullness of life and knowledge. They want to put God back into the deserted and desolate temple. They look and they want, but their means do not match their hopes. There is more negating than affirming, or else what is affirmed is a need rather than a way of satisfying it. Eyes turn naturally to the past, to times when the present torment was not felt, and trends revive that show themselves unequal to the present test. The reason is that if they existed in the past, the reason for their being superseded was also in the past. So eyes also turn to the beyond. If reason seems impotent, a person who has lost confidence in it takes refuge in faith, without noticing that faith itself, as the terminus and conclusion of the critique of reason, is itself a product of reason and can have no value higher than the one that reason gives it. Right here is the critical moment of contemporary consciousness. As if to reproduce Pomponazzi’s position, it reaffirms the principle of double truth and declares that the fundamental problems of thinking are neutral for reason, turning away from it towards what is called ‘feeling’ or the ‘inspiration of feeling’ – which is then supposed to be religion’s theoretical content.16 But this is a critical moment that contains the seed of its own destruction. For the truth of religion is a truth only on the condition that it is a truth of reason. And reason always works out the truth contained in it, short of the point where what is called ‘religious’ is elevated to the height of the nature of reason, since it does not measure

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up to that nature. Seeing that this necessary process goes from the duality of reason and faith to the unity of reason already completes that process and overcomes dualism. Therefore, if against naturalism we reaffirm the long-denied rights of idealism, we are not rising up in the name of mysticism but on behalf of that reason which is the origin of every truth and every right. An abyss lies between our cause and that of those who shout that science has been overthrown. Otherwise, I would not think it right for me to ascend to this Chair, which is a chair of science. I too agree with these people in saying that the science of naturalism has failed at the problems that it set for itself, but I say that naturalist science is not all of science. To tell the truth, what except reason itself, which is exactly what science is, puts us in a position to state that this science has failed? And since when are the judgments of science superior to itself? Bruno’s pyre wreaked terrible destruction on his person but did no harm to his philosophy, nor does the notorious decree of 1616, with Galileo’s subsequent condemnation, prove that the heliocentric view is false, revealing instead the resistance to the progress of natural science exerted in the seventeenth century by a false Aristotelianism, and a still false theology, through the force of inertia. Above science there is no authority to act as judge. And when science itself assists at the coronation of faith and thus of theology, it behaves like a father whose affection for his little child sometimes makes him forget his own dignity: he kneels down in front of the child, behaving like an infant and offering to heed every command. But the child of Themistocles has only the power given it by the parents.17 In the present resurgence of the ideal, then, it is good for our idealism to be a party on its own. It sees no limits as it voyages through reality, and so it sticks by that reality as absolute, opposing critical idealism or NeoKantianism no less than naturalism, mysticism no less than materialism. And we believe that only this idealism can rise again now by meeting the needs left unmet by naturalism. Our idealism does not deny the real progress made by the special sciences since it is their expected rectification, as Spaventa said. Yet our idealism never denies the rights of the Spirit asserted by Neo-Kantianism and by the trend towards mysticism, though when they offer an agnostic justification of those rights, our idealism rejects this as irrational. It also departs from naturalism by asserting the reality of ideas. But it differs from Neo-Kantianism and mysticism by aiming to clarify the intrinsic and unbreakable connection between ideas and nature, to locate the point at which nature and the Spirit make a unity, and to demonstrate this organic oneness of the real. Since both

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nature and the Spirit derive from the real, nature gains the same intelligibility and transparency that belongs to the Spirit. In truth, mistrust of the ideas that Plato called divine is an anachronism in today’s philosophy. Ever since Aristotle, once ideas were treated as outside the individual mind that ascends to them from sensory perceptions, those ideas had looked like a useless and empty reduplication of sensible reality. But if there were grounds for mistrust, out of opposition to the Platonic dualism that really was duplicating reality, for us that same reality is unitary – in all the results of our thinking and at all its levels. Hence, mistrust has been unjustified ever since idealism, as part of modern philosophy, took advantage of that same Aristotelian critique by discarding the caput mortuum that was the matter (ȣ/ȜȘ) of the Timaeus and Philebus, or rather those ineliminable residues that we sometimes hear mentioned even today.18 Right from the start of any philosophizing, ideal reality is beyond any possible dispute because philosophizing entails asserting just such a reality. If reality were just the object of sensory perception, as the object of sensible perception, then, to pass beyond sensory perception – as philosophy surely does, once it rises beyond bare description and simple cataloging – would be to pass beyond reality and to be tossed about helplessly in an absolute void. But it is the case that philosophy overcomes one reality by asserting another, by the same right that everyone, philosopher or not, recognizes in sensory perception – to posit its own object. But the special science itself asserts concepts, precisely because it is a level of philosophy. Yet it is only to higher or philosophical reflection that these concepts appear as not entirely stripped of every sensible and representational element and thus as capable of a new purification and of rising farther to the ideal. Within the sphere of reflection that belongs to a special science, however, concepts are kinds, they are categories, they are laws and they are principles; they are exact, meaning that they are true; but how could they be all that without corresponding to a reality? How could they be held as true if the very reflection that belongs to the special science did not regard them as corresponding to a reality? Or shall we say that kinds, categories, laws, and principles are sensible matter that can be plucked out of the soil as we go strolling down the lane?19 The reality that seems to grow distant from us, and from which, in some sense, we are indeed distanced by an abstract process of knowing, is the reality that is seen and touched, mere sensible reality. But by distancing ourselves from this reality and travelling the path of ideas, we encounter a new reality that is just the reality of ideas. This reality,

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far from being the degraded original, enfeebled in the better part of its being, must surely have a higher value, if, for the sake of it, we all depart from the original by a path that is arduous in itself and costs the investigator sweat and sleepless nights! Otherwise, says Dante in the Convivio (1.4), ‘the greater part of the human race lives by sense and not by reason, like children, and as such they understand things just by their outside, not seeing the goodness that is ordained for an obligatory end because they have shut the eyes of reason that penetrate within and see the goodness there.’20 And Vico says that ‘the human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externalized, in the body, and finds it very hard to understand itself by means of reflection.’ (Axiom 63)21 Given this natural inclination of the mind, the sensible always turns out to be treated as the standard of reality, even though the perception that represents sensible reality to us is just as subjective as the logical procedure that confirms reality as rational. Reality means an object of the Spirit – and the Spirit itself, insofar as it is its own object. Nor can any reality be imagined, unless, through the very act of being imagined, it is an object of the Spirit. And since the process of the Spirit’s development has various levels, the levels of reality are equally various. Reality has as many levels as that process has levels. Wanting to see and touch, like St Thomas, in order to believe presumes that God reveals himself to us by coming to pay us a visit, that he is led to us and introduced by his priests.22 This is an obvious sign of that wretchedness of the human mind ‘immersed and buried in the body’ that Vico has put among the luminous definitions of the New Science; it is the sensory need that, when it is satisfied, satisfies the sense, not the higher requirements of the Spirit, which, for its part, can have doubts about the senses and refuse to trust the object of sight and touch.23 But just as the sensible is not and must not be the object of reason, so the rational is not and must not be an object of sense. Using two weights and two measures is also illicit in the phenomenology of the Spirit, and if there is anyone whose law turns desire into a decree, so much the worse for him. Surely, in order to see the alpine flora, we must exercise our legs and climb mountains. If anyone standing on the plain were to deny that such a flora exists because he does not see it on the plain, then who knows what position he would be getting among the fauna? Still, for some time now it has been annoying to keep on saying that when people talk about ideas not as simple abstractions but as self-standing entities, it gives bodies to ghosts and turns philosophy into a mythology. And yet if philosophy is an elaboration of concepts from the special sciences or is said to

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be their systematization – as everyone is ready to admit, for better or worse – such a philosophy will be a nice coherent mythology, whereas the mythology of each special science can only be ugly and chaotic. Then this mythology presses on your brain like a suit of chain armour, and how do you get out of it? What do you match against it? Perception is no less mythical since it too is produced by the activity of the Spirit. And so? Ideal or rational reality unquestionably exists, and therefore the rights of idealism are indefeasible. The real question, the main problem of philosophy, is not the legitimacy of idealism, which is assumed by philosophy – is its first postulate, in fact. The real problem is to understand idealism. A person who shrinks from idealism when he wants to philosophize makes himself look crazy, like someone who wanted to walk without moving. Would he really want that? No one can be exempted from the iron necessity of logic. And since unless we move, even though we say we are walking, we are not really walking, then likewise we can say we are theorizing without ideas, but we are not theorizing at all. Without ideas we are still outside the temple, and anyone who disdains ideas and dares to mouth philosophical questions can be treated, without so many scruples and so many courtesies, like that cobbler who became so famous by wanting to climb ahead of his shoes. Once we have entered the temple, we need to see and recognize God in order to worship him; idealism ut sic, and nothing more, is no philosophy.24 We need to understand idealism, and understanding idealism means understanding the value of ideas. Here we encounter the supreme difficulty: that ideas appear as directly contrary to nature and irreconcilable with it – mors tua, vita mea.25 It looks as if ideas remove nature from its nest, and that nature does the same to ideas. Thus, the dominant character of the current idealism, rebelling against the naturalist movement, is to negate nature and oppose it to the Spirit: either idealist monism, which solves the problem by denying its existence; or else dualism, which acknowledges the problem but declares itself powerless to solve it. In neither case is there any real understanding of idealism. And since what is not understood is not in the Spirit, while idealism can be nowhere else but in the Spirit, I claim that real idealism is missing in both cases. There is movement towards it, but it is not yet done. As we have seen, it is not possible to negate ideas. Yet it is possible to negate nature; but the roots of the Spirit are in nature, and negating it is to shave the Spirit off from the soil where it gets its vital fluids. The idea grows out of sense, and sense is given us by nature; sense itself is

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nature, nature’s continuation, and it has no power except as knowledge of nature – of what is called a datum of sense. Negating nature is therefore the equivalent of rejecting sense, and since the idea develops out of sense, it is also the equivalent of cutting the idea off from its roots. The idealist can surely not remain content with this. Or will he break every bond between the idea and the senses, taking shelter yet again in the ancient tower of Platonic innatism? But that tower has been demolished for more than a hundred years, reduced to a shapeless pile of rubble. Kant demonstrated the emptiness of the category abstracted from the intuitive content on which it works as an immanent function of the intellect, and he had been prepared by modern empiricism of a post-Cartesian kind – also a post-Campanellan kind, I would say, recalling the power of the notitiae abditae that the philosopher of Stilo wanted.26 After Kant, later idealist philosophy and today’s empirical psychology have only confirmed the necessary connection between idea and sense, between the Spirit’s highest levels and the lowest, to the extent that such systems have brought this relation into the full light of day. And since it is impossible to negate nature, it is no longer possible to withhold approval from determinism or insist any longer on any notion of transcendence – for the same reasons. This is the problem: to reconcile transcendence with immanence, mechanical determinism with teleology, idea with sense, and once again to find the unity of the contraries. Only on this condition can we understand idealism and save Abel without causing the death of his brother and turning him into Cain. Understanding a new concept is certainly not getting rid of earlier concepts, which are themselves the actual essence of our empirical spirit, but bringing the new concept into the organism of the previous concepts, where the new one must appear as the organic and therefore necessary integration of the old. Obviously, the new organ transforms the organism, creating a new organism in which various concepts from one time cannot help but acquire new value. And because they are negated in some sense, they die as concepts of that one time. But such a death constitutes the life of everything, and that dying of our concepts – or rather of one phase of our empirical spirit – also constitutes the life of the understanding. Yes, then, idealists we are – but idealists who account for the value of the ideas that they use to understand reality; and to give an account of that value, such idealists establish the point where contraries coincide, and the unity thereby established is not the unity of nature alone nor the unity of the Spirit alone but the complete unity of the duality of nature

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and the Spirit. Spinoza’s substance, to which many modern thinkers have been returned by the notion of psycho-physical unity, is the expression of this basic problem of philosophy. But it is the expression, not the solution. Once the problem has been posed, either we solve it and have the right to philosophize, as is clear from what I have just told you, or we do not solve it and no longer have the right to conduct philosophical investigations. Wearing ourselves out on problems that appear to be insoluble and reaching for goals that cannot be attained is a sign of weak willpower, and so it interrupts the enactment of man’s rational nature, which is the first duty and the basis of every authentic duty. But declaring a solution impossible is the equivalent of denying the issues that give rise to the problem – at least that aspect of them that is the basis of the problem. Declaring the impossibility of squaring the circle is already abandoning that problem. Now might it be possible to declare that the solution of the problem of the Spirit and nature is equally beyond our reach? Might it be possible to deny as absurd that unity of contraries which causes the unity of the Spirit and nature to encounter insurmountable obstacles as they enter into ordinary understanding? But denial itself is a judgment. Kant – Kant above all, in fact – also showed that judgment signifies synthesis a priori, or just the unbreakable unity of subject and predicate: identity in diversity, to be precise. So then, declaring this problem insoluble is to not understand ideas. Hence, it is to understand nothing at all, since ideas – I believe no one would want to deny this as well –since ideas are the torch and the only torch that lights up and can light up the otherwise shadowy world of the complete intelligible. And will anyone claim to understand nothing at all – not even his own understanding of nothing? Scepticism, as an absolute statement of scepsis, makes a statement and thus is dogmatic; as a provisional statement it is also a statement, and a double statement, in fact – of its own content and of its own provisional character. Therefore, if no one can claim to not understand ideas, no one can declare the problem of the intelligibility of ideas – and then their intrinsic relation to nature – to be insoluble. The argument is so simple that it would take a miracle to see it ignored, or to see negligent and indolent experts on philosophy missing its importance, had it not been proved so often that the simplest arguments have the greatest difficulty in attracting enough attention to make them intelligible, and were it not well-known that the simplest ideas are the most abstract and thus the last to emerge in the phenomenological process, though they come first, by contrast, in the logical process.

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The problem is posited for speculative reflection as a question of its living or dying, then. The pressure of the dilemma is inexorable: either understand the unity of the Spirit and nature, or give up philosophy – indeed, give up any genuine understanding whatever, and shut ourselves up in the small sphere of the world of representations, which is the world of the merely animal. How can we and how must we understand – understand that unity in a serious way and then build philosophy as a whole, not just sketch its main outlines here in the dirt? We do not understand a book just by reading its preface – even though the contrary pretense is one of the most widespread forms of modern intellectual impertinence! We have to read the whole book: science is authenticated by itself, but when it is itself, since no one can defend himself if he is absent. Today I can only proclaim the principle of the idealism that I have the honour to profess: it is the concept of development understood as making intelligible the unity of sense and the Idea, of nature and the Spirit. This is not news. But without restating the melancholy maxim of Ecclesiastes, there is no doubt that multa renascentur: though this seems the newest of news to those without memory.27 So then, a principle of science is effective, when it is effective, not because it is new but because it is true, and no one dreams of being tired of the truth that to live one must eat, just because it is a truth older than Methuselah himself. The concept of development entails the movement of ideas, the negation of their separation, immutability, and fixity – as if they were stars mounted in the firmament of logical thinking. Through that concept, ideas emerge from one another in ceaseless disquiet, and ideas of ideas are drawn out from ideas of nature. The artificial dike that separates the continent of man and the Spirit from the billowing, iridescent ocean of nature breaks apart. Nature floods back upon the Spirit, and the Spirit abides in the depths of nature. The clearest evidence of this concept is the naturalist transformism that used its abundant experimental observations and sound inductions to invade not only all the natural sciences but also the sciences of the Spirit in the second half of the nineteenth century. Since everyone knows that everything real, the Spirit included, is a product of natural development, the concept of a single fixed form of nature becomes absurd – even for transformism. However – and here is the deep difference between our thinking and the naturalist kind – development is not a process that goes from less to more, which is impossible, because ex nihilo nihil; number does not come from unity as such, nor the larger number from the smaller.28 Consciousness is not produced

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by the unconscious, nor the psychic fact from the physiological fact as such, nor the physiological from the chemical, nor the chemical from the mechanical – as naturalist transformism maintains. For one miracle it substitutes any number of miracles more incomprehensible than the old one, and more mysterious. The truth is that the last in the order of time comes first in the order of logic, as Aristotle noted. Thinking, which is the last to appear in the world as the result of nature’s final development in the human soul, must be the first starting point for anyone who wants to understand the process of development. While it is true that determinism rules the process of the real in everything, this is not mechanical determinism and is not regulated by the principle of efficient causality. It is teleological determinism, the domain of final causality. All objections made against that concept derive from a false view: namely, from the notion that an end implies a purpose, or a consciousness of the end, whereas purpose and consciousness are consequent on the end and therefore different from it. An end implies immanence in the real as pure ideal determination of its own outer form, which is the terminus of its activity. Nature is not yet realized as consciousness, of course, and it cannot propose its own end, as the human person does. But even in the human, the end does not emerge from having a purpose, from abstract willing, which, one would hope, is a point that psychology has passed beyond (so-called free will); as has been observed, in fact, having a purpose emerges from the end. And if the end precedes the purpose, the end must be disassociated from it, since none of us can walk hand in hand with an out-of-date self, even if the out-of-date self is as different from the current one as two separate persons are from one another. We can certainly ask those who deny finality in nature whether the concept of development is intelligible in any other way. Nemo dat quod non habet: and if you negate reason in nature, it follows that you are also negating it in the Spirit, or else you give up on the concept of development – two hopeless choices, one more than the other.29 Gentlemen: This year, I hope to show the young students who would like to join me that nature actually has what it gives, and to do this by looking for the Spirit deep in nature’s belly, helping it be born and gradually take form through the main levels traversed by it in time. In this inquiry, I shall note how much recent studies have added to the speculative concept of the Spirit already worked out by absolute idealism by verifying it positively and proving it rationally, and how far some doc-

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trines have strayed from the path of true science – which, as such, is the only science. This will be the best introduction I could give to the new development of the idealism to which contemporary thought is returning. If a philosophy of the Spirit is possible on the principles that I have mentioned today, which remains to be seen, idealism’s rebirth will not signal a retreat from naturalism’s real and solid victories but a completion of them and a genuine integration. So as of today, it can be said that we present ourselves here not as followers of the old but as critics and promoters of the new, and therefore as pioneers of philosophy’s future.

NOTES 1 We have used the first edition, Gentile (1903a). 2 ‘My teacher there’ is Donato Jaja (1839−1914), the ‘valiant Pisan teacher’ greeted below by Gentile, who taught him philosophy at the Scuola Normale beginning in 1894; although Jaja had studied with Fiorentino, he was very close to Spaventa from 1879 until 1883, while teaching in a liceo in Naples. 3 [a] La legge del più forte, in Scritti filosofici, ed. Gentile (Naples: Morano, 1900): 352; [e] Spaventa (1972a), I, 544. 4 Hegel (1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8: but the bacchants represent the types of naturalism below in Gentile’s speech. 5 By ‘naturalismo trasformistico’ Gentile means Darwinism or evolutionism in the broadest sense, but by the 1870s trasformismo also became the name, first, of a style of electoral politics based on vote-trading and meant to preserve a progressive middle-class consensus, and, later, of the larger cultural problem that the political practice reflected: see Musella (2003). 6 Vergil, Aeneid, 6.726: ‘spiritus intus alit,’ ‘the spirit within nourishes.’ 7 For verismo see the notes to Croce’s ‘Concept of Art,’ and see also De Sanctis on ‘Realism.’ 8 Spaventa (1972a), I, 531−44, and n5 above. 9 [a] As I believe I have shown incontrovertibly in my critical studies on La Filosofia di Marx (Pisa: Spoerri, 1899): 147 ff., for all that they have not been noticed by the Marxists who in recent years have been awaiting that critical revision of Marx’s basic ideas which has been called a crisis of Marxism. For example, see Georges Sorel’s latest book: Saggi di critica del Marxismo, ed. V. Racca (Palermo: Sandron, 1903): he can be called a real Marxist like a lucus a non lucendo since he does not accept (in fact, he ferociously and often sarcastically resists) any of Marx’s theories and judgments. But it seems he has

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10 11 12 13

14

15 16

understood none of my criticisms of his persecuted author (even though he has certainly read my book), whom he sometimes reproaches with items that I, by contrast, have shown to be illogical and baseless. He is a talented man, of course, and many of his small-change observations against one point of Marxism or another hit the target. But for criticizing a logical construct like Marx’s, the philosophical dilettantism that satisfies Sorel is not enough. [e] Since a lucus is a dark grove, linking it by etymology with lucere, ‘to give light,’ as some scholars did, seems to be ridiculous; see also Gentile (1899b); Sorel (1903). The old Silenus is Kant, revived by the Neo-Kantians. [a] Stale for the experimental sciences, not in themselves: in fact, Kantianism presupposes the fact of science based on experience. For the peevish Ferdinand Brunetière, see the Introduction, section 22, and Brunetière (1896). [a] I am not unaware of the differences, on which the neo-vitalists insist, between the old vitalism and the new, but I do not consider the differences substantial. [a] In his important monograph, La logique de Hegel (Paris: Alcan, 1897): vii, while urging his own countrymen to study Hegel’s system, Georges Nöel could say: ‘To put us on this path, we have the additional example of our neighbors across the Channel whose philosophical situation shows so many analogies with our own. In recent years, a genuine rebirth of Hegelianism has been produced in England.’ He refers here to the second edition of the English translation of the Logic made by Wallace (1892−4; two volumes, one of which contains prolegomena to the study of Hegel); to the English translation of the Philosophy of the Spirit by the same author (1894); and to ‘numerous works dealing with Hegelian philosophy or visibly inspired by it’: especially notable among these are Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge: 1896) by McTaggart, and now the book by J.B. Baillie, The Origin and Significance of Hegel’s Logic: A General Introduction to Hegel’s system (London: Macmillan, 1901), which will be discussed in one of the next issues of La Critica. [e] Hegel (1874a), (1894); McTaggart (1896); Nöel (1897); Baillie (1901). [a] See the article by Benedetto Croce in La Critica on Wundt’s Introduction to Philosophy, p. 58 ; [e] Croce (1903). [a] See what I have written on this topic in La Critica, the January 1903 issue, pp. 33−5; [e] Gentile (1903b): In his notorious account of the immortality of the soul, Pomponazzi declared that doctrine a ‘neutral problem’ for Aristotelian natural philosophy, the implication being that for purposes of faith there might be a separate and (rationally) lesser truth.

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Part II: Translations 17 Plutarch, On the Education of Children, 1.2: ‘They say that Cleophantus, the son of Themistocles, often declared to many persons, that whatever he desired was always agreed to by the Athenian people; for whatever he wished his mother also wished; whatever his mother wished Themistocles also wished; and whatever Themistocles wished all the Athenians wished.’ 18 Caput mortuum: literally ‘dead head,’ the residue of a chemical or alchemical process like distillation. 19 [a] After the witty Benjamin Jowett, Plato’s celebrated translator, called Bain, Spencer, and the other positivists ‘appalling people who believe only in what they can hold in their hands,’ Spencer – in one of his articles collected in the volume Fatti e commenti, trans. Salvadori (Torino: Bocca, 1903): 104−5 – thought he had to protest, in the name of the agnosticism that he had professed in the First Principles and Principles of Psychology, against the accusation of materialism that he saw in Jowett’s definition; but he also said, ‘I shall not ask in what sense the law of evolution and various generalizations of an abstract character with which my name has been linked could be held as separate objects in my hands!’ There is no point here in judging the controversy between the critic and the person criticized, but it is worthwhile to take note of the declaration made by one of the leaders of empiricism. [e] Jowett (1899): 190. 20 Dante, Convivio, 1.4. 21 Vico (1977): 203. 22 For Doubting Thomas, see John 20:24−9. 23 Vico (1977): 232. 24 ut sic: ‘like this.’ 25 ‘Your death is my life.’ 26 notitiae abditae: ‘hidden knowledge,’ understood here as an anticipation by Campanella of Kant’s synthetic a priori. 27 Eccles. 1:9: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’; Horace, Art of Poetry, 70 : ‘Multa renascentur quae iam cecidere’; ‘Many will be reborn that now have fallen out.’ 28 Ex nihilo nihil: ‘Nothing from nothing.’ 29 Nemo dat quod non habet: ‘No one gives what he does not have.’

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20 Giovanni Gentile

The Act of Thinking as Pure Act1

1. Faith in Truth There is no philosophical or scientific inquiry, there is no thinking of any kind unless the thinking has faith in itself or in its own value, unless there is spontaneous and unyielding conviction of thinking the truth. The sceptic, who thinks he has cut this faith off at the root by suspending judgment – as the only reasonable alternative left to his thinking – stops with the unshaken certainty that his suspension is reasonable, and, since he continues to think, faith in this stubborn and empty thought of his is what he goes on. The fact of thinking, and therefore of philosophy, whatever the solution at which it aims, presupposes this affirmation of the truth of thinking as it thinks what it actually thinks.2 2. Abstract Thinking and Concrete Thinking The thinking whose truth is asserted by the foregoing consideration – the only thinking whose truth can be asserted, since, in fact, it is the only thinking that really is thinking – is not abstract thinking but concrete thinking. And the difficulty that ordinarily conceals from the philosopher’s consciousness the obvious truth stated above consists in looking for thinking in abstract thinking rather than in concrete thinking: for example, when we say that thinking is the thinking of another or our own thinking already thought, or, in both cases, not real thinking in the proper sense but only the object of thinking in its abstract objectivity.

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3. The First Moment of Abstract Thinking I said ‘abstract objectivity’ because I mean that the objectivity attributed in that case to thinking as an object of our thinking is not, in its turn, the concrete objectivity that in fact is conferred on thinking by asserting it, by thinking it, in other words, but is an inadequate interpretation of this objectivity through an effort of abstraction. Another’s thinking is not something we can think, even by willing to think it as another’s, except by thinking it as thinking, by meaning it, or by discerning and recognizing its value, and, in other, perhaps provisional, terms, by agreeing to it and making it ours. Our own thinking – once thought, however – is not thought again except inasmuch as it comes back to life in actual thinking: in other words, only inasmuch as it is not the thinking of one occasion, distinct from present thinking, but actual thinking itself, at least provisionally. Hence, to think a thought (or to posit thinking objectively) is to realize it, or rather to negate it in its abstract objectivity by affirming it in a concrete objectivity that is not beyond the subject since it exists in virtue of the act of this subject. 4. The Second Moment of Abstract Thinking But this is a first moment of thinking another’s thinking, or thinking what is our own and no longer our own (past). If this moment were never overcome, the thinking of another would be (through us) only our own, and past thinking would just be present. We would know only our own actual thinking. Behind the first moment stands another, and we will soon (§18) see why. Here it suffices to note that if this second moment, made possible by the first, annuls the actuality of the other’s thinking, or of what is our own and no longer our own, it is in a new act of thinking that the second moment annuls it. Thereby realized as a function of the new thinking, our own and actual, is the new objectivity (the true and effective objectivity) conferred on this thinking that our thinking expels from itself and accordingly treats as objective. And this objectivity is an organic element of the immanent unity of this thinking. 5. Thinking Absolutely Actual or Our Own Therefore, what we call the thinking of another, or our own in the past, is, in a first moment, our own actual thinking, and, in a second moment,

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a part of our actual thinking, a part inseparable from the whole to which it belongs, and therefore real in the unity of the whole itself. Hence, the only concrete thinking is our own actual thinking. And since our nonactual thinking is no longer our own, we may say that the only concrete thinking is our own thinking absolutely (but see the meaning of this we as the subject of our thinking in its context). Equally may one say that only concrete thinking is absolutely actual thinking, since the thinking that is not our own is not actual thinking. 6. Thinking as Nature As a consequence of the preceding consideration, the passage from the first to the second of the moments described above – by which one thinks a thinking that is not our own actual thinking – implies the devaluation of the thinking as thinking, or the assertion that what we have thought (in the first moment) is not thinking, since it is not concrete thinking, is not absolutely our own thinking; or else the assertion that what we have thought is now not thinking but a negation of thinking – the extension of the Cartesians, nature, the unthinkable, the limit of thinking, that which thinking cannot penetrate because it has already penetrated it. (For example, ‘the uncancelled days’ of Ermengarda, or Francesca’s memory ‘in misery of the happy time’: spiritual states turned to stone in the past, ineluctable, inexorable, as harsh as the most painful laws of nature, more painful because more deaf to the voice of the Spirit.)3 The passage from the first to the second moment is therefore the passage from thinking to nature. Nature, then, taken in its concrete reality, is the thinking that thinking begins to think as other than itself, or thinking fixed in its abstractness. Nature is abstract; only thinking is concrete (cf. §9). 7. Error Thinking that is absolutely our own or absolutely actual is true precisely because it is our own or actual. Error comes from the thinking that cannot be thought, from what another thinks and we cannot think, or what we have already thought but now can think no longer. What we think actually, if we think it, we think as truth. (Or else we think error, as error, but thinking that it is error and thus thinking the truth.) And error is not an accidental attribute of another’s thinking or of thinking no longer our own: indeed, it is necessary.

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If we call this non-actual thinking ‘nature,’ in place of the naturalist motto, Natura sive Deus, we must substitute the idealist motto, Natura sive error.4 The reason why this thinking is not actual, as we have seen (§4), is that it has been overcome, because having thought it, in other words, we can no longer think it. And by continuing to live as thinking beings, we must think otherwise. Now what can no longer be thought, after having been thought, is exactly what error is. Error is abstract, then; only the truth is concrete. 8. The Principle of Identity and the Dialectical Law If error is the thinking that cannot be thought, the true is the thinking that cannot not be thought: two necessities, which are only one necessity. Verum norma sui et falsi.5 Thinking thinks itself inasmuch as it thinks itself necessarily, which is to say, inasmuch as we think by not being able to think otherwise. Every act of thinking is an exclusion of another act of thinking (not of all the other possible acts, but of the one thought immediately before). Omnis determinatio est negatio.6 And therefore only by my becoming aware of an error and freeing myself from it do I know a truth – and think, in other words. In this living bond that joins (concrete) truth to (abstract) error is the root of thinking and the fundamental law of logic. The necessity expressed by the old logic in the law of identity is an abstract necessity, and likewise abstract was the thinking or the truth at which that logic aimed, winding through a maze of contradictions. The principle of identity (or of contradiction), A = A, declares a necessity in regard to what has been called abstract thinking, in regard to nature, in other words, which, by definition, is the negation of thinking and thus cannot admit to itself any kind of logical law. A = A is the law of error in its abstractness. Hence, whatever had been thought according to such a law would for that very reason be error. There is no thinking, in fact, that resolves itself into A = A. Logical necessity is of the real or concrete process of thinking that instead could be formulated schematically as A = non-A. In fact, every act of thinking is a negation of an act of thinking, a present in which the past dies, and thus a unity of these two moments. Take away the present, and you will have the past blind (abstract nature); take away the past, and you will have the present empty (abstract thinking or another nature). Truth is not of the being that is but of the being that annuls itself, and, by annulling itself, really is – an unthinkable proposition as long as thinking is taken to be abstract thinking, where being, having been fixed, can only be; on the other hand, it is a proposition that cannot not be thought

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when by thinking one means concrete thinking, absolutely actual thinking (so that the truth of the concept of becoming can be grasped only in regard to that true becoming that is thinking – the dialectic). The principle of identity should be replaced, therefore, not by the equally abstract principle of becoming, pure and simple, but by the principle of the dialectic or of the thinking as activity that posits itself by negating itself. This is the principle that is not the abolition of the principle of identity but rather its verification, since the dialectic denies not the truth of truth but the fixity of truth and thus asserts that the truth is itself – but in its movement. 9. The Freedom of Thinking The dialectical necessity of thinking coincides with the freedom of thinking because all limits are produced by the same dialectic of thinking. The limit of thinking cannot be a limit of thinking (§6) unless it starts by being thinking itself, unless, as limit, it is in the sphere of thinking itself. Nature – the only possible limit of thinking – is nature only abstractly; in the concrete it is thinking in its internal mediation. 10. The Universality of Thinking Absolutely actual thinking is universal by its very necessity. The universality of Plato and of Aristotle (parallel to the identity of every concept with itself), the kind desired by the realists and fought by the nominalists, is abstract universality because it is the universality of abstract thinking. One cannot speak of the universality of the concept of man, of animal, of triangle, of number, because there are no such concepts either in heaven or on earth; instead, there is the thinking that thinks these concepts. And the thinking of these concepts cannot be thinking in general, divine thinking (of a God who is other than us), if the only concrete thinking is absolutely our own thinking. The only thinkable universality, then, is that of our act of thinking. It is an act that is universal in the sense that, inasmuch as it is necessary, it is posited as the thinking not of a particular thinker from whom other thinkers, also being particulars, may diverge, but rather as the thinking of one who thinks through them all. When Galileo writes, taking understanding intensive, inasmuch as this term implies understanding some proposition intensively or perfectly, in other words,

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he says that the human intellect thus understands some of them

namely, all of them that it does understand perfectly, and so of these it has as much absolute certainty as nature itself has.

Notice this universality of actual thinking in its necessity. But Galileo adds, such are the pure mathematical sciences, geometry and arithmetic, of which the divine intellect certainly knows infinitely more propositions

another’s thinking (§4, 6), which instead is the negation of thinking because it knows them all, yet I believe that the knowledge of those few that are understood by the human intellect equals the divine in objective certainty since it comes to grasp the necessity beyond which, it seems, there can be no greater assurance.

And one should say, on the contrary, that not only pure mathematics but all our own thinking (even the most useless trifles) is real in the act that thinks itself.7 11. The Empirical I and the Absolute I If the thinking is our own inasmuch as it is universal, if there are other cases of thinking, or one other case, only in terms of an abstraction, as thinking is in its abstract objectivity, then the thinking does not arise from our individuality. But our own individuality, if it is ours because it is deep within us, or better because it is deep, present to itself, is universal – indeed, the universal concentrated and therefore made real in the One of consciousness. The we as subject of our thinking is not the I that has the not-I (another) or I-others (others) opposed to it, and hence it is not the empirical I that is apparent, one among many, to psychological observation. It is the absolute I, the One as I. It negates itself not only as thinking about things and I-others (note: about others, not belonging to I-others) but also as thinking about itself empirically conceived, as

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one I among many or among things, since an I of this sort is a particular among particulars and thus no longer that universal which is the true I. That particular I in which the I negates itself (and must negate itself) is nature, not thinking. True idealism cannot be solipsist, then, because it has overcome the position of solipsism (a concept of the world closed within the particular ipse).8 12. The Eternity of Thinking and Time Thinking in its actuality, or as universal I, contains and therefore overcomes not only the spatiality of pure nature but also the temporality of pure natural happening. Thinking is eternal, beyond time. In fact, time is a form of what we are thinking and therefore of thinking as having been thought in its abstract objectivity. When, in the act of thinking it, we attend to what we think, all points of time, distinct and successive, merge and contract into a single and unmultipliable point. To read a book, hours and hours will be needed; beyond the first will come the second, beyond the second the third, and so on – and the reverse. But anyone who gets to the end and does not think the whole book together by holding all of it present does not understand, does not think that book. And what belongs to the totality, once the temporal series is used up, belongs to every part at the corresponding point of time. Taking this into account, thinking – inasmuch as it is thinking – is what is all at once, all present together in a single instant. Therefore, the instant – the ™xa…fnhj – of thinking is not an instant among instants, is not in time, has no before nor after, is eternal.9 And therefore every act of thinking in all its absolute forms – philosophical system, poem, flashing and fleeting intuition – realizes itself as something eternal whose value was not born and will not die. 13. The Unity of Thinking and Number Absolutely actual thinking, or the absolute I, since it is not subject to time, is not subject to number. Incipis numerare, incipis errare.10 Number is not on this account a simple auxilium imaginationis except inasmuch as one aims to fix before the mind the process of the dialectic eternally unravelling itself from its moments.11 Number is legitimate abstraction where one refers to abstract reality (nature, or thinking in its pure objectivity). Nature, because it is the negation of thinking, is the negation of unity, and hence it is number. Thus it is the negation of freedom – mech-

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anism, in other words. Multiplicity, abstractly considered as pure multiplicity, cannot be understood except mechanically. Accordingly, nature is conceived deterministically as subject to the category of causality. 14. The Solution of the Antinomies Nature, multiple and mechanical precisely because it is abstract, is a reality, an object of an abstract science (a special science) not of the concrete (philosophical) science. And the solution of all the antinomies of reason pointed out by Kant is discovered just as soon as one notices the abstractness of nature or of the world viewed in its pure objectivity. This world of time and space is necessarily finite because it is necessarily particular. It contains no simple element because its law is multiplicity. Since number demands unity as its element, multiplicity would have no hope if unity in the domain of the multiple had to be an absolute unity rather than a provisional and therefore arbitrary unity, exactly as the determination of the particular can be, deferring the problem to the concept of another particular. Thus, even though the series of causes in a mechanical (nonphilosophical) system has a principle that makes determination possible, this principle is not absolute because it is relative to a particular reality that always has another one behind and alongside it. And in short there is nothing necessary in the world because everything is particular and so everything is conditioned. The force of logic that posits, counter to each thesis, its antithesis overcomes the abstractness of the Kantian world and will discover exactly that concrete reality to which it belongs as antithesis. It passes from the world of facts, which are many and nothing other than many (belonging to a multiplicity that contradicts itself as soon as one wants to think it absolutely), to the world of the act that is one, as the root of the many. 15. Thinking as Will The act, if it is not to be converted into a fact, must be grasped in its actual nature of pure act: all it can be is thinking. The fact is the negation of thinking, from which thinking itself creates for itself its other. Once having descended from the act to the fact, we are outside of thought, in the world of nature. There are no spiritual facts, only acts; indeed, there is nothing that is not the act of the Spirit, which in itself undergoes no opposition of any sort. In contrast with thinking, will (emotionality or practical activity) can only be other than thinking, other than

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thinking itself, not as act but as fact – what has already been thought and thus has become nature. 16. Absolute Immanence If beyond this other-than-thinking that is past thinking (logically, not chronologically past), more or less remote, another were posited as opposed to thinking in its origin, it would eo ipso be stripped of all its essential attributes, from unity up to truth, on and on, through all the attributes already exhibited.12 And it would no longer be thinking. Cogito, ergo sum. Sum substantia cogitans. Quatenus substantia, in me sum et per me concipior: hoc est, mei conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei a quo formari debeat.13 Nothing, in short, transcends thinking. Thinking is absolute immanence. 17. Potency and the Principle of Sufficient Reason Outside of actual thinking there is no altera res, neither actually nor potentially: not actually because of the preceding consideration; not potentially – in other words, as potency of the act that is absolutely our thinking – because potency is a category that can have a meaning through the world of facts, nature, generation, and corruption, not in the world of the act that is eternal.14 As possibility – Leibniz is correct – it needs to be completed by sufficient reason in order to pass into act. But this sufficient reason is other than possible, and this otherness implies multiplicity, which is the category of facts, of the universe. The principle of sufficient reason is in its place in Leibnizian pluralism (which, like all the old metaphysics, is just a conception of the world of facts or of thinking in its abstract objectivity), but it has no meaning in an idealistic monism of the absolute act or sub specie aeternitatis.15 The principle of sufficient reason, completing that of identity, supposes the latter to be true, and hence it is on the same plane: it too is false. From possibility to sufficient reason there is a leap that breaks the lex continui at its roots.16 Virtuality is a compromise. The true act cannot be transcended. And Leibnizian virtuality, when it becomes the Kantian category or form, will be just pure act. 18. The Process of Thinking The act of the I is consciousness in that it is self-consciousness: the object

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of the I is the I itself. Every cognitive process is an act of self-consciousness. This is not abstract identity and immobility but concrete act. If it were something identical, inert, it would need another to be moved. But that would annihilate its freedom. Its movement is not a posterius in relation to its being; it coincides with the being.17 Self-consciousness is movement itself or process. As originating or absolute process, it does not need to be made other. It is otherness within: not being, but being that bends back on itself, thus negating itself as being. A thing (abstractly considered, fixed by abstraction) is (always that), but precisely for that reason it is not thinking – self-consciousness, in other words. No one has been given permission to stop at that abstraction, as has been seen. As soon as the Spirit stops or seems to stop, the voice of logic is quick to cry out, ‘What laziness, what is this delay?’ It needs to move, to enter into the concrete, into the eternal process of thinking. And here being moves in a circle, turning back on itself and thus annihilating itself as being. Here is its life, its becoming: thinking. It is not pure thesis nor pure antithesis, not being and not non-being, but synthesis, that singular act that we are – Thinking. Being (thesis) in its abstraction is nothing, or rather nothing to do with thinking (which is the true being). But this thinking that is eternal is never preceded by a nothing of its own. In fact, this nothing is posited by it, and, because it is a nothing of thinking, it is a thinking of nothing, or rather thinking – everything, in other words. It is not the thesis that makes the synthesis possible, but the reverse: the synthesis makes the thesis possible, creating it along with its own antithesis or rather creating itself. And therefore the pure act is self-creation. 19. Philosophy and History The real, therefore, is self-creation because it is thinking. Thinking is the first dawn of consciousness (every psychic fact in that it is consciousness, in that it is act, in other words). Thinking is the whole of consciousness, including philosophy. Hence, it has two essential moments: first, it is reality, that reality which is thinking (by which all forms of scepticism are annulled), reality itself enacting its own inwardness; second, it is concept, thinking, consciousness of reality, and thus intrinsic overcoming of the prior moment. It is being and the consciousness of being, life and the mirror of life, and it is that in conformity with the essence of the pure act (self-creation) in general – being in that it is consciousness of being. And if the process of reality, that infinite and eternal dialectic which is

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thinking, is history, then philosophy is history and is an overcoming of history by thinking about it. It is history alive in the thinking of history – thinking, please note, always as pure act, and therefore never to be limited by the empirical determinations of history shattered in space and time – our own thinking, but our own absolutely because it is absolutely actual.

NOTES 1 Gentile first delivered this paper in 1911 in a meeting of his Philosophical Library in Palermo (see section 23 of the Introduction): it was first printed as Gentile (1912) and then included in Gentile (1913), the version used here. Section 23 of the Introduction also cites later versions. 2 The word ‘thinking’ in the title translates the infinitive pensare, but in the text that follows Gentile’s most frequent choice is the noun pensiero, almost always rendered here as ‘thinking’; Gentile emphasizes the active force of the word, meaning something less static than the English ‘thought,’ which in our translation sometimes represents pensato, the past participle of pensare, indicating an act (atto) of thinking (pensiero) that has already been thought (pensato) and is therefore past (passato) and not actual (attuale). For this last distinction, it is important that attuale, unlike the English ‘actual,’ is more temporal than ontological; when attuale means ‘existing,’ the claim for existence suggests current or present existence. On the other hand, attuale is cognate with atto (‘act’ or ‘deed’) and with attuare (‘actualize,’ ‘realize’). Finally, notice that in section 16 of this piece Gentile treats past thinking as past in a logical, not a temporal, sense. 3 Dante meets Francesca da Rimini with the lustful in the second circle of Hell; her betrothed killed her when he caught her with his younger brother, Paolo. In reply to Dante’s pitying question about her fate, Francesca answers that ‘there is no greater pain than in misery to remember the happy time’: Inferno, 5.121−3. The other quotation, referring to Ermengarda in Alessandro Manzoni’s tragedy Adelchi (1822), is from the chorus that closes the first scene of the fourth act: In the sleepless shadows Through lonely cloisters Amidst the chanting of the virgins To the entreated altars, The uncancelled days Always return in thinking.

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Part II: Translations 4 ‘Nature or God,’ in Spinoza’s notorious phrase, replaced here by ‘Nature or error.’ 5 ‘Verum index sui et falsi’: ‘Truth is the index of itself and of the false’ comes from a letter by Spinoza (76.7), cited by Jacobi (2004): 33, and then by Hegel (1986a), 16.62. Croce also cites it in chap. 5 of his ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ attributing it to Bacon. 6 In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel attributes ‘every determination is a negation’ to Spinoza, but Spinoza’s words are not quite the same: see Spinoza, Letter 50; Hegel (1986a), 8.196 ; (1991): 147 7 The Latin intensive means ‘intensively’ in contrast to ‘extensively’: Galileo’s point is that intensive understanding is much greater in humans than extensive understanding, but Gentile, glossing Galileo’s words, also puns on the Italian intendere (to understand) and the Latin intensive: Galileo (2005), II, 135. 8 He himself. 9 Dzxa…fnhj: all of a sudden. 10 The Latin means ‘start to count and start to go wrong,’ a phrase that Cusanus attributed to Augustine in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae; something close occurs in Augustine’s Treatise on John’s Gospel (MPL 35:1683): ‘Ubi cogitare coeperis, incipis numerare: ubi numeraveris, quid numeraveris non potes respondere.’ 11 ‘Aid to imagination,’ another phrase from Spinoza, which he used to describe various ways of quantifying, including time. 12 Eo ipso: for this very reason. 13 The Latin seems to be Gentile’s: ‘I think, therefore I am. I am a thinking substance. Inasmuch as I am substance, I am in myself, and I am conceived through myself: that is, the concept of me does not need a concept of another thing by which it should be formed.’ 14 Altera res: other thing. 15 Under the form of eternity: another Spinozan phrase. 16 Law of the continuum. 17 Posterius: after.

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21 Giovanni Gentile

The Foundations of Actual Idealism1

1. Historically, actualist philosophy goes back to German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, both directly and also through those Italians of the past century who followed, explained, and criticized the German thinkers of that era. But it also goes back to the Italian philosophy of the Renaissance (Telesio, Bruno, Campanella), to the great Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista Vico, and to those who renewed Italian theoretical thinking in the age of national Resurgence: Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti. The first writings to sketch actualist philosophy reach back to the last years of the nineteenth century. In the first decades of the current century, actualism continued to develop in parallel with Benedetto Croce’s philosophy of the Spirit. Croce’s works circulate widely in the major European countries, and the Aesthetic – Croce’s most original work, translated into many languages – is the Italian book about philosophy that is best known outside Italy. My constant collaboration on the journal that Croce founded in 1903, La Critica, which for many years conducted a tenacious and victorious struggle in Italy against positivist, naturalist, and rationalist directions of thought and culture, together with the fact that the ‘philosophy of Spirit’ matured about a decade earlier and right from the start attracted attention to itself everywhere, created the general appearance of two philosophies much more alike than they had been from the beginning. But differences naturally became ever more obvious as consequences unfolded from the principles of the two philosophies. And today – also because of contingent circumstances that need not be mentioned here – differences are much more apparent than likenesses and motives that the two certainly have in common. 2. This philosophy is called actualist from the method that it advocates.

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This might be defined as a ‘method of absolute immanence,’ profoundly unlike the immanence spoken of in other philosophies – ancient, modern, and contemporary as well. Missing in all those philosophies is the concept of the irreducible subjectivity of reality whereby the principle or measure of reality itself becomes immanent. In comparison with Plato’s abstract idealism, Aristotle is immanentist. Plato’s Idea becomes the form of nature itself, a form indivisibly connected with matter in the synthesis of the concrete individual, from which the idea, as its principle and measure, can be separated only by abstraction. But for actualist philosophy, the natural individual is itself something transcendent: as concrete, it is inconceivable outside that relation in which it, the object of experience, is indissolubly conjoined with the subject of experience in the act of thinking by means of which experience is realized. Before Kant’s critical philosophy, all realism stays on the terrain of this transcendence. Even if everything is reduced to experience, any philosophy that understands this experience as something objective remains there as well because it does not treat experience as the act of the thinking I as thinking, while realizing the reality of the I itself – a reality outside of which no thinking is given that is independent and stands on its own. This is the fixed point to which actual idealism adheres. The only solid reality given to me to assert, and with which any reality that I can think must therefore be connected, is that very reality that thinks, that is realized, and thus is a reality only in the act that thinks itself. Therefore, this is the immanence of all that is thinkable for the act of thinking, or for the act tout court, since, given what has been said, there is nothing that is actual except thinking in act. And everything that can be thought to be different from this act is actualized concretely to the extent that it is immanent in the act itself. Hence, the act of which we speak in this philosophy is not to be confused with the act (İ3ȞȑȡȖİȚĮ) of Aristotle and scholastic philosophy. The Aristotelian act is also pure thinking, but it is a transcendent thinking presupposed by our thinking. The act of actualist philosophy coincides exactly with our thinking. And for this philosophy the Aristotelian act, in its transcendence, is simply an abstraction and not an act. It is a logos, but it is an abstract logos whose concreteness lies solely in the concrete logos which is the thinking that thinks itself actually. Not only the Aristotelian act but also the Platonic Idea, and, in general, any metaphysical or empirical reality presupposed in a realist way for thinking, is, according to actualism, an abstract logos that has meaning only in the actuality of the concrete logos. Even if it is represented and correctly represented in this realism as independent of the subject,

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as standing on its own, as a thing in itself, as extraneous to thinking and the condition of thinking, it is still always the abstract logos, whose determinations are always a product of the originating activity of the I, and which is actualized in thinking as the concrete logos. Every realism gets something right, then, as long as it does not pretend to exhaust all the conditions of thought. Indeed, there will always be something to add to those conditions in order to overcome transcendence and reach the solid ground of effective reality – the thinking activity that will be the fundamental condition of all that is thinkable. But thinking activity, in order to support the infinite burden and infinite responsibility of all thinkable reality – which is thinkable only insofar as it is immanent in the spiritual world realized by that activity – must no longer be conceived in a materialist way as located in time and in space. Everything is in me inasmuch as I have space and time in me as structures of everything that experience represents. Far from being contained in space and time, then, I contain them. And far from my being included in the nature that is the system of everything structured by space and time – as commonly thought on the basis of faulty imagination – I include nature within me. And within me it ceases to be the spatial and temporal nature that is mechanical. Nature too is spiritualized and actualized in the concrete life of thinking. Because of this infinity that it has, in which everything is immanent, the I is free. Being free, it can will and know and keep choosing between the contradictory opposites that polarize the world of the Spirit, which has value because it stands against its opposite. Freedom does not belong to nature in its abstractness. Nor does it belong to any form of abstract logos, not even logical truth or truth of fact or the law represented to the will by the coercive necessity of a natural force. In short, it belongs to nothing, which, by opposing itself in thinking to the subject that thinks its object, defines and encloses it within definite boundaries, fixing it and depriving it of the life that belongs to actual spiritual reality. Man is not free insofar as he is treated and pictured as part of nature, a being who occupies a certain space for a certain time, who was born and will die, limited in every direction, surrounded in society itself by elements that are not in his power but act upon him. Yet insofar as he moves in this structure of ideas and stresses his own limitations, he diminishes and depletes his own possibilities and comes to suspect that his own freedom is just an illusion, that he can really do nothing to master the world nor even understand it. Then, at the peak of despair, he will be able neither to rediscover nor to reassert in his own depths the disclaimed freedom without which it would

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be impossible for him to think as much as he thinks. Hoc unum scio, me nihil scire.2 And yet, despite its limitations, knowing this implies the capacity to know the truth, which would not be truth had it not been distinguished from the false and had it not been conceived and apperceived in this distinction that it has, which is opposition. This would not be possible without freedom – the infinity of the one who conceives and apperceives by judging what is true and by proclaiming this judgment on the highest authority, against which no appeal is permitted, an authority that plainly could not belong to anyone closed within determinate limits. Thus, within empirical humanity every person possesses a deep humanity that is at the base of his whole being and of every being that he can distinguish from himself. This is the humanity by which a person is conscious of himself, thinking and speaking and willing. And by thinking he thinks himself and everything else, so that bit by bit a world forms, growing ever richer in determinations. He keeps trying to conceive it as a harmonic whole, an organism made of parts that relate mutually to one another, linked by an internal unity. But the person himself is always present to this world, which he represents to himself and tries to make always more adapted to his needs, to his desires, to his own nature. He faces not only the world but himself, the one related to the other, and both are put in this relation by him, craftsmen and custodian both, actor and spectator, unwearied and wakeful. Is it not this humanity that governs the particular individual but also associates individuals in thinking – by which I mean feeling and thinking, poetry and action, the civilization that is the life of Spirit, by linking different generations and races in one person alone, in a person who recognizes obstacles only to overcome them, mysteries only to unveil them, evils only to rectify them, bondage only to loose it, miseries only to relieve them, pains only to heal them? This deep humanity is what at first we do not detect in others or in ourselves. But it is also what makes it still possible for one person to seek another, to speak to another, and to offer a hand. When a truth lights up the mind or a feeling takes hold of us, stirring and inspiring us, it is also this humanity. Our tongue, in the words of the Italian poet, moves by itself.3 We cannot help talking. The soul expands and speaks and sings. And even if no one is really there to listen to us, we can say that there is an invisible crowd around us listening – living, dead, unborn, a nameless crowd of judges who have no faces but think and feel as we do. And in fact they are really in us; they really are us. They listen to us because we are what we hear ourselves saying.

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3. This humanity is no deus absconditus, no secret inaccessible I, which, by speaking and making itself manifest, goes out of itself, objectifying and denaturalizing itself, ceasing to be what it is in itself.4 It is inasmuch as it is realized, and by being realized it is made manifest. And therefore actual thinking is everything. Outside of actual thinking, the I itself is an abstraction, to be stored away in the great warehouse of metaphysical contraptions, those purely rational and non-existent entities. The I is not soul-substance. It is not a thing, nor the noblest of things. It is everything because it is not nothing. As long as there is anything, there is a determinate spirit – a personality actualized in a world of its own: a poem, an action, a word, a system of thinking. But this world is real insofar as the poem gets written, the action completed, the word uttered, the thought developed and made systematic. The poem was not and will not be; it is always insofar as it is written or, by its being read, goes back to being written. Left alone, it sinks into nothing. Its reality is a present that never fades into the past and has no fear of the future. It is eternal, from that absolute immanence of the spiritual act in which there are no successive moments of time that are not mutually present and simultaneous. The point of all this is that the eternal actuality (without past and without future) of the Spirit is inconceivable by way of the logic of identity belonging to the old metaphysics of substance: it is conceivable only by the dialectic such as modern philosophy can conceive it, as a concept not of being as an object of thinking but of thinking in its own subjectivity; not a concept but a self-concept (not Begriff, but Selbstbegriff). If thinking as act is the principle of actualism, its method is the dialectic. Not Platonic dialectic nor even a Hegelian one, but a new dialectic and one more properly dialectical, which is a reform of the Hegelian dialectic. This has already been contrasted to the Platonic type because that was a static dialectic of ideas that had been thought (or were somehow an object of thinking), and Hegel in his Science of Logic treated the dialectic instead as the movement of thinking ideas, or as categories by which thinking thinks its object. A dialectic of what has been thought, then, and a dialectic of thinking: that dialectic of thinking began to be posed as a problem by Fichte. But it was Hegel who first faced this problem in full awareness of the need for a new logic to oppose the Aristotelian analytic, which like all ancient philosophy is the logic of Platonism. Hegel poses the problem but does not solve it, because, by starting from the first categories (being, non-being, becoming), he allowed himself to avoid the absolute subjectivity of think-

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ing, and he treated his logic as a movement of ideas that are thought and therefore must be defined. Such a movement is absurd because the ideas are thought – defined, in other words – by being shut up in the circle of their terms and standing fixed. This is the reason why the Platonic ideas are all linked to one another, and hence they oblige the subjective thinking that wants to think one of them to think all the others as well, thus having to move from one to another without pause while they stand fixed, like the stadium with athletes running inside it. They stand fixed, but they are an abstract logos that must get back to real, actual thinking. Thinking is inasmuch as it is not, and it never stands fixed, always moving. Yes, it also defines, and it is mirrored in the defined object, but it does so by starting to define in a different way, always a better fit for the unceasing need in whose satisfaction lies its own realization. Thinking is dialectical through its becoming, which is not a thought unity of being and non-being, a concept in which the concept of being and the opposite concept of non-being are identified. It is a realized unity of the very being of thinking with its real non-being. Obviously we might define the concept of this unity, but our definition is not an image or a logical duplicate of a transcendent reality in relation to the logical act. By this act it is all one and the same. In this dialecticity lies the answer to the thousand sceptical doubts and the thousand anguished questions that arise from experience and life’s conflicts – conflicts between man and nature, life and death, idea and reality, pleasure and pain, science and mystery, good and evil, and so on: all the ancient problems that have tortured the religious conscience as well as the moral life of all people – the anxieties of theodicy as of philosophy. The actualist conception is a spiritualist conception and deeply religious, even though its religious character cannot satisfy anyone who is in the habit of conceiving the divine as transcendent or confuses the act of thinking with the simple fact of experience. Now a coherent religious conception of the world must be optimistic without denying pain, evil, and error. It must be idealistic without suppressing reality and all its defects. It must be spiritualist without shutting its eyes to nature and the iron laws of nature’s machinery. But all philosophies and all religions, despite every spiritualist and idealistic effort, are destined to fail if they stop with the logic of identity where opposites exclude one another – where, if there is being, there is no non-being, and vice versa – either by abandoning themselves to an absurd dualism or else shutting themselves up in an abstract and hence unsatisfactory and, once again, absurd monism.

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The antinomies of the moral life and religious conscience, of the world and humanity, are insoluble by this logic of identity. And there is no faith in human freedom, in human reason, in the power of the ideal, or the grace of God that can save mankind and, in brief, prop him up in a life entirely pervaded, as man’s is, by the thinking that is inquiry and doubt and perpetual questioning – with life as the answer. Are we are or are we not immortal? Is there truth for us? Does virtue have a place in the world? Is there a God who rules it all? Is this life worth the pain that it takes to live it? These questions keep coming and coming back again from the bottom of the human heart, which is why people think and have need of philosophy, which comforts them to go on living with an answer of sorts. Everyone who lives gets the answer that he can get. But a logical, solid, rational answer is not possible if thinking does not withdraw itself from the objects that it thinks from moment to moment and then welds them together in an iron chain as its world-system, never turning back on itself, where all reality has its root and whence it draws its life. This is where being is not already but comes to be, not existing from the beginning without mediation; where to know is to learn, and, even if we already know, to learn anew every time; where the good is not what has been done and already exists but what has not been done and therefore is being done; where joy is not what we have but what blossoms from its contrary, what does not stop by falling into the monotonous boredom that lies stagnant and breeds death but renews and reconquers itself with new toil and hence through new pains; where, in a word, the Spirit burns eternal, flashing and gleaming in the blaze as it consumes all the heavy slag, dead and inert. In that place, to say being is to say non-being: wisdom is ignorance there, good is evil, joy is pain, conquest is toil, peace is war, and the Spirit is nature that makes itself spirit. 4. Nature, real primordial nature, the eternal begetter of which Bruno spoke, before it becomes what we schematize in space and time and analyse in all its forms through experience and intellectual construction, before all this, nature is that deep nature that we encounter in our body and through our body – not the collection of abstractions whereby thinking, in order to think nature, disassembles, crumbles, pulverizes, and makes it impalpable by systematizing it in the abstract logos.5 Real nature is the unity that cannot be made manifold. It is the infinite and inexhaustible source of all the manifold reality that opens out in space and time. First of all, nature is the body that each of us senses in his self-consciousness as the first and irreducible object of his own consciousness. It is that

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body by means of which we sense and come to have consciousness of each quality of external things and of each particular given for individuation in the whole physical universe. I attend to the universe because it is related to my body, which is the direct and immediate object of my sensing. But it stands in this relation in its totality since nothing in the physical world can be thought except as correlated to everything else in the same physical world. Thus, it is obvious that my head would fall on the ground if my trunk were not holding it up and if my legs were not holding up my trunk. But it is also obvious that eliminating a single grain of sand at the bottom of the ocean would not only destabilize the nearby grains held up by it but would actually destroy the universe. We live on our planet. But this planet is part of a system without which we would not have the light and heat on our Earth that enable us to live on it. Everything exists in the universe. And my body, as I actually sense it, is a centre with an infinite circumference. It is a living component of a living organism, which is present and active and comes to have sensation in each of its components. Thinking of my body as just that part of physical nature which is inside my skin is an abstraction analogous to regarding my hand as something that could be entirely abstracted from the arm to which it must be joined, although if it were detached from my arm, it would then be deprived not only of its strength but also of its own material framework. To speak of body, then, is to speak of the whole bodily universe in which we live and die, from which all particular living individuals arise and to which they return. But what is this body? Where and how do we get its meaning and learn to understand it? I have already explained: in the first principle of our sensing when we still sense nothing particular but sense because we sense ourselves, where we are our own sense, this same sense that will then keep developing as consciousness of ourselves (selfconsciousness). There, in the primal and originating seed of our spiritual life, there is already a sentient principle as well as something that is sensed (and what is sensed is just the body). There is a synthesis of these two terms, each of which exists through the other, and together they realize the act of sensing, that synthesis outside of which it would be useless to look either for the sentient principle or for the sensed object. This originating immanence of the essence of body at the Spirit’s primitive core, this originating and fundamental spirituality and ideality of the body – and thus of nature in general – is the reason why thinking finds in direct experience the measure of existence that belongs to reality, that is not an abstract construction of thinking. Not that thinking has its own measure

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outside itself, in an imaginary external reality to which it relates by way of sensible experience. The measure of thinking is in thinking itself. But thinking as subject, self-consciousness, is first of all a sense of self, the soul of a body – of the body, of nature. And anything not linked with this principle of thinking and therefore not realized as a development of this principle is like a building destined to fall because it was not built upon the foundations that were needed. Thinking is always a circle, where the line moves away from its starting point only to turn back and close on itself. Where the end does not coincide with the beginning, my thinking is not my thinking. I no longer find myself there. It has no value. It is not truth. The point where the circle of thinking is closed and welded together is the I that thinks and is realized in thinking, so that the very thinking that it produces (the concept) is the concrete and effective existence of the I itself (self-concept). Consequently, everyone’s personality lies in his work. 5. It is not only nature – when we do not see it externally and abstractly – but all history itself that flows together and issues in the actuality of the thinking that thinks. History too is self-concept. It is not a consciousness that a person has of the activity of minds other than the one that he actualizes in his own historical consciousness. It is not consciousness of the actions of people who no longer exist or of the past, which is a mere ideality whereby thinking distinguishes the present that exists, and alone is real and matters and is eternal from what does not exist and does not matter and therefore is not present and is shut out of the world of the eternal (the site of everything that matters from the point of view of Spirit). Like all thinking, history is consciousness of self. Hence, every history has been said to be current history since it reflects the problems, interests, and mentality of the historian and of his time through the representation of past events and passions. The so-called remains and records of the past are components of culture and hence of present intellectual life. They are revived because of the interest that causes them to be sought out, criticized, and interpreted. They speak and become meaningful by the labour of writing history, which is an actual thinking that unfolds only by achieving ever more acute and careful consciousness of self. The dead would stay quite dead and would be removed from the picture of reality, which is divine reality, if there were no one living to speak of them by recalling them in their hearts and reviving them in their own spirit.

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6. Is this solipsism? No. The I of the solipsist is a particular and negative I, which, for that reason, can feel its solitude and the impossibility of escaping it. Hence, the solipsist is an egoist. He denies the good as he denies the truth. But his I is negative because it is identical to himself – identical to a thing, not spirit. His negativity is the negativity of the atom, which is always just that, incapable of any transformation. It can always absolutely exclude other atoms from itself, and be excluded from them in turn, precisely because it does not have the strength to negate itself and to change. But the dialectic of the I, as conceived by actualism, is the principle of infinite and progressive universalization of the I itself, which in that sense is infinite and excludes nothing from itself. Any limit can be overcome by this inner energy that is the very essence of the thinking that thinks. This energy negates and overcomes the limit because the limit is what it sets for itself as it gradually determines itself. Starting from the sense of self though which it is sensing, the I duplicates itself in the two end points, the subject and object of sensing, and as subject it thus comes to be confronted and hence limited by the object: the I manifests its infinite energy by ceaselessly positing and negating its own limit. This negation is not destruction. To be negated in the way that I mean, the limit must be preserved, but it must be internalized in the subject’s consciousness of infinity. To love one’s neighbour in the Christian way is to negate others as an external limit on our personhood, but this does not mean suppressing the personhood of the other but rather understanding and sensing it as within our own personality conceived in a deeper way. That is the meaning of the immanent conversion of the abstract logos into the concrete logos discussed in actualist logic. 7. Finally, is this philosophy with its radical immanentism an atheist philosophy? This is the persistent accusation aimed at it today by Catholic and traditionalist thinkers who never manage to account for the distinction that lies in the unity of the spiritual act. But they are the real atheists, in a philosophical way. For if that absurd separation between divine and human being really had to be conceived, any relation between the two terms would be completely impossible. And I am firmly convinced that this attitude of those thinkers is atheist because it is anti-Christian. I am really convinced that Christianity, with its central dogma of the Man-God, has this meaning theoretically: that at the base of the necessary distinction between God and man we must posit a unity that can only be the unity of the Spirit, and this will be the human spirit inasmuch as the spirit is divine, and it will be the divine Spirit inasmuch as it is also human. If any-

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one trembles and shies away from taking into his mind this consciousness of the infinite responsibility whereby man grows weightier by recognizing and sensing God in himself, he is not a Christian, and – if Christianity is only a revelation, a clearer consciousness of his own spiritual nature that the human acquires – he is not even human. By human I mean someone conscious of his own humanity. And how will this person be able to feel himself free and thus capable of recognizing and fulfilling a duty, of grasping a truth, and, in short, of entering the kingdom of the Spirit, if, in the depths of his own being, he does not sense history, the universe, the infinite, everything gathering and pulsating? Given the limited powers which, at any moment of his existence, he finds himself actually possessing, could he confront – as perhaps he does and ought to do – the problem of life and death that faces him terribly with the ineluctable might of nature’s laws? And yet, if he is to live a spiritual life, he must triumph over this law, and, both in the world of art and in that of morality, by action and by thought, he must participate in the life of those of immortal things that are divine and eternal. He must participate in them on his own, freely, since there is no outside help that can assist the Spirit’s spontaneous capacity unless it is help willed and valued and therefore freely sought and made effective. In other words, nothing comes to us from outside that does any good for the salvation of the soul, the strength of the intellect, and the power of the will. Therefore, the actualist does not deny God, but along with the mystics and the most religious souls who have ever lived on earth, he repeats: Est Deus in nobis.6

NOTES 1 We have used Gentile (1931a), which is the first edition of the Italian version of the essay that appeared originally in German in Gentile (1931b). 2 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 2.32: ‘The one thing I know is that I know nothing,’ a saying attributed to Socrates, here in Erasmian Latin. 3 Dante, La vita nuova, 19. 4 Deus absconditus: ‘hidden God.’ 5 Bruno (1888): 274 (De la causa, principio et uno, dial. 4). 6 ‘God is in us’ or ‘There is a god in us.’

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22 Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals

Origins Fascism is a recent and an ancient movement of the Italian spirit, deeply bound up with the history of the Italian nation, though not without meaning and interest for all the other nations. Its recent origins go back to 1919 when a band of men, returned from the trenches and resolved to fight vigorously against the demo-socialist politics that then prevailed, gathered around Benito Mussolini. The ruling politicians saw only the immediate material effects of the Great War from which the Italian people had emerged victorious but exhausted. If they did not openly deny its moral value, they let it go to waste by representing it to the Italians, from a petty individualist and utilitarian point of view, as a tally of sacrifices for which each person had to be compensated in proportion to the damage suffered. The result was a presumptuous and threatening opposition of private interests to the state, a disregard for its authority, a decline in prestige for the King and the Army – symbols of the nation at a level higher than individuals and the various categories of citizens – an unleashing of passions and baser instincts, an inciting of social fragmentation, of moral decadence, of a selfish and irresponsible spirit of rebellion against all law and discipline. The individual against the state: an expression typical of the political side of corruption in souls that could not abide any higher norm for human life that might vigorously regulate and constrain the attitudes and thoughts of each of them. In its origins, then, Fascism was a political and a moral movement. Its politics felt like a gymnasium of self-denial, as it campaigned for the sacrifice of the individual to an idea in which the individual might find his life’s purpose, his liberty, and his every right

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– the idea that is the fatherland, as an ideal that is realized historically without ever being exhausted, a specific and well-defined historical tradition of civilization, but a tradition that never remains in the past as a dead memory but becomes a personal force in the citizen’s consciousness, in the awareness that there is a goal to attain, a tradition which is therefore a mission. Fascism and the State This is the source of the religious character of Fascism. Its religious and therefore intransigent character explains the method that Fascism used in its struggle during the four years from 1919 to 1922. Fascists were a minority in the country and in Parliament, where a small core group arrived after the elections of 1921. The constitutional state was therefore anti-Fascist, as it had to be, since it was the state of the majority, and it was precisely this state that called itself liberal which stood opposed to Fascism. The state was liberal, but its liberalism was the agnostic and acquiescent kind that understands only external liberty – the state that is liberal because it regards itself as external to the free citizen’s mind, as if it were a mechanical system apart from the activity of each individual. Although the representatives of hybrid socialism – democratizing and parliamentary – had adapted themselves, even in Italy, to this individualist conception of the idea of politics, this state was plainly not what socialists yearned for. Nor was it the state whose idea had worked so powerfully in the heroic Italian era of our Risorgimento, when the state rose out the work of small minorities strengthened by the power of an idea to which individuals deferred in various ways: its basis was the great project of producing Italians after having given them independence and unity. Embattled against this state, Fascism also took strength from its idea, which gathered around it a rapidly growing number of the young because of the fascination that comes from any religious idea that calls for sacrifice. It was the party of the young – just as Mazzini’s Young Italy grew out of an analogous political and moral need after the events of 1831. This party also had its Hymn of Youth, which was sung by Fascists joyously with hearts exulting. And like Mazzini’s Young Italy, Fascism began to be the faith of all Italians who were offended by the past and eager for renewal – a faith like any faith colliding with a reality, which comes from breaking up and melting in the crucible of new energies and being reshaped in keeping with the new ideal, ardent and intransigent. It was the same faith that ripened in the trenches and in a deep rethinking of

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the sacrifice offered on the battlefields for the only purpose that could justify it – the life and greatness of the fatherland – a faith of energy and violence, disinclined to respect anything that opposed the life and greatness of the fatherland. Thus arose the movement of squadrons – young people, resolute, armed, wearing the black shirt, and organized militarily, opposing the law in order to set up a new law, a force armed against the state to establish the new state. The squadrons moved against the fragmented antinationalist forces whose activity culminated in the general strike of July 1922, and finally risked an uprising on 28 October 1922, when armed columns of Fascists marched on Rome after occupying public buildings in the provinces. Some died in the March on Rome, before and after it reached its goal, especially in the Po Valley. Like all bold actions with deep moral content, the march ended first with amazement, then admiration, and at last with universal acclaim. It thus seemed that at one stroke the Italian people had rediscovered its enthusiastic pre-war unanimity, but this was now even more vibrant because people realized that victory had been won and that a new, refreshing wave of faith had come to revitalize the victorious nation on its hard new path towards the urgent restoration of its financial and moral strength. Fascist Government The squadrons and the lawbreaking stopped, and Fascism outlined the elements of the regime that it wanted. Between 29 and 30 October, the fifty thousand blackshirts who had marched on the capital from the provinces left Rome in perfect order. They left after parading before His Majesty the King, and they left at a sign from their Leader, who became the head of government and the soul of the new Italy that Fascism promised. Was the revolution over? In a sense, yes: the squadrons no longer had a reason to exist. The Voluntary Militia for national Security was formed to incorporate former squadron members into the state’s armed forces. But the state is not government, and the government was still waiting, amidst the consensus of the great majority of Italians who saw in Fascism the most potent political force, the one capable of expressing the nation’s heart and bringing discipline to all its forces for the change in legislation wherein the state now needed to find the form best suited to the social trends and spiritual needs current among the Italian people. This transformation is gradually taking place amidst perfect public

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order, under a strict financial regime that has put the unstable post-war budget back in balance by reorganizing the army, the judiciary, and the educational institutions without wobbling or wavering, even while there has been, and still is, a great deal of vacillation in public opinion, violently agitated by a public press whose rigidified opposition becomes all the more furious as it grows more hopeless about any possibility of a return to the past. The press takes advantage of every mistake and every accident to stir the people up against the unrelenting and constructive hard work of the new government. But foreigners coming to Italy have crossed the ring of flame drawn around Fascist Italy by the defensive fire of ferocious propaganda, written and spoken, internal and external, from Italians and non-Italians, which has tried to isolate Fascist Italy by slandering it as a country fallen into the hands of the most violent and cynical power, arbitrarily eliminating every legal civil liberty and every guarantee of justice. As foreigners have been able to see this Italy with their own eyes, listen with their own ears to the new Italians, and experience their material and moral lives, they have come to envy the public order that prevails in Italy today. They have become interested in the spirit that strives every day to gain more mastery of this well-regulated mechanism, and they have begun to sense that here beats a heart, one full of humanity even if agitated by the frustrations of patriotic passion. The fatherland of the Fascist is also the fatherland that lives and stirs in the heart of every civic person, the fatherland that stirred feelings everywhere in the tragedy of the war and now stands vigilant in every region – must stand vigilant to protect its sacred interests even after the war, indeed, as a consequence of the war that no one any longer believes to be the last. This fatherland, moreover, is a reconsecration of traditions and institutions that are the constant in civilization, in the flux and perpetuity of traditions. It is also a school for the subordination of the particular and inferior to the universal and immortal. It is respect for law and discipline. It is liberty, but liberty to be won through law, liberty established by renouncing all petty wilfulness and wasteful, irrational ambition. It is an austere conception of life and a religious gravity that does not distinguish theory from practice, talking from doing, and does not paint grand ideals in order to banish them from this world, where the fact remains that life may go on in its base and wretched way, while it is hard work to make life ideal by expressing one’s own convictions in action and in words – these words themselves being deeds that bind the person who speaks them, and with him they also bind the world of which he is a

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living, responsible part at every moment of time, in every secret breath of consciousness. This ideal is an ideal, but it is an ideal for which a struggle goes on in Italy today, those very harsh conflicts that show how serious things are and that there is a faith in people’s hearts. Fascism, like all great individual movements, grows stronger as it becomes more able to attract and absorb, more effective and engaged in the workings of minds, ideas, interests, and institutions – briefly, in the living fabric of the Italian people. And so the point is no longer to count and weigh each single person but to look to and to value the idea, which, like any true or living idea, is endowed with a power of its own and has been made not by human beings but through them. State and Union Fascism is accused of being a reactionary movement, anti-liberal and anti-labour, but the accusation is false. For all national forces, Fascism is a spirit of progress and of driving forward. And its contrary intention is to break what the old political order created, under the false appearance of the old democratic liberalism, to encrust the citizen’s effective activity as an individual, through the atomism of universal suffrage that crushes real interests so that every individual is brought to feel himself under obligation to the system of economic forces. That old politics put the people in the hands of professional politicians dominated by the ever more powerful coalition of interests that are particularist and therefore antithetical to the nation’s common interest. Fascism – whose leaders, starting with the Supreme Leader, have all lived the socialist experience – aims to reconcile two terms that until now have seemed irreducibly contrary – state and union: the state, as the nation’s juridical force in its organic and functional unity; the union, as the individual’s juridical force, such as the economic activity that can get its guarantee from law, an activity therefore specified socially and belonging to a social category. This is the state as the way to organize all individual activities in their organic and concrete structure. In relation to the constitutional state it does not go backwards, then, but actually develops it, with greater intrinsic definition and better realization of its principle of representing the people effectively in the legislative power. So then, are police measures imputed to the Fascist government that are destructive to the freedom of the press? The questions are more of fact than principle. In the more liberal states, all constitutional liberties have been suspended when particular

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reasons have shown the need to do so, and all theorists and defenders of liberalism have always recognized the legitimacy of such suspensions. The point is to see when the government has used these police measures, whether it is true or not true that a certain publication (deliberately or not – it makes little difference) had caused the nation to run the risk of very serious disturbances of public order, so that it was worthwhile for the government to take the action that it took for the country and for the liberty that those disturbances would have compromised. The truth is that the great mass of the Italian people understands this and proves it by its calm indifference towards the heated protests and complaints of the opposition – the fact being that in today’s Italy the work on behalf of the nation’s liberty in the world is being done not by anti-Fascism but by Fascism, which takes great pains to build a solid foundation for the structure in which the free activities of citizens can actually develop, when citizens have the guarantee of a law that truly expresses their real, organic, concrete will. In Italy today, hearts are arrayed in two opposed camps: on one side the Fascists, on the other their opponents, democrats of all shades and stripes, two mutually exclusive worlds. But the great majority of Italians remains outside, feeling that the content of the conflict chosen by the opposition groups lacks a political solidity that might be valued and suited to popular interest. Those who stay outside the conflict personally fully understand that when the word ‘liberty’ is invoked, the meaning of the term is entirely elastic if it can be on the lips of the different parties. The Opposition to Fascism In the second place, this small opposition to Fascism, formed from the debris of the old Italian political machines (democratic, rationalist, radical, Masonic), is irreducible; gradually, through internal strain and inaction, it is bound to end up always on the margin of the political forces that operate effectively in the new Italy. This is because it has no principle that really opposes the principle Fascism, only one that is lower. And it is a law of history without exception that of two opposite principles, neither wins: a higher principle triumphs which is the synthesis of the two different vital components that inspire both principles separately. However, when one of two principles is lower and the other higher, one partial and the other total, the first must necessarily succumb because it is contained in the second, and the motive for its opposition is purely negative, living in the void. Facing their opponents, the Fascists know this, and thus they have an

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unshaken faith that their side will triumph, and they never give in. From now on, with patient forbearance, they can wait for opposition groups that have abandoned the legal ground of the struggle in Parliament to end up convinced of the inevitable necessity of abandoning their illegal ground as well, as they recognize that the residue of life and truth in their programs is contained in the Fascist program, but in a bold form, more complex, more responsive to historical reality and to the needs of the human spirit. Then Italy’s current spiritual crisis will be overcome. Then in the very heart of Fascist Italy and of Italy made Fascist, new ideas, new programs, and new political parties will slowly ripen and come to light. The Italian intellectuals committed to Fascism meeting in Bologna for their first congress (29−30 March) have decided to formulate these ideas and thereby bear witness to the many, within Italy and outside Italy, who wish to give an account of the doctrine and the action of the national Fascist Party.

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23 A Reply by Italian Authors, Professors, and Journalists to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist Intellectuals

A group of authors, professors, and journalists has decided to communicate to the press a reply to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist intellectuals. This reply makes no claim to represent, much less to monopolize, the anti-Fascist intelligentsia that has not and will not call any congress to show itself off in an artificial grouping. Instead, the chief point is to react against the method that would claim to subdue the intelligentsia into functioning as an instrumentum regni, while a concurrent aim is for some free intellectuals to protest against the version of Italian events as interpreted by the Fascist intellectuals, who thought that they had to spread this beyond the borders of Italy.1 The undersigned invite those who share the views expressed in their reply to communicate their agreement. With that preface, let us reproduce the document. The Fascist intellectuals meeting in congress in Bologna have addressed a ‘Manifesto’ to intellectuals of all nations in order to explain to them and defend the policies of the Fascist Party. When they set out upon such an enterprise, these eager gentlemen must not have been mindful of a similar and celebrated manifesto announced to the world by German intellectuals at the start of the Great War in Europe – a manifesto greeted by universal disapproval at the time and later considered a mistake by the Germans themselves. While it is true that intellectuals, experts on the art and sciences, exercise their rights and do their duty as citizens when they join a party and serve it loyally, nonetheless, their sole duty as intellectuals is to use the work of research, criticism, and artistic creation to elevate all people and all parties alike to a higher spiritual level so that they can fight the battles that they must with ever more positive results. To breach these boundaries of the office assigned to them, to contaminate politics and literature,

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politics and science, is a mistake that can scarcely be called fertile, when, as in this case, it happens by encouraging deplorable acts of violence and insolence and by suppressing freedom of the press. Moreover, this action taken by the Fascist intellectuals does not even respond with much sensitivity to the fatherland, for it is not right to submit the fatherland’s troubles to the judgment of foreigners, who do not take the trouble (naturally, as it happens) to look beyond the various special political interests of their own nations. In substance, what they write is a piece of half-baked schoolwork where one finds intellectual confusions and ill-spun arguments at every point – trading the atomism of certain types of eighteenth-century political science, for example, for nineteenth-century liberalism, treating anti-historical, abstract, and mathematical democratism, in other words, as equivalent to the highly historical notion of free competition and alternation of parties in power, whereby one makes progress, as if in small doses, thanks to the opposition. Another example is the facile and fevered rhetoric that celebrates the individual’s dutiful submission to the whole, as if that were the issue, rather than the capacity of authoritarian structures to guarantee the most effective moral progress. Or another example, where we are betrayed by a calamitous inability to distinguish economic institutions like unions from ethical institutions like legislative assemblies, thus courting the combining – or rather, the miscegenation – of the two types, which would end in their mutual corruption or, at least, their mutual obstruction. And we leave aside the arbitrary interpretations and manipulations of history, which by now are well-known. But the violence done by this piece to ideas and history counts for little in comparison to the abuse of the word ‘religion.’ As the leading Fascist intellectuals understand things, we should now have found joy in a war of religion, in the exploits of a new evangel or a new apostolate against an old superstition that fights to the death what stands above it and to which it still must bow – and they take this to be proven by the hatred and spite that now makes Italians rage against Italians as never before. This is what they are calling a disagreement about religion: the hatred and spite provoked by a party which denies that elements of other parties are Italian and insults them as foreigners, by that very act making itself a foreigner and oppressor in the eyes of the others and thereby introducing into the life of the fatherland the feelings and habits that attend such conflicts. Using the word ‘religion’ to dignify the suspicion and animosity that has been sown everywhere, depriving even university students of the trusting sense of brotherhood that they used to have

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when they shared youthful ideals, turning them against one another in fake clashes –this sounds like a rather sorry joke, to tell the truth. Whatever the new evangel might be, the new religion, the new faith, one cannot tell from the text of this wordy ‘Manifesto.’ As a practical matter, however, what its mute eloquence reveals to an objective observer is a bizarre and incoherent blend of appeals to authority and demagoguery; a profession of reverence for the law and violation of the laws; ultra-modern ideas and musty old notions; absolutist attitudes and Bolshevik dispositions; flattery for the Catholic Church and denials of belief; a dread of culture and sterile starts at a culture deprived of its premises; mystical mawkishness and cynicism. And even if there were any plausible proposals for the present government to enact or undertake, there is nothing in them to brag about, no innovative product to identify a new political system that would be named Fascism. For this chaotic and incomprehensible ‘religion,’ then, we are not inclined to abandon our old faith, the faith that for two and a half centuries has been the soul of a resurgent Italy and a modern Italy, the faith whose ingredients are love of truth; hope for justice; a generous human and civic sense; zeal for intellectual and moral education; and eagerness for liberty, which is the strength and security on which all progress depends. When we look back at images of the men of the Risorgimento, those who laboured, suffered, and died for Italy, their faces seem angry and upset at the words that are said and the things that are done by our Italian adversaries, and because we are steadfast in their cause we take the warnings seriously. Our faith is no abstract, artificial contrivance, no mental obsession produced by theories poorly supported or poorly understood. It is possessing a tradition that has become an emotional disposition and an intellectual or moral structure. In their ‘Manifesto’ the Fascist intellectuals repeat the hackneyed phrase that Italy’s Risorgimento was the work of a minority, not mentioning the weakness of our political and social makeup on this very point. Indeed, it almost seems that they take satisfaction when most citizens of Italy today, faced with disagreements between Fascism and its opponents, seem to be indifferent – at the least. Liberals have never been satisfied with such a thing, and they have tried with all their power to have an ever-growing number of Italians called to public life. This was the main reason for some of their most controversial actions, such as the granting of universal suffrage. Even the sympathy with which many liberals greeted the Fascist movement in its early days implied, among other things, the hope that it would introduce fresh new energies into political

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life, innovating energies and (why not?) conservative energies. But they never thought to keep the bulk of the nation inert and indifferent, buying them off with various material goods. They knew that doing so would have betrayed the purposes of the Italian Risorgimento and would have restored the evil devices of absolutist and quietist governments. Even now, neither this putative indifference and inertia nor the obstacles that block the path to freedom lead us to despair or resignation. What matters is to know that what one wants and should want is something intrinsically good. The present political struggle in Italy, because it presents such great contrasts, will serve to awaken our people and give them a more concrete and deeper understanding of the value of liberal policies and methods, causing people to have a more conscious sense of their desire for them. One day, perhaps, people will look serenely at the past and conclude that the ordeal we are now enduring, harsh and painful for us, was a stage that Italy had to go through in order to revive its life as a nation, complete its political education, and learn a harsher lesson about its duties as a civil society.

NOTE 1 instrumentum regni: ‘tool of the regime.’

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24 Antonio Gramsci

Notebooks: 11 (1932−3), Introduction to the Study of Philosophy1

The notes contained here, as in the other notebooks, have been written rapidly in order to make a quick record. All of them need to be reviewed and carefully checked since they certainly contain false starts, anachronisms, and things that are imprecise. Since they were written away from the books to which they refer, it is possible that after checking they may have to be extensively corrected if the opposite of what has been written turns out to be true. Comments and References of an Historical-Critical Nature 1. Antonio Labriola. To put together a complete essay on Antonio Labriola, we need to keep in mind not only his own writings, which are few and often only allusive or extremely synthetic, but also pieces and fragments of conversation reported by his friends and students (the memory that Labriola left is of an exceptional conversationalist). A few such pieces and fragments can be collected here and there from Benedetto Croce’s books. In Critical Conversations, for example: … ‘How would you give a Papuan a moral education?’ Some years ago, one of us students asked Professor Labriola this question in one of his lectures on pedagogy, objecting to the uselessness of the subject. ‘Provisionally,’ answered the Herbartian professor, with the sharpness of Vico and Hegel. ‘I would make him a slave provisionally, and this would be the pedagogy for the occasion, except to see if we could apply some of our pedagogy to his children and grandchildren.’2 Labriola’s reply should be compared to the interview that he gave on the colonial problem (Lybia) around 1903 …3 It should also be compared to Gentile’s way of thinking about religious instruction in the primary schools.4 It seems to be a kind of pseudo-his-

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toricism, something quite empirical and mechanical, very close to the most vulgar evolutionism. We might recall what Bertrando Spaventa says about those who would like to keep people in the cradle (in the moment of authority, that is, which may educate immature peoples towards liberty), and to think of all life (the lives of others) as a cradle.5 It seems to me that the problem must be expressed differently in historical terms: that a nation or social group that has achieved a higher level of civilization cannot (and therefore needs to) accelerate the process by which the more backward peoples and social groups are educated by universalizing their new experience and interpreting it in an appropriate way. Thus, when the English enlist recruits from primitive peoples who have never seen a modern rifle, they do not teach these recruits to use a bow, a boomerang, or a blowgun. In fact, they teach them to handle a rifle, even if the rules of instruction are necessarily adapted to the mentality of that particular primitive people. The way of thinking implied by Labriola’s answer seems not dialectical and progressive, then, but quite mechanical and reactionary, like Gentile’s pedagogic-religious thinking, which is just a derivative of the notion that ‘religion is good for the people’ (people = child = primitive phase of thinking corresponding to religion, and so on) – the (tendentious) abandonment of education for the people. In the interview on the colonial question, the mechanistic character of Labriola’s thinking seems even plainer. Indeed, it is quite possible that it is ‘necessary to reduce the Papuans to slavery’ in order to educate them, but it is no less necessary that someone affirm that it is necessary only contingently in specific conditions, that this necessity is historical and not absolute. It is necessary, in fact, for there to be a struggle in this case, and this struggle is really the condition whereby the Papuan’s sons and grandsons will be freed from slavery and will be educated according to modern pedagogy. That there is someone who resolutely insists that the slavery of the Papuans is only a necessity of the moment and who rebels against that necessity is also a philosophical-historical fact: (a) because it will help reduce the time needed for the period of slavery; (b) because it will induce those same Papuans to reflect on themselves, to be self-educated, in that they will feel themselves dependent on people of higher civilization; (c) because only this resistance shows that we really are in a higher period of civilization, of thinking, and so on.

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The historicism of Labriola and Gentile is of a very inferior type: it is the historicism of lawyers who say that the knout is not a knout when the knout is ‘historical.’6 And there are other reasons why it is a very cloudy and confused way of thinking. If a dogmatic exposition of educational material is needed in the elementary schools or if a mythology is needed, this does not mean that the dogma must be any particular religious dogma or that the mythology must be any particular mythology. That a backward people or social group needs coercive discipline from outside in order to acquire civil education does not mean that it must be reduced to slavery, unless we think that all coercion by the state is slavery. For labour there is also coercion of the military type, which can be applied to the dominant class as well, and this is not slavery but the appropriate expression of modern pedagogy aimed at educating an immature group (which is immature, admittedly, but alongside already mature groups, while slavery is the organic expression of universal conditions of immaturity). Taking the point of view of the liberal bourgeoisie against the historicist sophisms of the reactionary classes, and, speaking sarcastically, Spaventa was expressing a conception much more progressive and dialectical than that of Labriola and Gentile. 5. Antonio Labriola. Hegel asserted that slavery is the cradle of liberty. For Hegel, as for Machiavelli, the new principate (the period of dictatorship that marks the beginnings of every new type of state) and the slavery connected with it are justified only as education and discipline for people who are not yet free. But Spaventa’s … comment was well chosen: ‘The cradle is not life, however. Some would like us to stay in the cradle forever.’7 (A typical example of the cradle that becomes all of life is provided by protectionism in trade, which is always advocated and justified as a cradle but tends to become an eternal cradle.) 6. Giovanni Gentile. On Gentile’s philosophy, compare the article in Catholic Civilization … which is interesting for seeing how formal scholastic logic can be suitable for criticizing the banal sophisms of the actual idealism that claims to be the perfection of the dialectic.8 Really, why should the formal dialectic be superior to formal logic? The only issue is logical instruments, and a good old tool can be better than a more modern shoddy tool. A good sailing ship is better then a powered ship that is broken-down. In any case, it is interesting to read the criticisms of Gentile’s thinking by the neo-scholastics … With his followers … and collaborators on the Critical Journal of Italian Philosophy, Gentile can be

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said to have inaugurated a true and proper seventeenth-century style in which wit and polished phrases substitute for thinking in philosophy. All the same, comparison of this group to that of the Bauers satirized in the Holy Family is the most fitting approach and the most productive in a literary sense.9 7. Antonio Rosmini. See his Essay on Communism and Socialism … Compare it with the papal encyclicals issued before 1848 and cited in the Syllabus, to serve as commentary on the first paragraph of the Manifesto in the context of Italian history.10 Notes for an Introduction and Guide to the Study of Philosophy and the History of Culture, I: Some Preliminary Points of Reference 12. We must eliminate the widespread prejudice that philosophy is something very difficult because of the fact that it is intellectual activity belonging to a particular category of expert specialists or professional systematic philosophers. Accordingly, we must first demonstrate that all people are philosophers by defining the limits and features of the spontaneous philosophy that belongs to ‘everyone,’ the philosophy contained (a) in language itself, which is a collection of specific notions and concepts and not just words grammatically devoid of content; (b) in common sense and good sense; and (c) in popular religion and hence also in the whole system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, and ways of seeing and behaving that show up in what is generally called folklore. Having shown that all people are philosophers – though each in his own way, unconsciously, since even with only the smallest evidence of any intellectual activity at all, with language, there is a specific conception of the world – we move to the second moment, to the moment of criticism and consciousness, to the question of which is preferable: either to think without critical consciousness of thinking, in a fragmented and momentary way, participating in a conception of the world mechanically imposed by the outside environment, by one of many social groups in which everyone is automatically involved from the moment of entering the conscious world (this can be one’s own village or province; it can originate in the parish and the intellectual

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activity of the pastor or the imposing old patriarch whose wisdom dictates law, in the old woman who has inherited wisdom from witches, or in the petty intellectual embittered by his own stupidities and inability to act); or else to work out our own conception of the world consciously and critically, and then, on the basis of our own mental effort, to choose our own sphere of activity, to participate actively in producing the world’s history, to be our own guide, and not to accept, passively and abjectly, any outside imprint on our own personality? Note I. Through our own conception of the world, we belong to a definite grouping, specifically to the grouping of all the social elements that share the same way of thinking and acting. We are always conformists in some conformism, always mass-people or collective people. This is the question: what is the historical type of the conformism and of the massperson of which we are part? When our conception of the world is not critical and coherent but momentary and fragmented, we belong to a multitude of human masses all at once, and the composition of our own personalities is bizarre. In each person we find elements of the caveman and principles of the most modern and advanced science, prejudices of a narrowly local character from all past phases of history, and intuitions of a future philosophy that will belong to the human race unified throughout the world. Therefore, to criticize our own conception of the world means making it unitary and coherent and raising it to the level attained by the most advanced thinking in the world. Thus, it also means criticizing all the philosophy that has existed up to now, since strata left over from that philosophy have been built into popular philosophy. The beginning of critical development is consciousness of what we really are, a ‘knowing thyself’ as product of the historical process that up to now has left – without benefit of an inventory – an infinite collection of traces in ‘thyself.’ The first thing we need is such an inventory. Note II. Philosophy cannot be separated from the history of philosophy or culture from the history of culture. In the most direct and relevant sense, there can be no philosophers – no one with a critical and coherent conception of the world – without consciousness of their own historicity, of the phase of development represented by it, and of the fact that it stands in contradiction to other conceptions or parts of other conceptions. Our own conception of the world corresponds to specific problems posed

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by reality, problems that are completely defined and original in their actuality. How is it possible to think about the present – a well-defined present – with thinking that was worked out for problems of a past that is often quite remote and superseded? When this happens, it means that we are anachronists in our own time – fossils and not beings living in a modern way. Or at least that we are composites of a bizarre kind. And it does happen that social groups showing the most developed modernity in some ways are in other ways held back by their social situation and are thus incapable of full historical autonomy. Note III. If it is true that every language contains elements of a conception of the world and a culture, it will also be true that we can evaluate the greater or lesser complexity of any person’s conception of the world from his language. Someone who speaks only dialect or understands the national language at different levels necessarily has a more or less limited and provincial view of the world that has been fossilized, made anachronistic in relation to the great currents of thinking that govern world history. That person’s interests will be limited, more or less corporate or economist, not universal.11 Although it is not always possible to learn more foreign languages in order to put oneself in contact with other cultural experiences, it is at least necessary to learn the national language well.12 One great culture can be translated into the language of another great culture, meaning that one great national language, complex and historically rich, can somehow translate another great culture: it can be a global form of expression. But a dialect cannot do the same thing. Note IV. Creating a new culture does not mean just making some ‘original’ discoveries on an individual basis; most of all, it also has the specific sense of spreading truths in a critical way that have already been discovered, socializing them, so to speak, and thereby making them a basis of living activity, an element of coordination and of intellectual and moral order. That a mass of people has been led to think coherently and in a unitary way about current reality is a philosophical fact much more important and original than the discovery by some philosophical genius of a new truth that remains the property of small groups of intellectuals. The connection between common sense, religion, and philosophy. Philosophy is an intellectual framework, which neither religion nor common sense can be. Notice that not even religion and common sense really coincide but that religion is an element of decomposed common sense. Moreo-

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ver, common sense is a collective term, like religion; there exists no single common sense because it too is a product of historical becoming. Philosophy is the critique and the overcoming of religion and common sense, and as such it coincides with the good sense that is contrasted with common sense. Relations between science, religion, and common sense. Religion and common sense cannot constitute an intellectual framework because even in individual consciousness, not to speak of collective consciousness, they cannot be reduced to unity and coherence. Or they cannot be reduced to unity and coherence freely, since this could happen authoritatively, as, in fact, it did happen in the past – within certain limits. The problem of religion is understood here not in the confessional sense but in lay terms as a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a matching rule of conduct. But why call this unity of faith religion and not ideology or simply politics? In fact, there exists no general philosophy. What exists are different philosophies or conceptions of the world, and we always make a choice among them. How does this choice happen? Is the choice a merely intellectual fact or more complex? And does it not often happen that there is a contradiction between the intellectual fact and the rule of conduct? Which will be the real conception of the world, then: the one logically asserted as an intellectual fact, or the one that comes from each person’s real activity, the one implied by what the person does? And since what we do is always to do something political, can we not say that everyone’s real philosophy is contained completely in his politics? This conflict between thinking and doing, the coexistence of two conceptions of the world, one asserted in words and the other emerging from what we really do, need not always have been in bad faith. Bad faith might be a satisfactory explanation for some individuals taken one at a time, or even for relatively large groups; it is not satisfactory, however, when the conflict is clearly observed in the life of large masses. Then it can only be the expression of deeper conflicts in the historical-social order. This means that a social group with its own conception of the world, perhaps in an embryonic state, which becomes manifest in action and therefore discontinuously and episodically when such a group moves as an organic whole – it means that this group has borrowed, for reasons of intellectual submission and subordination, a conception not its own from another group, putting it in words. The group also believes that it follows this conception because it follows it in ‘normal times,’ when

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conduct is not independent and autonomous but just submissive and subordinated. This is why philosophy cannot be detached from politics, then, and it can also be shown that the choice and critique of a conception of the world is itself a political fact. We must next explain how it happens that many systems and currents of philosophy coexist in every period – how they emerge, how they spread, why they follow certain lines of cleavage and spread in certain directions, and so on. This shows how much we need to systematize our own intuitions of the world and life in a critical and coherent way, establishing exactly what system has to mean for it not to be taken in the pedantic and professorial sense of the word. But working this out must happen and can only happen in the context of the history of philosophy. This history shows what sort of elaboration the thinking has endured over the course of the centuries and what the cost was of collective effort towards our current way of thinking, which sums up and digests all this past history, even its mistakes and excesses. Besides, even though mistakes were made and corrected in the past, nothing says that they may not be repeated in the present and need correcting again. What idea of philosophy does the people make for itself? We can reconstruct it from forms of speech in ordinary language. One of the most widespread is ‘taking things philosophically,’ which, if we analyse it, is not to be completely dismissed. True, it contains an implicit invitation to resignation and patience. On the other hand, the more important point seems to be the invitation to reflection, to realizing and explaining that what happens is basically rational and that we must face it as such by concentrating our own powers of reason and not allowing ourselves to be carried away by instinctive and violent impulses. These popular forms of speech could be grouped with similar expressions – taking them from big dictionaries – from writers of a popular kind who use the terms philosophy and philosophically. It will be seen that these have the very precise meaning of overcoming basic animal passions with a conception of necessity that gives conscious direction to our own behaviour. This is the healthy core of common sense, which is exactly what could be called good sense and deserves to be developed and made unitary and coherent. For this reason it also appears that it is not possible to disconnect what they call scientific philosophy from that common and popular philosophy, which is only a unordered collection of ideas and opinions. At this point, we are posing the problem that is fundamental to any conception of the world, to any philosophy which has become a cultural movement, a religion, a faith, by having produced a practical activity and

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a will that contain an implicit theory as their premise. (We could call it an ideology if we were careful to give the term ideology the more general meaning of a conception of the world manifested implicitly in art, law, economic activity, and all phenomena of individual and collective life.) This is the problem of preserving ideological unity in the whole social block that is solidified and unified just by that particular ideology. The power of religions, and the Catholic Church especially, has consisted, and still consists, in their having a vigorous sense of the need for doctrinal unity among the whole mass of the religious and in struggling to prevent the higher intellectual strata from separating from the lower. The Roman Church has always been the most tenacious in the struggle to prevent the official formation of two religions, one for intellectuals and the other for ‘simple souls.’ For the Church itself, this struggle has not been without serious problems, but these problems are connected with the historical process that is transforming all of civil society and which, as a block, includes a corrosive critique of religions. All the more conspicuous is the clergy’s organizing capacity in the cultural sphere and in the relation – which in the abstract is rational and just – between intellectuals and simple people that the Church has been able to establish in its domain. Without doubt, the Jesuits have been the great architects of this equilibrium, and to sustain it they have brought the Church a progressive movement that tends to satisfy certain needs of science and philosophy. But the rhythm is so slow and deliberate that changes have not been detected by the mass of simple people, even though the changes appear revolutionary and demagogic to ‘integralists.’ In general, one of the greatest weaknesses of immanentist philosophies has really been their inability to create an ideological unity between low and high, between simple people and intellectuals. In the history of Western civilization, this fact has been verified on a European scale by the immediate failure of the Renaissance – and partly of the Reformation as well – in conflicts with the Roman Church. This weakness manifests itself in the problem of the schools because the immanentist philosophies have never even tried to construct a conception that could take the place of religion in early education – hence the pseudo-historicist sophism that leads non-religious (non-confessional) educators, who are really atheists, to concede the teaching of religion because religion is the philosophy of the infancy of the human race and is repeated in every non-metaphorical infancy.13 Idealism has also shown itself averse to the cultural movements that ‘go towards the people’ and has been seen in the so-called Popular Uni-

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versities and similar institutions, and the aversion has been not only to their defective features, since, in that case, the movements would only have had to try to do better. These movements were worth noticing, however, and they deserved study. They were successful in the sense that they showed real enthusiasm on the part of the simple, a strong desire to rise to a higher level of culture and a higher conception of the world. Missing from the movements, however, was any organic unity, either of philosophical thinking or of organizational strength and cultural centralization. They left the impression of being like the first contacts between English merchants and black people in Africa: junk was exchanged for gold nuggets. Besides, there could be organic unity of thought and cultural strength only if between intellectuals, and simple people there had existed the same unity that must exist between theory and practice – if the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those same masses, working out and making coherent the principles and problems that those masses created by their practical activity, thereby forming a cultural and social block. The question already mentioned was raised again: is a philosophical movement what it is only by striving to develop a specialized culture for limited groups of intellectuals? Or instead, is it what it is by never forgetting to stay in contact with simple people while working to develop a level of thinking that is higher than common sense and scientifically coherent – indeed, finding in this contact the source of problems to be studied and solved? A philosophy becomes historical only through this contact, by purging itself of intellectualist elements of an individual kind and becoming life … A philosophy of praxis can present itself initially only with a polemical and critical attitude, as the overcoming of the preceding mode of thinking and of the thinking that exists concretely (or the existing cultural world). Above all, then, this philosophy presents itself as a critique of common sense (although at first it bases itself on common sense in order to show that everyone is a philosopher and that the point is not to introduce a science de novo into everyone’s individual life but to renew an activity that already exists and make it critical). Hence, it is a critique of the philosophy of intellectuals that has produced the history of philosophy, and which, in individual cases (since it really develops mainly in the activity of single individuals with special gifts), can be thought of as peaks in the progress of common sense – at least the common sense of the better educated strata of society, and, through them, popular common sense as well.

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This is why an introduction to the study of philosophy must provide a synthetic explanation of problems that have emerged in the process of developing culture in general. This culture is reflected only partially in the history of philosophy. And yet, in the absence of a history of common sense (impossible to put together without documentary material), that history is still the most important source of data for criticizing those problems, for demonstrating their real value (if they still have one) or the significance that they used to have as (superseded) links in the chain – also for defining new current problems or the current view of old problems. The relation between higher philosophy and common sense is secured by politics, just as politics secures the relation between the Catholicism of intellectuals and that of simple people. Differences between the two cases are fundamental, however. That the Church has to face a problem with simple people really means that a breach has occurred in the community of the faithful – a breach that cannot be healed by elevating the simple to the level of intellectuals. (The Church has not even set itself this task, which is out of line intellectually and economically with its current powers.) Instead, there is iron discipline to keep the intellectuals from trespassing certain limits on the distinction between them and simple people, to keep them from making it catastrophic and irreparable. In the past, these breaches in the community of the faithful were healed by powerful mass movements that brought about, or else were subsumed by, the formation of new religious orders around strong personalities (Dominic, Francis) …14 But the Counter-Reformation sterilized this profusion of popular forces. The Society of Jesus is the last great religious order: with its reactionary and authoritarian origins and its ‘diplomatic’ and repressive character, the Society’s birth signalled the rigidifying of the Catholic organism. For the mass of the faithful, the new orders that have come after the Jesuits have very little religious significance but great disciplinary significance. They are branches and tentacles of the Society of Jesus or have come to be that – not forces for innovation and development but tools of resistance to preserve political gains. Catholicism has become Jesuitry. Modernism has created not religious orders but a political party: the Christian Democrats …15 The position of the philosophy of praxis is antithetical to this Catholic position. The philosophy of praxis does not try to keep simple people inside their primitive philosophy of common sense but aims instead to lead them to a higher conception of life. If it asserts the need for contact between intellectuals and simple people, it is not to limit scientific activ-

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ity and maintain unity at the low level of the masses but actually to construct a moral-intellectual block that makes mass intellectual progress – not just progress for a few groups of intellectuals – politically possible. The active person of the masses works in a practical way but does not have a clear theoretical consciousness of the work that he does, which is also knowledge of the world inasmuch as it transforms the world. His theoretical consciousness can actually be in conflict historically with his work. We can almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or one self-contradictory consciousness): one implied in his work and really uniting him with all his co-workers in the practical transformation of reality; the other superficially explicit or verbal, inherited from the past, and accepted without criticism. This ‘verbal’ conception is not without consequences, however: it ties back to a particular social group and influences moral conduct and the direction of will in a more or less vigorous way. This can continue up to the point where the contradictory character of consciousness permits no action, no decision, and no choice, producing a state of moral and political passivity. Our critical understanding of ourselves thus comes about through a struggle of political hegemonies, of opposing directions, first in the field of ethics, then in politics, leading to a higher development of our own conception of reality.16 Consciousness of being part of a particular hegemonic force (political consciousness) is the first phase of movement towards a subsequent and progressive self-consciousness in which theory and practice are finally united. Also, this does not make the unity of theory and practice a mechanically given fact but a becoming of history that has its elementary and primitive phase in the sense of distinction and apartness, of barely instinctive independence, and that then progresses to real and complete possession of a unitary and coherent conception of the world. This is why we must stress that political development of the concept of hegemony represents great philosophical as well as practical-political progress, why it necessarily entails and assumes an intellectual unity and an ethics conforming to a conception of reality that has superseded common sense and has become (though still within narrow bounds) critical. In the most recent developments of the philosophy of praxis, however, the deepening of the concept of unity of theory and practice is still only in its initial phase. Residues of a mechanical conception still remain when they talk about theory as ‘complementary’ or ‘accessory’ to practice – theory as the handmaid of practice. It seems right that this problem too must be posed historically, as one aspect of the political

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problem of intellectuals. Historically and politically, critical self-consciousness means creating an élite of intellectuals. A mass of humans does not ‘distinguish’ itself and become independent on its own without being organized (broadly speaking). And there is no organization without intellectuals, without organizers and leaders, without the theoretical side of the theory/practice nexus being made distinct and concrete in a stratum of people who specialize in working things out conceptually and philosophically. But this process of creating intellectuals is long, hard, and full of contradictions, full of advances and retreats, dispersals and reconsolidations that sometimes put the loyalty of the masses to a hard test. (Loyalty and discipline are the initial forms taken by the support of the masses and their collaboration in developing the whole phenomenon of culture.) The process of development is tied to a mass/intellectual dialectic. The stratum of intellectuals develops quantitatively and qualitatively, but any leap by the intellectual stratum towards new scope and complexity is tied to an analogous mass movement of simple people, who raise themselves towards higher levels of culture and simultaneously broaden their circle of influence when individuals, or even groups of some size, point towards the stratum of specialist intellectuals. But in this process moments keep recurring to create distance and loss of contact between the masses and the intellectuals (or some intellectuals, or a group of them), and this gives them the impression that intellectual theory is accessory, complementary, or subordinate. After not just distinguishing but also separating and severing the two components of the theory/ practice nexus (an operation that is really just mechanical and conventional), insisting on the practical element means moving through a relatively primitive historical phase that is still economic-corporate, where the general framework of structure is transformed quantitatively, and the appropriate quality-superstructure is in the process of emerging but has not yet formed organically.17 We must emphasize the meaning and importance that political parties have in modern times for developing and spreading conceptions of the world, basically by working out the ethics and politics suited to them, functioning like historical experimenters who work on these conceptions. Parties select individuals from the working masses, and the selecting goes on both in the practical field and conjointly in the theoretical, through a relation between theory and practice that becomes closer as the conception is more vitally and radically innovative and antagonistic to old ways of thinking. Therefore we can say that parties are laborato-

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ries for the new comprehensive and totalitarian types of intelligentsia, a crucible for the unification of theory and practice understood as a real historical process … We can see how the passage from a mechanical and purely external conception to an activist conception came about – that conception coming closer, as we have observed, to a correct understanding of the unity of theory and practice, even though it still did not get the whole synthetic meaning. We can observe how the determinist, fatalist, and mechanistic element has been an ideological aroma coming straight from the philosophy of practice, a form of religion and a stimulant (but like a narcotic), necessitated and justified historically by the subaltern character of particular social strata.18 When we do not have the initiative in the struggle, and then the struggle itself ends up being identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a formidable force for moral resistance and solidarity, for patient and stubborn perseverance … Why are the limits and territory of ‘the force of events’ restricted? Basically, because if the subaltern was a thing yesterday, today it is no longer a thing but an historical person, a protagonist. If it was not accountable yesterday because it was resistant to an external will, today it feels itself accountable because it no longer resists but acts, and is necessarily active and enterprising. But even yesterday was it ever mere resistance, a mere thing, mere unaccountability? Certainly not. And it must really be stressed that fatalism is just a covering-up of real active will by weakness. This is why we must always point out the futility of mechanical determinism, which can be explained as naïve mass-philosophy, and, only as such, an intrinsic part of power. But when it comes to be adopted by reflective and coherent philosophy on the part of intellectuals, it becomes a cause of passivity, of foolish self-sufficiency – and it becomes that without waiting for the subaltern to become directive and accountable. Part of the masses, even when subaltern, is always in charge and accountable, and the philosophy of the part always precedes the philosophy of the whole, not only as theoretical anticipation but as actual necessity. That the mechanistic conception has been a religion of subalterns is apparent from an analysis of the development of the Christian religion. In a particular historical era and in specific historical conditions, Christianity was and continues to be a necessity – a necessary form of the will of the popular masses, a particular form of the world’s rationality and life that set the general contexts of real practical activity … But the position of Calvinism, with its iron conception of predestination and grace defining a vast expansion of the spirit of initiative (or becoming the form of this movement) is still more expressive and meaningful …19

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Why and how do new conceptions of the world spread and become popular? In this process of diffusion (which is, at the same time, a replacement of the old, and, quite often, a combining of old and new), how and to what degree do these conceptions influence the rational form in which the new conception is presented and explained; the authority (to the extent that this is recognized and valued, at least generically) of the person who explains and of the thinkers and experts whom the person cites to support himself; and membership in the same organization for anyone who supports the new conception (after joining the organization for a different motive, however, and not sharing the new conception)? In reality, these things vary depending on the social group and the cultural level of the particular group. But the question is especially interesting in the case of masses of people who find it harder to change conceptions, and, in any event, never change them at all by accepting things in pure form, so to speak, but always and only in a more or less bizarre and irregular mix. Logically coherent rational form, the thorough reasoning that disregards no positive or negative argument of any weight, has its importance but is very far from being decisive. It can be decisive in a minor way when the person involved is already in a state of intellectual crisis, wavering between old and new, having lost faith in the old but not yet having decided for the new, and so on. We can say the same for the authority of thinkers and experts. Their authority is great among the people. But every conception, in fact, has thinkers and experts to put forward, and authority is divided. Besides, it is possible to make distinctions about any thinker, to raise doubts about what was really said in the way it was said, and so on. We can conclude that the process of spreading new conceptions happens for political reasons – social reasons, in the final analysis – but that the formal element of logical coherence, the element of authority, and the element of organization have very large roles in this process immediately after the general orientation has occurred, both in single individuals and in large groups. From this we conclude, then, that in the masses as such, philosophy can be lived only as a faith. After all, picture the intellectual position of a man of the people. He has formed various opinions, convictions, rules of judgment, and rules of conduct for himself. Anyone who takes a position opposed to his, as long as that person is intellectually superior, knows how to argue a case better than he, how to swindle him with logic, and so on. So why should the man of the people change his convictions? Because he cannot prevail in a particular discussion? But then he might need to change once a day, whenever he meets an ideological opponent intellectually supe-

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rior to him. So from what ingredients does he make his philosophy? Especially his philosophy in the form most important to him – a rule of conduct? The nature of the most important component is undoubtedly not rational: it is faith. But faith in whom and what? Faith specifically in the social group to which he belongs inasmuch as he thinks, broadly speaking, as it thinks. The man of the people thinks that so many people cannot be as massively wrong as his opponent in argument would have him believe. True, he thinks himself incapable of backing up and developing his own reasons as his opponent can do with his reasons. But he also thinks that in his group there is someone who could do this, surely even better than that particular opponent. And he actually remembers hearing the reasons behind his faith broadly and coherently explained in a way that has kept him convinced of them. He does not remember the reasons concretely and could not repeat them, but he knows they exist because he has heard them explained, and he has stayed convinced. Having once been convinced in an illuminating way is the persistent reason for the persistence of the conviction, even if he does not know how to say anything more about it. But these considerations lead to the conclusion of great instability in the new convictions of the popular masses, especially if these new convictions are in conflict with (also new) orthodox convictions that are in social conformity with the broad interests of the dominant classes. We can see this by reflecting on the fortunes of religions and churches. A religion, and a particular church, maintains its community of faithful (within certain limits given by the necessities of general historical development) to the extent that it keeps its own faith permanently and organizationally, tirelessly repeating its apologetics, always battling at every moment by using the same arguments, and maintaining a hierarchy of intellectuals to give the faith at least the appearance of respectable thinking. Whenever the continuity of relations between Church and faithful has been violently interrupted for political reasons, which happened during the French Revolution, the losses sustained by the Church have been incalculable. And when conditions that make it hard to keep up habitual practices have gone beyond certain limits of time, we have to think that such losses might have been definitive and that a new religion might have emerged – as it did emerge in France, after all, in combination with the old Catholicism. From this come particular requirements for any cultural movement that tries to replace common sense and old conceptions of the world in general:

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(a) never tire of repeating one’s arguments (while varying their literary form); repetition is the most effective teaching method when working with the popular mind; (b) work ceaselessly to elevate the intellectual conditions of ever larger strata of the people, to give personality to the amorphous component of the masses, which means working to stimulate intellectual élites of a new kind that emerge directly from the masses and remain in contact with it in order to become its ‘stays.’20 If the second requirement is met, this is what really changes the ideological panorama of an era. On the other hand, these élites cannot be constructed and developed unless inside them there arises a hierarchy of authority and intellectual competence that can culminate in a great individual philosopher. This person must be capable of reliving, in a concrete way, the needs of the mass ideological community; capable of understanding that it cannot have the agility of movement possessed by an individual mind; and therefore capable of developing the collective doctrine formally in a manner that is closer and better suited to the way that a collective thinker thinks. It is obvious that a mass construct of that type cannot arise arbitrarily, around just any ideology, through the formally constructive will of a person or group advocating its own religious or philosophical convictions out of fanaticism. The adhering or non-adhering of the masses to an ideology is how a real critique occurs of the rationality and historicity of ways of thinking. Arbitrary constructs are eliminated rather quickly in historical competition even if, through a combination of currently favourable circumstances, they sometimes manage to gain some popular support, while constructions that correspond to the needs of a complex and organic historical period always end up asserting themselves, and also prevailing, though they pass through many intermediate phases where they assert themselves only in more or less bizarre and irregular combinations. These developments pose many problems, the most important of which are included in the mode and character of relations among various strata of the intellectually qualified – in the importance and use that the creative contribution of higher groups must and can have in connection with the organic capacity for discussion and development of new critical concepts on the part of intellectually lower strata. The point, then, is to define the limits of freedom of discussion and propaganda, a freedom that must not be understood in the sense of administration and policing but in the sense of self-defined limits that leaders impose

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on their own activity – or rather, in the strict sense, defining the direction of cultural politics. Who will define the ‘rights of science’ and limits on scientific inquiry, in other words, and will it be possible for these rights and limits to be properly defined? It seems necessary that the labour of seeking new and better truths, more coherent and clearer formulations of those same truths, should be left to the free initiative of individual experts, even if they keep questioning the very principles that seem most essential. Besides, it will not be hard to make it clear when such initiatives for discussion have interested motives and are not of a scientific kind. Nor is it impossible to think that individual initiatives might be disciplined and organized by passing through the sieve of academies or cultural institutes of various kinds and becoming public only after they are vetted, and so on. It would be interesting to make a concrete study, for a single country, of the cultural organization that keeps the country’s ideological life moving, and then examine its functioning in practice. Studying the numerical relation between people professionally committed to active cultural labour and the population of each country would also be useful, with a rough calculation of the unemployed. By number of people employed, schools at all levels, along with the church, are the two largest cultural organizations in every country. There are also newspapers, journals, book-selling and private educational institutions, either to complete state schooling or to serve as cultural institutions of the People’s University type. Other professions incorporate no small part of culture in their specialized activity – physicians, military officers, and lawyers. But it should be noted that in all countries, though in varying degree, there is a big break between the masses of the people and intellectual groups, even those that are most numerous and most on the margins of the nation, like teachers and priests. This happens because the state as such has no unitary, coherent, homogenous conception, even where the state claims in its speeches to have one, and so intellectual groups are fragmented from stratum to stratum and within the same stratum. Except in some countries, the university plays no unifying role. A private thinker often has more influence than the whole university structure …21 II: Observations and Critical Notes on an Attempt at a People’s Essay on Sociology22 13. A work like the People’s Essay, meant basically for a community of

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readers who are not professional intellectuals, should have started with a critical analysis of the philosophy of common sense, ‘the philosophy of non-philosophers,’ a conception of the world absorbed uncritically by the different social and cultural domains in which the moral personality of the average person develops. Common sense is no single conception, stable in time and space. It is philosophy’s folklore, and, like folklore, it appears in countless forms. Its fundamental and most characteristic feature (even in individual minds) is that it is a fragmented, incoherent, and inconsistent conception, conforming to the cultural and social position of the multitude whose philosophy it is. When a homogenous social group develops in history, there also develops – counter to common sense – a homogenous philosophy that is coherent and systematic. The People’s Essay goes wrong by starting (implicitly) with the assumption that this development of an original philosophy for the masses of people is opposed by the great traditional systems of philosophy and the religion of the higher clergy, conceptions of the world belonging to intellectuals and the high culture. In reality, these systems are unknown to the multitude and have no direct effect on how they think and act. This certainly does not mean that they are completely without historical effect, but the effect is of a different kind. These systems influence the popular masses as an external political force, as an element of the force that keeps the ruling classes together, and thus as an element of subordination to an outside hegemony. This is a negative limit on the original thinking of the masses of people. It has no positive influence as a vital ferment of internal change acting on what the masses think, embryonically and chaotically, about the world and life. The main elements of common sense are furnished by religions, and so the relation between common sense and religion is much deeper than the one between common sense and the philosophical systems of intellectuals. But critical distinctions have to be made for religion as well. Every religion, even the Catholic religion (indeed, especially the Catholic religion, precisely because of its efforts to remain superficially unitary by not breaking up into national churches and social stratifications), is really a multiplicity of distinct and often contradictory religions. There is a Catholicism of peasants, a Catholicism of the petty bourgeoisie and the urban workers, a Catholicism of women, and a Catholicism of intellectuals, which is itself variegated and disaggregated. But it is not only the cruder and less developed forms of these various Catholicisms, as they actually exist, that influence common sense. Earlier religions and earlier forms of today’s Catholicism, popular heretical movements and

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learned superstitions tied to past religions, have influenced current common sense and are components of it. The dominant elements of common sense are realistic and materialist, the direct product of raw sensation, but this does not contradict the religious element – far from it. These elements are superstitious, however, and uncritical. Accordingly, there is a danger present in the People’s Essay, which, instead of criticizing them scientifically, often confirms these uncritical elements in which common sense has still remained Ptolemaic, anthropomorphic, and anthropocentric. What has been said up to now about the People’s Essay – its criticizing systematic philosophies instead of starting with criticism of common sense – must be understood as a methodological point, within certain limits. I certainly do not mean to say that criticizing the systematic philosophies of intellectuals is to be avoided. When a component of the masses critically overcomes common sense in a particular case, by this very fact it accepts a new philosophy. Hence, in an account of the philosophy of praxis, we see the need for the polemic against traditional philosophies. In fact, because mass philosophy has this tendentious character, the philosophy of praxis can be conceived only in polemic form, as perpetual struggle. However, the point of departure must always be the common sense that automatically becomes the philosophy of the multitudes, and its aim is to make them homogenous ideologically. There are more treatises on common sense in French philosophical literature than in other national literatures. This is due to the character of French culture, which is more strictly national-popular.23 More than elsewhere, for various reasons of tradition, intellectuals in France tend to stay close to the people in order to guide them ideologically and keep them connected to the ruling group. Hence, it will be possible to find much material on common sense in French writing to use and to develop. The attitude of French philosophical culture towards common sense can actually provide a model of hegemonic ideological construction. English and American culture can also supply much data, but not in a way that is as complete and organic as the French case. Common sense has been treated in many ways: as a direct basis for philosophy; or as criticized from the point view of another philosophy. In reality, and in every case, the result has been to overcome a particular case of common sense and make another one out of it that is closer to the leadership’s conception of the world … Croce’s attitude to common sense seems unclear. For Croce, the proposition that every person is a philosopher weighs too heavily on

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the evaluation of common sense. Croce seems satisfied that particular philosophical propositions are shared by common sense, but what can this mean concretely? Common sense is a chaotic aggregate of different conceptions, and we can find whatever we like in it. Besides, this attitude of Croce’s towards common sense has not led to a conception of culture that is productive from the national-popular perspective – not to a more concretely historicist conception of philosophy, which, in any event, can come to be only in the philosophy of praxis. For Gentile, see his article on ‘The Humanist Conception of the World’ … where he writes that ‘philosophy might be defined as a great effort made by reflective thinking to achieve critical certainty about the truths of common sense and naïve consciousness, those truths of which we can say that each person feels them naturally and that they constitute the solid structure of the mentality that each person uses in order to live.’ This appears to be another example of the raw crudity of Gentile’s thinking: his claim seems to derive naïvely from Croce’s claims about the people’s way of thinking as confirmation of the truth of particular philosophical propositions. And Gentile has more to say: ‘A healthy person believes in God and the freedom of his spirit.’24 Thus, in these two propositions from Gentile we may surely find: (a) an extra-historical ‘human nature,’ exactly what we do not know; (b) the human nature of the healthy person; (c) the common sense of the healthy person, and thus also a common sense of the unhealthy person. And what will ‘healthy person’ mean? Physically healthy? Not mad? Or rather that this person thinks in a healthy way – a conformist, a philistine? And what is meant by ‘truths of common sense’? Gentile’s philosophy, for instance, is completely contrary to common sense, whether by common sense we mean the naïve philosophy of the people that abhors any kind of subjective idealism or good sense as an attitude of disdain for the abstrusities, complexities, and obscurities of certain scientific and philosophical views. This flirtation of Gentile’s with common sense is quite amusing. What has been said up to now does not mean that there are no truths in common sense. It means that common sense is an ambiguous, contradictory, and polymorphous notion and that referring to common sense as confirmation of truth is nonsense. We can say correctly that a particular truth has become common sense in order to show that it has

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spread beyond the sphere of intellectual groups. But in that case we are only making an observation of an historical nature and a claim about historical rationality. In this sense, provided that that we use it soberly, the argument has its value, precisely because common sense is narrowly misoneist and conservative, while success in making us dig into a new truth is proof that this truth has enough strength to grow and to be clear. Remember Giusti’s epigram: Good Sense once ran a school, but in our schools he’s dead: Science, his little girl – to see how it was done – hit him over the head.25

This could serve to introduce a chapter and to show how the terms good sense and common sense are used ambiguously: both as philosophy, a particular mode of thought, with a certain content of beliefs and opinions; and as an attitude, well-meaning and generous in its disdain for the abstruse and convoluted. This is why it was necessary for Science to kill a certain kind of traditional Good Sense in order to create a ‘new’ good sense. Marx often refers to common sense and the strength of its convictions. But his references point not to the validity of the content of those beliefs, just to their formal strength and hence their commanding character when they produce rules of conduct. In fact, these references imply an assertion of the need for new popular beliefs, for a new common sense, and thus a new culture and a new philosophy rooted in popular consciousness, with the same strength and power of command found in traditional beliefs. Note I. Regarding Gentile’s statements about common sense, we must add that the author’s language is deliberately ambiguous because of an ideological opportunism that is not worth much. When Gentile writes that ‘a healthy person believes in God and the freedom of his spirit’ in order to give an example of one of those truths of common sense whose critical certainty is worked out by reflective thought, he wants to persuade us that his philosophy achieves critical certainty for the truths of Catholicism. But the Catholics do not swallow it, maintaining that Gentile’s idealism is pure paganism. All the same, Gentile insists on it, preserving an ambiguity that is not without consequences for creating an environment

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of louche culture in which all cats are grey, religion embraces atheism, immanence flirts with transcendence and Antonio Bruers rejoices, since the more tangled the knot and the darker the thought, the more Bruers is seen to have been right in his pidgin syncretism26 … If Gentile’s words meant what they say, literally, actual idealism would have become ‘the manservant of theology’27 … 14. On Metaphysics. Can we derive a critique of metaphysics and speculative philosophy from the People’s Essay? It must be said that the very concept of metaphysics eludes the author inasmuch as the concepts of historical movement, becoming, and hence the dialectic itself elude him. Thinking of a philosophical assertion as true at a particular time in history, as a necessary expression inseparable from a particular historical event, from a specific praxis, and yet overcome and frustrated at a later time, without lapsing thereby into scepticism and moral-ideological relativism, and thus conceiving of philosophy as historicity – this is a mental operation that is rather arduous and difficult. Instead, the author falls straight into dogmatism and thus into a form of metaphysics, although it is naïve. This is clear from the start, from the statement of the problem, from his desire to construct a systematic ‘sociology’ of the philosophy of praxis. In this case, sociology just means naïve metaphysics. In the last paragraph of the introduction, the author cannot respond to objections from various critics who maintain that the philosophy of praxis can exist only in concrete acts of history. He does not succeed in developing the notion of the philosophy of praxis as an historical methodology and then developing this as philosophy, as the only concrete philosophy. This means that he does not succeed in posing and solving, from the perspective of the real dialectic, the problem that Croce has posed and has tried to solve from a theoretical point of view. In place of an historical methodology, in place of a philosophy, the author constructs a survey of particular problems conceived and addressed dogmatically when they are not addressed in a purely verbal way, by paralogisms as naïve as they are pretentious. This survey might still be useful and interesting if only it had been presented as such, with no pretense of providing rough schemes of an empirical nature, useful for immediate application. Otherwise, we realize that it must be this way because in the People’s Essay the philosophy of praxis is not an autonomous and original philosophy; it is the sociology of metaphysical materialism. As such, metaphysics means only a particular philosophical formulation, the speculative formulation of idealism – definitely not any-

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thing systematic posited as extra-historical truth, as an abstract universal beyond time and space. The (implicit) philosophy of the People’s Essay can be called a positivist Aristotelianism, an adaptation of formal logic to the methods of the physical and natural sciences. The laws of causality, the search for regularity, for the normal and the uniform, replace the dialectic of history. But from this way of thinking how can one derive the overcoming, the ‘praxis overthrown’?28 Mechanically, the effect can never overcome the cause or the system of causes, so there can be no development other than the dull and vulgar development of evolutionism. If theoretical idealism is the science of the categories and of the a priori synthesis of the Spirit – a form of anti-historicist abstraction – the philosophy implicit in the People’s Essay is an idealism being overthrown, meaning that empirical concepts and classifications take the place of theoretical categories, though they are just as abstract and anti-historical … 20. The objectivity and reality of the external world … To get a precise understanding of meanings that the problem of the external world can have, it can help to follow the example of notions of ‘east’ and ‘west’ that never cease to be objectively real even though analysis shows them to be nothing more than a conventional construct, which is historical-cultural (the terms artificial and conventional often indicate historical facts produced by the development of civilization, not rationally arbitrary nor individually fabricated constructs). We should also recall the example contained in a little book by Bertrand Russell translated into Italian … The Problems of Philosophy. This is roughly what Russell says: ‘Unless humans exist on earth, we cannot think about the existence of London or Edinburgh, but we can think about the existence of two points in space, where London and Edinburgh are today, one north and the other south.’29 One can object that unless we think about the existence of people, we cannot think about thinking – in which case, generally, we cannot think about any fact or relation that exists only insofar as people exist. Without people, what would north/south and east/west mean? These are real relations, and yet they would not exist without people and without the development of civilization. It is clear that east and west are arbitrary constructs, conventional and historical, since outside of real history every place on earth is east and west at the same time. This can be seen more clearly by the fact that these terms have not been crystallized from the perspective of some sad, hypothetical person-in-general but from the perspective of the educated European classes which have made them

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accepted everywhere by means of their worldwide hegemony. Japan is the Far East not only for Europe but also for the American in California and perhaps for the Japanese himself, who can call Egypt the Near East because of English cultural politics. Through their historical content, then, lumped together with geographical terms, the expressions East and West have turned out to indicate particular relations between complexes of various civilizations. Thus, when Italians talk about Morocco, they often describe it as an ‘Oriental’ country, referring to Moslem and Arab civilization. And these references are real, corresponding to real facts, allowing us to travel land and sea and get where we really want to go, to foresee the future, to objectify reality, to grasp the objectivity of the external world. Rational and real are identified. Without having understood this relation, it seems we cannot understand the philosophy of praxis – its position in contrast to idealism and mechanical materialism, and the importance and meaning of the doctrine of superstructures. It is not correct that in the philosophy of praxis the Hegelian Idea has been replaced by the concept of structure, as Croce claims.30 The Hegelian Idea has dissolved in structure as much as in superstructures, and the whole way of thinking about philosophy has been historicized, meaning that a new way of philosophizing, more concrete and historical than the previous way, has begun to emerge … 32. Quantity and Quality. In the People’s Essay it is said (off-handedly, since the claim is not justified or evaluated, and does not express a productive concept, being casual, without antecedent or consequent connections) that every society is something more than the mere sum of its individual parts. Abstractly, this is true, but what does it mean concretely? The explanation provided, empirically, was often baroque. It is said that a hundred cows one by one are quite different than a hundred cows together because then they are a herd – which is simply a question of words. Likewise, it is said that by counting up to ten we get a decade, as if there were not also a pair, a triplet, a tetrad, and so on – just a different way of counting. The more concrete explanation in theoretical-practical terms can be found in the first volume of the Critique of Political Economy, where it is shown that there is a production quota in the factory system that can be assigned not to any single worker but to the whole workforce, to the collective human.31 Based on the division of labour and jobs, something similar happens with the whole society, which therefore is worth more than the sum of its parts. How the philosophy of praxis has concretized

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the Hegelian law of quantity becoming quality is another of those theoretical points that the People’s Essay does not develop but treats as understood, when it is not content with simple plays on words – the water that changes temperature changes state (ice, liquid, gas), a purely mechanical fact caused by an external agent (fire, sun, or the evaporation of solid carbonic acid, and so on).32 For man, what will this external agent be? In the factory it is the division of labour and so on, conditions created by man himself. In society it is the collection of productive forces. But the author of the Essay has not realized that if every social aggregate is something more (and also different) than the sum of its parts, this means that the law or principle that explains society’s development cannot be a physical law since in physics we never leave the domain of quantity, except metaphorically. In the philosophy of praxis, however, quality is always connected to quantity, and it may be that the most original and fertile part of this philosophy lies in that connection. In fact, idealism hypostasizes this something-more (quality) by making it an entity on its own (Spirit), just as religion had made a divinity of it. But if the quality of religion and idealism is an hypostasis, an arbitrary abstraction and not a process of analytic distinction required in practice for pedagogic reasons, the quality of vulgar materialism is also an hypostasis that divinizes a hypostatic matter. We must compare this way of looking at the conception of society with the conception of the state that the actual idealists have. For actualists, the state really ends up being this something that is higher than individuals … The conception of the vulgar actualists has fallen so low into pure parroting that comic caricature has become the only possible critique. One could have imagined a recruit who explains to the draft board the theory of the state that is higher than individuals, asking that they leave his physical and material person free and draft that bit of something that contributes to the construction of the national something that is the state. Or recall the story in the Novellino in which the wise Saladin settles the argument between the grocer, who wants to be paid for the use of aromatic emanations from his foods, and the beggar, who does not want to pay: Saladin makes him pay by jingling coins, telling the grocer to pocket the sound in the same way that the beggar had ingested the aromatic effluvia …33 44. The Technique of Thinking. On this topic, compare the claim made in the preface to the Antidühring … that ‘the art of operating with concepts is nothing innate or given in ordinary consciousness; it is a technical

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effort of thinking that has a long history, no more nor less than experimental research in the natural sciences’ … Citing this passage, Croce notes in parentheses that the issue is not a foreign concept but one that had already become common sense before Engels.34 The issue, however, is not the greater or lesser originality or strangeness of the concept, in this case and in this context; it is the importance and position that the concept must have in a system of philosophy of praxis, and the point is to see if the concept gets the practical and cultural recognition that it must have. We must refer to this concept to understand what Engels means when he writes that some old philosophy – including formal logic – remains after the innovations produced by the philosophy of praxis, a claim that Croce reports in his essay on Hegel, marking it with an exclamation point.35 Croce’s amazement at the ‘rehabilitation’ of formal logic that seems implicit in the claim that Engels made must be connected with Croce’s teaching on the technique of art, for example, and with the whole series of other views that add up to Croce’s basic anti-historicism and his being abstract in method. (The distinctions, the principle of method that Croce was proud to have introduced into the dialectical tradition, became scientific from the start, causing abstractness and antihistoricism in their formal application.)36 But the analogy between artistic technique and the technique of thinking is superficial and false, at least in a certain sense. An artist can exist and understand nothing consciously or reflectively about earlier developments in technique. (He will get his own technique naïvely from common sense.) But this cannot happen in the domain of science, where there is progress and must be progress, where the progress of knowledge is closely connected with instrumental, technical, and methodological progress and is actually conditioned on it – especially in the experimental sciences in the strict sense. This immediately makes us ask whether modern idealism – and Croceanism especially, with its reduction of philosophy to a methodology of history – is not basically a technique, whether the very concept of speculation is not basically a technical inquiry, though understood in a higher sense, obviously, as less external and material than the inquiry that resulted in the construction of formal scholastic logic … A question may arise about the place that such a technique must have in contexts of philosophical science, whether it becomes part of that science as such, as already developed, or part of the propaedeutic to science and of the process of its development as science. (No one can deny the importance of catalytic agents in chemistry

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just because no trace of them remains in the final product.) The same problem arises for the dialectic, which is a new way of thinking, a new philosophy, but thus also a new technique. The principle of distinction maintained by Croce – and hence all his battles with Gentile’s actualism – are they not technical problems too? Can we detach the technical fact from the philosophical fact? If not, we can isolate it for practical educational purposes. In fact, we must note the importance of the technique of thinking in constructing educational programs. And the technique of thinking cannot be compared with old rhetorical techniques. These did not create artists, did not create taste, and did not produce criteria for appraising beauty. They were useful only for creating a cultural conformism and a language for conversation among the educated. The technique of thinking, developed as such, will surely not create great philosophers, but it will provide criteria of judgment and verification and will correct deformities in the way that common sense thinks. This would be interesting: a comparative test of the technique of common sense, of the philosophy of the man on the street, and the technique of reflective and coherent thought. Macaulay’s observation about the logical weaknesses of culture formed by means of oratory and declamation also holds in this case.37 This whole topic must be carefully studied after gathering all the information about it that we can get. And with this topic we must connect the question asked by the pragmatists about language as a cause of error – Prezzolini, Pareto, and so on.38 We must carefully examine the question of the study of the technique of thinking as propaedeutic, as a process of development, but we must be cautious because the image of a technical instrument can lead us into error. There is more likeness between technique and thinking in act than there is in the experimental sciences between material instruments and science, properly speaking. Perhaps we can conceive of an astronomer who does not know how to use his instruments (he could get research material from elsewhere by developing it mathematically) because the relations between astronomy and astronomical instruments are external and mechanical, and even in astronomy there is a technique of thinking beyond the technique of material instruments. A poet might not know how to read and write. In a certain sense, a thinker also might make himself read and write everything that interests him by other thinkers or everything that he has already thought. The reason is that reading and writing have to do with memory: they are aids to memory. The technique of thinking cannot be compared to these activities, for which we can say that it is important

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to learn this technique, just as it is important to learn to read and write without any philosophical connection, just as reading and writing have nothing to do with the poet as such … 45. Philosophical and Scientific Esperanto. The consequence of not understanding the historicity of languages and hence of philosophies – the historicity of ideologies and scientific opinions – is the tendency found in all forms of thinking (including the idealist-historicist forms) to make themselves into Esperantos or Volapüks of philosophy and science.39 We can say that this has perpetuated (in forms that always vary and are more or less attenuated) the state of mind of primitive peoples towards other peoples with whom they made contact. Every primitive people named (or names) itself with a word that means ‘human,’ naming others with words that mean ‘mute’ or ‘stammering’ (barbarian), as if they did not understand ‘the language of humans.’ (From this came the splendid paradox whereby ‘cannibal’ or ‘eater of humans’ originally – etymologically – means ‘excellent human’ or ‘true human.’)40 For the esperantists of philosophy and science, anything not expressed by their language is madness, prejudice, superstition, and so on. By a process analogous to what is observed in the mentality of the cult, they transform what ought to be a simple historical judgment into a moral judgment or a diagnosis of a psychiatric kind. Many traces of this tendency are found in the People’s Essay. The roots of philosophical esperantism are especially deep in positivist and naturalist conceptions, and sociology is perhaps the main product of such a mentality: hence the tendencies of sociology towards abstract classification, methodologism, and formal logic. Logic and general methodology are conceived as existing in themselves and on their own, as mathematical formulas abstracted from concrete thinking and from particular concrete sciences (as some suppose that language exists in the dictionary and grammars, the technique standing outside the work and the concrete activity, and so on). On the other hand, there is no need to believe that the anti-esperantist form of thinking indicates scepticism, agnosticism, or eclecticism. It is certain that every form of thinking must regard itself as correct and true and must fight other forms of thinking – but in a critical way. Hence, the question is about the dosage of criticism and historicism contained in every form of thinking. The philosophy of praxis, by confining the speculative to the right limits (and denying that the speculative, even as understood by the historicists of idealism, is the essential feature of philosophy), appears to be the historical methodology that stays closest to reality and truth …

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53. Speculative Philosophy. We must not conceal the difficulty presented by discussion and criticism of the speculative character of certain philosophical systems, the theoretical negation of the speculative form of philosophical conceptions. Questions that arise are (a) Does the ‘speculative’ element belong to every philosophy; is it just the form that every theoretical construct as such must take, meaning that ‘speculation’ is synonymous with ‘philosophy’ and ‘theory’? (b) Or should the question be historical instead? Is the problem only an historical problem and not theoretical in the sense that every conception of the world, in a particular historical phase, takes a speculative form that represents its climax and the beginning of its end? There is an analogy and a connection with the development of the state, which passes from the economic-corporate phase to the hegemonic phase (of active consensus). We can say, in other words, that every culture has its speculative or religious moment that coincides with the period of complete hegemony of the social group that expresses – and perhaps really corresponds to – the moment in which the real hegemony breaks up at its base, molecule by molecule. But this system of thinking, precisely because it perfects itself dogmatically (by reacting to the breakup), becomes a transcendental faith. Accordingly, we note that every so-called Age of Decadence (in which a breaking-up of the old world occurs) is characterized by refined and highly speculative thinking. Criticism must therefore break speculation down into its real terms of political ideology, as an instrument of practical action. But criticism itself will have its speculative phase, which will mark its climax. The question is this: whether this climax may not be the beginning of an historical phase of a new type in which, since necessity/ liberty is an organically interpenetrated complex, there will be no more social contradictions, and the only dialectic will be that ideal dialectic of concepts and no longer of historical forces? 54. Unity of Theory and Practice. We must research, analyse, and criticize the different form in which the concept of the unity of theory and practice appears in the history of ideas, since it is beyond doubt that every conception of the world and every philosophy is concerned with this problem: 1. The claim made by Saint Thomas and scholasticism: intellectus specula-

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tivus extensione fit practicus; just by extension, theory is made into practice, an affirmation of the necessary connection between the order of ideas and that of action. 2. An aphorism from Leibniz, so much esteemed by Italian idealists: quo magis speculativa, magis practica – said about science. 3. The statement by G.B. Vico that verum ipsum factum, so much discussed and so variously interpreted (see Croce’s book on Vico and other polemical writings by Croce himself). Croce develops this in the idealist sense that knowing is doing and that we know what we do, where ‘doing’ has a special meaning, so special that it means nothing other than ‘knowing,’ resulting in a tautology (a conception that must still be related to the conception belonging to the philosophy of praxis) …41 59. What is philosophy? A purely receptive activity or at best a regulative one or an absolutely creative activity? We must define what we mean by receptive, regulative, and creative. Receptive implies the certainty of an absolutely immutable external world that exists in general – objectively, in the ordinary sense of the term. Regulative comes close to receptive: even though it implies activity in thinking, this activity is limited and narrow. But what does creative mean? Will it mean that the external world is created by thinking? But by what thinking and whose? We may lapse into solipsism. In fact, every form of idealism necessarily lapses into solipsism. To avoid solipsism, and, at the same time, avoid the mechanistic conceptions implied by conceiving of thinking as a receptive and regulative activity, we must pose the question in a historicist way, and, at the same time, locate will (practical or political activity, in the final analysis) at the foundation of philosophy. But this is a rational will, not arbitrary, which is realized in that it corresponds to objective historical necessities, insofar as it is universal history itself in the moment of its progressive actualization. If this will is represented initially by a single individual, its rationality is proved by its coming to be accepted, and accepted permanently, by a great number of people, by its becoming a culture, a good sense, a conception of the world with an ethics matching its structure. Up to the time of classical German philosophy, philosophy was conceived as a receptive, or, at most, a regulative activity; it was conceived as knowledge of a mechanism functioning objectively, outside the human being. Classical German philosophy introduced the concept of creativity in thinking, but in an idealist and speculative sense. It seems that only the

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philosophy of praxis has taken a step forward in thinking, on the basis of classical German philosophy, avoiding any tendency to solipsism and also historicizing thought by taking it in as a conception of the world, as good sense spread over the great majority of people (a spreading that would not have been thinkable at all without rationality or historicity). And good sense was spread in that way by being converted into an active rule of conduct. Creative must then be understood in the relative sense, as thinking that changes the way that the greater number of people perceives things, and, therefore, as the same reality that cannot be thought without this larger number. It is also creative in the sense that it teaches that there is no reality standing on its own, in itself and by itself, but only a reality historically related to the people who change it, and so on … 62. The Historicity of the Philosophy of Praxis. That the philosophy of praxis conceives of itself in a historicist way, as a transitional phase of philosophical thinking, is clear not only implicitly, from the system as a whole, but also explicitly, from the well-known thesis that historical development will be marked at a certain point by the passage from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.42 All philosophies (philosophical systems) existing up to now have been the manifestation of internal contradictions that have torn society apart. But each philosophical system, taken by itself, has not been the conscious expression of these contradictions since that expression could be produced only by all the systems struggling against one another. Every philosopher is, and can only be, convinced that he expresses the unity of the human spirit, the unity of history and nature. In fact, if there were no such conviction, people would not act, they would not create new history, and philosophies could not become ideologies, could not in practice take on the fanatical granitic solidity of popular beliefs that have the same energy as physical forces. In the history of philosophical thinking, Hegel represents a direction of his own because, in his system, in one way or another, perhaps in the form of a ‘philosophical novel,’ he manages to grasp what reality is.43 In other words, in a single system and in a single philosopher, there is that consciousness of the contradictions that came previously from all systems together, from all philosophies in dispute with one another, contradicting one another. In a certain sense, therefore, the philosophy of praxis is a reform and a development of Hegelianism. It is a philosophy liberated (or seeking to be liberated) from every one-sided and fanatical ideological element. It is full consciousness of the contradictions by

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which the philosopher himself – taken as an individual or taken as a whole social group – not only grasps the contradictions but posits himself as a component of the contradiction and elevates this component to a principle of knowledge and hence of action.

NOTES 1 We have used Gramsci (1975), II, 1365−1487, along with the extensive notes and bibliography in vol. IV of Gerratana’s edition, though bibliographical references supplied in the Italian text have sometimes been omitted in our translation. We have also made less use of quotation marks for emphasis (scare-quotes), which are frequent in the Italian text. Since Gramsci’s access to books and journals was limited and erratic, his references are sometimes from memory and sometimes indirect. 2 Croce (1918b): 601: for Labriola and Herbart, see section 14 of the Introduction; Papua was a British and then an Australian colony in Labriola’s lifetime. 3 Labriola (1906): 432−41; until the Italian invasion of 1911, the territories now called Libya were part of the enfeebled Ottoman Empire. 4 See n13 below. 5 Gramsci cites Spaventa from Alderisio (1931): 287−8. 6 Gramsci alludes to a famous purple passage from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for which see the Italian version in Marx, Engels, and Lasalle (1922), I, 25: ‘One school (the historical school of law) that legitimizes the disgrace of today with yesterday’s disgrace is a school that declares a rebellion at every cry of the serf against the knout, once the knout is antique, an ancestral knout, a knout with history.’ 7 Gramsci cites Hegel, Machiavelli, and Spaventa from Alderisio (1931): 287−8; see also the master/slave dialectic in Hegel (1986), 3.145−55, and new princes in Machiavelli (1990): 103−21. 8 Anon. (1930a). 9 Bruno Bauer (1809−82), a theologian of the Young Hegelian Left, and his brother Edgar were targets of The Holy Family of 1844, which was the first collaborative project by Marx and Engels (1845). 10 In the stirring prologue to the Communist Manifesto, the Pope is one of the old powers chasing down the specter of communism. Pius IX, who was responsible for the infamous Syllabus of Errors (1864), had been close to Rosmini until the events of 1848−9 ended the philosopher’s political usefulness. For Gramsci’s source, see Tarozzi (1930).

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Part II: Translations 11 Corporativo-economisto is a term of art for Gramsci, indicating economic interests specific to some particular group, such as merchants, as distinct from broader interests involving people from other callings, which can eventually become political, moral, and intellectual as well: Gramsci (1975), III, 1583−5. 12 Language was still a very serious socio-political problem as well as a cultural issue in Gramsci’s Italy. One estimate is that the number of residents of the peninsula and its islands who spoke ‘Italian’ (meaning a form of Tuscan) at the time of national unification in 1860 was less than 3 per cent. Even today, some people from Gramsci’s native Sardinia speak Catalan: Duggan (1994): 27−30. 13 As minister of education in 1923 in Mussolini’s first government, Gentile was responsible for a reform that enforced compulsory religious education in elementary schools, even though (like Croce) he had been an outspoken critic of traditional religion: Turi (1995): 316−44. 14 In the thirteenth century, St Dominic and St Francis founded the two great mendicant orders that carry their names; these new organizations responded to socio-economic changes, especially in the cities, which were then underway in Europe. 15 The Christian Democrats formed as an anti-socialist and anti-union manifestation of the policies of Pope Leo XIII, who recognized problems caused by industrial and agrarian poverty and sought a means of addressing them in a way that would suit the Church’s interests. In Gramsci’s day, a populist heir of this policy was Don Luigi Sturzo, the leader of the Partito Popolare Italiano, whom Mussolini crushed in 1923. A few years later, Communist support for the Christian Democrats helped ensure the establishment of the Lateran Pacts with the Church in 1929. 16 Hegemony is another key term for Gramsci: it is the leadership of an economically class-conscious group that becomes stronger by looking beyond its immediate economic interests to the concerns of other groups and to broader issues of culture, morality, and philosophy manifested not only in political but also in civil society and maintained by consent and leadership rather than by coercion and domination: Gramsci (1975), II, 1222−5, 1234−5; III, 1513-40. 17 Following Croce’s lead, Gramsci challenged the conventional Marxist notion that all changes in the political, ideological or cultural superstructure are caused by changes in the structure or economic base: Gramsci (1975), II, 871−3, 1051−2, 1249−50, 1298−1301. 18 For descriptions of subaltern groups, see Gramsci (1975), III, 1589−91, 1860−63.

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29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39

Gramsci alludes to Weber (1904−5). Stays (stecche) as in a corset. Croce, and Gentile to a lesser extent, operated outside the university. For Nikolai Bukharin’s Manual, which Gramsci read in a French translation, calling it a Saggio popolare di sociologia, see section 25 of the Introduction: also Bukharin (1925), (1927). Gramsci regretted that Italy lacked a national-popular culture such as he believed to exist in Russia, Germany and France, as evidenced especially by the popularity of the great Russian novelists whom he saw as models of the artist-intellectuals whom he did not find in Italy. He reasoned that their absence explained the serialization in Italian newspapers of old French novels like The Count of Monte Cristo: Gramsci (1975), III, 2113−20. Gentile (1931c). The poet Giuseppe Giusti (1809−50) was a political activist and popular satirist. For Antonio Bruers, an admirer of Gabriele d’Annunzio, see Gramsci (1975), I, 94; Garin (1966b): 310−11, 451−2. Above, in the second paragraph before n17, the gender is reversed and theory is ‘the handmaid [ancella instead of ancello] of practice.’ See Gentile’s translation of the third Thesis on Feuerbach in his ‘Philosophy of Praxis,’ where he translates ‘revolutionary praxis (revolutionäre Praxis),’ as ‘praxis rovesciata’: Gramsci has ‘rovesciamento della praxis.’ Russell (1922): 113−14. Croce (1930). Marx, Engels, and Ferdinand Lasalle (1922), VII, 382−2. Hegel (1986a), 5.394−8; (1969): 333−6. Anon. (1930b), in the story called ‘Qui si determina una quistione e sententia che fu data in Alessandria.’ The statement by Engels is paraphrased from Croce (1921): 31; see also Engels (1894). For Croce’s being surprised by Engels, see chapter. 11 of ‘The Philosophy of Hegel,’ citing Engels (1894): 9−11, 137−46. For Croce’s ‘distinctions’ see the Logic and the ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ with sections 18−20 of the Introduction. Gramsci took the reference to Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800−59) from Bonghi (1927). Vilfredo Pareto (1848−1923) was a pioneer of the modern social sciences; for Prezzolini see section 20 of the Introduction (1904); also Prezzolini (1904); Pareto (1923). Esperanto and Volapük are artificial languages invented in the late nine-

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teenth century. They were well known to Gramsci, whose formal higher education was in linguistics. Gramsci alludes to the story that ‘cannibal’ came from a name (Galibi), meaning ‘brave people,’ that Columbus heard Native Americans calling themselves. ‘The speculative intellect becomes practical by extension’; ‘The more speculative, the more practical’; ‘Truth itself is made.’ Gramsci could have found these learned aphorisms in sources well known to him: Anon. (1932); Croce (1911a), (1921b):226; see also Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIa-IIae 4.2.ad 3; cf. Aristotle, De anima, 433a15. Engels (1894), though the original conception of the opposition between physical necessity and moral freedom is Kant’s. For ‘philosophical novel,’ see Croce, ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ chapter 5.

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25 Benedetto Croce

History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century: Epilogue1

Suppose someone makes a comparison of political geography before and after the Great War and sees the German Republic replacing the Germany of the Hohenzollerns; sees the Austrian Empire taken apart and replaced by new or enlarged nation-states, with German Austria and Magyar Hungary confined to narrow frontiers; sees France reintegrated with the provinces lost in ’70; sees Italy reunited with the ‘unredeemed’ lands and extending its borders to the Brenner pass; sees Poland reconstituted and Russia no longer czarist but Soviet; sees the United States of America elevated among the major factors in European politics; and so on through the other great transformations that have taken place in territories and relations of power. And then, by contrast, suppose that the same someone has been led to think again, first, of the earlier Europe – orderly, rich, flourishing with commerce, abounding with goods, its life easy, gallant, and self-assured; but then to contemplate in sadness the later Europe – impoverished, restless, sad, broken up everywhere by high customs barriers, the brilliant international society that its capitals used to welcome now dispersed, each people occupied by its own worries and by fear of something worse and hence distracted from matters of the Spirit, so that the shared life of thinking, art, and civilization has been burned out, or nearly burned out. That person has been led to put a deep divide between the two Europes and to mark the distance between them by the boundary – or rather the chasm – of the war of 1914−18. On the other hand, someone who moves from the extrinsic and secondary to what is intrinsic, searching for the passions and actions of the European soul, soon reconstructs in his mind the continuity and homogeneity between the two Europes that seem so different. Looking closely

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in both directions, without letting himself be diverted by those superficial impressions, he finds the same features, even though they were aggravated after the War and by what has happened since then. In the altered political circumstances, the dispositions are the same and the spiritual conflicts are the same, though made more burdensome by that heaviness and dullness that the war – by killing millions, by making violence habitual and by eliminating the lively mental habit of critical and constructive effort, of careful attention and subtlety – could not help producing, along with the harsh effects of its own profound tragedy. Activism emerges, as impetuous as before and actually more violent. Nationalist and imperialist impulses shake the victorious peoples because they are victors and the vanquished because they have been vanquished. The new states that have arisen add new nationalisms and imperialisms. Impatience for liberal politics has given rise to dictatorships, opened or concealed, and to desires for dictatorship everywhere. The liberty that before the war was a static faith, or was practised without much faith, has vanished from people’s minds even where it has not vanished from institutions. It has been replaced by the activist libertarianism that dreams, more than before, of wars, revolutions, and destruction, bursting out in disordered movements and devising showy, barren projects – careless or contemptuous of works built on concentration and love, works with a dutiful sense of the past and the burning strength that opens up the future; despising deeds that come from the heart and reach to the heart, the meditations that speak words of truth, the histories that make us aware of everything that mankind has created in weary work and struggle, the poetry that is poetry, and, as such, beautiful. Communism, which under the name of socialism was allowed into political life, into the state and the course of history, has come back again with its own fragmentation and crudeness, another embittered enemy of the liberalism that it mocks, calling it naively moralistic. Like the activism often confused with it, this communism is sterile and suffocates thinking, religion, art, and all those other things that it would like to enslave but cannot without destroying them. Also back again, in the domain of theory and judgment – as if they were ideas newly born and fresh with the truth of the young – are all those cockeyed, shop-worn sophisms of the historical materialism that anyone with expertise in criticism and the history of ideas knows how to evaluate. Nonetheless, those ideas have again acquired the look of the novel and modern just because, having been exported to Russia from Europe, they have come back here again, even clumsier and more simple-minded then they were before, faring well again in times that are crude, simple, and credulous.

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On another front, the Catholicism that had tried to regain strength through irrationalism and mysticism has welcomed – and goes on welcoming, in great numbers – souls that are feeble or enfeebled, the muddled and misbegotten buccaneers of the Spirit. Even the pessimism and the voices of decadence heard in literature before the war are now heard again, preaching the decline of the West or of the whole human race: having tried to ascend from beast to human, mankind is now about to relapse into a brutish life – according to the new philosophers and prophets.2 All that is fact. There is no point in denying it or even confining it to a few persons or to this or that country or people, because, like the fact of which it is a continuation, it belongs to Europe and the whole world. And because it is a fact, it must have a function in the development of the Spirit, in social and human progress, if not directly as a creator of new values, then at least as matter and motive to reinvigorate, deepen, and extend the old values. But only the historian of the future will know and describe what the function of that fact may be; he will see before him, at the end of its development, the movement in which we are now involved and what it will have started. Just because we are now involved in it, we cannot know or describe this movement. As we live and move in the midst of it, there are many things that we can observe and understand – that we do, in fact, observe and understand – but not that one thing that has not yet happened and whose history cannot be thought. And what difference does it make to any of us, in practice, that this history cannot be thought? This difference: it means that we must participate in history not by contemplating what cannot be contemplated but by playing the part assigned to each of us, as conscience directs and duty commands. Those who violate Solon’s ancient warning by striving to understand and evaluate a life ‘before it is over,’ getting lost in guesswork and great expectations, should take care that they have not strayed into what cannot possibly be known because an evil demon has lured them, beguiling them into idleness and distracting them from action.3 It is not the ‘history of the future’ – as older authorities used to define prophecy – but the history of the past recapitulated in the present that we need for work and action, which would not be genuine were it not illuminated by the light of truth.4 From that same need came this reflection that we have tried to apply – and invite others to apply – to the history of the nineteenth century. For present and current purposes, we must examine, and in every case re-examine, the ideals that are now being accepted or proposed or tried in order to see if they have the power to dissolve or overcome or correct our own ideal, and, at the same time, to change or modify ours as a consequence of the criticism that

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it has undergone, and, in every case, to take possession of it again in a firmer way. It is obvious that today the ideal of a transcendent order of truth, of a moral and practical law and an associated governance from heaven above, exercised on earth by a pastor and represented by a church, has still not acquired that intrinsic intellectual justification whose absence was discovered over the course of centuries. Pointing this out is almost distasteful, as in all debates that turn on something obvious and raise the risk of seeming ungenerous. It is the main point, however. And the renewed temerity of the clergy in the years after the war – owing to the difficulty in which officials found themselves and the concessions that their problems induced them to make – may cause resentment, but it has no real importance in itself: it is a familiar event and something transitory. Here it is useful to cite what a German Catholic has recently written: that ‘only in appearance, and only on the surface of its actual nature, has Catholicism made gains in recent times. But the great idea that gave it unity is no longer alive, and never has it been so insecure, unstable, and wrapped up in material and superficial things.’5 On this last point, one must really wonder what strength the Church can take from the quality of the people who have crowded into her bosom. And yet the spiritual motive that has pushed the best of them to take refuge in Catholicism or return to it (or to similar sites of refuge, less venerable and with less stable authority) has been nothing more than the need – in the tumult of changing feelings and colliding ideas – for a fixed truth and an imposed rule. Or rather it is a lack of trust and a disavowal, a weak and childish fear of the notion that all truth is absolute and relative at the same time, fear of the need for the constant criticism and self-criticism from which truth grows and is renewed at every moment, along with the life that grows and is renewed. But a moral ideal cannot adapt itself to the requirements of the weak, the distrustful, and the fearful. Equally, it cannot be adapted to the purposes of those who get drunk on action for the sake of action, which, when it is felt, conceived, and done in this way, leaves nausea in its wake and indifference to everything that has stirred or can stir human passion, as well as unfitness for any objective labour. By now the human race has had experience of nationalisms, imperialisms, and other such efforts and triumphs, and already it says inveni amariorem felle.6 Activism still rages widely, but where in it is peace of mind or trust or the joy of living? Sadness marks the faces of those people, the better among them, because where not even that can be seen, there is worse: there is boorishness and stupidity. And perhaps

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the very excesses that activism allows itself, the passion in which it writhes, the shakeups that it threatens, signal that a healing of the fever that has infected and still infects Europe and the world is not far off – a fever, and not an ideal, unless we want to sublimate the fever in an ideal. Communism, which is usually said to be a settled and accomplished fact in Russia now, has not been accomplished as communism but in the way that its critics pointed out and which was suited to its internal contradiction – as a form of autocracy, in other words, which has deprived the Russian people of what little mental space or liberty they had or procured under the earlier autocracy of the czars. The evolution of the state, the ‘transition from the kingdom of necessity to that of liberty’ that Marx theorized, has not only not happened, since communism has not abolished the state – and could not abolish what no one will ever be able to abolish – but also, given the irony of things, has put together the most ponderous state of which one could ever conceive.7 In saying this there is no intent to take anything away from the necessity that the Russian revolutionaries faced, forcing them to follow that path and no other; nor of the immense labour that, in those conditions, they undertook and pushed forward, seeing to it that the rich productive forces of that land were made fruitful; nor of the various lessons that can be drawn from their various deeds; nor of the mystical enthusiasm, even if it is a materialist mysticism, that animates them and alone can enable them to bear the huge weight placed on their shoulders and give them the courage to tread underfoot – as they are now doing – religion, thought, and poetry, everything that we revere as sacred, everything that we love as noble. The point of our assertion, rather, is that by now, with words, acts of violence, and repressive methods, they have arbitrarily denied but have not solved – nor could they ever solve in that way – the basic problem of human community, which is that of liberty, the only condition in which human society flourishes and bears fruit, the only reason for humans to live on earth, without which life would not be worth living. That problem remains there and cannot be eliminated; it is born out of the guts of things, and they must feel it stirring in the same human material that they want to pick up and shape according to their own notions. If they ever face up to it in the future – or if others face it for them – it will destroy the materialist basis of what they have constructed, and then that construct will need to be sustained in a different way and greatly modified. And just as pure communism has not been achieved now, likewise it will not be achieved even then. Even though that pseudo-communism impresses thinkers outside Rus-

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sia because of the added impact described by the old saying that ‘maior e longinquo reverentia,’ because fascination with what is remote in time and space gives it fantastic and alluring forms, this communism has still not spread, or else it has been suppressed as soon as it has appeared.8 Actually, in Western and Central Europe, the two conditions that were present in Russia are absent: the czarist tradition and mysticism. So Milyukov was not wrong twelve years ago when he said that he thought Lenin ‘was building on the firm soil of the good old autocratic tradition in Russia, while designing castles in the sky for other countries to see.’9 And even if experiments of this kind are done in other parts of Europe, one of two things will happen: either that pseudo-communism will become, under similar names and appearances, an entirely different thing when transported to countries that differ in religion, civilization, culture, custom, and tradition – countries that have different histories, in short; or else we will have a time, perhaps a long one, of dark anguish, and, sooner or later, out of the heart of that travail, liberty, or rather humanity, will grow again. Liberty is the only ideal that has the solidity that Catholicism once had and the flexibility that it could not have; it is the only ideal that always faces up to the future and makes no pretense of containing it in a particular contingent form; it is the only ideal that stands up to criticism, and, for human society, constitutes the point where equilibrium always reasserts itself amid society’s continuing oscillations and frequent losses of equilibrium. Hence, when we hear people asking whether liberty can achieve what they call the future, we must answer that it has something better – it has eternity. Even today, despite the coldness, contempt, and scorn that liberty faces, it still exists in many of our institutions, our customs, and our habits of mind, and there it does its good work. More important is that it survives in many of the best minds in every part of the world. Even scattered and isolated, reduced almost to an aristocratic but small republic of letters, they still keep the faith, surrounding it with more reverence and following it with a hotter love than in the days when there was no one to harm it or call its absolute mastery into question. Around them swarmed the mob that shouted liberty’s name, infecting it with the vulgarity of which it has now been cleansed. It is not only in those people that liberty lives. It is not just that liberty exists and resists in the government of many of the greater states and in institutions and customs. Its power also operates in things themselves, opening a path, more or less slowly, amid the severest difficulties. We see this mainly in the feeling and thinking that people are now concerned

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about – a truce or reduction of the armaments that cause unrest, a peace and alliance among the states of Europe, an agreement about intentions and projects among its peoples. Around the world and for the good of the world this would preserve, if not the economic and political supremacy of nations, then their age-old supremacy as creators and advocates of civilization and their acquired aptitudes for that unending work. This is the only political plan, among many made after the war, that has not drifted off and dissipated but actually gains ground year after year, and attracts thinkers who used to reject it or seemed unconvinced or wanted to believe in it but did not dare. It helps to hope that it will not be allowed to disappear and will reach its goal despite all the opposition, overcoming all obstacles and finding its way through them, aided by the skills of statesmen and the will of the various peoples. It may be that the World War – which future historians may consider the reduction to absurdity of all nationalisms – has soured some relations between states because of the iniquitous and stupid peace treaty that ended it. But it has also created a deep community among peoples who have felt themselves, and more and more will always understand themselves, as equals in their virtues and mistakes, in their strengths and weaknesses, subject to the same fate, saddened by the same loves, suffering the same pains, and proud of the same patrimony of ideas. Meanwhile, we are present at the conception of a new consciousness in every part of Europe, a new kind of nationality: the reason, as already noted, is that nations are not given in nature but are states of consciousness and historical products. Seventy years ago, a Neapolitan of the old Regno or a Piedmontese of the subalpine Kingdom became Italian not by repudiating a prior nature but by raising it up to that new nature and thus resolving it; in the same way, the French, the Germans, the Italians, and all the rest will raise themselves up into Europeans. They will direct their thoughts to Europe, and their hearts will beat for her as they used to beat for their lesser fatherlands, not forgotten but better loved. This process of European unification directly opposes nationalist competitions, already resists them, and one day will be able to liberate Europe from them altogether. It strives at the same time to liberate her from the whole psychology that is bound up with nationalisms, sustaining them and producing behaviors, habits, and actions akin to them. If such a thing comes to pass, or when it comes to pass, the liberal ideal will be fully restored to people’s minds and will reclaim its domain there. But we must not imagine the restoration of this ideal as a return to the conditions of some other time, like one of those returns to the past dreamt of

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by Romanticism while it dozed in its sweet idyll. Whatever has happened, whatever will happen in the meantime, cannot have happened for nothing. Some institutions of the old liberalism will need to be modified in greater or lesser degree or be replaced by others that are better adapted. Political and ruling classes constituted much differently than the earlier ones will arise. The experience of the past will produce different concepts, directing the will in different ways. With those mental and moral attitudes we will need to take up again the problems that we call ‘social.’ Obviously they were not born yesterday; thinkers and politicians have been working at them for centuries, solving them, from time to time, in ways suited to the age. Throughout the nineteenth century, they were the object of the most passionate attention and fervent concern, but even then they were solved, from time to time, as they could be, and with such results as greatly changing the conditions of labour, improving the quality of life for workers, and raising their legal and moral status. The economics – ‘rationalized,’ as people like to say – that has now become a leading topic of debate is also not a new thing in itself. The crux of the discussion cannot be using this rationalism to require the replacement of the economics of the individual or free enterprise, which are indispensable to human life and to economic progress itself. The debate can only be about allotting more or less to the one side or the other in relation to goods, locations, times, and other circumstances. This is a problem for the experts and politicians who have the job of solving it, from time to time, in the way most advantageous to the growth of productivity and most equitable for the distribution of wealth. But experts and politicians will be unable to do their jobs and cannot hope for anything but a fictitious implementation of their proposals if liberty does not provide and maintain the intellectual and moral environment needed for so great a work, and if liberty does not guarantee the legal arrangements in which implementation can be achieved. These notions, sketched rapidly here, are not the great expectations forbidden to us and to everyone just because they are empty. They are directions for travel that our current moral awareness and observation may suggest for those whose regulative concepts and whose interpretation of nineteenth-century events agree with the narrative of those events provided by this history. Others, with different minds, different concepts, different temperaments, and different cultural qualities, will choose other routes, and if they do so with a pure mind, obeying a command from within, they too will do a good job of preparing the future. A history informed by liberal thinking cannot end, even in its practical and moral

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corollary, by absolutely rejecting and condemning those who feel and think differently. Only to those who think along with it does it say: ‘Work along the line indicated for you here, with all that you have, every day, every hour, in your every action; don’t worry about divine providence, which knows more about it than any of us and works with us, within us, and above us.’ Words like those, that we have learned and spoken often in our Christian life and education, have their place, as do other words from the same source, in the ‘religion of liberty.’10

NOTES 1 We have used Croce (1932): 349−60: although this version was released in April, only two months after the book first appeared, the title-page calls it the ‘third edition revised’: very large sales required rapid reprintings, in which Croce undoubtedly made small changes, although the text of the part translated here seems to be very close, if not identical, to the standard version, as in Croce (1991). 2 Oswald Spengler (1880−1936) was not a Nazi or a racist, although he was an authoritarian nationalist, but also a sort of socialist and a critic of liberalism; his enormously influential Decline of the West was first published in 1918: Spengler (1918−23). 3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100a10−12: ‘Should we regard no other human being as happy while alive, following Solon’s saying, “Look to the end”?’ 4 For ‘conjectural history’ in Kant and other writers, see Palmieri (2003). 5 Perhaps Croce is thinking of Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward DalbergActon, 1834−1902), an eminent Catholic liberal, a protégé of the theologian Johann Döllinger and a Regius professor of history at Cambridge who wrote about the history of freedom. 6 I have found it more bitter than gall; cf. Eccles, 7:27; Prov. 5:3−4 (Vulgate). 7 The words that Croce paraphrases actually come from Engels: see section 62 of Gramsci’s ‘Introduction.’ 8 ‘Awe inspires better at a distance’: Tacitus, Annals, 1.47. 9 Pavel Milyukov (1859−1943) was a leading Russian liberal who lived in exile in France after the Bolsheviks came to power: Milyukov (1922): 49. 10 In Hegel, ‘Religion der Freiheit’; see Hegel (1986), 17.203−4, and section 26 of the Introduction.

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26 Antonio Gramsci

Letters from Prison1

Letter 300, 18 April 1932 Dearest Tania:2 Thanks for making me a copy of the letter in which Giulia gave you more details on the state of Delio’s health. I will take the Somatose, as I wrote to you – no need to get me too worked up about it because I’m already persuaded, enough to make me take it anyhow.3 When I’ve read the Croce book, I’ll be very happy to help you with it by writing some critical notes about it – though not a complete review, as you ask, because it would be hard to gulp it all down right away. However, I’ve already read the introductory chapters of the book, which appeared some months ago as a separate work.4 So I can already start to make some points today that might help you do research and get better information, if you want to give your work a certain unity and broaden it somewhat. In my opinion, this might be the first question to ask: What cultural interests now dominate Croce’s literary and philosophical activity, both those that are currently relevant and those of more general significance relating to deeper needs and not arising from the passions of the moment? The answer is not in doubt: Croce’s activity has distant origins, from the period of the War, to be precise. To understand his recent work, one must review his writings on the War, collected in two volumes (Pagine sulla guerra, 2d ed., enlarged).5 I don’t have these two volumes, but I did read the pieces one by one as they were published. Their essential content can be briefly summarized: a struggle against the definition given to the War under the influence of French and Masonic propaganda, whereby the War became a War

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for Civilization, like a crusade with its unleashing of popular passions and its character of religious fanaticism. After war comes peace, meaning not just that conflict must be followed by new cooperation among peoples but also that groupings produced by war will be followed by groupings of peace, and nothing says that the two coincide. But how will this new cooperation be possible, both the general and the particular, if a direct criterion of utilitarian politics becomes the universal and categorical principle? This is why intellectuals must resist these irrational forms of propaganda, and, while not making their country weak in war, must resist demagoguery and protect the future. Croce always sees the moment of war in the moment of peace and the moment of peace in that of war, always doing his best to prevent the destruction of every possibility of mediation and compromise between the two moments. In practice, Croce’s position permitted Italian intellectuals to renew relations with German intellectuals, something that was not and is not easy for the French and the Germans. For this reason, Croce’s activity has been useful to the Italian state during the postwar period when the deepest impulses of the nation’s history have pointed to the end of the Franco-Italian military alliance and to a shift of policy against France through reconciliation with Germany. Croce, who had never involved himself in activist party politics, therefore became minister of public education in the Giolitti government of 1920−1.6 But did the War end? And did the mistake end – the mistake of wrongly promoting particular criteria of current politics to general principles, expanding ideologies into philosophies and religions? No, of course not. Hence, the intellectual and moral struggle continues: interests are still alive and current, so we must not abandon the battlefield. The second question is about the position that Croce holds in the field of world culture. Even before the War, he was held in very high regard by intellectual groups from all countries. What is interesting, contrary to popular opinion, is that his reputation was greater in AngloSaxon countries than in the German one. There are lots of English translations of his books, more than German and more than [French].7 It is clear from his writings that Croce has a high opinion of this position of his as ‘leader’ of world culture and of the duties and responsibilities that come with it. His writings obviously assume an élite world audience. We must remember that in the last years of the previous century Croce’s writings on the theory of history gave intellectual ammunition to the two most important ‘revisionist’ movements of the time, those of Eduard Bernstein in Germany and Sorel in France.8 Bernstein himself

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has written of being convinced to rework all his philosophical and economic thinking after having read Croce’s essays.9 The close link between Sorel and Croce was known, but its depth and persistence became especially obvious after the publication of the letters of Sorel, who, in a surprising way, often shows himself to be Croce’s inferior intellectually. But Croce carried his revisionist activity still farther, especially during the War and especially after 1917. The new series of essays on the theory of history begins after 1910 with the memoir, Cronache, storie e false storie, and it continues up to the final chapters of the Storia della storiografia italiana nel secolo XIX, the essays on political science and the most recent literary appearances, among which is the Storia dell’ Europa – so it seems, at least, from the chapters that I’ve read.10 I find that Croce holds above all to his position as leader of revisionism and that he understands this to be his best current work … He says explicitly that the whole reworking of his theory of history as ethical-political history (meaning all or almost all that he has done as a thinker for almost twenty years) is meant to complete his revisionism of forty years ago.11 Dearest Tania, if suggestions like this can be useful to you for your work, let me know when you write, and I will try to do more of them. I hug you tenderly, Antonio

Letter 302, 25 April 1932 Dearest Tania: I received your postcards of April 17 and 22. I’ve also received a book, as you promised. How is your cough? The weather here keeps changing a lot. Maybe it’s been changing in Rome too, and you’ll need to be a little careful of your health. I’m glad that my letter to Delio arrived. We’ll see if he answers and if it will be possible, even with so many ups and downs, to put a correspondence together. I still don’t know if the notes about Croce that I wrote for you were interesting to you and if they suit the needs of you work: I’m sure you’ll tell me, and then I’ll be able to do better. In any case, understand that these are bits and pieces that would have to be developed and completed. I’m writing a paragraph for you again this time, and then you can reorganize as seems best. One question that I find very interesting asks about

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the reasons for the great success of Croce’s work; this does not usually happen to philosophers during their lifetimes, and it is especially unusual outside of academic circles. I think we should look to his style for one reason. It has been said that Croce is the greatest writer of Italian prose since Manzoni.12 The claim seems true to me, with this qualification: that Croce’s prose derives not so much from Manzoni’s as from the great writers of learned prose, and especially from Galileo. Croce’s innovation as stylist is in the domain of learned prose, in his ability to explain with great simplicity, as well as great power, explaining material that other writers usually present in a muddled, quibbling, obscure, and wordy way. Croce’s literary style expresses a style that suits his morality, an attitude that can be called Goethian in its serenity, order, and unshakable confidence. As so many people lose their heads, wavering among apocalyptic feelings of intellectual panic, Croce, with his steadfast certainty that evil cannot prevail metaphysically and that history is rationality, becomes a point of reference for acquiring inner strength. Moreover, we must note that to many people Croce’s thinking does not present itself as a cumbersome philosophical system and hence as something hard to assimilate. I find that Croce’s outstanding quality has always been this: putting his conception of the world in circulation unpedantically in a whole series of brief writings in which philosophy is presented straightforwardly and then absorbed as good sense and common sense. In this way, his solutions to many problems end up circulating anonymously, finding their way into newspapers and everyday life. There are a great many ‘Croceans’ who do not know what they are and may not even know that Croce exists. In this way, a kind of summa of idealist notions has penetrated into Catholic writers, who are now seeking to free themselves from them, though without success, attempting to present Thomism as a self-sufficient conception and one that suffices for the intellectual needs of the modern world. I hug you tenderly, Antonio Letter 303, 2 May 1932 Dearest Tania: I’ve received three letters, of April 23, 25, and 27. I’ve read and re-read the letter from your Dad and your long thoughts about it, which generally seem right to me.13 There are other pieces of the problem that

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necessarily elude you, of course, and those may be the main and decisive causes of the state of confusion and painful powerlessness in which they are all floundering a bit. But the greater difficulty lies in not knowing where to start in order to react with energy to the situation and fix it. You talk about energy, energy, always energy. But in Rome, thinking about it now, even applying all your energy, what would you be able to get? You would not be up against anything solid and well founded that could be cleanly reversed, but a gelatinous state of affairs, so to speak, offering no resistance and shifting its shape continuously and invincibly. You once criticized me for not having asked you the question in Rome and for not having tried to make an alliance between the two of us, as it were, and unite our forces. Maybe you were right, and this was the duty that I ought to have done. But then there were many things to which I did not attach the same importance that I would now, and it happened to me then as if I were in the middle of a forest, seeing each tree clearly but not seeing the whole. Many things appeared to me rather as picturesque qualities, aesthetically interesting, not as symptoms of a sickly condition. You see that I am very frank with you and give you the evidence to judge me harshly. I believe there are mitigating circumstances, however. The most important, as far as I’m concerned, is that I’ve always lived isolated, outside the family, and I’ve actually always had a certain impatience with family life. Therefore, I’ll convict myself of being hypercritical, of seeing the mote in the eye of the next person and not the beam in my own eye. This made it necessary for me not to intervene but to let everyone live his own life independently. But I don’t know what to do and where to begin. I’m grateful to you for what you’ve written because I can at least orient myself concretely, which until now has not been possible. From now on, anyhow, I won’t throw stones in the dark, something that may have happened on these recent occasions. I don’t know if I’ll ever send you the outline on ‘Italian intellectuals’ that I promised you. The point of view from which I see the problem sometimes changes: maybe it’s still early to summarize and synthesize. The material is still in a fluid state and will need further development. Don’t get it in your head to re-copy the proposal for publishing on Italians abroad: it seems not worth the trouble to me, especially since Marzocco has given a rather accurate summary of it.14 If you can get a copy of it, fine; otherwise, relax. Likewise, I certainly have no need of the works of William Petty to deal with the problem of Machiavelli’s economic ideas. The reference is interesting, but the reference is enough.15 Instead, in a little while I’ll ask for the complete works of Machiavelli himself,

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which, as you may recall, I asked for when for when I was still in Milan, but publication had not yet happened. I can still give you a point of reference for a study of Croce’s book (which I have not yet read as a whole). Even if these notes are a little disconnected, I think that they may be useful to you all the same. You might then think of organizing them on your own, for the purposes of your work. I’ve already mentioned the great importance that Croce assigns to his theoretical activity as a revisionist – also, by his own explicit admission, how all his work as a thinker during these last twenty years has been aimed at completing the revision until it becomes liquidation. As a revisionist, he has contributed to maintaining the trend of economiclegal history (still represented today in a weakened form by Academician Gioacchino Volpe especially).16 He has now given written form to the history that he calls ethical-political, of which the Storia d’Europa is supposed to be and to become the model. What is Croce’s innovation? Does it have the significance that he attributes to it, and, in particular, does it have that liquidating effect that he claims? We can say concretely that Croce, in his historical-political activity, puts the accent solely on the moment which in politics is called the moment of hegemony, consensus, and cultural direction, in order to distinguish it from the moment of force, compulsion, and intervention by the legislature and the state or the police.17 In fact, I cannot understand why Croce believes that his position on the theory of history has the capacity to liquidate every philosophy of praxis definitively. In the same period when Croce fashioned this so-called truncheon of his, what actually happened is that the philosophy of praxis, according to its greatest modern theorists, was fashioned in the same way, and the moment of hegemony or cultural direction was systematically revalued exactly against the mechanist and fatalist conceptions of economism. In fact, it has been possible to assert that the essential feature of the most modern philosophy of praxis is precisely the historical-political concept of hegemony. So it seems to me either that Croce is not ‘up to date’ with the research and bibliography of his chosen fields or that he has lost his capacity for critical orientation. As for his own information, it is based directly on a notorious book by a Viennese journalist, Fülop-Miller.18 This point should be developed thoroughly and analytically, but that would require very long treatment. For your interests, I think these suggestions are enough. It would not be easy for me to extend them. Dear one, I hug you tenderly, Antonio

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Letter 304, 9 May 1932 Dearest Tania: I received your postcard of April 30 and a letter of May 6. I haven’t received the issue of Riforma Sociale for September-October 1931, nor any of the books ordered then. Four books reached me one after another: the edition of Machiavelli’s Prince done by Luigi Russo; the autobiography of Gandhi with a preface by Senator Gentile; Senator Croce’s Storia d’Europa; and a little book of local Genoese history by Mario Bettinotti. But up to now only The Prince has been delivered to me. The book by Benco is La Storia del Piccolo di Trieste, published by Treves-TrecanniTuminelli, and the book by Emilio Zanella is Dalla Barbarie alla civiltà nel Polesine, published by Problems of Labor.19 As for other books, see that they send me none at all. From now on, this is the rule that we need to follow strictly: if I need a book, I will say so myself. In this last period, the books sent to me have not been delivered. For each one I have to apply to the Ministry, which is not only tedious but absurd. Don’t you think? You had written about subscribing to Cultura, for which I had already gotten permission, but I don’t know if this was done. I’ve seen now that it’s published in four issues a year and that the first issue for 1932 has come out. From home I’ve had no news for more than a month and a half. Fifteen days ago I got a postcard from Teresina with just a hello.20 Since I still haven’t read the Storia d’Europa, I can’t give you any clue about its real content. But I can put down some observations that would only seemingly be external to it, as you’ll see. I had already written to you that all Croce’s efforts of the last twenty years as an historian have been aimed at developing a theory of history as ethical-political history, in contrast to the economic-legal history that used to reflect the theory derived from historical materialism, following the revisionist process that it had gone through because of the work of Croce himself. So is Croce’s history ethical-political? It seems to me that Croce’s history can only be called speculative or philosophical history, not ethical-political, and that its opposition to historical materialism lies in this feature, not in its being ethical-political. An ethical-political history is not excluded by historical materialism inasmuch as it is the history of the hegemonic moment, while speculative history, like all speculative philosophy, is excluded. In working out his philosophy, Croce says that he wanted to free modern thinking of every trace of transcendence, of theology,

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and hence of metaphysics in the traditional sense. Pursuing this course, he went as far as to reject philosophy as system precisely because there is a theological residue in the idea of system. But his own philosophy is a speculative philosophy, and as such it fully sustains transcendence and theology while using historicist language. Croce is so immersed in this speculative method and language of his that he can only judge in those terms. When he writes that structure in the philosophy of praxis is like a hidden God, this would be true if the philosophy of praxis were a speculative philosophy and not an absolute historicism, really – not just verbally – liberated from any transcendental and theological residue.21 Connected with this point is another observation that relates more closely to the conception and composition of the Storia d’Europa. Can you imagine a unitary history of Europe that starts from 1815, from the Restoration? If a history of Europe can be written as the formation of a block of history, it cannot exclude the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which are the economic-legal premise, the moment of force and struggle, in the block of European history. Croce is thinking of the next moment, the one in which forces previously unleashed have been stabilized – have undergone catharsis, so to speak – and to construct his historical model he turns this moment into a fact on its own. He did the same thing with the Storia d’Italia.22 By starting in 1870, this history bypasses the moment of struggle, the economic moment, to offer an apology for the purely ethical-political moment, as if it had fallen from the sky. Naturally, with all the clever and cunning moves of modern critical language, Croce has produced a new form of rhetorical history, whose current form is speculative history and precisely that. We can see this even better if we examine the historical concept that is at the centre of Croce’s book – the concept of liberty. Contradicting himself, Croce confuses liberty as a speculative concept or philosophical principle with liberty as ideology or as a practical instrument of government, a component of hegemonic moral unity. If all history is the history of liberty, or of the Spirit that creates itself (and in this language liberty is equivalent to the Spirit, the Spirit is equivalent to history and history to liberty), why should the history of Europe in the nineteenth century be the only history of liberty? This history will not be one of liberty in the philosophical sense, then, but of the self-consciousness of this liberty and of the spreading of this self-consciousness under the form of religion at the level of intellectuals and of superstition at the level of the people, who feel themselves united to the intellectuals, who feel themselves to be participants in a political block where those intellectuals are the stand-

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ard-bearers and priests. So we are talking about an ideology, a practical instrument of government, and it will be necessary to study the nexus of practice on which it is based. Liberty as a historical concept is just the dialectic of history, which has no distinct and individuated representative practices. History was liberty even in the satrapies of the Orient, so truly that even then it was historical movement, and those satrapies collapsed. In the end, it seems to me that the words change, that the words may be well said, but that they don’t even scratch the surface of the facts. I think that an article in Critica Fascista has made the correct criticism, though not explicitly, when it observes that Croce, looking at the present in perspective, will be able to find its historical justification as a process of liberty within twenty years.23 Otherwise, if you remember the first point that I made in writing you – my observations about Croce’s attitude during the war – you’ll understand his point of view better. As ‘priest’ of the modern historicist religion, Croce lives the thesis and the antithesis of the historical process and insists on ‘practical reasons’ in the one, and in the other because he sees the future in the present and worries about the future as much as about the present. Each person has his part to play – the priests are the custodians of tomorrow. At bottom, there’s a good dose of moral cynicism in this ethical-political notion. It’s the current form of Machiavellianism. I hug you tenderly, Antonio Letter 307, 23 May 1932 Dearest Tania: I received your postcard of the 17th and the letter of the 19th. The news that Carlo gave you about the state of my health is not very clear. I haven’t had serious bouts of uric acid, even though the continuing intestinal inflammation must certainly be connected with excessive acidity. On the other hand, I have been suffering for some time from insomnia, if you can call it that. More precisely, I don’t sleep not because I’m not sleepy but because sleep is interrupted by external causes, which has put me in a state of great fatigue and exhaustion, and this is apparent even externally, as Carlo noticed. The problem is complicated, and I’ll be able to speak with you about it if you come to talk. For the date when you come I have no special preferences. You should pick the time that’s

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convenient for you from any point of view. I’ve read your Dad’s letter with great interest. It’s quite charming and full of observations that make me think. As far as what you say about my being able to write him, I don’t agree. It would be hard for me to give you a full account of the reason. Some things I don’t like writing about in a letter from prison. You haven’t given me your opinion of the notes I wrote you about Croce. Do they seem generally useful to you? Anyhow, you must keep in mind that they cannot be complete, that they could not deal with certain issues that may need to be dealt with, and that, even as they stand, they’ve suffered voluntary mutilation. I finally got the books ordered a long time ago. But I haven’t received the issue of Riforma Sociale for September-October 1931. I’m also missing the April 1932 issue of Problemi del Lavoro, and I’ll be grateful if you ask for it. (I’ve never received the first issue of Cultura for the year.) If you happen to write to Piero, mention to him that in a passage of Certezze, a recent book by Silvio D’Amico, a chapter dedicated to Spielberg talks about a petition for mercy sent by Federico Confalonieri to the Emperor of Austria that should go straight to Spielberg’s own Italian museum. D’Amico does not reprint this entreaty, but he hints around as if it were written by a person reduced to the lowest level of degradation and humiliation. Piero may know if this piece by Confalonieri was already printed in some publication about Confalonieri. I think I’ve never heard anything about it.24 Could you also send me some Hunt Salts, dearest? I can no longer do without taking them, and I’ve almost finished the supply. I’ve tried to stop using it, but the problems come right back. I embrace you tenderly, Antonio

Letter 308, 30 May 1932 Dearest Tania: I received your postcard of the 25th and the money order of the 28th. I’m deeply grateful, but I assure you that there was no urgency. As I wrote some months ago, the expenses that I have are relatively small; and besides, it’s impossible to buy anything worth eating. It’s really better not to go off a strict diet so things don’t get worse. Any change or any

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attempt to increase the amount of food that I eat causes me such trouble that from now on I’d rather not even try. Besides, I’m not worried about this now, and I feel no weaker than usual. You must not think that I’ve turned into a fatalist and abandoned myself to the moving current like a chien crevé.25 On the contrary, I keep fussing about it to find more rational solutions, but my range of choice is quite restricted and keeps becoming more restricted with every effort that turns out to be useless. But let’s talk about more interesting things that will let me express my mania and string four bits of gossip together. I want to make a series of observations so that, if you have a chance, you can send a copy to Piero and ask him for any bibliographical information that would help me enlarge the scope of my thinking and orient myself better. I would like to know if there is any special publication, even in English, on Ricardo’s own method of research in the economic sciences and on the innovations in methodological criticism that Ricardo introduced. Ten years ago, specifically on the centenary of his death, I believe that a rich literature on this subject appeared, and that there is some likelihood of finding there exactly what has to do with my topic.26 This is where my thinking is going: can we say that Ricardo was important for the history of philosophy as well as the history of economics, where he certainly stands in the first rank? And can we say that Ricardo contributed to pointing the first theorizers of the philosophy of praxis towards their overcoming of Hegelian philosophy and towards the construction of their new historicism, purged of every trace of speculative logic?27 It seems to me that one could try to prove this proposition, and that it would be worth the trouble to do so. I start with two concepts, fundamental for economics, which I believe we owe to Ricardo, those of a determinate market and of a trend law. Here is my reasoning: may it not be from these two concepts that we get the motive to reduce the immanentist conception of history, as expressed in the speculative and idealist language of classical German philosophy, to a directly historical, realist immanence, wherein the law of causality in the natural sciences has been purged of its mechanism and identified synthetically with the dialectical reasoning of Hegelian thought? Maybe this whole nexus of ideas still seems a bit muddy, but what matters to me is just the overall understanding, even if it is approximate, as long as it suffices to learn whether the problem has been foreseen and studied by some expert on Ricardo. We must remember how Hegel himself, in other contexts, had seen these necessary connections between different scientific activities, and

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also between scientific activities and practical activities. Thus, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he found a nexus between the French Revolution and the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and he said that ‘only two peoples, the German and the French, as opposed as they may be to one another, yet, just because they are opposed, have taken part in the great epoch of universal history’ at the end of the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century, once the new principle ‘erupted as Spirit and concept’ in Germany while in France it unfolded ‘as effective reality.’28 From the Holy Family it appears that this nexus between French political activity and German philosophical activity posited by Hegel was taken over by the theorists of the philosophy of praxis.29 The point is to see how and to what extent classical English economics, in the methodological form worked out by Ricardo, contributed to the later development of the new theory. That classical English economics contributed to the development of the new philosophy is commonly accepted, but we usually think of Ricardo’s theory of value. It seems to me that we must look farther and identify a contribution that I would call synthetic, having to do with the world view and the mode of thinking, and so it is not only analytic, regarding a particular doctrine, but also fundamental. In his research for the critical edition of Ricardo’s Works, Piero might be able to collect valuable material on this topic. In any case, let him see if some publication exists that deals with these issues or might help me in my imprisoned state, when I cannot do organized research in a library. Dearest Tania, I hug you tenderly, Antonio Letter 309, 6 June 1932 Dearest Tania: I received your letter of May 30, and I’ve also received the samples delivered with the medicines. I’ve already taken the Sedosine, but I have to say that it doesn’t do anything for me. I’ve taken Somatose now and then, but still not on a regular basis. I really don’t know what to do because the food that I get doesn’t work for mixing with a preparation of that kind. I’ll just trying swallowing it loose in cold water, but I not sure how that will work. Maybe you have to put it in a hot liquid. I assure you that I have no problem calling things by their names. I

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call them as I can, given what I know. I don’t know how to call ‘intestinal inflammation’ anything but that. Likewise, it is correct that it is not ‘organic’ insomnia that keeps me from sleeping. I believe that not sleeping, even if it is called ‘insomnia,’ is not always to be cured like insomnia. I think it better not to ask questions about words. The important thing is to understand, and I think you have understood what the problem is. For the three months beginning on July 1, please subscribe again to the Corriere della Sera, but this time please send L17 instead of L14.50, and specify that you also want the Monday issue.30 Looking closer at the subscription advertisement that they sent me because the last three months is expiring, I noticed that you can also subscribe for the Monday issue, which was not clear from the heading in the newspaper. I’m sending you the form for the checking account that you can use to send the money from Rome without delivery charges! I’ll try to answer the other questions that you ask me about Croce, even though I don’t quite understand why they are important, and maybe I think I’ve already answered them in what I said before. Look again at the note in which I mentioned the attitude maintained by Croce during the War, and see if it doesn’t contain the answer to one part of your current questions implicitly. The break with Gentile occurred in 1912, and it’s Gentile who distanced himself from Croce and tried to make himself philosophically independent.31 I don’t believe that Croce has changed his position from that time on, even though he has defined his teachings better; the more notable transformation occurred between 1900 and 1910. The so-called ‘religion of liberty’ is not a discovery of the present years. In one sharp formulation, it sums up his thinking over the whole period from the moment when he abandoned Catholicism – as he himself writes in his intellectual autobiography (Contributo alla critica di me stesso). And I do not think that Gentile disagrees with Croce about this. I believe that the interpretation of the ‘religion of liberty’ formula that you give is incorrect since you attribute a mystical content to it (one might think so from the fact that you refer to a ‘taking refuge’ in this religion and thus to a kind of ‘flight’ from the world, and so on). Nothing of the sort. ‘Religion of liberty’ simply means faith in modern civilization that has no need of the transcendental and revelatory but contains in itself its own rationality and its own origin. Hence, it is an anti-mystical formula, and, if you like, anti-religious. For Croce, every conception of the world, every philosophy, insofar as it becomes a rule of life and a morality, is religion. Religions in the confessional sense are religions too,

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but mythological religions, and thus, in a certain sense, ‘lower’ and primitive, as if corresponding to an historical infancy of the human race. The origins of this doctrine are already there in Hegel and Vico, and they are the common heritage of all Italian idealist philosophy, whether Croce’s or Gentile’s. This doctrine is the basis of Gentile’s educational reform with regard to religious instruction in the schools, which even Gentile wanted to restrict to elementary schools alone (infancy true and proper), and which, in any event, not even the government has wanted to introduce into the upper level. Thus, I think you may be exaggerating Croce’s position at the present moment, seeing it as more isolated than it is. We must not let ourselves be deceived by the polemical effervescence of writers who are dilettantes, more or less, and irresponsible. Croce has explained much of his current thinking in the journal Politica, edited by Coppola and Minister Rocco.32 Not only Coppola, I believe, but many others are persuaded of the usefulness of the position taken by Croce, which creates the situation that makes it possible to give real education, aimed at the life of the state, to new groups of leaders who surfaced in the postwar period. If you study the whole history of Italy from 1815 on, you see that a small leadership group managed methodically to absorb into its circle all the political personnel produced by originally subversive mass movements. From 1860 to 1876, the Action Party of Mazzini and Garibaldi was absorbed by the monarchy, leaving an insignificant residue that continued to exist as the Republican Party, but with an effect that belongs more to folklore than to the history of politics. The phenomenon has been called transformism, but it was not an isolated phenomenon.33 It was an organic process, which, for the formation of the ruling class, took the place of what had happened in France with the Revolution and Napoleon and happened in England with Cromwell. Indeed, even after 1876, the process continues, bit by bit. This phenomenon is of great moment in the postwar period when the traditional leadership group is apparently in no position to assimilate and digest the new forces thrown up by events. But this leadership group is more malin and capable than we might have supposed. Absorbing them is difficult and burdensome, but, despite all that, it happens, in many ways and by various methods. Croce’s activity is one of these ways and these methods. His teaching produces perhaps the largest quantity of ‘gastric juices’ involved in the work of digestion. When we put it in historical perspective – Italian history, naturally – Croce’s energy seems to be the most powerful machine for ‘conforming’

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the new forces to the vital interests (not only current, but also future) of the group dominant today, which, I believe, puts the right value on it, certain superficial appearances notwithstanding. When you melt down different substances to produce an alloy, effervescence on the surface indicates that the alloy is actually forming, and not the reverse. And likewise in these human cases, concord always shows up as discord, as a struggle and a battle, not a hug on the stage. But concord it always is, and the deepest and most effective kind. I hug you tenderly, dearest, Antonio

NOTES 1 We have used Gramsci (1996a): 562−87, along with Antonio Santucci’s very informative notes. 2 For Tania Schucht (1887−1943), see section 27 of the Introduction. Tania was the sister of Giulia Schucht (1896−1980), Gramsci’s wife, and both were daughters of Apollon Schucht, a Russian exile. Giulia joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. When Gramsci went to Moscow in 1922, Giulia met him while he was recovering from exhaustion in a sanatorium near Moscow. She was very ill for much of the time that Gramsci spent in prison. 3 Delio was Giulia’s and Antonio’s oldest son, born in Moscow in 1926. Somatose was a dietary supplement. 4 The book in question is Croce (1932), parts of which Gramsci had read in Croce (1931b): see section 27 of the Introduction. 5 Croce (1928b), collecting essays from La Critica and elsewhere. 6 The Liberal Giovanni Giolitti (1842−1928) was the most persistent presence in Italian politics between Cavour and Mussolini, premier five times between 1892 and 1921. Croce served his last government as minister of public education in 1920−1: Duggan (1994): 178−90; Bonetti (2001): 149−50. 7 The Italian text has più che in tedesco e più che in italiano. 8 Eduard Bernstein (1850−1932) became the champion of an anti-Hegelian critique of orthodox Marxism that came to be called ‘revisionism’ (by Lenin, for example, referring to the possibility of participation in electoral politics), in the way that criticisms of early Christianity came to be called ‘heresy.’ For Sorel, see sections 14 and 27 of the Introduction. 9 Sorel (1927): 311. 10 Croce (1912), (1921a), (1925b), (1932).

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Gramsci, Letters 11 Croce (1928−9); Gramsci (1996a), ed. Santucci, II, 565. 12 Crémieux (1928):190. 13 The letter from Apollon Schucht, Tania’s father, was about the health of Giulia, Gramsci’s wife; Tania thought the letter inappropriate: Gramsci (1996a), II, 571. 14 Marzocco was a Florentine journal of art and culture founded in 1896; it had drifted far to the right by the time of its extinction in 1932. Gramsci refers to the issue of 6 March 1932 in which the government had announced plans for a publication about Italians abroad: Gramsci (1996b), II, 554. 15 William Petty (1623−87) was an early economic theorist regarded as important by Marx. 16 The distinguished medievalist Gioacchino Volpe, who signed the Fascist Manifesto of 1925, also wrote influential works about the Italy of his own day. 17 For hegemony, see Gramsci’s ‘Introduction to Philosophy,’ and sections 25 and 27 of the Introduction. 18 Fülop-Miller (1926). 19 Silvio Benco (1874−1949) was a journalist and critic for Il Piccolo, a newspaper in Trieste; Emilio Zanella was a political activist and a follower of Nicola Badaloni: Gandhi (1921); Machiavelli (1931); Benco (1931); Croce (1932); Bettinotti (1932); Zanella (1931). 20 Teresina was Gramsci’s sister. 21 Gramsci (1975), II, 1225−6. 22 Croce (1928a). 23 D’Andrea (1932). 24 Federico Confaloniere (1785−1846) was an aristocrat and a revolutionary who suffered harsh interrogations and a sentence of life imprisonment in Spielberg in Austria, but then was allowed to go into exile: D’Amico (1932). For Piero Sraffa see section 27 of the Introduction. 25 Dead dog. 26 David Ricardo (1772−1823) was a major systematizer of classical economics and the author of the ‘iron law of wages.’ 27 It was Marx and Engels who were ‘the first theorizers of the philosophy of praxis’: see Gentile’s ‘Philosophy of Praxis.’ 28 Gramsci quotes Hegel from Croce (1918b): 292−4. 29 For The Holy Family, see Gramsci, ‘Introduction,’ section 6; Gramsci uses Marx (1927), II, 67. 30 Founded in 1876, the Corriere della Sera became one of Italy’s most widely read newspapers, maintaining its editorial independence and centrist point of view until the Fascist period. 31 See section 23 of the Introduction on Gentile’s relationship with Croce.

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Part II: Translations 32 The journalist Francesco Coppola (1878−1957), who founded Politica with Alfredo Rocca (1875−1935), was a Fascist and supported racism; Rocca was an ex-Marxist and a minister in the Fascist government. Croce’s articles, which appeared in Politica in 1919, were collected in Croce (1928b). 33 For transformism, see the notes to Gentile, ‘Idealism,’ as well as Musella (2003).

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References – (1999a). La Storia è una scienza? Ed. M. Martirano. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. – (1999b). Teoria e filosofia della storia. Ed. M. Martirano and G. Cacciatore. Rome: Riuniti. Villers, Charles. (1801). Philosophie de Kant, ou principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendentale. Metz: Collignon. Volpe, Gioacchino. (1991). Italia in cammino. Bari: Laterza. Voltaire. (1738). L’Enfant prodigue: Comedie en vers dissillabes, représentée sur le Théatre de la Comédie Françoise le 10 Octobre 1736. Paris: Prault. Waddington-Kastus, Charles. (1848). De la psychologie d’Aristotle (Paris). Weber, Max. (1904−5). Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus (Tübingen). Werner, Karl. (1881). ‘Kant in Italien.’ Denkschrift der philosophishe-historische Classe der königliche Akademie der Wissenschaftlehre, 7 (Vienna). Whittam, John. (1995). Fascist Italy. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1974). Tractatus Logio-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Woltmann, Ludwig. (1900). Der historische Materialismus. Darstellung und Kritik der Marxistischen Weltanschauung (Düsseldorf). – (1903). Politische Anthropologie: Eine Untersuchung über den Einfluß der Descendenztheorie auf die Lehre von der politischen Entwicklung der Völker (Leipzig). Wundt, Wilhelm. (1888). ‘Über Ziele und Wege der Völkerpsychologie.’ Philosophische Studien, 4. Zambelli, Paola. (1972). La formazione filosofica di Antonio Genovesi. Naples: Morano. Zanella, Emilio. (1931). Dalla Barbarie alla civiltà nel Polesine: L’Opera di Nicola Badaloni. Milan: Edizioni dell’A.N.S. Zimmermann, Robert. (1858). Geschichte der Aesthetik als philosophischer Wissenschaft. Vienna: Braumüller. – (1862−3). ‘Zur Reform der Aesthetik als exacter Wissenschaft.’ Zeitschrift für exacte Philosophie, 2: 309−58; 4:199−206. Zolo, Danilo. (2008). L’Alito della libertà: Su Bobbio. Milan: Feltrinelli. Zumbini, Bonaventura. (1876). Saggi critici. Naples: Morano.

804

Name Index

A Reply to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist Intellectuals, 142−6, 713−16 Abruzzi, 49, 493 Accademia dei Lincei, 54, 334 Accademia del Cimento, 334 Accademia della Crusca, 54, 311 Accademia Pontaniana, 91, 106, 502, 662

Achilles, 549 Achillini, Alessandro, 352, 354 Aconcio, Jacopo, 321, 326, 328, 331, 339−40, 779

Acton, Lord (John Dalberg-Acton), 761

Adam, 70, 567, 604 Aeneas, 465 Africa, 116, 611, 614, 726 Agricola, Rudolf, 318, 340 Agrippa von Nettesheim, Henry Cornelius, 327, 341 Agrippina, 416−17 Ajello, Giambattista, 48 Alaric, 590 Albert of Saxony, 277 Alcaeus, 479 Alexandrian, 267−8, 316 Alfieri, Vittorio, 36 Alps, 88, 163, 674

Amabile, Luigi, 635 Amari, Michele, 50 Amendola, Giovanni, 143, 147 America, 3−4, 7, 128, 167, 169, 186, 205, 389, 392, 395, 472, 610, 629, 660, 671, 736, 741, 752−3

Amphitrite, 355, 369 Anaxagoras, 268 Anaximenes, 581 ancien régime, 24, 580 Angiulli, Andrea, 54, 474, 483 Anselm of Aosta, 7, 267, 269, 438, 445, 536, 579, 625

Aoma, 266 Apollo, 376, 627, 640 Aquinas, Thomas, 7, 26, 30, 164, 166, 257, 267, 269, 352, 381, 390, 634, 674, 746, 752 Araldi, Michele, 9

Archimedes, 46, 316 Ardigò, Roberto, 54, 88, 127, 165, 178 Arethusa, 459, 462 Ariosto, Ludovico, 431, 457, 627 Aristotelian, 141, 166, 269, 317, 340, 342, 345, 347, 352, 462, 532, 551, 577, 579, 582, 589, 600, 624, 672−3, 681, 696, 699, 740

Aristotle, 8, 69, 82, 238, 269, 275, 308,

Name Index 317−21, 323, 329, 331, 340, 345, 378−9, 387, 396, 409, 412, 418, 458, 469, 472, 549−50, 571, 580, 589, 608, 632, 640, 652, 659, 663−4, 673, 679, 687, 696, 752, 761

Arnauld, Antoine, 263 Aryan, 392, 470, 482 Asia, 116, 266, 400, 468, 610−11, 614 Aspasia, 505 Assyria, 469,482 Asturaro, Alfonso, 473, 482 Athens, 83, 432, 435, 468, 472, 621, 682

Augustine, 30, 257, 267−8, 284, 694 Australia, 610, 749, 795 Austria, 11, 24−5, 45, 505, 508, 753, 771, 777

Avellino, 60 Avesta, 277 Babel, 468, 482 Babylon, 468 Bacinetti family, 68 Bacon, Francis, 47, 56, 62−3, 73, 324, 330−3, 341, 352, 357, 378, 398, 401, 410−11, 431, 448, 579, 589, 632, 636, 694

Bactria, 277 Baillie, J.B., 681 Bain, Alexander, 88, 682 Balzac, Honoré de, 512 Barbaro, Ermolao, 317, 340 Barth, Paul, 469, 482, 640 Barzellotti, Giacomo, 86−9, 142, 181 Bastille, 429, 444 Bauer. Bruno and Edgar, 720, 749 Bavaria, 68 Bayard, 544, 627 Beatrice, 487, 504 Beattie, James, 338

Bebel, August, 477, 483 Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 245, 263, 373, 448 Bergson, Henri, 117, 623, 641 Berkeley, George, 8, 21, 245−8, 250−2, 254, 263, 448

Berlin, 61, 401, 625, 629−30, 635, 638, 640

Bern, 69, 421 Bernard, Claude, 371, 382, 399 Bernard of Clairvaux, 268−9 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri, 558, 629 Bernheim, Ernst, 465, 467, 485, 491, 494, 502−3, 506, 509, 513−14

Bernstein, Eduard, 160, 763, 776 Berthelot, Marcelin, 371, 399 Berti, Domenico, 635 Bethnal Green, 495, 509 Bettinotti, Mario, 768 Bibel-Babel, 468, 482 Bible, 11, 264, 276, 482, 627 Bichat, Marie F.X., 453, 461 Bismarck, Otto von, 562, 630 Bobbio, Norberto, 3−6, 163, 165, 167−9, 171, 173, 189−90, 370

Bologna, 45, 50, 52, 66−7, 70, 143, 343, 433, 439, 444, 712−13

Bolshevik, 715, 761, 776 Bomba, 48 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 45 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 595 Bonatelli, Francesco, 87 Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, 7, 30, 267, 269, 284, 289, 311

Born, Friedrich Gottlob, 23, 174 Bosanquet, Bernard, 504, 629 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 374, 390, 399, 437, 445

Bothwell, Earl of (James Hepburn), 513

806

Name Index Bouillier, Francisque, 438, 446 Bradley, F.H., 629 Brenner Pass, 753 Bresciani, Antonio, 50 Breton, 269 Britain, 73−4, 76, 86, 88, 163, 166−7, 169, 621, 749

Broussais, François, 453, 461 Brucker, Jacob, 608, 638 Bruers, Antonio, 739, 751 Brunetière, Ferdinand, 127−8, 681 Bruno, Giordano, 7, 37, 47, 50, 52, 66, 68−9, 79, 88, 119, 127, 168, 181, 269, 319, 322, 331, 333, 344, 348−9, 352, 354−9, 362−3, 365−7, 369, 378, 396, 418−21, 428, 550−2, 624, 627−8, 635, 672, 695, 701

Brussels, 36, 642, 644 Buckle, Henry, 53−4, 182, 493, 502−3, 507−8, 510

Buddhism, 114, 266, 576, 579, 611, 624 Bukharin, Nikolai, 149−51, 734−6, 739−42, 745, 751

Bunsen, Baron Karl von, 69, 418, 421, 428

Burckhardt, Jacob, 53, 66, 95, 179, 369 Burtt, E.A., 186 Butler, Samuel, 632 Böhme, Jacob, 551, 628 Büchner, Ludwig, 371, 399, 660, 664 Caesar, Julius, 267, 590 Calabria, 11, 60, 66 Calais, 96 Caliban, 95, 490 California, 741 Caligero, Guido, 186 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de, 632 Calvello, Giambattista, 48 Calvinism, 730

Cambridge, 159, 761 Campanella, Tommaso, 7, 47, 50, 52, 88, 127, 269, 323−5, 328, 330−3, 339, 344, 348, 352−5, 357, 364−5, 367, 378, 595, 635, 676, 682, 695

Campania, 445−6 Campo de’ Fiori, 79 Candide, 55 Cannes, 418 Canterbury, 445 Capuana, Luigi, 512 Carbonari, 36, 45 Cardano, Girolamo, 269, 319, 327, 340 Carducci, Giosuè, 90, 498−9, 511; Hymn to Satan, 526−7, 532; Odi barbare, 498, 511 Carlo Alberto, 36, 38 Carlo Felice, 36 Carlyle, Thomas, 152 Carnap, Rudolf, 639 Cartesianism, 8, 18, 20, 38, 46, 71−2, 109, 270−1, 276, 331, 334, 357, 436−8, 443, 551, 577, 624, 676, 685 Cassino, 77

Cassirer, Ernst, 117, 639, 788 Castel dell’Ovo, 60 Castelli, Enrico, 176 Castelvetrano, 118 Catalan, 750 Catholic, 10, 12−13, 24, 38, 49, 68, 86−7, 127, 156−8, 161, 164−7, 171, 263−8, 310, 340, 348, 352, 354, 477, 564, 566, 595, 633, 704, 715, 719, 725, 727, 732, 735, 738, 755−6, 758, 761, 765, 774

Cattaneo, Carlo, 25 Cavour, Camillo Benso di, 26, 47, 60, 562, 630, 776

Ceci, Luigi, 468, 482 Celtic, 269, 272

807

Name Index Cesalpino, Andrea, 319, 327, 340−1, 352, 354

Commune of Rome, 142 Comte, Auguste, 52−3, 56, 73−4, 88,

Chabod, Federico, 153 Chaldaea, 275 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 609,

165, 331, 342, 371−2, 376−7, 385, 392−3, 399, 448−9, 451, 453, 460−1, 468, 474, 505, 507, 509, 562, 630;

Cours de philosophie positive, 53, 331,

638

Charles I, 509 Charles II, 495, 509 Chateaubriand, François René de, 36 Chevalier, Sulpice, 512 Chieti, 49 China, 430, 610−11 Chios, 662 Christ, 30, 69, 166, 265, 444 Christianity, 3, 24, 36−7, 64, 121−2, 166, 188, 267−70, 273−6, 302, 349−50, 367, 370, 389, 391, 400, 409, 474, 497, 505, 550−1, 554, 564, 579, 608, 610-611, 618, 624, 627, 640, 644-646, 653-654, 663-664, 704-705, 727, 730, 750, 761, 776

Church, 12, 24−5, 37, 51, 54, 79, 87, 157, 161, 164−6, 269, 348, 352, 354, 564, 595, 628, 715, 725, 727, 732, 750, 756

342, 448

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 8−11, 33, 126, 163, 174, 234, 245, 248, 252, 263, 322, 338, 373, 401, 411, 507, 570, 631

Confaloniere, Federico, 771, 777 Confucius, 266 Conti, Augusto, 86, 505 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 266, 327 Coppola, Francesco, 775, 778 Corriere della Sera (newspaper), 774, 777

Corsini, Lorenzo, 439, 446 Cosenza, 334 Cossa, Pietro, 417 Counter-Reformation, 727 Cousin, Victor, 9−10, 13, 25, 48, 66, 70, 174, 277, 338−9, 554, 629, 637

Cremonini, Cesare, 319, 340, 352, 458,

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 7, 170, 297, 317, 321

Cieskowski, August von, 640 Cilento, 439, 446 Cimini, Angiola (Angela Cimmino),

462

Crivelluci, Amedeo, 118 Croce, Benedetto, 6−7, 52, 54, 60−1, 63, 66, 73, 79−80, 89−119, 126, 131, 142−3, 145−7, 149−51, 153−61, 163−70, 182−3, 188, 482, 484−641, 643, 680−1, 694−5, 717, 736−7, 739, 741, 743−4, 747, 749−65, 767−71, 774−8; ‘Fundamental Theses of an

439, 446

Civiltà Cattolica (Catholic Civilization), 49, 164

Claudius, Emperor, 417 Clement XII, 446 Cleophantus, 682 Cohen, Hermann, 639−40 Collechi, Ottavio, 48−9, 60 Collingwood, R.G., 169, 182 Columbus, Christopher, 542, 752

Aesthetics,’ 94; ‘History Brought Under the General Concept of Art’,’ 54, 80, 91, 94, 482, 484−515; ‘Reply by Italian Authors, Professors and Journalists,’ 143; ‘The Gentile Case and Dishonesty in

808

Name Index Italian University Life,’ 131; Aesthetic as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics, 94, 99, 107, 695; Contribution to the Critique of Myself, 153, 169, 182; Critical Conversations, 717; History as Thought and Action, 153; History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 153−61, 168, 753−78; History of Italian Historiography, 153, 168, 764; History of Italy from 1871 to 1915, 153; History of the Age of the Baroque in Italy, 153, 168; History of the Kingdom of Naples, 153, 168; History, Chronicle and False Histories, 764; Logic as Science of the Pure Concept, 99, 515−32; New Essays on Italian Literature in the Seventeenth Century, 153, 168; Outlines of Logic, 106; Philosophy as Science of the Spirit, 107; Philosophy of Practice, 107; The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 747; Theory and History of Historiography, 107; What is Living and What is Dead in Hegel’s Philosophy?, 106, 533−641 Cromwell, Oliver, 775 Croton, 266−7 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 46, 67 Curci, Carlo, 38 Cusani, Stefano, 48 Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), 353, 356,

Inferno, 513, 693; La Vita Nuova, 504, 705; Paradiso, 639−40; Purgatorio, 46, 177

Darnley, Henry Stuart, 501, 513 Darwin, 65, 124, 127, 165, 475, 603, 636, 669

Darwinism, 54, 78, 475, 603, 666, 680 David, Jacques-Louis, 96, 495, 509 Davidson, Donald, 107, 183 De Gérando, Joseph, 176 De Meis, Camillo, 606, 635, 637 De Ruggiero, Guido, 5−6, 143 De Sanctis, Francesco, 7, 48, 51, 53, 60−6, 77, 90, 167, 170, 401−17, 490, 498, 503−6, 510−11, 680; ‘Science

and Life,’ 60−1, 66; ‘The Ideal,’ 64−5, 413−17; ‘The Principle of Realism,’ 61−4, 66, 401−12; The History of Italian Literature, 60−1 Delfico, Melchiorre, 493, 507 Delitzsch, Friedrich, 482 Demiurge, 123, 267, 656 Democritus of Abdera, 579, 582, 662 Dennett, Daniel, 183 Descartes, René, 8, 11−12, 19−20, 37, 47, 50, 52, 67, 70−2, 74, 88, 120, 193, 267, 270, 276, 281, 297, 328, 331−3, 336, 352, 357, 398, 401, 409, 430−1, 436−9, 442−4, 446, 454, 551−2, 562, 564, 577, 579, 582, 597, 618, 649, 663

550, 626−7, 694

Cyprus, 341

Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 10, 174,

d’Amico, Silvio, 771 d’Ancona, Alessandro, 118 d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 751 Dante Alighieri, 46, 60, 115, 127, 154,

Devenir social, 106, 662 Dewey, John, 4 Diana, 462 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 91, 510 Diogenes, 705 Dionysian, 545, 627 Döllinger, Johann, 761

193, 234

167, 177, 188, 266, 350, 389, 400, 432, 445, 465, 487, 496, 499, 504, 511, 513, 590, 639−40, 674, 682, 693, 705;

809

Name Index Dominic Guzman, 727, 750 Dominican, 48, 323, 352, 354, 627 Don Abbondio, 492, 507 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 182, 484−6,

372, 378, 394−5, 397, 430, 467, 496, 510, 611, 614, 629, 713, 741, 750, 753−5, 757−9, 764, 767−9 Eustachi, Bartolomeo, 327, 341

495−6, 502−3, 508

Dumas fils, Alexandre, 499, 511 Edinburgh, 291, 628, 740 Egypt, 64, 466, 468, 480, 483, 508, 611,

Fabroni, Angelo, 460, 462 Fallopio, Gabriele, 327, 341 Fascism, 3−7, 117, 132, 137, 142−7, 149, 153−4, 158, 161, 163−4, 169, 173, 706−15, 770, 777−8

741

Einaudi, Luigi, 143 Einstein, Albert, 117 Eleatic, 46, 114, 268, 316, 324, 376, 548, 576−7, 579, 624

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 167 Empedocles, 7, 46, 316 Enciclopedia Italiana, 142 Engels, Friedrich, 49, 79, 83, 119, 149−50, 473, 482, 561, 620−1, 630, 637−8, 640, 642−4, 646, 662−3, 742−3, 749, 751−2, 761, 777

England, 3−5, 9, 24, 49, 53, 67, 88, 93, 101, 128, 167, 169−70, 173−5, 182−3, 232, 245, 248, 269, 333, 355, 369, 371−2, 448, 451, 457, 461, 485, 487, 503, 507, 509, 530, 579, 601, 608, 624−6, 633, 660, 671, 681, 693, 718, 726, 736, 741, 763, 772− 3, 775

Fascist regime, 3, 132, 143, 153−4, 163, 708−9, 716

Ferrari, Giuseppe, 431, 444 Ferrari, Sante, 87 Ferri, Luigi, 86−7, 181 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 77, 83, 119−22, 400, 473−4, 482, 642, 644−8, 651, 653−5, 661, 663−4, 751 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 5, 12, 35, 120, 126, 250−1, 253−4, 263, 272, 337, 363, 403, 407, 409, 478, 553−4, 561, 570, 579, 622, 629, 637, 640, 651, 661, 699, 773

Ficino, Marsilio, 378 Fiorentino, Francesco, 7, 66−75, 118, 168, 170−1, 429−62, 504, 531, 627−8, 635−6, 663, 680; Giordano Bruno and

His Times, 69; Letters on the New Science to the Marchesa Florenzi Waddington, 67−8, 70−3, 429−46, 628, 636; The Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, 66; The Philosophical Resurgence of the Fifteenth Century, 66−7, 627; ‘Positivism and Idealism,’ 67, 73−6, 170−1,

English Channel, 73, 448, 629, 681 Enlightenment, 9, 11, 27, 36, 86, 126, 131, 163−4, 263, 507, 562, 564, 597, 628, 664 Epicurus, 565, 658, 662

Erizzo, Sebastiano, 322, 331, 339, 341 Erkenntnisproblem, 628 Ermengarda, 685, 693 Esperti, Giuseppe Luigi, 438, 446 Etruscan, 72, 266−7, 441 Europe, 5, 8, 13, 36, 48, 50, 52, 69, 88,

447−62

Fischer, Kuno, 535, 621, 625, 627, 636, 640

Florence, 45, 49, 53, 86, 117−18, 330, 334, 389, 399−400, 464, 467, 482, 487, 496, 562, 630, 777

90, 116, 122, 126, 154, 156−8, 160, 163, 168, 193, 273, 275−6, 351, 355,

810

Name Index Florenzi Waddington, Marianna, 7,

Galilei, Galileo, 7, 10, 37−8, 46−7,

66−76, 79, 180, 418−46, 531, 628, 636; ‘Pantheism as the Founda-

tion of the True Good,’ 69, 418−21; ‘Remarks on Pantheism,’ 68, 422−29; Essays on Psychology and Logic, 68; translation of Schelling’s Bruno, 68−9, 421; Various Thoughts,

56−7, 63, 74−5, 127, 160, 243, 266, 270−1, 274, 277, 313, 316, 327−33, 339, 341, 378−81, 385, 393, 396, 398, 411, 431, 449, 454, 457−8, 460, 462, 672, 687−8, 694, 765

Gallo, Niccolò, 503−4 Galluppi, Pasquale, 7−8, 11−25, 37−9,

69

Formíggini, Angelo, 475, 483 Fornari, Vito, 503−4, 506 Foscolo, Ugo, 24, 36, 277 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 327, 341 France, 9, 11, 36, 69, 73, 75, 245, 272, 318, 333, 338, 355, 371−3, 471, 622, 629, 632, 664, 670, 732, 736, 751, 753, 761, 763, 773, 775

Francesca da Rimini, 685, 693 Franchi, Ausonio, 87 Francis of Assisi, 633, 727, 750 Freeman, E.A., 503 Frege, Gottlob, 639 Freiburg, 508 French, 8−11, 36−8, 45, 47, 61, 66−7,

45, 47−50, 52, 66, 86−8, 119, 163, 166, 173−6, 193−244, 254, 271, 334, 344, 348, 363−5, 368, 695; Elements

of Philosophy, 12, 14−23, 193−244; On Analysis and Synthesis, 12, 235; Philosophical Essay on the Critique of Consciusness, 12, 212, 235; Philosophical Letters, 12; Philosophy of Will, 13 Gandhi, Mohandas, 768 Gans, Eduard, 595, 634−5 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 47, 60, 775 Garin, Eugenio, 54, 67, 183 Gassendi, Pierre, 319, 340 Gatti, Stanislao, 48 Gavarni, Paul (Sulpice Chevalier), 512

70, 87, 93, 126, 159, 163, 166, 234, 269, 271−2, 281, 339, 357, 371, 389, 399, 401, 410, 439, 444, 446, 451, 455, 461, 466, 481, 485, 487, 502, 507−8, 512, 561, 595, 609, 630, 632, 635, 637, 658, 662−4, 732, 736, 751, 759, 762−3, 769, 773

Gebhardt, Bruno, 503 Genesis (Bible), 428 Geneva, 482 Genoa, 47, 87, 768 Genovesi, Antonio, 11, 119, 163, 270,

French Revolution, 4, 9, 24, 65, 79, 82,

66−7, 80, 89, 106, 117−46, 149−51, 161, 163−7, 169−70, 173, 175−81, 185−7, 189−90, 277, 533, 628, 637, 642−712, 717−19, 737−9, 744, 750−1, 768, 774−5, 777−8; ‘Critique of

277, 334

Gentile, Giovanni, 6−8, 50, 52, 61,

154−5, 234, 389, 466, 471, 473, 481, 561, 580, 595, 609, 630, 632, 635, 659, 732, 769, 773, 775

Froebel, Friedrich, 120, 651, 663 Fülop-Miller, René, 767, 777

Historical Materialism,’ 119, 664; ‘The Act of Thinking as Pure Act,’ 131−41, 187, 683−94; ‘The Foundations of Actual Idealism,’ 131−41,

Gabelli, Aristide, 54, 88 Galen of Pergamum, 320, 323

811

Name Index 37, 40−4, 278−311; On the Civil and Moral Primacy of the Italians, 4−5, 8, 36−9, 47, 50, 168, 264−77, 609; The Modern Jesuit, 38; On the Philosophi-

695−705; From Genovesi to Galluppi, 119; A General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act, 132; The Philosophy of

Marx, 119; ‘The Philosophy of Praxis,’ 118−25, 642−64, 751, 777; ‘The Rebirth of Idealism,’ 126−30, 665−82; Rosmini and Gioberti, 118−19, 126, 173; A System of Logic as a Theory of Knowledge, 132; Teaching Philosophy in High Schools, 126 Gerdil, Hyacinthe, 257, 263 German, 9, 11, 23, 27, 37−8, 48−50, 61, 66−70, 77−8, 80, 87, 91−2, 94, 97, 122, 132, 148, 159, 163, 174, 236, 239, 253, 265, 269, 271−2, 281, 359, 363, 371−4, 399, 401, 410, 429, 443−4, 463, 468, 471−2, 482, 485, 499, 501, 503−4, 506, 566, 609−11, 624, 626, 628−31, 635, 638, 642, 667, 695, 705, 713, 747−8, 753, 756, 759, 763, 772−3

cal Errors of Antonio Rosmini, 38; Philosophy of Revelation, 348; Protology, 348; Theory of the Supernatural, 37 Giobertians, 51, 66, 86, 347 Gioia, Melchiorre, 10, 24, 174 Giolitti, Giovanni, 142, 161, 763, 776 Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 142

Giornale dei letterati, 440, 443, 445−6, 462

Giusti, Giuseppe, 738, 751 God, 13, 30−1, 33, 37, 42, 44, 47, 59, 68, 107, 120, 123, 128, 155, 197, 207−8, 211, 230, 243, 246−7, 249−51, 257−8, 263, 265, 270, 276, 279, 282, 284−5, 289, 295−6, 302, 306−10, 318, 344, 346−9, 351−3, 355−68, 373, 376, 383, 385, 388, 390−1, 397, 399, 405, 418−19, 421−8, 433, 438, 442, 445−6, 460, 462, 501, 526, 549−51, 564, 576, 578, 583−4, 597, 613, 618, 625−6, 639−40, 645, 649, 656, 671, 674−5, 687, 694, 701, 704−5, 737−8, 769

Germany, 5, 48, 77, 86−7, 89, 126, 154, 157, 194, 251, 272, 280, 355, 371, 384, 400−1, 430, 445, 477, 482−4, 487, 502−4, 528, 551, 562, 597, 611, 621−2, 624, 629−30, 638, 671, 751, 753, 763, 773

Gerson, Jean Charlier de, 311 Gervinus, Georg, 463, 465, 482 Giani, Costanzo, 441, 446 Gibbon, Edward, 96 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 5, 7−8, 25, 36−47, 50-52, 57, 66−8, 86−8, 106, 118−19, 126, 163, 166−8, 170, 173, 177, 263−5, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275−9, 281, 283, 285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 295, 297, 299, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309−11, 344−9, 354, 362, 364−6, 368−9, 400, 417, 426, 428, 609, 663, 695; The

Catholic Reform of the Church, 348; Introduction to the Study of Philosophy,

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 160, 384, 435, 496, 501, 513, 557, 561, 597, 604, 608, 629−30, 634−8, 765

Goldbach, Christian, 505 Goldberg, Rube, 168 Goldbridle, 544, 627 Golgatha, 429, 444 Goncourt, Edmond de, 512 Gospel, 271, 415, 417, 694 Gracchi brothers, 267 Grammont, Philibert, Comte de, 509 Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 7, 147−53, 159−64, 166−8, 170, 188−90, 717, 719,

812

Name Index 721, 723, 725, 727, 729, 731, 733, 735, 737, 739, 741, 743, 745, 747, 749−52, 761−3, 765, 767, 769, 771, 773, 775−7;

Hebrew, 435, 445, 564, 640 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5, 8, 37, 48−53, 57, 60−4, 68, 70, 77−8, 87−9, 96, 99, 104−22, 125−6, 148, 150−1, 155−6, 162, 170, 184, 188, 251, 265, 267, 272, 363, 369, 373−4, 384, 387, 392, 397−9, 402−3, 405, 408−10, 412, 451, 473, 476, 482, 493−4, 496, 498, 502, 504, 508, 525, 532−641, 644−5, 649, 653−64, 671, 680−1, 694−5, 699, 717, 719, 743, 748−9, 751−2, 761, 772−3, 775, 777; Aesthet-

Letters from Prison, 159−62, 762−78; Prison Notebooks: Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, 147−52, 717−52 Gramsci, Carlo, 770 Gramsci, Delio, 762, 764 Gramsci, Teresina, 768, 777 Graz, 508 Greece, 37, 46, 72, 80, 187, 194, 241, 266−8, 270, 274, 277, 317, 320, 333, 345−6, 348−9, 378, 387, 390−1, 394, 403, 428, 432−3, 440, 445, 451, 457, 462−3, 468, 479−80, 482, 497, 509, 528, 548, 554, 580, 593, 609−11, 663

ics, 576, 584, 587, 609, 613; Encyclopedia Logic, 576, 633, 639, 694; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 548, 579−80, 583, 592−3, 604, 608, 610, 621, 773; Philosophical Dissertation

Gregory XVI, 24−5, 165 Grotius, Hugo, 431, 445, 600, 636 Guardian (newspaper), 3 Guelf, 38, 50−1, 66, 87, 400 Guerrini, Orlindo (Lorenzo Stecchetti), 511 Gumplovicz, Ludwig, 508 Guyau, Jean Marie, 504 Göttingen, 77, 421, 631

on the Orbits of the Planets, 604; Philosophical Propaedeutic, 583; Philosophy of History, 78, 96, 115, 156, 482, 493, 508, 591−5, 601−2, 604−7, 621, 630, 634−5; The Difference between Fichte’s

and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy, 629; The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 106−7, 533, 535, 566, 569, 576, 587, 591−2, 600, 604, 608, 617, 625, 633−4, 636−7, 639−40, 694; The Phenomenology of Spirit, 48, 156, 535, 546, 554, 566, 575−6, 580−1, 583, 585, 587, 599, 613, 625, 629−30, 632, 674; The Philosophy of Nature, 115,

Haeckel, Ernst, 512 Halley, Edmond, 327 Hamann, Johann Georg, 67, 435, 445, 552, 628

Hamilton, Anthony, 495, 509 Hampton Court Palace, 495, 509 Hartmann, Eduard von, 94, 409, 412, 488, 497, 504−6, 510−12, 618, 639; German Aesthetics, 94, 504−5, 510−11; Philosophy of the Beautiful, 488, 505−6, 511−12; Philosophy of the Unconscious, 94, 409, 412

Harvard University, 186 Haym, Rudolf, 640

566, 583, 591, 599, 601−5, 607−8, 611, 615−17, 619−21, 633, 637, 639; The

Philosophy of Right, 629, 637, 749; The Philosophy of Spirit, 582−3, 591, 601, 613, 633, 636, 681; The Science of Logic, 531, 535, 576, 578, 580−3, 599, 614, 681, 699; The System of Ethical Life, 583 Hegelian, 7−8, 48−53, 60−2, 64, 67−8,

813

Name Index 77−8, 83, 87−8, 94, 104, 106−7, 110, 115−16, 119, 128, 143, 148, 160, 169−70, 188, 267, 272, 452, 473−5, 487−8, 493, 503−4, 533, 544, 548, 556, 561−3, 566−8, 571, 583, 595−6, 606−7, 614−15, 618−22, 624−7, 629, 632, 636−7, 640, 642, 644−5, 661, 666−7, 671, 681, 699, 741−2, 748−9, 772, 776

Heidelberg, 625 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 637 Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 245, 263 Heraclitus, 549, 579, 582, 608, 624, 627 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 77−8, 84, 87, 90−1, 94−5, 181−2, 475, 483, 487−9, 491, 505−6, 562, 569, 622, 630−1, 640, 717, 749

Hercules, 430, 451 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 67, 508, 579, 635

Hutten, Ulrich von, 640 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 629 I Ching, 266 Iago, 94−5, 490 Idéologues, 10, 234 Il Cimento, 49 Il Contemporaneo (newspaper), 4 Il Mondo (newspaper), 143 Il Piemonte (newspaper), 49 Imbriani, Vittorio, 503−4, 506, 513 Index of Forbidden Books, 12, 25−6, 157, 263, 348

India, 266, 279, 293, 310, 610−11 Inquisition, 355, 396 Ionia, 376 Iran, 275 Ireland, 510, 581, 633 Israel, 469 Italy, 189, 663, 769, 779−80, 782−5,

Herodotus, 463, 479, 482 Hidden God (Deus absconditus), 699, 705, 769

789−91, 796−7, 799−802, 804

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 19, 67–68,

Hirth, Georg, 512 Historical Right (Destra storica), 119, 504

Hitler, Adolf, 117, 154, 157 Hobbes, Thomas, 321, 330, 658 Holmes, Roger, 186 Homer, 274, 391, 395, 435, 460, 468, 499, 609

Horace, 626−7, 662, 682 Horapollon, 483 Huizong (U Sheng), 266, 277 Hume, David, 8, 16, 19−22, 62, 163, 203, 232−3, 244, 246−8, 250, 252, 410, 442, 444, 448−9, 451, 552, 577, 579

Hungary, 753 Hus. John, 633

175, 277, 552, 579, 597-598, 608, 623, 628, 632, 635, 694

Jacobin, 24, 156, 559, 562-563 Jäger, Johannes, 640 Jaja, Donato, 118-119, 127, 142, 665, 680

James, William, 167, 170 James I of England, 513 Janet, Paul, 622, 640−1 Jannelli, Cataldo, 508 Jansenist, 509 Japan, 741 Jena, 625 Jerome, 633 Jesuit, 25, 38, 49, 164, 178, 340, 497, 725, 727

Jesus, 164, 399−400, 727

814

Name Index Jews, 121, 508, 549, 611, 635, 647, 653, 785

John’s Gospel, 417, 639, 682, 694 Jouffroy, Théodore, 9−10, 174 Jowett, Benjamin, 682 Judgment of Paris, 604, 636 Jupiter, 169, 375−6, 410, 449, 460 Kaffir, 392 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 7−8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 19−23, 27−8, 35, 38, 49−50, 52, 55−6, 62, 66−8, 70, 72−4, 77, 88, 93, 107, 123, 126, 129, 136, 138, 148, 163, 168, 170, 174−5, 187, 194, 212, 214−16, 218−22, 225, 227−8, 230−3, 235−44, 248−51, 253−4, 271, 318, 325, 336−7, 363, 370, 373, 386, 398−400, 405−7, 409, 430−1, 433, 435, 437, 439, 441−5, 450−1, 454, 458−9, 504, 536, 552−5, 569−70, 577, 579, 582, 587, 597−8, 608, 613, 621−2, 625, 628, 637−40, 657, 661, 663, 676−7, 681−2, 690, 695−6, 752, 761, 773; Critique of Judg-

ment, 552, 587; Critique of Practical Reason, 639; Critique of Pure Reason, 19−24, 72, 74, 163, 174, 214, 236−7, 243, 249−50, 373, 399, 430, 444, 454, 487, 552, 625, 628, 639

Kantian, 8, 21, 24, 38, 48−9, 55, 67, 75, 77, 87−8, 117−18, 126−8, 138, 167, 169−70, 215, 229, 271, 412, 487, 504, 549, 552, 555, 559, 621, 624, 629, 638−9, 669−70, 672, 681, 690−1

Kapila, 279, 310 Kepler, Johann, 266, 327 Kirchmann, Julius von, 61, 401, 409−12

Kitcher, Patricia, 21 Königsberg, 12, 23, 35, 77, 212, 232,

Köstlin, Karl, 499, 505 Krug, Wilhelm, 606, 637 La Critica, 5−6, 106, 117, 126, 142−3, 153, 164, 169, 628, 681, 695, 776

La Critica Fascista, 770 La Revue des deux mondes, 127 La Stampa (newspaper), 3, 483 La Voce, 117 Labriola, Antonio, 7, 77−86, 90−1, 94, 106, 119−20, 122, 149, 170, 181, 463−83, 506−8, 511, 513, 638, 640, 644, 650, 653, 658, 660, 662−4, 717−19, 749; Dell’insegnamento della

storia, 513; Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia, 640, 662; ‘History, Philosophy of History, Sociology and Historical Materialism,’ 80−5, 463−83, 638; I Problemi della filosofia della storia, 506, 508, 511; In Memory of the Communist Manifesto, 79, 106 Lammenais, Hugues Félicité Robert de, 25 Lamprecht, Karl, 503 Lange, Friedrich, 400 Lao Tse, 266 Lasalle, Ferdinand, 749, 751 Lateran Pacts, 157, 164, 750 Laterza, Giovanni, 106 Latin, 23−4, 42, 64, 71, 174, 267−70, 296−7, 317, 325, 333, 349, 415, 438−41, 472, 474, 480, 501, 651

Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 634 Lavoisier, Antoine, 65, 453 Lazarus, Moritz, 95, 182, 492, 495, 506, 509, 511−12

Lecky, William, 182, 496, 510 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 318, 340 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 8, 11, 27,

248, 442, 637

52, 77, 163, 270, 281, 321, 340, 357−8,

815

Name Index 370, 390, 398, 409, 489, 505, 539, 551−2, 579, 582, 597, 626, 691, 747 Leipzig, 401, 469, 482, 631, 637

Lely, Peter, 495, 509 Lenin, Vladimir, 758, 776 Leo XII, 45 Leo XIII, 26, 164, 189, 750 Leonardo da Vinci, 46, 117, 326−7, 330−1, 334, 339

270, 331, 399, 435, 437, 467, 496, 564, 609, 630−1, 719, 749, 766, 768, 770, 777 McTaggart, John, 629, 681 Mai, Angelo, 462 Malatesta, Paolo, 685, 693

Malebranche, Nicolas, 8−9, 30, 257, 263, 277, 281, 284, 426, 428

Mamiani, Terenzio, 7−8, 25, 45−7,

Leopardi, Giacomo, 60, 416−17, 457,

51−2, 69, 87, 167−8, 173, 177−8, 180−1, 273−4, 310, 312−42, 363−4, 368, 370, 400; Dialogues, 368; The

462, 489, 505

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 68, 510, 628

Lewes, George, 448, 461 Lewis, C.I., 186 Libya, 749 Littré, Paul-Émile, 75, 371, 385, 399, 455, 461, 474

Livy, 465 Locke, John, 8−11, 14, 28, 33−4, 47, 62, 163, 175, 229, 234, 245−8, 252, 263, 270, 335−7, 352, 357, 387, 401, 410−11, 444, 448−9, 579, 602

Lockhart, William, 174 Lombroso, Cesare, 509 London, 69, 421, 509, 740 Loria, Achille, 480, 483 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 504, 573, 631 Louis XIV, 509 Louis XVI, 632 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, 45 Lucan, 626 Ludwig I of Bavaria, 68−9 Lull, Ramon, 322 Luther, Martin, 37, 267, 270, 595 Lybia, 717 Macaulay, Thomas, 73, 448, 744, 751 Macedonia, 621 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 7, 37, 53, 161,

Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy, 45, 312−42 Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, 142−6, 706−12

Mann, Thomas, 154 Manzoni, Alessandro, 25, 36, 159, 167, 492, 507, 511, 693, 765

Marat, Jean-Paul, 96 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 632

Marinetti, Filippo, 143 Marsyas, 639−40 Martha, Constant, 510 Marucci, Achille, 479, 483 Marx, Karl, 49, 79−80, 83−4, 106, 119−27, 148−9, 473, 475−6, 480, 482, 620, 630, 636, 642−4, 646, 648−51, 653, 655−64, 680−1, 738, 749, 751, 757, 777; A Contribution to the Cri-

tique of Political Economy, 642−3; A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 749; Theses on Feuerbach, 119−20, 644−8, 662−3 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 49, 79, 106, 562, 749; The German Ideology, 482; The Holy Family, 720, 749, 777 Marxism, 80, 86, 106, 119, 126, 151,

816

Name Index 160, 638, 644, 661−2, 680−1, 750, 776 Marzocco, 766, 777

Masci, Filippo, 504 Masons, 145, 159, 711, 762 Maudsley, Henry, 632 Maurolico, Francesco, 327, 341 Maximilian II of Bavaria, 421 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 36, 47, 60, 144,

Montaigne, Michel de, 451−2, 461 Montecassino, 49 Moore, Thomas, 633 Morocco, 741 Moscow, 147, 776 Moses, 424 Moslem, 497, 741 Munich, 69, 508 Mussolini, Benito, 3, 5, 132, 142−3,

417, 707, 775

Mazzoni, Domenico, 48 Medici family, 327, 334 Medusa, 668 Mendelssohn, Moses, 68, 628 Mesopotamia, 482 Messalina, 416−17 Methuselah, 678 Metrodorus of Chios, 642, 662 Mexico, 610 Michelet, Jules, 67, 163, 632 Michelet, Karl Ludwig, 605, 619, 637,

147, 154, 157−8, 161, 163, 169, 706, 750, 776

Müller, Friedrich Max, 392, 400 Nahlowsky, Josef, 505 Naples, 5, 11, 13, 46, 48−51, 53, 60−1, 64, 66−8, 77−8, 86, 90−1, 117, 119, 126, 131, 143, 153, 168, 334, 354, 417, 429, 431−2, 434−5, 439, 444, 454, 460, 504, 513, 533, 566, 606, 624, 637, 649, 665, 680, 695, 759

Napoleon Bonaparte, 8−9, 24, 154−5,

640

Middle Ages, 37−8, 269, 274, 293, 344, 349−51, 353−4, 356, 367, 377−82, 389, 410, 467, 609 Milan, 55, 334, 767

167, 509, 595, 635

Nask (Avestan), 266, 277 Neo-Guelf, 38 Neo-Kantian, 181, 672 Neo-scholasticism, 6, 149, 164, 166,

Mill, John Stuart, 4, 52, 56, 73−5, 88, 170, 371−2, 385, 448−9, 451−3, 456−7, 461−2, 624, 628

Milyukov, Pavel, 758, 761 Mind, 86 Minerva, 375, 410 Mnesarchus of Tyre, 267 Moby Dick, 168 Mocenigo, Filippo, 323, 341 Modena, 50 Modernism, 165, 727 Mommsen, Theodor, 465−6, 482, 496, 609, 638

189, 719

Neoplatonism, 316, 346, 550, 608, 624, 627

Nero, 417 Nerva, 267 Neudecker, Georg, 504 New Testament, 466 Newton, Isaac, 55, 62, 163, 380−1, 398, 431, 600, 604, 620, 636−7

Niebuhr, Barthold, 609, 638 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 545, 627, 669 Nineveh, 468 Nizolio, Mario, 321, 326, 328, 331,

Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 143

339−40

817

Name Index Nobel Prize, 482, 511 Nola, 348, 369, 624 North America, 167, 169 Novara, 38 Nuova Antologia, 132, 412, 503 Ockham, William of, 269 Ornato, Luigi, 273, 277 Orwell, George, 137, 187 Oswald, James, 338 Ovid, 369 Owen, Robert, 647 Oxford, 86 Padua, 24, 54, 354 Palermo, 131−2, 693 Palladio, Andrea, 168 Palmieri, Luigi, 49, 51, 178 Pangloss, 55 Pantheon, 429, 444 Papal States, 45 Papini, Giovanni, 117, 633 Papua, 717−18, 749 Pareto, Vilfredo, 744, 751 Paris, 36, 38, 45, 69, 354, 399, 421, 444, 461, 509

Parma, 9 Parmenides, 7, 549, 582, 608, 627, 631 Passerini, Giambattista, 48 Pastonchi, Francesco, 475, 483 Patrizi, Francesco, 269, 319, 325, 331,

Pericles of Athens, 468 Peripatetic, 267, 269, 293, 318, 321, 323, 326, 328, 333, 341

Persia, 422, 428, 610−11, 621 Persico, Federico, 413, 417 Peru, 610 Perugia, 68−9 Pesaro, 45 Pescasseroli, 90 Peter Abelard, 269, 277 Peter the Hermit, 394 Petrarch, 317, 340, 506 Petty, William, 766, 777 Phenarete, 649 Phidias of Athens, 395 Philo Judaeus, 549, 627 Phoenicia, 470 Phoenix, 566 Physiocrats, 659, 664 Piedmont, 36−8, 49, 273, 277, 759 Pirandello, Luigi, 143 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 168 Pisa, 53, 66, 73, 118, 127, 142, 170, 380, 431, 454, 460, 462, 666, 680

Pius VIII, 24, 45 Pius IX, 25−6, 46, 69, 79, 165, 720, 749 Pius X, 165 Planck, Max, 117 Plato, 8, 27, 30, 46, 70, 123−4, 128−9, 169, 257, 266−7, 275, 277, 317, 320−1, 323, 341, 345, 347, 381, 387, 391, 396, 404, 409, 431−5, 437−9, 445, 486, 495, 549−50, 561, 608, 614, 627, 630, 633, 640, 649, 656, 660, 669, 673, 682, 687, 696; Cratylus, 435, 445; Parmenides,

340−1

Pattison, Mark, 86 Paul (New Testament), 68, 290, 419 Paul, Hermann, 508 Pavia, 86 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 117, 167 Pelasgian, 37, 168, 266−7, 269−70, 273−5

549, 627, 631; Philebus, 549, 673; Republic, 70, 432−4, 438, 630, 633, 669; Sophist, 549; Timaeus, 438, 673 Platonism, 47−8, 70, 87, 124, 141,

Pellico, Silvio, 90

269−70, 273, 325, 330−1, 334, 345,

818

Name Index 347, 438, 440, 549, 577−9, 624, 660, 673, 676, 696, 699−700 Pliny the Elder, 323

Reid, Thomas, 8−10, 12, 27−8, 33−5,

Plotinus, 7, 403, 408, 550, 627 Plutarch, 682 Po (river), 708 Poland, 753 Politecnico, 55, 399 Poliziano, Angelo, 317, 340 Polonius, 607 Polybius of Megalopolis, 609 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 46, 66−7, 127, 2

Remus, 465 Renaissance, 8, 46−7, 50, 53, 56, 66−7,

69, 317−19, 333−4, 340, 352−4, 671, 681

Popper, Karl, 169 Porphyry of Tyre, 277, 317, 532 Poseidon, 369 Prague, 505, 508 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 117, 744, 751 Proclus, 316, 320, 331, 550, 627 Procrustes, 582, 668 Protestant, 37, 68−9, 88, 270, 340, 554, 633

Proteus, 75, 455 Provence, 461 Prussia, 69, 212, 421, 482, 484, 503, 561, 630

Pythagoras, 7, 265−7, 445 Pythagorean, 37, 70, 265−9, 275, 376, 579

37−9, 126, 163, 174, 176, 247−8, 251− 3, 263, 271, 291, 304, 306, 336, 338

71, 127, 168, 369, 453, 461, 469, 482, 562, 595−6, 609, 630, 695, 725

Renan, Ernest, 371, 399, 502 Restoration, 8−11, 24−6, 45, 161, 354, 561, 630, 769

Reuchlin, Johann, 640 Revolutions, Italian and European, 19th Century, 8, 11, 25, 36, 45, 47, 50, 60, 65, 87, 121, 154, 161, 234, 277, 481, 561−2, 595, 647, 655, 664, 777 Rhea Silvia, 465 Ricardo, David, 161, 772−3, 777

Richter, Johann Paul (Jean Paul), 526, 532

Risorgimento, 66−7, 69, 71, 73, 75, 79, 144, 146, 168, 173, 369, 461, 482, 627, 695, 707, 715−16 Rivista italiana di filosofia, 47, 181 Rocca family, 445

Rocco, Alfredo, 775, 778 Rodin, Auguste, 96 Rollin, Charles, 495, 509 Romagnosi, Gian Domenico, 10, 24, 37, 270, 277, 508

Roman, 37, 64, 71−2, 79, 83, 168, 267−9, 349−50, 355, 378, 389, 394, 417, 436, 440−1, 444, 468−9, 472, 477, 480, 495−6, 507, 509, 610−11, 624, 725

Quattrocento, 67, 627 Quine, W.V., 183 Quintilian, 297 Rabelais, François, 583, 633 Ranke, Leopold von, 503 Ravenna, 68 Reformation, 354, 471, 595, 609, 725 Regno (Kingdom of Naples), 759

Roman Catholic, 10, 68, 164, 166, 725 Rome, 12, 25, 45, 47, 69, 72, 77, 79, 86−7, 90, 142−3, 147, 165, 169, 186, 267−8, 277, 334, 348−9, 421, 436, 441, 444, 470, 481−2, 504, 509, 513, 528, 590, 609, 621, 638, 708, 764, 766

819

Name Index Romulus, 267, 441, 465 Roscelin of Compiegne, Jean, 269 Rosenkranz, Johann Karl Friedrich, 605, 620, 628, 630, 632−3, 637−8, 640

Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio 7−13, 23−36, 38−9, 46−7, 50, 52, 57, 68, 86−8, 106, 118−19, 126, 163, 165−6, 173−7, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 271−2, 277, 281−2, 284−91, 310, 340, 344−8, 363−5, 368, 373, 400, 545−6, 622, 641, 695, 720, 749;

A Sketch of Modern Philosophy, 27−35, 174, 245−63; Essay on Communism and Socialism, 720; New Essay on the Origin of Ideas, 8, 10, 12, 24, 27−8, 46, 174−5, 281; The Five Wounds of the Holy Church, 25; The Renewal of Philosophy in Italy Proposed by Mamiani, 46, 310; Theosophy, 25, 176; Treatise on Moral Conscience, 25 Rosminianism, 38, 271−2, 347 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 163, 263, 373, 561, 629−30, 633, 635 Rovereto, 271, 277, 347

Royer-Collard, Pierre-Paul, 9 Ruggeri, Cosmo, 333 Russell, Bertrand, 4, 143, 150, 169,

Saluzzo Roero, Diodata, 461 Samanean, 266, 277 Sambiase Catanzaro, 66 Samkyha, 279, 310 Samos, 267 Sanfedisti, 45 Santarosa, Annibale Santorre, Count of, 273, 277 Santayana, George, 170 Sardinia, 36, 147, 750 Sardou, Victorien, 499, 511 Sarpi, Paolo, 37, 270, 277 Satan, 25, 526 Savonarola, Girolamo, 53, 170 Savoy, 263, 482 Schasler, M.F.A., 504 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 68−9, 113, 251, 337, 363, 397, 403−4, 409, 418, 421, 426−8, 553−5, 570, 577, 579, 587, 597−8, 601−2, 606−8, 617−18, 623, 629, 631, 636−7, 639−40

Schiller, Friedrich, 416, 498, 501, 504, 506, 513, 587, 635

Schlegel, Friedrich, 36, 461 Schmid, Aloys, 627 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 94−5, 182, 407, 491, 493−5, 498, 506, 510, 562, 587, 618, 622, 640

639, 740

Russia, 48, 147, 150, 157, 751, 753−4,

Schoppe, Caspar (Scioppius), 318,

757−8, 761, 776

Russian Revolution, 147, 149, 157−8, 757

Ryle, Gilbert, 109, 112 Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de, 340 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de, 453, 461, 474 Saints Maurice and Lazarus, Order of, 473, 482 Saladin, 742

340

Schucht, Giulia, 147, 776 Schucht, Tania, 147, 159−62, 762−78 Scientific Revolution, 57, 398 Scotism, 272 Scott, Walter, 594 Scottish, 8−9, 27, 37−9, 45, 126, 247−8, 271, 288, 290−1, 304, 306, 321

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 118−19, 142, 664, 680

Sellars, Wilfrid, 107, 184

820

Name Index Semitic, 468, 630 Senate, 3−4, 142−3, 768 Seneca the Younger, 268, 297 Sepulveda, Juan Ginés de, 318, 340 Servite, 277 Servius Tullius, 267 Settembrini, Luigi, 511 Shakespeare, William, 94, 167, 494, 514, 526, 532, 607, 609; Hamlet, 607; Macbeth, 96, 494, 526, 532; Richard III, 494 Sicily, 46, 118−19, 126, 131, 462 Siebeck, Hermann, 505 Siena, 3 Silenus, 669−70, 681 Simmel, Georg, 91, 182, 507, 510 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard de,

losophy,’ 343−70; ‘Jesuit Saturdays,’ 49; Italian Philosophy in Relation to European Philosophy, 50; Principles of Philosophy, 51−2; ‘Prolusione e introduzione alle lezioni di filosofia,’ 627; Studies on Hegel’s Ethics, 52 Spaventa, Silvio, 49, 51, 90, 777 Spencer, Herbert, 54, 74, 86, 88, 165, 181, 450−1, 458, 462, 504, 562, 624, 630, 641, 682 Spengler, Oswald, 755, 761

Spielberg, 771, 777 Spinelli, Matteo, 501, 513 Spinoza, Baruch, 50, 52, 68−9, 77, 88, 117, 129−30, 276, 280, 356−9, 363, 366−7, 398, 403−5, 408−9, 422, 425, 515, 517, 531, 551, 562, 577, 579, 582, 597, 618, 624, 628, 631−2, 639, 677, 694

461

Smith. Adam, 8 Soave, Francesco, 174 Socrates, 77, 120, 266, 268, 315−16, 320, 345−6, 372, 381, 392, 441, 549, 577, 608, 624, 640, 648−9, 705 Solla, Nicola, 439, 446

Solon of Athens, 479, 755, 761 Sorbonne, 9, 641 Sorel, Georges, 79, 106, 160, 644, 662, 680−1, 763−4, 776

Soviet Union, 147, 149, 753 Spain, 276, 509 Sparta, 621 Spaventa, Bertrando, 7−8, 47−54, 66−7, 69−70, 77, 79, 87−8, 90, 106, 118−19, 126−7, 149, 167−8, 170, 173−4, 178, 180, 343, 345, 347, 349, 351, 353, 355, 357, 359, 361, 363, 365, 367, 369−70, 400, 504, 616, 621, 627, 631, 635, 637, 639−40, 665−6, 672, 680, 718−19, 749; ‘The Character

and Development of Italian Phi-

Spoleto, 66 Sraffa, Piero, 159, 771, 777 St Helena, 24 St Bartholemew’s Day, 50 Staël, Madame de (Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine de), 457, 461

Stalin, Josef, 149 Stecchetti, Lorenzo (Orlindo Guerrini), 498, 511 Stewart, Dugald, 8, 10, 174, 176 Stilo, 676 Stirling, James H., 621, 624, 628−9, 640

Stirner, Max (Johann Schmidt), 473, 482

Stoic, 267−8, 323, 409, 565, 608, 624 Strato of Lampsacus, 269 Strauss, David, 400 Stresa, 25 Stuart dynasty, 495

821

Name Index Stuart, Mary, 501, 513 Sturm und Drang, 597 Sturzo, Luigi, 750 Swift, Jonathan, 71 Swiss, 45, 66, 634 Sybel, Heinrich von, 503, 507 Symonds, John Addington, 53 Syria, 611 Tabor, 429, 444 Tacitus, 431, 437, 467, 501, 513, 761 Tai Chi, 266 Taine, Hippolyte, 371, 385, 399, 609, 632, 638

Tantalus, 667 Taoism, 266, 277 Targioni Tozzetti, Fanny, 505 Tari, Antonio, 48, 503−4 Tartaglia, Niccolò, 327, 341 Tasso, Torquato, 462 Telesio, Bernardino, 66−7, 269, 319, 323−6, 328, 334, 340−1, 352, 354, 378, 695 Tertullian, 268

Thales of Miletus, 581 Themistocles, 672, 682 Theophrastus of Eresos, 269 Thomism, 164, 166, 765 Thucydides, 467, 609 Tiber, 268 Tiedemann, Dieterich, 608, 638 Tissot, C.J., 174 Tocco, Felice, 118−19, 635, 663 Tommasi, Salvatore, 54, 606, 637 Torino, 3, 25, 36, 38, 46−7, 49, 60, 147 Tours, 437 Trajan, 267−8 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 561, 630 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 622,

Trent, Council of, 164, 277, 595 Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold, 608, 637−8

Trieste, 768, 777 Tropea, 11, 193 Troy, 604, 636, 662 Tübingen, 629, 664 Tuscan, 167, 327, 507, 750 Tyrrhenian, 267 Ullmann, Heinrich, 503 United States, 4, 167, 753 Vacherot, Étienne, 70, 371, 399 Valbusa, Domenico, 179 Valla, Lorenzo, 46, 317−18, 321, 326, 328, 331, 340

Vanini, Giulio Cesare, 319, 333, 340 Vatican, 25, 387 Vatolla, 437, 445−6 Venice, 277, 355 Venn, John, 86 Venus, 449 Vera, Augusto, 48, 77, 87, 605, 620, 635, 637, 640, 662

Verdi, Giuseppe, 167, 511 Vergil, 154, 513, 680 Vico, Giambattista, 7, 10, 37, 45−6, 50, 52, 56, 58, 67, 70−4, 88, 91, 120, 127, 131, 150, 162−3, 168, 190, 270, 273−4, 277, 297, 334, 344, 348, 360−5, 367−8, 370, 376, 392, 394, 399, 429−46, 454, 461, 508−9, 531−2, 551−2, 564−5, 570−1, 597, 624, 628, 631, 649−50, 663, 668, 674, 695, 717, 747, 775;

Autobiography, 430; The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (De antiquissima italorum sapientia), 437−40, 445, 649; The New Science, 67, 70, 72, 163,

627, 640−1

168, 270, 359−60, 370, 392, 429−34,

822

Name Index 437−9, 442−6, 532, 566, 649, 674; The Sole Origin and End of Law, 437, 441, 445; Universal Right, 439

Vienna, 505, 767 Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro, 45 Villari, Pasquale, 7, 51, 53−60, 73, 82, 88, 90, 92, 118, 127, 165, 168, 170, 371−400, 445, 467, 482, 503, 509−10;

History of Girolamo Savonarola and His Times, 53; ‘Is History a Science?’ 54, 90, 92, 482, 503, 509−10; Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times, 53; ‘Positive Philosophy and Historical Method,’ 51, 371−400, 445 Villers, Charles, 174 Volapük, 745, 751 Volpe, Gioacchino, 143, 154, 767, 777 Voltaire, 163, 499, 511 Vulgate Bible, 639, 761 Waddington, Evelino, 68 Waddington-Kastus, Charles, 69, 421 Wagner, Richard, 501, 638 Wallace, William, 681 Waterloo, 595, 635 Weber, Max, 751

Werner, Karl, 663 Westphalia, 642 Windelband, Wilhelm, 91 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 184 Wolff, Christian, 11, 358, 370, 579, 638 Woltmann, Ludwig, 609, 638 Wundt, Wilhelm, 475, 483, 507, 681 Xenophon of Athens, 317, 320 Yoga, 310 Young Italy (newspaper, movement), 36−7, 60, 144, 707

Zabarella, Jacopo, 319, 340, 352 Zanella, Emilio, 768, 777 Zarathustra, 127 Zeller, Eduard, 77 Zeno of Elea, 46, 316, 320, 331, 548−9 Zervan Akarana, 266, 277 Zeus, 499 Zimmermann, Robert, 488, 504−5 Zola, Émile, 61 Zoroaster, 266, 277, 428 Zumbini, Bonaventura, 511 Zurich, 60

823

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General Index

a priori, 22, 34, 61, 74, 123, 128, 194, 213−22, 224, 226, 228−30, 232, 234−7, 240−1, 243−4, 289, 298, 302, 314, 322, 328, 336−7, 410, 450, 515, 532, 552−3, 577, 583, 592−5, 628, 656−8, 677, 682, 740 Absolute, 16−18, 22, 57, 62, 114−15, 206−8, 230−1, 243, 280, 373, 377, 384−5, 388, 390, 404, 407, 412, 420−1, 451−2, 529, 550, 553, 557, 576−7, 579, 581, 585, 587−8, 601, 616, 618−19, 623, 626, 629 abstract, 30−2, 41−2, 58, 70−1, 82−4, 102−4, 108, 110, 113−15, 120−2, 125, 131−4, 136−7, 139−41, 250, 259−60, 282−4, 290−4, 361, 363, 470−2, 476−7, 495, 510, 519−30, 547, 549−50, 576, 634, 645−61, 682−92, 696−7, 700−4, 740, 743, 745 abstraction, 15, 28−9, 31, 33, 137−40, 196−7, 260−1, 283−4, 292−3, 545−6, 556, 576, 651−2, 656, 658, 684, 692, 696 accident, 201−2, 214, 219−20, 239, 243, 258−60, 405, 523, 532, 556, 593

act, 28−9, 34, 41−2, 70, 104, 123, 132−4, 138−41, 157, 169, 196, 201−2, 205−6, 216, 221−2, 248, 251, 274, 280, 282−5, 290−305, 309, 311, 313, 325, 360−1, 365, 368−9, 414, 428, 455, 516, 519, 525−6, 532, 555, 559−61, 566, 580, 586, 589, 634, 646, 650, 674, 683−93, 696−704, 714, 721, 730, 735, 739, 744, 748, 757 action, 14, 71, 79, 81, 85, 104, 138−9, 146, 153, 157−8, 195−6, 203, 208, 216, 220, 238, 240, 246, 251, 268, 276, 282−3, 285, 297, 300, 302, 304−5, 318, 337, 349−50, 360, 372, 388, 402, 407, 414, 419, 424−7, 437, 449−50, 455−6, 464−5, 474, 490, 492, 494, 501, 510, 519, 525−6, 531, 560, 594, 599, 646, 651, 670, 698−9, 703, 705, 708−9, 711−12, 714−15, 723, 728, 746−7, 749, 753, 755−6, 759, 761, 775 activism, 117, 145, 157−8, 169, 730, 751, 754, 756−7, 763, 777 activity, 14−15, 28−9, 33−5, 40−1, 44, 75, 78−80, 99, 103, 105, 108, 110, 120−3, 134, 136, 138−40, 148,

General Index 155, 195−6, 203, 213, 216−17, 228−9, 233, 236, 246, 266, 282, 295−6, 299−301, 305, 309, 313, 324−5, 334, 345−6, 348, 351−2, 362, 365−9, 375, 382, 403, 406−7, 424, 427, 450, 455−7, 486−7, 491, 497, 500, 514, 516, 520, 524, 534−5, 537−8, 543, 555, 559−60, 563, 568−70, 572, 576, 579, 584−8, 592, 595, 599−600, 605, 616, 626, 646−57, 661, 663−4, 667, 675, 679, 687, 690, 697, 702−3, 707, 710−11, 720−8, 730, 734, 744−8, 762−4, 767, 772−3, 775 actual, 7, 43, 97, 121, 126, 131, 133−41, 149, 164, 169, 220, 239, 260, 287, 290, 296−7, 303, 306, 347, 363, 529, 546−7, 559−60, 563, 593, 595, 646, 651, 676, 683−700, 703, 719, 730, 739, 742 actual idealism, 7, 121, 126, 131, 149, 164, 695−6, 719, 739 actualism, 126, 131−3, 137, 140, 142, 151, 158, 164, 186, 695−6, 699−700, 704−5, 742, 744 actuality, 141, 169, 243, 282, 309, 423, 428, 559, 684, 689, 696, 699, 703, 722 actualization, 155, 296, 309, 368, 522, 560, 606, 693, 696−7, 699, 703, 747 aesthetic, 72, 81, 92, 94−7, 117, 216−17, 237−8, 352, 415, 478, 485−9, 496−9, 504−5, 511, 516, 526, 528, 541, 551, 553, 573, 581, 584−9, 597, 620, 623, 631, 640, 695, 766 aesthetics, 78, 91, 93−4, 96, 99, 106−7, 112, 114−15, 131, 153,

156, 181, 237, 374, 401, 464, 487−8, 495, 497−9, 503−6, 510−12, 519, 534, 564, 568−9, 576, 584, 587, 609, 613, 625 affect, 14, 19, 194−5, 200, 215−18, 229−30, 236−8, 262, 425, 499, 604, 672 affirmation, 15, 28, 43, 110, 133−40, 197, 218−19, 234, 306−7, 363, 420, 517, 519, 524, 527, 540, 543−4, 558, 572, 602, 617, 629, 645, 671−2, 683−4 affirmative, 211, 218, 220, 234, 238, 580 age, 13, 36−7, 52, 60, 70, 85, 147−8, 163, 171, 266, 281, 323, 326, 329, 358, 362, 368, 377, 391, 399, 411, 416, 444, 455, 481−2, 508, 530, 622, 695, 759−60 age (epoch), 157, 562, 595, 608−9, 746 agency, 58, 79, 94, 120, 122−3, 146, 156, 388−9, 456, 560, 742−3 agnostic, 128, 144, 552, 672, 682, 707, 745 alchemy, 56−7, 374, 377−8, 381, 384−5, 668, 682 alienation, 127, 562, 616−17, 667 alteration, 75, 239, 243, 289, 301−2, 304, 454−6, 517, 521, 653 ambiguity, 80, 149, 239, 290, 486, 505, 606, 737−8 anachronism, 128, 151, 673, 717, 722 analogy, 3, 17, 56, 70, 97, 110, 138, 167, 210, 231, 243, 254, 288, 290, 296, 312, 326, 329, 348, 378, 393, 428, 463, 496, 516, 522, 541−2, 576, 590, 600−3, 606, 654, 661, 702, 707, 729, 743, 745−6

826

General Index analysis, 12, 15−16, 22, 38, 40, 42−3, 62, 88, 102−4, 141, 152, 183, 193−202, 216−17, 229−33, 235, 246, 262, 271, 273, 279, 281, 289, 292, 310, 319, 322, 324, 327, 330, 336−7, 370, 403−4, 408, 419−20, 469, 473, 476, 487, 494, 537, 582, 590, 614, 646, 648−9, 699, 701, 735, 740, 742, 746, 767, 773 ancestor, 45−6, 149, 270, 312, 315−16, 326, 330, 332, 334, 339, 368, 449, 457, 749 ancient thought and culture, 8, 36−7, 46, 56, 70, 167−8, 238, 264−6, 269−70, 273, 275−6, 278−9, 281, 296, 300−1, 309−10, 313, 319−20, 322, 324, 333, 340, 346, 348−9, 353, 367, 377, 379, 382, 385, 388−9, 396, 419, 428, 437−42, 451, 460, 465−70, 479−80, 523, 548, 608−10, 621, 627, 676, 696, 699−700, 706, 755 ancient wisdom, 8, 37, 46, 168, 266, 270, 272−5, 320, 437−40, 442, 460 ancients, 238, 265, 279, 281, 301, 322, 324, 333, 349, 379, 467 anglophone, 3−5, 7, 24, 53, 86, 88, 99, 107, 112, 163, 167, 169−71, 174,763 animal, 9, 32, 64−5, 84, 116, 124, 217, 223−4, 234, 241, 252, 258, 262, 327, 360, 362, 376, 382, 391−2, 414−16, 426, 433, 464, 478, 489−90, 515, 522, 532, 565, 594, 602−3, 605, 612, 617, 636, 658−9, 678, 687, 724 annihilation, 205, 214, 327−8, 357, 544−5, 591, 692 anthropology, 72, 114, 313, 398, 574, 608, 613, 645−6

anticlericalism, 118, 165 antinomy, 62, 72, 74, 136, 138, 405, 450, 552, 554, 577, 628, 690, 701 antithesis, 62, 114, 145, 160−1, 293, 345, 405, 451, 538−9, 541, 543, 550−4, 557, 573−4, 581, 601, 610, 612−13, 618, 628, 632, 690, 692, 710, 727, 770 anxiety, 270, 320, 427, 456, 700 aphorism, 557, 630−1, 638, 747, 752 apodictic, 46, 220, 289, 316, 335−6 apparent, 212, 216, 283, 293, 345, 423, 491, 500, 549, 617, 620, 688, 695 appearance, 20−1, 42−3, 96, 111, 127, 129, 138, 202, 214−16, 229−30, 236−40, 242, 244, 246, 248−50, 296, 298, 304, 311, 351, 356, 360, 362, 365, 402, 405, 407−8, 415−16, 422−3, 425, 438, 464, 472, 478, 485, 489, 492, 494, 497, 506, 536, 538, 548, 552, 555−7, 568, 570, 575−8, 582, 593, 599, 603, 606, 615, 654, 656, 662, 668−9, 673, 675, 677, 695, 710, 724−5, 732, 735, 756, 758, 766, 776 apperception, 19, 84, 222, 236, 240− 1, 402, 478, 490, 497, 628, 698 appetite, 65, 70, 361, 416, 432−3 apprehension, 10, 29, 33−4, 115, 176, 201, 239, 244, 251, 282−3, 285−6, 289−91, 300−1, 303−5, 309, 348, 365, 479, 551, 587 arbitrary, 27, 34−5, 149, 157, 232, 314, 517, 520, 522−3, 528, 532, 536, 541, 543, 545, 556, 560, 571, 578, 581, 583, 587, 592, 599, 602, 606, 612, 660, 667, 690, 709, 714, 733, 740, 742, 747, 757

827

General Index architecture, 228, 387, 495, 497, 605, 613 argument, 18−19, 27−8, 32, 68, 72, 76, 95, 120, 146, 176, 219−20, 233, 235, 246, 250−1, 264, 279−80, 282−4, 288, 298, 313, 317, 322, 324, 330, 333, 335−6, 338, 346, 411, 430, 438, 445−6, 450, 455, 459−60, 492, 496, 536, 546, 549, 575, 604, 608, 625, 653, 677, 714, 731−3, 738, 742 aristocracy, 11, 68, 70, 267, 570, 610, 758, 777 arithmetic, 50, 347, 489, 505, 571, 582, 600, 620, 650, 688 art, 54, 58, 61, 64, 80−1, 85, 91−9, 107, 111−15, 119, 167, 241, 275, 321−4, 326−7, 329−32, 350−1, 364, 372, 378, 381, 387−8, 393, 395, 397−8, 401−2, 404, 407, 414−16, 428, 434, 443, 451, 453, 457, 463−5, 467, 470−1, 480−2, 484−91, 493−503, 505, 507, 509−14, 519, 521, 528−9, 532, 534−5, 541, 553, 558, 560, 568, 570−4, 584−90, 594, 596, 601, 607, 609−11, 613, 618, 621, 623, 634, 638−9, 641, 649, 666, 668−9, 671, 680, 682, 705, 713, 725, 742−3, 750, 753−4, 777 artificial, 79, 102, 120, 150, 289, 295, 407−8, 435, 602, 678, 713, 715, 740, 751 artist, 96−7, 113−15, 127, 143, 326, 387−8, 465−6, 484−5, 490−1, 494−6, 499−502, 510−13, 558, 560, 568, 571−3, 584, 586−8, 590, 597, 610, 619, 713, 743−4, 751 assertion, 31, 41, 128, 132, 140, 219, 238, 247−8, 252−5, 258, 260, 289,

292, 294−5, 384, 416, 526, 530, 539, 547−8, 551, 558, 577−9, 582, 590, 593−4, 615, 657−8, 672−3, 683−7, 696, 723, 733, 738−9 assumption, 17, 31−2, 64, 129, 175, 203−4, 210−11, 221−3, 226−9, 235, 260−1, 285−9, 292, 300, 302−4, 314, 316−17, 325, 329, 336−7, 407−8, 433, 450, 458, 469, 471, 474, 498, 535−6, 538, 570, 575, 579, 588, 590, 599, 602, 617, 620, 623, 635, 644, 649, 652, 657, 675, 728, 735 astrology, 56−7, 374, 377, 381, 384−5, 395 astronomy, 56, 266, 341, 374, 380, 611, 620, 744 atheism, 149, 250, 265, 269, 279−80, 562, 704, 725, 739 atom, 64, 74, 100−1, 123−4, 340, 358, 412, 453, 516, 519, 523, 569, 579, 603, 659, 704, 710, 714 attention, 15, 34, 196−200, 212, 242, 403, 406, 477, 689, 702 attitude, 5, 84, 119, 148, 169, 302, 354, 402, 463, 476, 481, 535, 559, 561−2, 564, 586, 594, 623, 666, 704, 706, 715, 726, 736−8, 760, 765, 770, 774 attribute, 358−9, 409, 422, 478, 517, 551, 557, 578, 618, 670, 685, 691 authentic, 84, 103, 115, 352, 377, 477−8, 481, 570, 677 authority, 6, 25, 53, 139, 152, 165, 170−1, 209−10, 212, 274−5, 302, 314, 316, 318−19, 321, 325, 328, 331−2, 334, 339, 362, 372, 378−9, 400, 406, 435−6, 447, 454, 467, 471, 515, 552, 564, 672, 698, 706,

828

General Index 714−15, 718, 727, 731, 733, 756, 761 autobiography, 152−3, 163, 169, 173, 182, 444, 511, 580−1, 768, 774 autocracy, 157, 757−8 autoctisis (self-creation), 140, 187 autonomy, 41, 80, 115−16, 294, 357, 367, 400, 415, 423, 469, 476, 572, 584, 589, 591, 601, 607, 619, 663, 671, 722, 724, 739 axiom, 108, 264, 297, 301, 329, 335−7 bacchant, 355, 546, 611, 667, 669−70, 680 bad habit, 319, 323, 334, 457 bad infinity, 62, 105, 529, 532, 556 baptism, 164, 280, 576 barbarian, 150, 268−9, 273, 317, 321, 350, 392, 468, 498, 523, 536, 563, 604, 610, 622, 745, 768 baroque, 153, 168, 497, 741 beauty, 55, 61, 64, 92−4, 103−4, 108, 111−12, 328, 330, 348, 374, 386−7, 415, 425, 486−90, 505−6, 511, 516−17, 520, 524, 526, 528, 538−9, 541, 557, 572, 583, 587, 611, 744, 754 becoming, 61, 64, 116, 125, 133, 140, 216, 228, 283−4, 293, 355, 357, 361, 406, 414, 424, 426−7, 435−6, 452, 472, 525, 543−5, 549, 557, 560, 565, 571−3, 575−6, 581, 583−4, 596, 601, 603, 613−14, 616, 620−22, 626, 655, 659, 661, 667, 687, 692, 699−700, 723, 726, 728, 739 being, 12, 17, 30−4, 41−4, 51, 57, 61−2, 108−9, 111, 114, 116, 136, 139−41, 196, 203−8, 213, 216,

222, 230, 237, 243, 247−8, 254, 257−63, 275, 280−2, 284−311, 314, 325, 329, 335, 345−8, 355, 357−69, 377, 384−5, 402−11, 414, 419−20, 422−8, 438, 517, 525−9, 532, 538−9, 543−7, 549, 551, 557−9, 571−8, 581−3, 592, 613−16, 626, 652, 674, 686, 692, 698−701, 705 belief, 28, 30, 33−4, 134−5, 248−9, 255, 258, 275, 283, 288, 339, 350−6, 375, 379, 390, 411, 451, 456, 460, 497, 564, 651, 653−4, 674, 715, 720, 737−8, 748 biography, 175, 177, 182, 185, 188, 446, 461−2, 512, 561, 564, 581, 637 biology, 54, 67, 73, 83, 124, 448, 453, 474, 478, 637 body, 15, 22, 27, 34, 39, 75, 120, 140, 155, 166, 194, 196−7, 201−2, 207, 211−12, 214, 217−20, 222, 224, 229, 233−4, 246, 248, 250, 253−4, 256, 270, 272, 283−4, 288, 290−1, 296, 301, 304, 327, 337, 358, 360, 372, 375−6, 380−1, 383, 403−4, 408, 416, 423, 426, 456, 489, 510, 557, 577, 579, 612, 617, 646, 655−6, 668, 674, 701−3, 799 botany, 327, 391, 494, 507, 608, 611 bourgeois, 120, 471, 648, 719, 735 brain, 236, 337, 403, 407, 410, 499, 539, 552, 559, 675 canon, 19, 67, 163, 223−4, 229, 269, 475, 578, 629, 660 categorical, 219−20, 239, 243, 267, 763 categorical imperative, 552 category, 19, 62, 80, 93−4, 101−2,

829

General Index 112, 128, 220, 222−30, 233, 237−9, 241, 256, 317−18, 336, 395, 402, 406−7, 410, 424, 443, 448, 480, 490, 494, 498, 518, 538−9, 549, 570, 576, 580−3, 589, 593, 614, 621, 627, 657, 673, 676, 690−1, 699, 706, 710, 720, 740 cathedral, 122, 431, 458, 497, 654 Catholic, 10, 12−13, 24, 38, 49, 68, 86−7, 127, 156−8, 161, 164−7, 171, 263−8, 310, 340, 348, 352, 354, 477, 564, 566, 595, 633, 704, 715, 719, 725, 727, 732, 735, 738, 755−6, 758, 761, 765, 774 causality, 16, 18−21, 42−3, 109, 137−9, 203, 205−8, 211, 219, 228, 232−3, 239, 297, 299−302, 304, 306, 336, 402, 448−50, 467, 507, 511−12, 514, 650, 679, 690, 740, 772 cause, 11−12, 14, 16−19, 21, 43, 70, 72−5, 84, 121, 129, 138, 195, 197−8, 203−12, 219−20, 228−9, 231, 239−40, 246−8, 252, 264−5, 274−6, 280, 288, 290−1, 294, 297−302, 304, 307−8, 312−13, 315, 317−19, 324, 328, 330, 332, 337−9, 348−9, 351, 354−5, 357, 361−2, 366−7, 375−9, 381−2, 384, 386, 389−90, 393, 401, 405, 419, 422, 424, 426−7, 431−2, 437, 442−3, 447−8, 450, 453, 457−8, 467, 476, 481, 492−3, 501, 506, 512, 530, 538, 540, 542, 553, 562−5, 567−9, 573, 600, 604, 607, 620, 652, 656, 664, 666, 668, 670, 672, 676−7, 690, 703, 711, 715−16, 730, 740, 742−4, 750, 756, 759, 766, 770, 772 certainty, 41, 46, 55, 57, 70−2, 74,

81, 85, 138, 160, 168, 194, 202, 209−210, 213, 221, 223, 242, 246−50, 260, 280, 294−5, 302, 305−6, 312−14, 316, 320, 324−5, 328−9, 332, 335−8, 354, 357, 359, 362, 365, 374, 378−9, 383−4, 388, 393, 398, 403, 406, 419, 425−6, 430, 433−5, 439, 441−3, 454, 466−7, 478, 493, 495, 528, 544, 558−60, 564, 581, 585−6, 597, 599, 643, 649, 683, 688, 737−8, 745, 747, 765, 771 change, 19, 43, 74−5, 77−8, 81, 84, 120, 124, 148, 151−2, 155, 163, 166, 193, 208, 228, 243, 298, 304, 306, 313, 338, 374−6, 386, 389, 391−2, 398, 430, 452−6, 465, 473, 476, 481, 492, 502, 512, 520−1, 543, 555, 559−60, 565, 577−8, 582−3, 585, 623, 626, 647−8, 650, 659−60, 704, 708, 725, 731, 733, 735, 748, 750, 755−6, 760, 774 chaos, 71, 146, 151, 265, 349, 369, 477, 675, 715, 735, 737 character (abstract/empirical/intelligible), 138, 305 character (dramatic, fictional), 94, 150, 369, 488−90, 492, 506−7, 512 character (intellectual, moral, aesthetic, historical, national, ethnic), 52, 124, 144, 160, 169, 268, 275−6, 279, 330, 343, 345, 349, 353, 367−8, 371, 375, 392, 398, 441, 460, 469−70, 481, 484, 486, 488−9, 492−4, 514−15, 529, 533, 535, 542, 563, 567, 576, 584−5, 588−9, 594−6, 599−600, 609−10, 661, 675, 677, 700, 707, 718, 721, 727, 730, 733, 735−6, 738, 746, 763

830

General Index character (logical, metaphysical), 523, 529−30, 535, 542−3, 545, 553, 563, 589, 594−5, 599, 618, 728 character (objective/subjective), 29, 284, 304, 324 character (phenomenal), 409 characters (symbols), 243, 657 chemistry, 27, 56, 65, 73, 116, 312, 372, 374, 377, 383, 399, 416, 448−9, 453, 485, 507, 582−3, 605, 611−12, 657, 668, 679, 682, 743 choice, 58, 85, 136, 138, 148, 154, 157, 271, 275, 344, 360, 408, 424−5, 428, 452, 479, 512, 520, 532, 566, 669, 679, 697, 711, 721, 723−4, 728, 760, 772 chronicle, 513−14 chronology, 10, 173, 180, 188, 289, 446, 514, 579, 632−3, 691 church, 75, 164, 199−200, 352, 497, 663, 732, 734−5, 756 circulation, 8, 48, 50, 126, 343 circumstance, 70, 75, 97−8, 330, 432, 437, 454, 490, 496, 498−9, 561, 595, 733, 754, 760 citizenship, 4, 37, 112, 144−5, 270, 369, 410, 706−7, 710−11, 713, 715 city, 3, 25, 60, 69, 90, 143, 147, 165, 268, 303, 349, 362, 387, 400, 432, 480, 507 civil, 37, 114, 145−6, 267−8, 350, 359, 477, 565, 574, 614, 632, 709, 715−16, 719, 725, 750 civil society, 114, 146, 477, 574, 614, 632, 716, 725, 750 civilization, 53, 64, 72, 84, 159, 161, 164, 275−6, 333−4, 349, 388, 390−1, 394−5, 410, 416, 441, 468, 472, 477−8, 480, 484, 507−8, 518,

607, 610, 617, 620, 698, 707, 709, 718−19, 725, 740−1, 753, 758−9, 763, 768, 774 class (logic, taxonomy, metaphysics), 30−1, 100, 122, 218, 238, 249, 257−8, 279, 456, 496, 516, 520, 537, 558, 587, 590, 595, 606, 634, 654 class (socio-economic, political), 36, 48, 82, 85, 88, 90, 97, 118, 147, 151−2, 167, 469−71, 476−7, 481, 499, 561, 587, 680, 719, 732, 735, 740, 750, 760, 775 classical (curricular, theoretical), 36, 148, 183, 193, 508, 533, 642, 747−8, 772−3, 777 classical English economics, 773, 777 classical German philosophy, 148, 508, 642, 747−8, 772 classics (ancient), classicism, 37, 71, 269, 399, 496, 508, 510, 610, 621 classification, 30, 62, 70, 82, 101, 103, 112−13, 258, 317, 338, 387−8, 392, 424, 464, 467, 470, 488, 494, 496−7, 499, 522−3, 532, 568−9, 571, 589, 602, 613, 631, 740, 745 clergy, 25, 51, 69, 79, 87, 446, 725, 735, 756 coercion, 478, 697, 719, 750 cogito, 18, 72, 443, 649, 691 cognition, 12, 14−22, 28−9, 35, 40−1, 46, 54, 74, 96, 113, 138, 193−4, 198, 204, 209−25, 230−1, 234−42, 245−51, 253−6, 258, 260, 262, 265, 275−6, 282, 289, 291, 293, 304−5, 308, 313, 315, 322, 324−5, 332, 337−8, 361, 363−4, 368, 384, 402−3, 406−7, 411, 425, 428, 442, 453, 509, 515, 531, 571,

831

General Index 574, 582, 585, 597, 602, 615, 628, 649, 655, 668, 692 collective, 84−5, 151, 334, 454−5, 465, 478−80, 506, 721, 723−5, 733, 741 colony, 37, 46, 168, 472, 717−18, 749 colour, 30−1, 100, 123, 213, 215−16, 226−7, 232, 241, 404, 489, 551, 586−7, 613, 656−7 comedy, 50, 65, 97, 115, 417, 493, 496, 499−500, 504, 506, 569, 590, 596, 625, 742 commerce, 82−3, 219−20, 239, 350, 753 commune, 464, 467, 501, 513 communication, 19, 42, 223, 253−4, 257, 284, 491, 501, 518, 585, 634, 669, 713 communism, 3, 79, 85−6, 106, 147, 149, 156−8, 473, 476, 480, 562, 620−1, 648, 720, 749−50, 754, 757−8 community, 51, 152, 157, 239, 343, 349, 352, 401, 727, 732−4, 757, 759 comparison, 33, 83, 204, 215, 234−5, 286−7, 297, 300, 303, 314−15, 323, 325, 334, 345, 391, 397, 400, 403, 406, 468, 479, 493, 497, 500, 506, 510, 512−13, 518−19, 521, 539, 542, 585, 602, 649, 720, 742, 744, 753 competition, 264, 477, 714, 733, 759 comprehension, 109, 253, 274, 280, 290, 300, 355−6, 364, 373, 391, 420, 535, 550−1, 577−8, 586, 602, 607, 652 compulsion, 160, 750, 767 conceivable, 137, 524, 539, 571, 699

conceiving, 29, 64, 105, 137, 204−5, 220, 226−8, 256, 282, 287−8, 291, 298−300, 302, 348, 358, 367, 403, 414, 422−3, 426, 451, 466, 518−19, 524, 526, 528, 530, 539, 543, 545, 553, 562, 567, 569−71, 574, 577−8, 581, 589, 594, 601, 610, 618, 643, 646−8, 651−3, 655, 657, 664, 688, 690, 694, 696−700, 704, 736, 739, 744−5, 747−8, 756 concept, 40, 42−3, 62−4, 83, 95−109, 112−16, 121−3, 128−9, 132, 155−6, 160, 183, 216−21, 225−9, 231−3, 236−9, 241−3, 265, 275, 278−309, 336, 346−8, 359, 362, 367−8, 402−12, 422, 458, 465, 479−80, 484−6, 489−95, 498, 502−3, 515−32, 534−45, 549, 551−2, 555−7, 565−6, 568−623, 626, 629, 634−5, 638, 643−4, 648−9, 655−8, 660, 671, 673−4, 676, 678−9, 687, 689−92, 694, 699−700, 703, 720, 728, 733, 739−43, 746, 760, 767, 769−70, 772−3 conception, 20, 22, 29, 34, 56, 74, 81, 93, 119, 124, 138, 145, 155, 160, 315, 327, 409, 434, 457, 461, 464−6, 473, 481, 527, 545, 548, 550, 554−5, 557−8, 561, 563, 566, 572, 577, 587, 599, 611, 642−3, 646, 648, 655, 658−9, 661, 691, 700, 707, 709, 719−32, 734−7, 742, 745−8, 752, 759, 765, 767, 769, 772, 774, 798 concrete, 30−2, 41−2, 70−1, 82−3, 95−6, 108−10, 113, 115−16, 121, 131−41, 145, 151, 156, 250, 259, 282, 288, 291−4, 302, 314, 349−50, 361, 387, 390, 436, 438,

832

General Index 441, 454, 470−2, 475−6, 487, 490, 492, 494, 498, 520, 535−8, 541−3, 545, 547, 549, 552, 556−7, 562, 564, 566, 568, 570−2, 574, 576−8, 580, 583, 588, 591−2, 594, 600, 608, 610, 612−13, 617, 619, 623, 626, 640, 645−6, 651−3, 661, 683−7, 690, 692, 696−7, 703−4, 710−11, 716, 726, 729, 732−4, 737, 739, 741, 745, 766−7 concreteness, 41−2, 83, 284, 288, 291−3, 305, 488, 494, 545, 576, 616, 623, 696 condensation, 95−6, 182, 492, 495, 531, 613 conscience, 12, 25, 356, 389, 667, 700−1, 755 consciousness, 12, 14−16, 18, 46, 72−4, 84−5, 123, 139−41, 151, 194−203, 208−12, 215, 221−4, 226, 230, 235, 240, 242, 244, 253, 273, 290, 316, 323, 325, 337, 339, 343−4, 347−8, 352−4, 357−9, 362−3, 366−7, 369, 386−7, 390−1, 397, 402, 410, 414, 416, 420, 426−7, 434−5, 442−4, 450, 453−5, 459, 472, 474, 477−80, 486, 492, 500−1, 516, 535, 539−41, 549, 555−6, 560, 563, 565−6, 571, 588, 592, 601, 611, 613, 617−18, 623−4, 649, 655, 662, 666, 671, 678−9, 683, 688, 691−2, 698, 701−5, 707, 710, 716, 720−1, 723−4, 728−9, 737−8, 742−3, 748, 750, 759, 769 conservative, 127, 151, 165, 561, 716, 738 constitution, 24−5, 37, 69, 142, 145, 154, 277, 389, 707, 710 contemplation, 70−1, 114, 266, 274,

284, 303, 321, 327, 337, 347, 353, 355, 359−61, 366, 368, 375, 387, 390, 418, 425, 427, 433−4, 451, 486, 497, 541−2, 553, 573, 585, 587, 594, 597, 600−1, 623, 753, 755 content, 29, 40, 61−2, 82−4, 94−7, 128, 213, 278, 303, 305, 307, 313−14, 340, 365, 402−8, 465, 469, 475, 477−9, 486, 488−90, 495−500, 505−6, 509, 511, 517, 521, 531−2, 544−5, 582−3, 586, 590, 600, 610, 618, 644−7, 653, 660−2, 671, 676−7, 720, 738, 741 contingency, 17, 22, 29, 34, 42−3, 58, 203, 206−7, 214, 220, 231, 234, 239−40, 257, 261, 263, 267, 285, 289, 292, 294, 299, 302, 304, 306, 308, 337, 364, 386, 426, 529, 545, 592, 595, 619, 718, 758 contract, 358, 373, 613 contradiction, 62−3, 72, 77, 104−5, 110−11, 114, 124−5, 134−9, 143, 204, 210, 232−3, 257, 262−3, 294, 338, 356, 375, 404−10, 422, 491, 527−30, 541, 543, 546−52, 568, 573, 578−9, 584−7, 591, 594, 602, 619, 622, 634, 644, 647, 652, 659−61, 663, 669, 686, 690, 697, 721, 728−9, 737, 746, 748−9, 757 contrary, 103, 129, 264−5, 291−2, 294, 405, 422, 524, 538, 543, 546, 549−51, 556, 615, 627, 676−7, 710 corso e ricorso, 531 cosmos, 265, 267, 275, 277, 310, 319, 346, 366, 549, 562, 581, 611 country, 3−4, 37, 167, 270−1, 331, 339, 394, 401, 410, 487, 493, 502−3, 621, 681, 707, 709, 711, 734, 755, 758, 763

833

General Index creation, 37, 42−4, 51, 57−8, 65, 68, 79, 115, 126, 138, 140−1, 148, 155, 165, 187, 195, 208, 228, 251, 256, 264−9, 274−6, 282, 285−8, 292, 295, 298−309, 333, 344, 347−9, 362−9, 384, 394, 414−15, 420, 422, 424−5, 427−8, 431, 443, 457, 478, 501−2, 509, 528, 560, 590, 618−19, 639, 649, 656−7, 660, 663, 670, 676, 690, 692, 713, 742, 747−8, 754−5, 759, 769 Creator, 32, 43, 208, 260, 262, 285, 308, 348, 365, 368 creature, 140, 285, 292, 308, 350, 353, 490, 526 crime, 96, 143, 444, 494, 509 criminology, 96, 494, 509 criterion (aesthetic, moral, political, historical), 81, 112, 345, 464, 468, 481, 496−7, 514, 519, 548, 568, 744, 763 criterion (logical, epistemic), 248, 329, 442−3, 451, 459, 528, 548, 568, 626, 744 critic, 48, 52, 55, 57, 60−1, 63, 66, 72, 92, 95, 107, 119, 122, 126−7, 165−6, 194, 263, 277, 417, 439, 446, 461, 473, 482, 498, 506, 511−12, 535, 562, 581, 601, 608, 619, 622−3, 626, 628, 630, 633, 680, 682, 739, 750, 757, 761, 777 critical philosophy, 12, 23, 27, 38, 212, 250−1, 271−2, 325, 363, 451, 696 criticism, 5−6, 10, 12, 19, 23, 27, 34−6, 38, 51, 61−3, 81, 88, 96−7, 104, 106−7, 117, 120, 126, 128, 142−3, 146, 148, 151−3, 157−8, 160, 164, 166, 169, 176, 183, 212, 249−51, 271−2, 277, 316−17,

323−5, 363, 431−2, 445, 451, 459, 463, 468, 470, 477, 484, 488, 494, 498, 501, 505−6, 509, 511−12, 533, 535, 545, 568−9, 584, 589, 592, 597, 608−9, 615, 619, 621, 623−4, 628, 630, 632, 637−8, 642−4, 647, 649−50, 652, 655, 657, 662, 666, 670−2, 680−1, 695−6, 713, 717, 719−22, 724, 726, 728−9, 733−8, 745−6, 754−6, 758, 762, 767, 769−70, 772−4, 776 critique, 12, 19, 21, 23−4, 50, 52, 67, 72, 74, 106, 119−20, 125, 148, 151, 153, 163, 176, 212, 214, 236−7, 243, 249−51, 257, 373, 399, 430, 444, 454, 487, 503, 515, 519, 552, 579, 581−2, 587, 617, 625, 628−9, 639, 642−5, 655, 660−1, 664, 666, 671, 673, 723−6, 733, 739, 741−2, 749, 776, 794, 796, 800 cronotopos, 275, 277 culture, 4, 6−7, 9, 11, 25, 47, 53, 55, 64, 66, 68, 70−1, 78, 81, 88, 90, 92, 117, 119, 126, 131, 142−3, 145, 147, 149, 151−5, 157, 160, 163−4, 166−71, 189, 266, 349, 394, 398−9, 410, 468, 506−7, 609, 635, 638−9, 665, 680, 695, 703, 715, 720−2, 724−7, 729, 731−2, 734−41, 743−4, 746−7, 750−1, 758, 760, 762−3, 767−8, 771, 777 Dasein, 239, 243, 581 data, 16, 21, 58−9, 73, 75, 90−1, 95, 123, 127, 213, 217, 230−3, 236, 331, 474, 492, 523, 567, 592−3, 601, 667, 669, 676, 727 dead, 64−5, 103, 106−7, 121, 136, 141, 170, 355, 376, 398, 413−14,

834

General Index 417, 420, 498, 508, 524, 533, 567, 588, 624, 666, 682, 698, 701, 703, 707, 738 death, 108, 129, 136, 382, 392, 423, 523, 538, 549, 557, 559, 572, 588, 591, 626, 652, 676, 682, 700−1, 705 decadence, 37, 65, 158, 415, 480, 622, 706, 746, 755 decline, 82, 96, 153, 269−70, 274, 333, 346, 370, 392, 428, 430, 445, 466, 468, 526, 706, 755, 761 deduction, 21−2, 56, 73−4, 76, 85, 194, 202, 210, 234−5, 240, 243, 245, 289−90, 378, 380, 407, 442, 449, 453, 458−9, 479, 570, 580, 583, 595, 600, 606, 612, 637 deed, 104, 343, 445, 559−60, 599, 635, 668, 693, 709, 754, 757 definition, 32, 73, 82, 97, 101−2, 122, 148−9, 155−6, 193, 229, 235, 238, 247, 254−5, 261−2, 292, 294, 311, 316, 322, 325, 330, 332, 339, 352, 361, 371, 382, 385, 388−9, 392−3, 409, 438, 445−6, 449, 460, 474, 476−7, 480, 484, 489−91, 500−2, 514−16, 520−3, 534, 555−6, 562, 579, 581, 586, 589, 594, 599, 602, 634, 642, 649, 655, 674, 682, 686, 696, 700, 720, 727, 734, 737, 747, 755 degeneration, 119, 158, 270, 358, 573, 644 degree, 227, 230, 243, 292, 427 demagogue, 146, 159, 715, 725, 763 democracy, 3, 69−70, 145, 152, 156, 432, 476, 483, 570, 610, 619, 707, 710−11, 714, 727, 750 demonstration, 46, 58, 203−4, 275, 282, 289, 310, 314, 316, 319,

322−3, 327, 330, 336, 359, 384, 388, 392, 394, 408, 418, 449, 451, 460, 522, 536, 570−1, 579, 589, 623, 633−4, 672, 676, 720 dependency, 16−18, 40, 42−3, 85, 101−3, 108−10, 203−4, 223, 279, 298, 308−9, 449, 480−1, 507, 539, 561, 565, 572, 669, 718, 731 derivation, 44, 63, 83, 103, 123, 141, 233, 280, 297, 318, 330, 373, 375, 379−80, 386, 419, 474, 520, 522, 544, 651, 664, 667−8, 673, 718, 739−40 description, 31−2, 73, 95, 103, 105, 260, 262, 329, 335, 449, 477−8, 492, 494, 507, 509, 549, 600, 673, 755 desire, 121, 198, 200, 276, 402, 404, 416, 420−1, 447, 494, 523, 526−7, 529, 674, 682, 698, 716, 726 destiny, 68, 263, 271, 327, 397, 430, 449, 466, 471−2, 528, 553, 559, 592, 601, 667, 670, 700, 703 determination, 15, 30−2, 34, 100, 102, 125, 138, 141, 154, 197, 202, 216−17, 224−5, 227, 235, 239−40, 242−3, 249, 257−62, 294, 348, 361, 364−5, 394, 404, 406, 424−6, 428, 492−3, 497, 518−20, 522−3, 526, 528−9, 535, 543−4, 547, 550, 572, 575, 580−1, 583, 585, 599−601, 604, 612−13, 615, 617−18, 622, 626, 652, 660, 662, 669, 679, 686, 690, 693−4, 697−9, 751, 772 determinism, 129, 137−9, 141, 150, 450, 483, 645, 660, 667−71, 676, 679, 690, 730 development, 52, 56, 78−82, 85, 95, 125, 127, 156, 289, 343, 345,

835

General Index 349, 352, 362, 365, 367, 391−2, 404, 407−10, 414−15, 424, 426−7, 437−8, 442, 459, 464−5, 475, 477, 491, 494, 516, 542, 544−5, 548−9, 553, 557−8, 562, 572, 578, 592−3, 601, 610, 616, 620, 623, 636, 651−2, 655, 660, 667, 674, 678−80, 728−9, 732, 740, 742, 748, 755 dialect, 392, 395, 507, 511, 722 dialectic, 46, 80, 83, 104−5, 109−16, 122, 125, 134−6, 141, 145, 150, 152, 155−6, 265, 316−17, 320−1, 340, 354, 407−8, 410, 473, 526, 528−30, 534, 542−5, 547−9, 551−8, 563−4, 566, 568, 571, 574−8, 580, 582, 588, 594, 603, 607, 609−14, 616−17, 619−22, 626−8, 632, 649, 655, 660, 681, 686−7, 689, 692, 699−700, 704, 718−19, 729, 739−40, 743−4, 746, 749, 770, 772 dictator, 157, 269, 719, 754 dignity, 349, 351, 419, 563, 584, 595, 672 distinction, 93, 95, 99−116, 118, 134−9, 146, 150, 182−3, 253−6, 264, 308, 356, 366, 434, 442, 490, 515−30, 532, 537−8, 543, 547−8, 551−2, 555−7, 562, 566, 568−89, 592, 594−6, 612, 616−19, 623, 626, 631−2, 698, 729, 742−4, 751, 770 divine, 9, 30, 41−2, 56, 68, 71, 107, 115, 117, 128, 251, 257−8, 267−9, 273, 280, 284, 295, 302, 306−8, 348, 350−3, 355−6, 358, 360, 362, 364−6, 369−70, 372, 376−7, 391, 404, 409, 418−20, 423−8, 438, 550, 565, 570, 645, 673, 687−8, 700, 703−5, 742, 761

doctrine, 12, 33, 39, 63, 68, 83, 87−8, 104−5, 122, 150−1, 162, 164, 170−1, 174, 231, 234, 236, 266−9, 275−6, 278, 282, 290, 301, 304, 308, 310, 319−21, 324−5, 331−2, 337−40, 354, 371−3, 389, 409, 411, 422, 426, 447, 449−50, 461, 463, 473−5, 477, 481, 498, 511, 518, 520−2, 532, 536−7, 539, 542, 548, 563, 566, 570, 577−9, 582−3, 596, 600, 614, 617, 619−20, 625, 629, 643, 647−9, 651, 654, 663, 666, 681, 712, 725, 733, 741 dogma, 9, 35, 46, 50, 54, 61, 63, 68, 72, 86−8, 130, 157, 165, 167, 211−12, 249, 251, 305, 312−13, 316, 320, 328, 331, 333, 335−7, 353−4, 474, 503, 654, 677, 704, 719, 739, 746 doubt, 66, 71, 78, 90, 94, 119, 144, 211, 251, 253, 272, 281, 291, 305−6, 316, 322−4, 329, 332, 336, 348, 356, 373, 383, 396−7, 399, 406, 408−9, 424, 431, 447, 457, 469, 480, 490, 499, 501−2, 509, 520, 523−4, 534, 541, 548, 558, 564−5, 578, 584, 589, 592, 597, 616, 622, 643−4, 674, 678, 682, 700−1, 725, 731, 746, 762 drama, 90, 94, 155, 558, 595, 613 dualism, 37, 55, 109, 122, 124, 129, 136, 264−5, 267, 353, 408, 538−40, 542−3, 548, 550, 553, 555, 557−8, 562−3, 614−18, 660, 672−3, 675, 700 duration, 16, 21, 204−6, 208, 213−14, 403 duty, 33, 64, 115, 146, 263, 399, 413, 458, 460, 500, 559, 565, 605, 629,

836

General Index 677, 705, 713−14, 716, 754−5, 763, 766 eclecticism, 125, 270, 339, 499, 661, 745 economics, 54, 80−5, 93, 106, 120, 122, 151, 158−61, 170, 411, 464, 469−72, 475−6, 478, 480−1, 483, 526, 534, 563, 568, 609, 642−3, 646, 654−5, 659, 663−4, 710, 714, 722, 725, 727, 729, 741, 746, 750, 759−60, 764, 766−9, 772−3, 777 education, 50−1, 54, 60, 77, 81, 118, 126, 129, 131, 142−3, 149, 152, 164, 234, 351, 381, 459−60, 464−5, 482−3, 487, 504−5, 513, 532, 537, 624, 633, 647, 663, 709, 715−19, 725, 734, 744, 750, 761, 763, 775−6 egoism, 539, 645, 669, 704 election, 25, 61, 267, 680, 707, 776 electricity, 381, 612, 621 element, 21−2, 42−3, 116, 164, 193−5, 197, 199, 201−5, 207, 209, 211−33, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 258−60, 270, 275, 278, 280, 285−8, 290−3, 297, 304, 307, 321, 323, 352−4, 365, 403, 419, 435, 438, 457, 464, 470−1, 474−5, 481, 484, 509, 511, 531−2, 581, 584, 586, 588−9, 592−3, 605, 611, 617, 623, 634, 652, 673, 684, 690, 697, 708, 714, 719, 721−2, 726, 728−31, 735−6, 746, 748, 750, 775 eloquence, 73, 87, 146, 317, 328, 465, 502, 550, 715 emanation, 266, 269, 298−9, 301−2, 306, 579, 742 emotion, 85, 156, 364, 391, 416, 479, 514−15, 529, 666, 690, 715

empiricism, 14, 16, 18, 20−1, 23, 29, 33, 38−9, 45, 47, 50, 52, 57, 61, 63, 77−8, 82, 85, 100, 103, 108−9, 112, 115−16, 121, 127, 129, 137−41, 166, 193−4, 211, 215−16, 221−4, 226−9, 231−4, 236−41, 312, 314, 325, 327, 330, 335, 339, 345, 352, 357−9, 394, 402, 410−11, 426, 466, 471, 478, 495, 509, 511, 515−16, 522−4, 528, 530, 535−7, 539, 545, 556, 567, 569, 571, 582, 584, 590, 593, 597, 599−600, 602, 605−9, 611, 613, 615, 617, 619, 624, 645, 657, 676, 682, 688, 693, 696, 698, 718, 739−41 encyclical, 164−5, 720 encyclopedia, 106−7, 264, 266, 274, 276, 307, 329, 410, 448, 465, 476, 533, 535, 559, 564, 566, 569, 576, 587, 591−2, 600, 604, 608, 625, 629, 633−4, 636−7, 639−41, 694 energy, 124, 144, 161, 358, 431, 503, 649−50, 655, 660, 667, 704, 707−8, 715−16, 748, 766, 775 entailment, 101−2, 105, 108−9, 133, 422, 490, 492, 673, 678, 728 enthusiasm, 324, 355, 447, 456, 458, 599, 666, 708, 726, 757 entity, 39, 246, 280, 284, 304, 308, 358, 367, 386, 472, 659, 742 enumeration, 280, 320, 514, 522, 570 environment, 19, 75, 79, 149, 455−6, 467, 469, 647, 720, 738, 760 epistemic, 40−4, 132, 168 epistemology, 12, 18, 21, 40, 58, 77−8, 126, 277, 628 equality (logical, mathematical, physical), 15−16, 197, 204, 213,

837

General Index 218, 226, 234, 242, 282, 285−6, 380, 390, 405, 422, 427, 517, 660 equality (moral, political, legal), 51, 83, 154−5, 343, 472, 759 equivalence, 75, 105, 347, 363, 383, 450, 455, 470, 476, 509, 584, 616, 652, 660, 676−7, 714, 769 Erkenntnisproblem, 628 error, 18−19, 40, 74, 110, 115−16, 134−6, 165, 209−13, 253, 272, 301, 303, 315, 328, 335, 408, 496, 517, 519, 532, 557−8, 567−8, 576−80, 607, 614−15, 632, 685−6, 694, 700, 744, 749 erudition, 71, 118, 319, 366, 431, 436 esperantism, 150−1, 745, 751 essence, 29, 32−3, 57−8, 100, 108, 111, 120, 123−4, 201−3, 239, 252−3, 255−6, 259, 262, 265, 275, 290, 300, 311, 318, 335, 338, 354, 356−8, 361, 364−5, 368−9, 377−83, 386−8, 391−3, 396, 405, 419−28, 449, 532, 536, 556−7, 562, 573, 578, 582−3, 593−7, 617−18, 621, 629, 645, 647−8, 655, 657, 660, 676, 691−2, 702, 704, 767 eternity, 30, 33, 56, 58, 70−1, 74, 105, 127, 136, 138−40, 158, 165, 257, 263, 280, 284−5, 347, 350−1, 359, 370, 381, 383, 386, 388, 396, 403, 406, 412, 418−27, 432, 445, 449, 453, 518, 521, 529−31, 544, 547, 570, 573, 577, 588, 594, 602, 618, 631, 656, 667, 689, 691−2, 694, 699, 701, 703, 705, 719, 758 ethics, 52, 78, 93, 106−7, 112, 114−15, 156, 160−1, 266, 268, 271, 407, 450, 466, 478, 481,

487−8, 524, 531, 534, 568−9, 574−5, 583, 600, 613−14, 631−3, 639, 658, 668, 714, 728−9, 747, 761, 764, 767−70 etymology, 42, 80, 241, 254, 296−7, 321, 445, 461, 651, 681, 745 event, 31, 80−2, 85, 135, 138−40, 228, 265, 274, 334, 344, 351, 376, 393, 431, 435, 437, 447, 449−50, 463−8, 470−1, 476, 478, 481, 485, 489, 492, 494, 496, 506−7, 512, 514, 561, 588, 594, 605, 643, 668, 703, 707, 713, 730−1, 737, 739, 749, 756, 760, 775 evidence, 39, 56, 72, 75, 96, 157, 208−10, 212, 278−9, 294, 304, 310, 314, 316, 327−8, 336, 426−7, 435−6, 445, 455−6, 458, 464, 469, 478, 495, 503, 534, 546, 550, 555, 628, 644, 650, 678, 766 evil, 104, 108−12, 136, 156, 160, 169, 245, 293, 422, 424, 428, 524−6, 538−9, 543, 551, 557−9, 562, 599, 698, 700−1, 716, 755, 765 evolution, 54, 61, 64, 67, 78, 83, 124, 149, 376, 412, 414, 472, 510, 603, 636, 644, 670, 680, 682, 718, 740, 757 existence, 15−18, 20, 22, 27, 29, 33, 42−4, 51, 57, 61−3, 65, 72, 82, 85, 96, 109−10, 129, 136, 156, 197, 203−13, 215−16, 220, 228, 230−1, 233, 239−40, 243, 246−8, 250−4, 256, 263, 272, 282−3, 285−9, 291−3, 296−8, 300−2, 304−9, 311, 313, 324, 336, 346, 348−50, 352−5, 357, 359, 361−4, 366, 373, 376, 384, 388−91, 393, 395−6, 402−6, 408, 411, 415, 419−28,

838

General Index 433, 438, 443, 445, 449−50, 459, 468, 470−4, 476−80, 486−7, 492−3, 496, 498, 500, 510, 516, 519, 525−6, 529, 534, 536, 538, 547, 555, 557, 559, 561, 565, 571−2, 575, 585, 595, 602, 605, 607, 612−13, 615, 617, 625, 632, 635, 643, 645−6, 652, 656−7, 659, 664, 671, 674−5, 684, 693, 701−3, 705, 708, 721, 723, 726, 732, 735, 739−40, 743, 745, 747−8, 751, 758, 765, 773, 775 existent, 51, 57, 206, 209, 220, 298−9, 303−9, 311, 365−6, 384−5, 402, 405, 612, 699 existential, 519, 529, 612 existentialism, 3, 6 experience, 12, 14−24, 27, 42, 47, 52, 61−2, 64, 74, 78−9, 94, 100−1, 107, 123, 140, 166, 173, 198, 202, 204, 206, 209−10, 213−16, 218, 222−4, 226−33, 235−8, 241−3, 247, 249, 252, 259, 261, 271, 273, 281, 301, 308, 314, 319, 324−6, 330−2, 335−7, 352, 354, 357, 365−6, 369, 375, 377−8, 402, 404−9, 411, 420, 426, 434, 442, 450, 452, 454, 458, 479, 552, 599, 601−2, 604, 615, 623, 639, 657, 666, 681, 696−7, 700−3, 709−10, 718, 722, 756, 760 experiment, 38, 46, 57−9, 74−5, 127−8, 234, 270−1, 278, 307, 312, 316, 319, 326−32, 334, 336, 364, 379−80, 382, 385, 390−5, 397, 399, 409−10, 454−5, 464, 483, 534−5, 596, 604, 620, 650, 657, 668−70, 678, 681, 729, 743−4, 758 explanation, 27, 35, 38, 70, 72−3, 79, 83−5, 96, 100, 103, 109, 116,

122−3, 138, 144, 159, 166, 194, 196−201, 205, 207, 209, 212, 215, 217, 221, 223−5, 228, 230, 235, 237, 239, 247−8, 250−3, 256, 258−61, 271, 275−6, 281, 287−8, 295, 300, 302, 305−8, 313−17, 325−6, 329, 335, 337, 345, 353, 358, 362, 364, 368, 371, 373, 376−7, 379, 387, 390−2, 394, 396, 402, 409, 416, 428, 432, 442, 445, 448−9, 458, 464, 466−7, 473−6, 478−81, 485, 488−9, 492, 504, 507, 512−13, 522, 564−8, 570, 575, 577−8, 588, 609, 624, 635−6, 646−50, 653−4, 668, 670, 695, 702, 707, 713, 723−4, 727, 730−2, 741−2, 751, 765, 775 expression, 15, 18, 40−3, 87−8, 94−7, 102, 105, 113−14, 122, 129, 136, 145, 197, 199, 203, 206, 209−10, 219−20, 229, 243, 246, 256−7, 269−70, 273−4, 276−8, 280, 282, 287, 290, 292, 294−301, 303−4, 307−11, 325, 329, 333, 340, 344, 350, 355, 361, 364−5, 368, 375, 392, 403, 405−6, 410, 440, 453, 458, 460, 462−3, 465, 470, 477−8, 481, 486, 488−92, 496−7, 505, 508−9, 516, 518, 526−7, 530, 532, 541−3, 548, 550, 557, 561, 569, 572, 586, 590, 597, 599, 613, 615, 624, 631, 638, 643, 649, 659, 677, 686, 706, 708−9, 711, 713, 718−19, 722−4, 730, 739, 741, 745−6, 748, 765, 772 extension (logical, semantic, spatial), 102, 214−15, 224, 229, 356, 358, 409, 416, 498, 517, 520, 528−30, 551, 577, 586, 618, 685, 747, 752 externality, 171, 273, 285, 298−9,

839

General Index 305, 350, 427, 593, 596, 603, 612−13, 639, 674 extinction, 156, 386, 777 fact, 17−18, 33, 35, 38, 43−4, 51, 53, 55−9, 73−6, 80−5, 94−6, 111, 115−16, 123, 138−9, 193, 208−10, 214, 230, 247, 253, 268−9, 271, 273, 279, 285, 289, 291, 301, 305−8, 321−6, 328−9, 331−2, 336, 339, 353, 365, 372, 377−9, 381, 383−4, 388−90, 393−7, 406−8, 419−20, 433−4, 437, 448−50, 452−60, 463−4, 466−8, 470−8, 487−8, 492−3, 506−10, 512−14, 518−19, 526, 529, 558−62, 565, 590, 592−6, 602, 604−7, 612, 617, 635, 646−7, 649−50, 653, 655−6, 658, 660, 667−8, 679, 681, 683, 690−2, 697, 700, 710, 723−4, 728, 740−2, 744, 747, 755, 769−70 faculty, 9, 14−15, 18, 20−2, 28, 59, 70, 85, 195−6, 198, 200−1, 213, 228, 231, 237−8, 240−1, 245, 247−8, 252, 261, 271, 283−4, 288, 313, 315, 317, 319, 327, 337−8, 361, 364, 376, 384−5, 387, 389, 393, 398, 404, 414, 426, 432−3, 454, 509, 569−70, 635 faith, 12, 51, 68, 88, 121, 128, 132, 144, 146, 151, 154, 156, 161, 164−5, 167, 237, 266, 275, 348, 353−6, 360, 364−5, 383, 390−1, 393, 397, 406, 451, 457, 459, 472−3, 535, 553, 594, 613, 619, 633, 644−5, 648, 666, 669, 671−2, 681, 683, 701, 707−8, 710, 712, 715, 723−4, 727, 731−2, 746, 754, 758, 774 family, 114, 116, 360−2, 392, 456,

477, 481, 528, 565, 574, 614, 632, 647, 663, 720, 749, 766, 773, 777 fantasy, 85, 205, 266, 281, 316, 320, 329, 333, 337, 347, 383, 404, 457, 479, 487, 516, 585, 611, 622, 645, 758 fatalism, 160, 276, 301, 730, 767, 772 fate, 156, 302, 355, 357, 360, 566, 668 fatherland, 144, 161, 267, 271−3, 315, 335, 414, 707−9, 714, 759 feeling, 22, 64, 108, 119, 128, 216, 221−2, 261, 272, 288, 291, 320, 349, 352, 365, 387, 390−1, 394, 397, 402, 404, 413−15, 421, 425, 444, 456, 468, 477, 484, 486, 488, 493−4, 497, 499, 529, 535−6, 541, 549, 557, 559−60, 566−7, 573, 584, 607, 612, 621−5, 645, 648, 662, 666, 668, 671, 698, 704−5, 709−11, 714, 718, 730, 737, 756−8, 761, 765, 769, 772 feudalism, 471, 476, 481, 545 fiction, 61, 103, 531, 599, 604, 760 finality, 330, 332, 448, 552, 558, 611, 668, 679 finite, 17, 29−30, 101−2, 111, 138, 207, 257−8, 291−2, 299, 308, 353−4, 364, 367, 405, 419, 422−5, 427, 517−18, 536, 549, 556, 562, 578, 589, 597, 600, 615, 618, 645, 690 folklore, 720, 735, 775 force, 51, 116, 125, 155, 160−1, 273, 288, 315, 326, 328, 347, 351, 358, 360, 379−83, 387−8, 395−6, 407−8, 416, 428, 432, 450, 453, 456−7, 465, 507, 556, 565, 569−70, 599, 601−5, 649, 660, 664, 667−9, 672, 697, 707−8,

840

General Index 710−11, 727−8, 730, 735, 742, 746, 748, 757, 767, 769, 775−6 foreign, 10−11, 37, 48, 51, 68, 89, 144, 166, 214, 237, 271−3, 280, 318, 333−4, 344, 371−2, 429, 617, 709, 714, 722, 743 form, 27, 32, 37, 42−3, 61−3, 73−5, 82−5, 93−7, 99, 103, 107, 114−16, 121, 151, 153, 183, 215−17, 224−9, 236−8, 244, 249−51, 259, 261−2, 280, 283, 289, 292, 296, 298−9, 301, 304, 318, 338, 356, 366, 376, 387, 394−5, 402−3, 405−7, 410, 414−15, 423−4, 428, 442, 448, 451−2, 455−6, 461, 464, 468, 470, 472, 474−5, 480, 488−90, 499−500, 505−6, 511, 516−31, 534−8, 540, 542−3, 545, 548−51, 553−6, 566, 568, 571−5, 579, 582−91, 596−8, 600, 603, 605, 609−19, 623, 632, 634, 639, 642, 644−8, 653, 656, 659−62, 667−8, 671, 678−9, 689, 691, 694, 696−7, 701, 708, 724, 729−36, 739−40, 745−8, 758, 767, 769−70, 773 formal, 93, 108, 148, 150, 164, 241, 274, 403, 487−8, 490, 498, 589, 591, 601, 620, 719, 731, 733, 738, 740, 743, 745 formalism, 93−4, 96, 150, 349, 487−8, 498, 505, 510, 512, 589 formula, 39−43, 51, 62, 166, 274−9, 281−3, 285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 295−7, 299−301, 303−5, 307−9, 311, 320, 368, 373, 375, 402, 407, 527−8, 536, 542, 561−2, 610, 657, 745, 774 foundation, 13, 18, 40, 43−4, 55, 62, 72−4, 90, 207, 231, 248, 257,

263−4, 271, 279, 307, 330, 333, 347−9, 352, 363, 374−5, 402, 407, 410, 418−19, 423, 426−7, 435, 442, 451−2, 576, 590, 597, 604, 621, 648−9, 655, 695, 703, 711, 747 freedom, 12, 65, 74, 78, 137−9, 145, 154−6, 188, 266, 268, 321, 356, 367−9, 415, 424−5, 427, 450, 480, 505, 512, 565, 587, 615, 624, 665, 687, 689, 692, 697−8, 701, 710, 714, 716, 733, 737−8, 748, 752, 761 fundamental, 32, 79, 81, 94, 128, 236, 252, 267, 276, 307, 310, 385, 399, 445, 536, 539, 553, 582, 610−11, 671, 686, 697, 702, 724, 727, 735, 772−3 genre, 127, 153, 465, 497, 499, 508 genus, 103, 111−13, 225, 350, 392, 438, 515, 523−4, 532, 550, 571 geography, 474, 492−3, 619, 741, 753 geology, 270, 312, 327, 395, 611−12 geometry, 224, 226, 312, 314, 316, 320, 327, 330, 332−3, 407, 523, 611, 688 gnoseology, 553, 564, 582, 590, 599−600, 613, 623, 628 Gnostics, 269, 549, 579, 627 government, 70, 142−5, 154−5, 157, 164, 267−8, 307, 313−14, 324, 340, 351, 388−9, 411, 432−3, 452, 460, 493, 513, 545, 556, 561, 564−5, 570, 619, 635, 657, 698, 708−11, 715−16, 722, 750, 756, 758, 763, 769−70, 775−8 grammar, 318, 321, 340, 463, 474−5, 508, 586, 720, 745

841

General Index harmony, 119, 246, 248, 265, 267, 338−9, 350, 357, 377, 383, 409, 481, 540, 549, 551, 554, 566, 569, 602, 626, 644, 698 heaven, 92, 164, 235, 266, 329, 351, 355, 437, 472, 487, 536, 546, 559, 687, 756 hegemony, 151−2, 160−1, 166, 728, 735−6, 741, 746, 750, 767−9, 777 heresy, 9, 37, 68, 165, 266, 270, 352, 467, 633, 735, 776, 800 hierarchy, 85, 152, 354, 432, 454, 480−1, 491, 631, 668, 732−3 historian, 51, 53−4, 60, 66, 72, 75, 81−2, 84, 92, 95−9, 154, 169−70, 355, 394, 398−9, 444, 456, 466−7, 469−71, 482, 484−5, 487, 496, 500−3, 509−14, 547, 560−2, 590−2, 594, 604, 608−10, 616, 638, 703, 755, 759, 768 historical, 8−9, 12, 45, 50−6, 59, 70, 75−86, 88, 90−1, 95−8, 106, 115, 118−20, 124−5, 127, 141, 149−51, 153, 156−7, 160−1, 167, 169, 173−4, 182, 189, 314, 331, 371, 392−3, 395−9, 414, 435, 438, 454, 456, 459−60, 463, 465−8, 470−82, 484−5, 491−7, 500−3, 507−9, 511, 515, 518, 530, 534, 540, 545, 548, 559, 561−3, 567, 574, 590−3, 595−6, 601−2, 606−10, 615, 624, 627, 631, 634−5, 638, 640, 642−4, 646, 648−9, 655, 659−61, 663−4, 668−9, 695, 703, 707, 712, 714, 717−19, 721−3, 725−6, 728−30, 732−3, 735, 737−41, 745−9, 754, 759, 767−70, 772, 775 historical materialism, 78, 80, 83−6, 90, 106, 118−20, 124−5, 149, 157, 160, 463, 473−81, 642−6, 655, 659−61, 664, 669, 754, 768

historicism, 54, 61, 149−50, 155, 160−1, 170−1, 474, 564, 670, 719, 725, 737, 740−1, 743, 745, 747−8, 769−70, 772 historiography, 5, 8, 47, 54, 67, 79, 107, 153, 168, 502, 584, 589, 591−2, 634 history, 3−5, 7−10, 12, 46, 50−4, 56, 58−61, 64−5, 67, 70−1, 73−8, 80−7, 90−9, 106−7, 112, 115−16, 118−20, 124, 127−8, 131, 141, 143, 145−6, 151, 153−60, 163−5, 167−71, 173, 181, 193, 266−7, 277, 313−15, 317, 325, 330−1, 333, 335−7, 343−4, 346, 349, 351−2, 354, 358, 361−2, 364−7, 369−72, 374−6, 378, 388−91, 393−5, 398−401, 406, 410, 414−15, 419−20, 431, 433−8, 441−5, 447−8, 450−7, 459, 463−77, 479−82, 484−8, 490−7, 500−4, 506−10, 512−14, 518−19, 521, 531, 534−5, 540, 547−9, 551−2, 555, 557, 562−4, 566−7, 569−73, 576, 578−80, 582−4, 587−96, 599−602, 604−11, 614, 616, 619−21, 623−5, 628−30, 634−5, 637−8, 642−4, 646, 648−50, 653, 659−61, 663−4, 667−8, 671, 692−3, 703, 705−6, 711, 714, 720−2, 724−8, 735, 739−40, 743, 746−9, 753−5, 758, 760−1, 763−5, 767−70, 772−3, 775 holism, 102−3, 105, 183 human, 9, 12, 14, 16, 19, 27, 30, 32−4, 41−4, 51−60, 64−5, 68, 70−4, 76, 78−81, 83−5, 93, 96−7, 99, 120−4, 128, 138, 146, 152, 156−8, 201−3, 209, 211−12, 228−9, 241, 245−53, 255−63, 266−8, 275−6, 278, 283−4, 290,

842

General Index 292−3, 295, 299−301, 305−7, 313, 315−16, 318, 321, 324−5, 327, 329−30, 332−3, 336−8, 344, 346−63, 365−70, 372−9, 384, 386, 388−9, 391−9, 405, 407, 411, 414−16, 418, 420, 424−7, 430, 432−7, 442−4, 447, 449−50, 452−4, 456−9, 464, 466, 468, 470−3, 475−6, 478, 481, 487, 490, 494−5, 499−501, 507−8, 519, 525, 535, 538−9, 550−2, 557, 559−60, 562−5, 570, 573, 576−7, 579, 584, 586−8, 592, 594, 602, 604, 617, 619−20, 622−3, 639, 645−9, 651, 653−6, 660, 664, 667, 669−70, 674, 679, 688, 701, 704−6, 710, 712, 715, 721, 725, 737, 741, 745, 747−8, 755−8, 760−1, 775−6, 783, 793, 795 human nature, 9, 32, 72, 81, 248, 252, 256, 374−5, 393, 457, 466, 737 human race, 59, 64, 84, 97, 349, 360−1, 365, 372, 376, 379, 389, 391, 394, 414, 416, 447, 450, 454−5, 457, 459, 467, 469, 475, 478, 508, 562, 577, 604, 619, 674, 721, 725, 755−6, 775 humanist, 54, 168, 340, 737 humanity, 55, 58, 64−5, 79, 81, 85, 140, 267, 293, 349−50, 353, 358, 361, 367, 386, 390−1, 393−4, 415−16, 433−4, 453, 459, 461, 464−5, 472, 519, 536, 560, 568, 620, 638, 648, 698−9, 701, 705, 709, 758 hypostasis, 151, 663, 742 hypothesis, 57, 63, 203, 207, 239, 243, 285, 287, 296, 303, 305−6, 314, 328−30, 336−7, 374, 379, 397, 404, 409−11, 441, 474, 481, 488, 740

idea, 8−9, 14−16, 18, 20, 27−35, 39−44, 55−9, 64, 71, 73−9, 88, 93−4, 96, 107, 119, 122, 128−30, 136, 141, 144, 146, 166, 197−202, 206−8, 214−15, 221, 229−30, 234, 236, 238−40, 244, 251, 256, 258−62, 268−70, 273−5, 278−94, 297−307, 309, 317, 323−5, 328, 335, 345−50, 353, 357−8, 361, 363−6, 377−93, 410, 414−16, 420, 423, 425, 430−5, 438, 445, 448−9, 452, 458, 465−7, 472, 487, 489, 495, 498, 504, 529, 548, 550, 552−4, 557−60, 562−3, 568, 574, 578−83, 586, 589, 593−7, 603−4, 607, 615−16, 618, 624, 649, 655−7, 661, 671, 675−6, 678, 696, 700, 706−7, 710, 724, 741, 756, 769 ideal, 15−16, 30, 32, 40, 42−3, 56, 61, 64−5, 70−1, 78, 80, 88, 94−5, 97, 111, 119, 122, 128, 145−6, 153−6, 158, 169, 197−8, 204−5, 256, 258, 262, 267, 284−5, 300−1, 306−8, 346−7, 350−2, 356−7, 363, 365, 367, 370, 381, 389, 391, 397, 409, 415, 419, 423, 425, 432, 434−5, 445, 488, 490, 492, 496, 498, 501, 512, 518, 521, 523, 526, 529, 531, 539, 545, 552, 557−60, 570−1, 573, 576, 587, 594, 597, 603, 612, 622−3, 633, 661, 667, 672−3, 679, 701, 707, 709−10, 715, 746, 755−9 Ideal Formula, 39−44, 51, 166, 276−311, 368 idealism, 4−9, 20−1, 23, 28−9, 33, 35, 40, 45, 48, 50−2, 61−4, 66−7, 70−5, 78, 83, 87−9, 93−6, 117, 120−3, 126−9, 131−2, 137, 142, 146, 149−51, 155, 161−7, 169−70,

843

General Index 190, 229, 246, 248, 250−1, 253−4, 301, 306, 345, 354, 402−3, 407−9, 412, 417, 447−8, 451−3, 457−9, 473−5, 478, 487, 493, 495, 498, 503, 505, 508, 510−11, 615, 618, 621, 629, 631, 637, 645−6, 648−9, 651, 653−4, 657, 660−1, 665−7, 669, 671−3, 675−81, 686, 689, 691, 695−7, 699−701, 703, 705, 719, 725, 737−43, 745, 747, 765, 772, 775, 778 ideality, 93, 99, 346−7, 358, 416, 487, 490, 519, 613, 670, 702−3 idealize, 108, 121, 358, 510, 635 identical, 17, 29−31, 75, 102, 110, 124, 203, 208, 234, 264, 275, 280, 282, 285−6, 289, 305−6, 363, 403, 422−3, 425, 427−8, 454, 518, 520−2, 532, 544, 592, 654, 659−60, 692, 704, 761 identity, 16, 93, 105, 110, 124, 134−7, 194, 202, 204, 209−11, 231, 234, 251, 265, 267, 280, 285−6, 304, 329, 356, 403, 408−10, 521, 526−8, 530, 539, 546−7, 549, 552−3, 556, 568, 570, 577, 582, 594, 617, 626, 645, 658, 677, 686−7, 691−2, 699−701 ideology, 8, 10, 14−19, 21, 23, 28, 32, 54, 118, 121−2, 149, 152, 158, 161, 193, 201−2, 206, 208, 221−2, 235, 247, 263, 472−4, 482, 503, 562, 642, 653, 655, 660, 663, 723, 725, 730−1, 733−4, 736, 738−9, 745−6, 748, 750, 763, 769−70 imagination, 15, 33−5, 40, 63−5, 81, 85, 96−7, 108, 119, 156, 158, 197−200, 228, 238, 241−3, 245, 273, 286, 293, 324, 361, 376−9, 393, 409−11, 414−16, 454−7, 466,

490, 494−5, 500, 502, 528, 535, 537−8, 541, 552, 554, 566, 570, 572, 576, 578, 614, 625, 645, 674, 689, 694, 697, 742, 759, 769 immanence, 107, 117, 123−5, 129, 140, 149, 155, 161, 166, 301, 304, 309, 345, 347, 355, 366, 368, 560, 563, 618−19, 639, 644, 646, 648, 657−8, 660−1, 676, 679, 684, 691, 696−7, 699, 702, 704, 725, 739, 772 independence, 14−16, 18−19, 32−3, 36−7, 45, 108, 113, 161, 165, 167, 203, 205, 213−14, 216−18, 221−2, 224, 228−30, 236, 248, 250, 252, 256, 263, 267, 279, 304, 309, 317−18, 351, 354, 388, 393, 415, 450, 476, 488, 567, 569, 572, 601, 608, 615, 647, 651−2, 655, 658, 663, 670, 696, 707, 724, 728−9, 766, 774, 777 individual, 30−1, 41−2, 65, 74, 79, 81, 84−5, 95, 97, 99−105, 112, 116, 120, 123−4, 139−40, 144, 146, 152, 225−8, 288, 291−2, 334, 347, 357, 360−1, 372, 376, 389, 393, 415, 420, 423−4, 426, 442, 454−5, 465, 467, 473−5, 478−80, 483, 487, 492, 499, 507, 515−16, 519, 530, 535, 539, 541, 545, 560−1, 573, 586, 591, 593, 595, 606−7, 609−12, 616, 619, 633, 645−8, 650, 658, 673, 696, 698, 706−7, 710, 714, 722−3, 725−6, 733−5, 741, 747, 749, 760 individualism, 144, 706−7 individuality, 41−2, 85, 99, 140, 283, 288, 291−2, 357, 422, 424−5, 478−9, 492, 516, 560, 579, 587, 593, 595, 688

844

General Index individuation, 31, 42, 102−4, 137, 139, 702, 770 induction, 19, 38, 46, 56−9, 62, 73−6, 271, 289, 316, 322−3, 325−7, 329−32, 376, 378−80, 393−5, 398, 407−10, 412, 449, 454−60, 552, 589, 678, 718, 756 infallibility, 318, 338, 430 infinite, 16−17, 30, 41−2, 62, 100−1, 105, 111, 140, 205−8, 214, 216, 218, 238, 242, 257, 284, 287, 291−3, 298−9, 308, 320, 329, 344, 347−9, 351, 355, 357, 362−5, 367−8, 377, 389−90, 393, 397, 405, 415, 418−20, 422−8, 438, 476, 517, 522, 529, 531−2, 549, 556, 562, 597, 606, 645, 667, 688, 692, 697−8, 701−2, 704−5, 721 innate, 27, 32, 34−5, 129, 245, 250, 262, 321, 335−6, 338, 357, 404, 676, 742 instinct, 27, 65, 150, 248, 250, 252−3, 270, 276, 290, 314−15, 327, 338, 351−2, 414, 416, 431, 450−1, 530, 586, 602, 621, 706, 724, 728 intellect, 9, 28, 32−4, 62, 71−2, 112, 125, 141, 198, 200−1, 235, 254, 257, 262, 266, 273, 282, 284, 289−90, 297, 306, 308, 313−14, 323−5, 328, 347, 354−5, 357, 361−2, 367−8, 374−5, 390, 392, 398, 404, 406, 409, 412, 425−6, 451, 457, 459, 466, 499, 508, 518, 550, 553−5, 562, 566, 585−9, 597, 599−600, 611, 631, 636, 649, 657−8, 661, 676, 688, 701, 705, 714−15, 720−3, 746, 752, 756 intellectual, 3−6, 46, 53, 60, 70, 79, 90, 118−19, 132, 143, 145−6, 148,

150−2, 156, 159, 165−6, 409, 706−16, 720−38, 750−1, 760, 763, 765−6, 769, 774 intellectualism, 116, 156, 357, 359, 409, 552, 554, 562, 566, 588, 597, 631, 726 intelligence, 17, 32, 207−8, 240, 254, 257, 260−1, 268, 280, 316, 348, 357, 360, 425, 428, 450, 453, 458, 463, 565−6, 617 intelligentsia, 713, 730 intelligible, 115, 128, 138, 141, 280, 285−8, 290−1, 293−5, 300, 307, 346−7, 536, 570, 646, 657, 664, 673, 677−9 interest, 97, 472, 486, 492, 496, 499−500, 506, 510−11 interpretation, 22, 56, 120, 329, 429−30, 440−1, 467, 472, 475, 484, 492, 501, 566−7, 592, 615−19, 624, 643−4, 648, 654, 660, 662, 684, 703, 713−14, 747, 760, 774 intuition, 19, 28−30, 34, 39−44, 88, 99, 105, 108, 114, 121, 129, 131, 176, 215−16, 221, 223−5, 227, 229−30, 236−8, 240−2, 244, 251, 255, 258, 262, 265, 275, 282−6, 288−92, 294−5, 302−6, 308−9, 311, 345, 348, 365, 367−8, 409, 420, 425−6, 428, 458, 464, 466, 481, 487, 515−16, 520, 523, 529−30, 536, 541−2, 545, 553−4, 570, 574, 576, 585−6, 588, 590−2, 597, 615−16, 623, 632, 646−51, 653, 655, 657−8, 662, 667, 676, 689, 721, 724 investigation, 240, 258, 281, 312, 319−20, 322−3, 326−7, 329, 332, 335, 431, 440, 442, 501, 507, 509,

845

General Index 534, 538, 549, 561, 564, 570, 592, 665, 674, 677 journalism, 36, 49, 60, 68, 117, 143, 147, 170, 609, 713, 767, 777−8 just, 83, 93, 97, 101, 114, 134, 140, 206, 265, 300, 305, 307, 345, 350, 362, 431, 468, 500−1, 515, 523, 564, 568, 573−4, 601, 656, 755 justice, 25, 85, 164, 349, 351, 479, 559, 709, 715 justification, 18, 240, 353, 475, 490, 514, 536, 540−2, 546, 551, 553, 555, 558−9, 561, 579, 581, 599, 605, 609, 649, 661, 672, 708, 719, 730, 741, 756, 770 kind, 94−5, 128, 492, 516, 602, 668, 673 knowledge, 18−19, 22, 28−30, 32, 34−5, 39, 46, 58−9, 61−2, 70, 72−3, 78, 85, 92, 112, 115, 120−2, 128, 132, 134, 136, 150, 157, 194, 198, 209, 211−12, 217, 220−1, 224, 228−9, 233−6, 243, 246−66, 274−6, 279−80, 283, 286, 288−90, 294−5, 298, 301−10, 312−15, 318−27, 331−5, 338, 346, 352−60, 364−8, 375, 378−99, 401−11, 420, 424−7, 430, 435−8, 442−4, 449−53, 458−60, 485, 491−5, 499, 502, 507−8, 510, 517, 521−3, 530, 539, 548, 550−2, 556, 563−4, 584, 590, 592−3, 597, 600, 611, 613, 618, 623, 628, 649−59, 665, 670−3, 676, 682, 684−8, 697−8, 701, 705, 721, 728, 737, 743, 747, 749, 755, 761 landscape, 97, 500

language, 30, 71−2, 75, 78, 83, 85, 150−1, 167, 202−3, 243, 270, 294, 296, 321, 333, 337, 358, 364, 391−2, 395, 398, 400, 403, 405−7, 436, 440−1, 455−6, 461, 474−5, 479, 489, 495−6, 508, 511, 538, 563, 570, 584−9, 623, 629, 650−1, 720−4, 744−5, 750−1 law, 15, 24, 34−5, 53−9, 62, 70−5, 78, 81, 83−5, 95, 105, 109, 123, 128, 137, 139, 144−5, 150, 154, 164, 166, 194, 199, 216, 228, 233−6, 241, 248−9, 254, 267, 275, 293, 316, 323, 327, 331−2, 335, 349−51, 358, 360, 362, 364, 369−70, 372, 374, 379−89, 392−6, 398−9, 402−9, 412, 416, 419, 425, 427, 431−7, 441−50, 453−4, 458, 460, 464, 467, 469−70, 472, 474−6, 479−81, 492−3, 507−10, 527−30, 538, 547, 559, 563, 565, 570−1, 599, 601−5, 613−14, 618, 620, 632, 635−6, 657, 659, 667, 669, 671, 673−4, 682, 685−6, 690, 694, 697, 700, 705−11, 715, 721, 725, 740, 742, 749, 756, 772, 777 lawyer, 149, 417, 575, 635, 719, 734 level, 102−4, 113−16, 123, 164, 488, 514−22, 528−9, 569−78, 582, 587−8, 591−3, 603, 613, 619, 631−2, 634, 648, 655, 667−8, 673−6, 679, 706, 713, 718, 721, 726 liberalism, 7, 25, 36, 69, 86−7, 118, 143−6, 153−8, 160−1, 165, 168, 482, 503, 707, 710−11, 714−16, 719, 753−61, 776 liberty, 37, 139, 145, 153−8, 160−1, 188, 354, 360, 503, 559−60, 565, 592, 611, 664, 706−7, 709−11,

846

General Index 715, 718−19, 746, 754−5, 757−61, 769−70, 774 liceo, 66, 90, 126, 131, 680 life, 58−61, 66, 75, 83, 108, 124, 128, 136, 141, 144−5, 155−6, 164, 198, 220, 246, 265−6, 268, 274, 290, 306, 343, 348−55, 358, 360−6, 369−70, 374, 376, 382, 389, 396−402, 404, 407, 411, 414−30, 439, 441, 448−57, 460, 468, 470−6, 490, 493, 495, 498, 507, 509, 516, 518−19, 524, 527, 529, 534, 538, 540, 542, 545−7, 551, 555, 557−62, 565−8, 572−4, 579, 583−4, 587, 590, 594, 596, 610, 612, 615, 621, 623−4, 626, 632−3, 638, 645−8, 651−3, 658, 665−71, 676, 682, 684, 692, 697−703, 705−9, 712−19, 723−7, 730, 734−5, 753−7, 760−1, 765−6, 774−7 linguistics, 42, 75, 84, 94, 147, 392, 464, 466, 476, 482, 508, 631, 752 literature, 45, 60−1, 81, 92, 96, 106, 118, 126, 153, 164, 168, 170, 268, 273, 275, 321, 351, 381, 391, 395, 399, 463, 465, 482, 485, 488, 503−4, 507, 511, 563, 580, 584, 607, 609, 635, 643, 654, 713, 720, 755, 762, 764−5 logic, 3, 13−22, 28, 34, 51−2, 57-58, 63, 68, 73, 77−8, 86, 93, 99−109, 111−12, 115−16, 125, 132, 136, 150−1, 164, 184, 193−4, 197, 204−5, 209, 212−13, 225, 231, 234−5, 238−42, 247, 251, 253, 256, 280, 282−4, 293, 296, 298, 301, 306, 317, 322, 331, 337, 341, 363, 379−80, 383−4, 386, 393, 404, 408, 416, 426, 432, 438,

449, 475, 492, 515−39, 542−57, 563−71, 574−83, 586−92, 594, 596, 598−601, 605, 613−21, 625, 629, 631−5, 639, 644, 646, 648, 656, 661−2, 674−9, 681, 686, 690−4, 697−701, 704, 719, 723, 731, 740, 743−5, 751, 772 logicism, 116, 516, 532, 614, 619, 639 logos, 141, 267, 616−18, 639, 696−7, 700−1, 704 materialism, 10, 55, 61−3, 78−80, 83−6, 90, 106, 109, 111, 118−25, 127−9, 149, 151, 157, 160, 167, 245, 250, 254, 263, 310, 357−9, 372, 374, 381, 390, 396, 399−400, 402−3, 410−11, 423, 463, 465, 467, 469, 471, 473−7, 479−81, 483, 506−7, 539−40, 548, 556−7, 562−3, 566, 597, 618, 621, 638, 642−8, 651−62, 664, 667−70, 672, 682, 697, 736, 739, 741−2, 754, 757, 768 mathematics, 56−7, 62, 71−4, 108, 115, 232, 236, 307, 327, 341, 358, 375, 383, 385, 398, 404, 438, 442−3, 448, 452−3, 460, 489, 496, 534−6, 545, 551−2, 556, 567, 581, 596−604, 608, 611, 618, 620, 623, 633, 635, 649, 657, 688, 714, 744−5 matter, 27, 77−85, 111, 122−5, 151, 155, 215−16, 228, 236−7, 249−50, 332, 337, 356, 359, 366−7, 373, 379, 381, 402, 420, 423, 428, 556, 617, 635, 645, 655−61, 667, 673, 696, 742, 755 meaning, 50, 78, 82, 94, 96, 133, 155, 164, 170, 202, 274, 276,

847

General Index 278, 287, 296−7, 300, 303, 317, 336, 343−6, 351, 359−63, 368, 390, 407, 419, 429, 436, 466−72, 478, 480, 487−92, 508−9, 526, 539, 543−6, 549, 553−4, 558, 562, 572, 580−1, 583, 586, 592−3, 595−6, 600, 612, 616, 629, 647, 669, 684−5, 691, 696, 702−6, 711, 724−5, 729−30, 737, 740−1, 745, 747 measure, 82, 206, 241, 313, 325, 334, 358, 375, 380, 426, 467, 508, 552, 578−9, 611, 668−9, 674, 696, 702 mechanical, 65, 81, 109, 129, 137, 139, 156, 160, 212, 327, 358, 367, 396, 423, 438, 448−9, 467, 523, 537, 539, 552, 582−3, 587, 611−12, 616, 621, 650, 668, 670, 676, 679, 689−90, 697, 707, 709, 718, 720, 728−30, 740−2, 744, 747, 767, 772 memory, 15, 18, 34−5, 100, 198−200, 209−10, 212, 235, 245, 403, 450, 455, 475, 586, 685, 707, 744 mental, 14, 18, 20, 28−9, 31−4, 39−41, 44, 58, 61, 74−5, 84, 90, 109, 113, 120−1, 171, 205, 213, 217, 220, 236, 254, 293, 297−8, 303−6, 308, 317, 326, 332, 336−7, 402−4, 419, 447, 454, 457, 460, 476, 479, 484, 520, 534−5, 555, 570, 595, 623, 625−6, 643−4, 657−8, 715, 721, 739, 754, 757, 760 metaphor, 113, 296−7, 518, 525, 542, 546, 549, 566, 571−3, 577, 650, 668, 725, 742 metaphysics, 12−13, 15, 18, 27, 34, 37, 47, 51−2, 54−7, 59, 63−4,

70−1, 77−8, 80−1, 83, 85, 99, 101, 103, 105−6, 108, 112, 116, 123, 126, 136, 141, 151, 160, 166, 176, 202, 209−10, 221, 223, 234−5, 267, 277, 296−7, 309−10, 313, 315, 319, 321, 324, 329, 332, 359−60, 363−8, 370, 373−4, 377−8, 383−6, 389−90, 393, 395−400, 409, 412, 420, 430, 432−3, 438, 441−2, 479, 491, 506, 508−9, 535, 549, 553, 569, 577, 580, 591, 593, 599−600, 603−4, 614, 618−19, 622−3, 625, 627, 632, 634, 639−40, 656, 663, 666, 670, 691, 696, 699, 739, 765, 769 method, 38, 40, 45−7, 51, 53−4, 56−9, 63, 71, 73−6, 81, 91, 102, 107, 111−12, 116, 140, 148, 150−1, 169, 194, 211−12, 269, 271, 274− 5, 278, 281, 285, 293, 299, 302−3, 305, 310, 312−16, 318, 320−42, 371−2, 375−6, 379, 382, 384−5, 387, 391−3, 395−9, 408−9, 411, 416, 436−7, 449−52, 454−5, 457− 60, 463−7, 472, 476, 484−5, 492, 494, 503, 506, 510, 512, 534−6, 568−70, 580−2, 589, 591−3, 597−8, 600, 605−8, 619−21, 634, 651, 663, 670, 695−6, 699, 707, 713, 716, 733, 736, 739−40, 743, 745, 757, 769, 772−3, 775 mind, 12, 14−16, 19−20, 27−35, 40−1, 44, 56, 58, 70−1, 73−4, 96, 108, 111, 120−1, 128, 152, 155, 176, 195−206, 209−19, 223−36, 240−1, 245−63, 271, 273, 278−309, 313−14, 320−1, 325−37, 343, 346, 352, 355, 359−64, 367, 370, 373, 376−83, 386−7, 390,

848

General Index 393−4, 403−4, 408, 411, 415−16, 419−20, 422−5, 431−8, 441−4, 450−62, 475, 483, 487, 489, 494, 509, 531, 538−42, 550−1, 566, 569−70, 586, 615, 626, 632, 649−50, 653−4, 657−8, 668−70, 673−4, 689, 698, 703, 705, 707, 710, 733, 735, 745 mistakes (philosophical), 109, 114−15, 313, 335, 500, 557, 567, 575−609, 614, 622−3, 724, 759 modality, 14−16, 29, 108, 194−8, 200−3, 205−6, 212−13, 215−21, 227−8, 231, 245−7, 249−50, 253−4, 256−7, 281, 285, 288−9, 299−301, 356−9, 370, 392, 405−7, 424, 497, 516, 518, 522−3, 535, 551, 555, 586−7, 613, 650, 653, 660, 733, 738, 755, 757, 760, 773 moment, 81, 104, 110−11, 113−16, 121, 128, 134, 141, 159−60, 344−5, 367, 369, 464, 523, 525, 527, 529, 532, 542−4, 571−4, 576, 578, 592, 612−16, 621−2, 652−3, 658, 671, 684−92, 699, 701, 718, 720−1, 729, 746−7, 756, 763, 767−9 monism, 55, 62−3, 74−5, 101, 109, 122, 124, 129, 136, 403, 408, 453, 539−40, 542−3, 548, 558, 655, 660, 675, 691, 700 morality, 4, 14, 24−5, 32−3, 37, 54−5, 58−9, 65, 71−2, 74−5, 77−9, 81, 85, 88, 90, 94, 103, 111−12, 128, 144, 148, 155, 161, 197, 235, 245, 247, 263−4, 268, 275, 316, 349−51, 359, 367, 371, 373−5, 379, 392, 395−6, 398, 404, 407, 410−11, 414, 416, 419−20, 424, 449−50, 453−4, 456, 465, 470,

474, 476, 480−1, 498−9, 502−3, 508−10, 516, 519, 524, 534−5, 538, 553, 559, 568, 571, 575, 587, 597, 613, 621, 628−9, 632, 641, 663, 669, 700−1, 705−9, 714−15, 717, 722, 728, 730, 735, 739, 745, 750, 752, 754, 756, 760, 763, 765, 769−70, 774 Mother Idea, 27−35, 166, 261, 290, 297 motion, 110, 197, 207, 214, 233, 267, 329, 347, 383, 387, 423, 599−600, 617 movement, 42−3, 80, 86−9, 129, 139, 143−4, 195−6, 201, 226, 267, 297, 303, 305, 309, 311, 355, 362, 380−1, 403, 419, 421, 456, 464, 542, 545−6, 548−9, 554, 559−60, 592−4, 601, 623−4, 660−1, 675, 678, 687, 692, 699−700, 703 music, 94, 266, 387, 397, 453, 487, 489, 495, 504−5, 573, 585, 587, 591, 613, 640 mysticism, 47, 71, 79, 108, 128, 157, 161, 168, 181, 316, 337, 461, 477, 516−17, 536, 541, 550, 552, 563, 608, 623, 628, 648, 670, 672, 705, 715, 755, 757−8, 774 narrative, 7, 80−1, 85, 95, 97, 118, 370, 463−5, 467, 469, 476, 481, 492−3, 497, 501−2, 506, 509, 514, 590−1, 595, 602, 760 nation, 7−8, 37−8, 51, 58, 60, 66−7, 69, 73, 78, 86−8, 97, 118, 127, 142, 144, 146, 151, 154, 156−8, 164−71, 268, 333, 335, 343−4, 349−51, 358−61, 364, 369−70, 376, 394, 430, 432, 445, 448−9, 468, 499, 504, 509, 531, 565−6,

849

General Index 592, 609−10, 630, 695, 706, 708, 710−14, 716, 718, 722, 734−7, 742, 750−1, 753−4, 756, 759, 761, 763, 790−1, 803 natural, 9, 14, 17−18, 24, 32, 44−7, 50, 55−9, 62, 64, 72, 74-75, 78, 81, 95, 108, 112, 114, 116-117, 120, 127-129, 137-139, 166, 193, 196, 201, 211, 224, 228, 230, 245, 248, 253, 262, 267, 275−6, 282, 293, 307, 309, 312−15, 318, 320−2, 324, 326, 328−30, 332−6, 338−40, 347, 349, 351−4, 358−63, 366−71, 374−5, 377−8, 381−2, 385, 387, 389−92, 395−6, 399, 405, 407, 410−12, 419, 441, 445, 449−50, 452, 454−6, 460, 466−7, 469, 472−3, 477−9, 481, 484, 490, 507, 511−12, 514, 516, 533−4, 536, 541−2, 564−5, 567, 574, 576, 582, 584−5, 587, 596−8, 600, 602−4, 606, 608, 610−11, 613, 615, 617, 620, 623, 626, 631, 633, 635−7, 646, 648−9, 655, 659−60, 669−72, 674, 678, 681, 689, 695−7, 714, 737, 740, 743, 769, 772, 775 naturalism, 35, 40, 54, 61, 74, 79, 89, 117, 124, 127-129, 166, 279, 306, 359, 367, 453, 511, 534, 551, 554-556, 563-564, 568, 587, 589, 597-598, 600-603, 605, 629, 631, 658-659, 666-670, 672, 675, 678680, 686, 695, 745 nature, 9, 32, 34−5, 40, 43, 53, 55, 57−8, 61, 72, 74−5, 81, 85, 113, 115−17, 123, 127−30, 136−41, 166, 196, 200−1, 204−9, 226, 228−9, 232−3, 240, 248−9, 252−6, 262, 268, 270, 278−9, 285, 293, 298, 300−2, 305, 307−11, 313,

315−16, 319−20, 323−7, 329−30, 332, 334−5, 337−9, 346−9, 352−62, 364−7, 370−1, 373−5, 377, 379−93, 396−8, 403, 405, 409−10, 414−16, 418−19, 422−8, 430, 432, 434−7, 445, 450−1, 453−8, 465−6, 473, 475, 479, 486, 489−90, 496−7, 500, 502, 506−7, 509, 514, 521, 524, 527, 530, 533, 535, 549−53, 555−7, 559, 565−6, 570, 573, 576, 583, 586−7, 591−2, 596−608, 611−13, 615−21, 623, 629, 631−3, 635, 637, 639, 650, 652, 654, 657, 659−61, 667−9, 671−3, 675−9, 685−91, 694, 696−8, 700−3, 705, 717, 732, 737−9, 748, 756, 759 necessary, 16−17, 20−2, 29−30, 32, 34, 41−3, 62, 78, 102, 104−5, 111, 113, 115−16, 119, 124, 129, 134, 137−8, 145, 155, 195, 202−3, 205, 208, 212, 214, 217−22, 226−9, 231−4, 239, 243−4, 248, 253, 257−8, 261−2, 280, 283−4, 286, 289, 294, 297−9, 302−3, 306, 308, 313, 320, 322, 332, 337, 345, 350−1, 357, 359, 363, 402, 422, 425−7, 432, 440, 443, 449−50, 458−60, 498, 517, 521−2, 528−9, 536, 539, 543−4, 551−2, 564, 578, 581−2, 587−9, 592, 595−6, 598, 619, 651, 655, 657−8, 660, 666, 670, 672, 676, 685−7, 690, 704, 711, 718, 722, 728, 730, 734, 738−9, 747, 766, 770, 772 necessity, 22, 29−30, 41, 74, 119, 137, 158, 212, 214−15, 220, 233, 237, 239, 256−7, 280, 283, 285, 298, 336, 339, 353, 367, 370, 402−3, 406−8, 419, 424−5, 427−8,

850

General Index 448, 534, 573, 581, 587, 595, 599, 612−13, 647, 667, 675, 686−8, 697, 712, 718, 724, 730, 732, 746−8, 752, 757 negation, 42, 57, 65, 104−5, 108−10, 113, 129, 133−40, 183, 218−20, 234, 238−9, 251, 292−3, 349−50, 363−4, 379, 403, 405, 415−16, 427, 473, 482, 493, 517, 524−9, 536, 538, 542−5, 549, 556−8, 572, 574−5, 579, 588, 591, 594, 596, 599, 612, 615−17, 620−1, 626, 640, 652, 660, 671, 675−6, 678−9, 684−90, 692, 694, 704, 711, 731, 735, 746 newspaper, 3−4, 37, 49, 60, 483, 734, 751, 765, 774, 777 nominalism, 15, 55, 176−7, 269, 276, 377, 602, 658, 687 non-being, 114, 136, 525−7, 532, 539, 543, 545, 549, 557−9, 571−2, 574−5, 578, 581, 616, 692, 699−701 nothing, 29, 32, 61−3, 65, 73−4, 84, 86−7, 90, 95, 98, 101−2, 108−11, 114, 116, 123, 139, 141, 155, 160, 166, 170, 204−8, 214, 217, 219−21, 223, 230, 236, 238−9, 241, 245−6, 248, 250−1, 254−8, 261−2, 271, 279, 281−3, 287, 289−90, 292, 294−5, 298, 300, 303−5, 323, 327, 332−3, 336, 345, 348−53, 357, 361−4, 366−8, 374, 378, 383, 393, 397, 403, 408, 412, 416−18, 422−7, 430, 434−7, 446, 449, 451−2, 464, 477−9, 485, 502, 511, 514, 525, 530, 536, 538, 540, 543−6, 556, 558, 560, 562−3, 576, 583−5, 591, 593, 597, 600, 606−7, 610, 614−18, 623, 625−6, 646−7,

651−2, 655−7, 663, 668−70, 675, 677, 682, 690−2, 696−7, 699, 702−5, 715, 724, 740, 742−5, 747, 756, 760, 763, 774 noumenon, 19, 221, 223, 230, 451 nullism, 364−5 number, 100−2, 205, 207, 219, 224−6, 229, 242, 256, 259−60, 264−6, 280, 284, 301, 312, 317, 325, 338, 369, 374−5, 377, 390, 405, 410, 421, 425, 428, 452, 456, 479, 505, 517−18, 522−3, 525, 528, 538, 543, 569, 600, 613, 629, 633, 669, 678−9, 687, 689−90, 694, 707, 715, 734, 747−8, 750, 755 object, 14−22, 28−35, 39, 41, 44, 61, 63, 70, 74−5, 78−83, 94−9, 107−8, 120−5, 133−4, 139−40, 195−8, 209−33, 236, 238−57, 260, 283−91, 294−5, 303−6, 309, 324−7, 346−8, 353, 355, 357, 359, 363, 366−7, 375, 402−9, 452, 465−70, 487−500, 506−7, 510−14, 516, 518, 523, 531, 534−6, 553, 556, 558, 570, 579, 585, 587, 594, 599, 610, 617, 638, 645−6, 649, 651−5, 658, 661−4, 667, 673−4, 683−4, 690−1, 696−7, 699−702, 704, 740, 760 objectifying, 570, 699, 741 objectivity, 12, 15−16, 20−2, 28−9, 35, 39, 41, 44, 55, 79−81, 120−1, 128, 133−4, 137, 139, 197−8, 202−6, 213−15, 219−23, 226−33, 237, 240−3, 248−50, 252, 267, 284, 293−5, 303−6, 310, 324, 346, 367, 384, 386, 390, 407, 410, 420, 464−7, 497, 512, 526, 544,

851

General Index 564, 570−2, 581−2, 595, 601, 613, 646−7, 653−4, 662, 664, 683−4, 688−91, 696, 715, 740−1, 747, 756 observation, 18, 38, 46, 53, 56−7, 59, 62, 64, 75, 97, 212, 232, 249, 254, 269, 271, 281, 291, 314, 316, 319, 321, 324−31, 339, 365, 372, 376, 378−9, 383−4, 386−90, 393, 403, 407, 410, 412, 419, 437, 452, 454−5, 464, 480, 487−8, 495, 500−1, 504, 507, 510, 513, 521, 534, 540, 552, 560, 598−9, 604, 608, 612, 615, 622, 650, 654, 658, 678, 688, 715, 723, 730, 745, 755, 760 ontologism, 50, 275−6, 281, 285, 302−3, 310, 323, 345−8 ontology, 40, 43−4, 50, 63, 84, 109, 254, 272, 275−82, 284−5, 290, 295, 302−6, 308, 310, 320, 322−3, 325−6, 331, 337, 345−8, 366, 419−20, 445−6, 536, 625, 693 opinion, 338, 349, 411, 496, 557, 720, 724, 731, 738, 745, 771 opposite, 70, 101−5, 108−16, 124, 136, 145, 183, 235, 254, 267, 310, 346, 382, 405, 524−9, 534−58, 562−3, 566−78, 582, 584, 586, 588, 603, 616−17, 619, 622, 626, 632, 658, 697, 700, 711 opposition, 71, 82, 104−5, 108−10, 112, 118, 136−7, 150, 155, 290, 352−4, 405, 408, 448, 468, 523−30, 538−43, 557, 577, 612, 626, 632, 646, 690, 698, 752, 768 overcome (aufheben), 110, 141, 145, 344, 358, 367, 471, 476, 516, 523, 540, 542, 547, 553−4, 557−8, 560, 566, 571−2, 574, 585, 614, 617−18, 622, 658, 666−7,

672−3, 684, 686, 689−90, 692−3, 697−8, 704, 712, 723−4, 726, 736, 739−40, 755, 759, 772 painting, 96−7, 387, 494−5, 497, 500, 509−10, 573, 587, 591, 594, 609, 613 panlogicism, 116, 532, 614−15, 619, 639 pantheism, 25, 37, 40, 48−9, 55, 66, 68−9, 180, 250, 253, 264−9, 272, 274−6, 279−81, 288−9, 298−302, 306, 308, 357−8, 363, 372, 374, 382, 390, 418−19, 421−3, 425, 427, 562, 579, 628 papacy, 25, 38, 45, 50, 69, 88, 164, 269, 277, 400, 465, 720 paradox, 21, 33−4, 319, 588, 627, 745 paralogism, 301, 739 participation, 286, 360, 383, 419, 424, 705 particular, 15, 22, 28, 30−1, 41, 62, 82−3, 95, 99−102, 105, 108, 116, 127, 136−40, 144, 194, 202, 217−18, 222, 234, 238, 250, 257−61, 292, 314, 319, 322, 326, 332, 336, 347, 357, 379, 383, 398, 408, 434, 441, 459, 466, 469, 472−3, 479, 488, 490, 492, 494, 509, 514, 516, 520−3, 529, 531, 536−8, 543, 550, 555, 560, 565, 568, 570, 572−615, 645−8, 656−7, 662, 670−1, 687−90, 698, 702, 704, 709−10, 718−20, 725, 728, 730−2, 736−41, 745−6, 750, 758, 763, 773 passion, 14, 65, 195, 203, 375−7, 384, 389, 393−5, 416, 516, 560, 565−6, 594, 599, 604−5, 703, 706, 724, 753, 756−7

852

General Index passivity, 14, 28, 43−4, 108, 110, 121, 138−9, 148, 151, 195, 203, 216, 228, 238, 246, 528, 538, 572, 616, 650−1, 721, 728, 730 past, 15, 33, 80−2, 97, 115, 128, 133−6, 141, 153, 157, 167−71, 198−200, 206, 252, 272, 345, 372, 394−5, 464, 466, 468, 501, 506, 588, 603, 612, 638, 654, 658, 671, 684−6, 691, 693, 699, 703, 707, 709, 716, 721−4, 728, 736, 754−5, 759−60 patriotism, 5, 24, 36, 64, 143, 165, 168−9, 709 pedagogy, 77, 118, 120, 131, 151, 476, 518, 581, 584, 633, 651, 717−19, 742 perception, 14−16, 18, 20, 31, 33−5, 39, 43, 61−3, 108, 195−6, 198−9, 201−2, 204−5, 209−15, 221, 223, 230−3, 237, 241−3, 247−8, 254, 260, 282−3, 285, 288, 290−2, 301, 303−6, 324, 328, 357, 367, 402−4, 407, 411, 422, 434, 442, 449, 456, 497, 524, 536, 556, 560, 571, 588, 597, 622−3, 673−5, 748 perennial, 50, 338, 349, 372, 667 perfect, 79, 200, 238, 273, 284, 330, 337, 357, 366, 389, 418−19, 423−6, 433, 438, 468, 490, 499, 506, 514−15, 541, 643, 652, 687−8, 719, 746 personality, 56, 64, 103, 123, 161, 307, 346−8, 356−8, 363, 373, 408, 413, 418−19, 460, 467, 479−80, 488, 492, 496, 524, 593, 595, 618, 679, 699, 703−4, 707, 721, 727, 733, 735, 775 perspective, 81−2, 97, 120, 254, 280, 334, 346, 424, 467, 490, 497, 506,

551, 563, 650, 652, 737, 739−40, 770, 775 pessimism, 94−5, 139, 155, 182, 540, 558, 755 phenomenon, 21, 38, 56−8, 83, 116, 127, 206−7, 213−14, 229−30, 236, 252, 271, 314, 319, 325, 327, 330, 332, 335−6, 351, 358, 376−7, 379, 383, 387−8, 390, 407, 409, 415−16, 419, 422−3, 436, 448−50, 452, 469, 474−6, 488−9, 504, 556−7, 581, 585, 596, 604, 656, 668, 725, 729 phenomenology, 3, 31, 48, 123, 156, 535, 546, 554, 566, 575−6, 580−1, 583, 585, 587, 599, 613, 625, 629− 30, 632, 653, 655−6, 674, 677, 793 philology, 54, 64, 67, 71−2, 80, 351, 366, 369, 392, 395, 397, 400, 413, 417, 435−7, 441−2, 454, 456, 460, 462, 464−6, 533, 564, 593 philosophy of praxis, 79, 118−25, 148, 151−2, 160, 642−64, 726−8, 736−45, 748, 751, 767, 769, 772−3, 777 physical, 15, 81, 83, 90, 101, 109, 116, 119, 123−4, 127, 129, 131, 166, 202, 213, 220, 222−3, 234, 263, 296, 313−14, 317, 320, 326, 330, 338, 351, 399, 419−20, 438, 442, 450, 457, 489, 519, 584, 595, 605, 610−12, 615, 618, 620, 645−6, 656, 668, 677, 702, 737, 740, 742, 748, 752 physics, 54, 73, 197, 307, 314, 319, 323, 327, 329, 331, 341, 352, 372, 377, 383, 395−6, 438, 449, 485, 507−8, 519, 552, 599, 601−5, 608, 611−12, 620, 635−7, 668, 742 physiognomy, 402, 634

853

General Index physiology, 80, 116, 371, 382, 399, 403, 408, 464, 489, 501, 507, 512, 542, 605−6, 608, 611−12, 646, 668, 670, 679 poetry, 15, 24, 46, 60, 64, 75, 90, 96−7, 115, 156−7, 198, 266, 318, 341, 347, 361−2, 372, 378, 384, 387, 395, 397, 403−4, 412, 417, 426, 431, 453, 461, 464, 479, 482−3, 488, 490, 493−4, 496−7, 499, 505, 509−11, 514−15, 519, 526, 529, 534−5, 541−2, 545, 552, 566, 568, 570−1, 573, 585−8, 590, 594, 597, 605, 609, 613, 616, 624, 633−4, 682, 689, 698−9, 744−5, 751, 754, 757 politics, 3−6, 9, 12, 24, 26, 28, 36−9, 47, 49, 51−5, 58, 60−1, 66−70, 78−81, 84−6, 88, 90, 106, 119, 122, 124, 142−9, 152−5, 158−61, 163, 165, 167−9, 171, 173, 234, 264−5, 267−9, 276, 331, 341, 350−1, 359, 388−9, 394, 399, 417, 445, 465, 469, 476, 481, 483−4, 499, 503−4, 507, 509, 519, 561−2, 565, 601, 609, 628, 630, 642−3, 659, 664, 666, 680, 706−8, 710−16, 723−4, 727−9, 731−2, 734−5, 741, 746−7, 749−51, 753−4, 759−60, 763−4, 767−70, 773, 775−7 pope, 25−6, 37−8, 45, 47, 69, 156, 164−6, 263, 269, 352, 354, 400, 446, 564, 749−50 positivism, 6, 47, 51, 53−4, 56−7, 59, 61, 66−7, 73−6, 78, 80, 83, 85−6, 88, 90−1, 93, 117−19, 126−8, 150, 165−6, 178, 330, 334, 336, 366, 371−9, 381−5, 387, 389, 391−3, 395−400, 447−9, 451−3, 455−9,

461, 468−9, 474, 479, 483, 503−4, 506, 562−3, 587, 605, 607−8, 611, 617, 620−2, 632, 635, 637, 668, 670, 682, 695, 740, 745 practice, 7, 15, 37, 52, 55−9, 62, 70, 72, 74, 79−85, 91, 93, 98−9, 103, 107, 114, 119, 122, 139−40, 148, 151−2, 155−6, 159, 161, 198, 228, 264, 266, 268, 278, 281−2, 285, 302, 306, 310, 314, 316−19, 323−8, 331−2, 334, 339−40, 352, 360, 362, 378, 389, 391, 393, 404, 411, 419, 441−3, 447, 450, 457, 464, 477, 479, 488, 499, 502, 505, 514, 516, 519, 523−4, 531−2, 535, 572, 574, 576, 582−3, 597−9, 601, 613, 632, 635, 647−8, 653−5, 663, 680, 690, 709, 715, 724, 726, 728−30, 732, 734, 741−4, 746−8, 751−2, 754−6, 760, 763, 769−70, 773 pragmatism, 6, 58, 117−18, 744 praktri, 279, 310 praxis, 79, 119−26, 148−52, 160, 573, 623, 642−3, 645−51, 653−5, 657−61, 663, 726−8, 736−7, 739−43, 745, 747−8, 751, 767, 769, 772−3, 777 Primacy (Primato), 4−5, 8, 36−9, 47, 50, 168, 177, 264−77, 609 Prime (principle), 264, 275, 277, 279−82, 290, 292, 367 prolusione, 49−51, 53, 60, 73, 78, 127, 170, 399, 445, 627, 640 prose, 95−6, 159−60, 318, 485, 491, 496−7, 570−1, 587, 765 protology, 37, 183, 264, 275−7, 348 providence, 5, 71, 81, 127, 273, 359−62, 374, 399, 437, 444, 467, 565, 668, 761

854

General Index psychologism, 37, 40, 43−4, 52, 272, 276, 281, 284−5, 295, 302−4, 345, 367 psychology, 12−15, 18, 28, 32, 37−40, 54, 57−9, 68−70, 77−8, 83−6, 94−6, 114, 123, 129, 138, 193−6, 200, 213, 231, 234−5, 263, 270−1, 275−85, 290, 292, 295, 303−10, 316, 319, 325, 332, 335−7, 359, 361−8, 384, 394−5, 399, 454, 467, 474−8, 481, 483, 487, 492, 494−7, 500−1, 504, 506, 508, 512, 514, 519, 569, 574, 586, 590, 601, 608, 613, 618, 620, 653, 656, 668, 670, 676, 679, 682, 688, 759 quality, 21, 64−5, 151, 196, 202−3, 205, 215, 217−20, 224, 227−8, 230, 238, 246, 249, 259, 281, 318, 327, 332, 360, 388, 414, 416, 419, 425, 468, 567, 613, 617, 626, 702, 729, 741−2, 756, 760, 765−6 quantification, 73−4, 77, 448, 553, 556, 626, 694 quantity, 151, 217−18, 220, 225−8, 234, 238, 241−2, 249, 375, 425, 448, 456, 582, 612−13, 621, 741−2 racism, 156, 168, 638, 761, 778 railroads, 25, 165, 381 rational, 18, 32, 74, 108, 111, 125, 166, 209−10, 234, 243, 261, 267, 289−90, 307, 312, 318, 324, 330, 332−3, 350, 365, 532, 557−8, 561− 3, 565, 567, 591−3, 599, 611, 630, 648, 657, 660, 674−5, 677, 699, 701, 724−5, 731−2, 741, 747, 772 rationalism, 37−8, 93−4, 96, 145, 266, 270, 272, 276, 321, 328, 330−1, 335−7, 352, 487, 495−6,

498, 510, 554, 564, 695, 711, 760 rationality, 131, 160−1, 313, 435, 522−3, 560, 606, 647, 657−8, 679, 681, 730, 733, 738, 740, 747−8, 765, 774 reaction (historical), 24−6, 45, 47, 145, 154, 158, 165, 372, 402, 561, 566−7, 569, 597, 609, 666, 710, 718−19, 727 realism, 5, 21, 37, 55, 61−6, 71, 122, 125, 127, 161, 229, 267, 269−70, 274, 276, 365, 377, 401−12, 415−16, 511−12, 661, 669, 680, 687, 696−7, 736, 772 recirculation, 48−51 regulative, 79, 148, 240, 328, 747, 760 religion, 24, 28, 36−8, 59, 64, 69, 85, 97, 114, 119−22, 127−8, 131, 144−6, 149, 151−66, 188, 193, 245, 247, 266, 268, 274−6, 280, 301, 340, 350, 352−3, 356, 362, 364−5, 389−91, 393, 398, 400, 404, 409, 414−15, 434, 443, 449, 451, 455, 457, 461, 467, 470, 473−4, 481, 497, 499, 507, 553, 563−4, 570, 574, 581, 587−8, 590, 601, 608−9, 611, 618, 624, 633, 639, 645−8, 653−4, 666, 668, 670−1, 700−1, 705, 707, 709, 714−15, 717−25, 727, 730, 732−6, 739, 742, 746, 750, 754, 757−8, 761, 763, 769−70, 774−5 representation, 20, 28−9, 33, 44, 81, 85, 88, 95−100, 105−8, 114, 138−9, 141, 144, 183, 207, 214−15, 217−18, 221−7, 229−32, 236−7, 239−43, 251, 269, 282−4, 290, 297−8, 303−4, 307, 309, 345, 350, 352, 357, 361, 366, 368,

855

General Index 403−6, 415, 432, 445, 463−4, 466, 469−70, 476, 478−9, 481, 484, 487, 490−2, 494−502, 506, 509, 512, 517, 523, 529−32, 536, 541, 545, 548, 557, 569, 574, 586−7, 592, 594−6, 599, 603, 611, 619, 622, 632, 634, 644−5, 647, 650, 662, 668, 673−4, 678, 680, 693, 696−8, 703, 706, 710, 713, 721, 728, 746−8, 756, 767 republic, 11, 25, 69−70, 83, 267−8, 432−4, 438, 472, 477, 565, 630, 633, 669, 753, 758, 775 revelation, 41−2, 108, 266, 274, 276, 290, 295, 307, 348, 355−6, 362, 390, 705, 774 revisionism, 160, 763−4, 767−8, 776 revolution, 4, 8, 11, 25, 36, 45, 47, 50, 56−7, 60, 65, 82, 85, 87, 111, 121, 149, 157−8, 167, 193−4, 234, 277, 347, 378, 385, 394−6, 398, 481, 509, 552, 561, 564, 569, 647, 655, 660, 663−4, 708, 725, 751, 754, 757, 777 rhetoric, 19, 73, 81, 146, 170, 439, 444, 446, 465, 480, 485, 497, 502, 587, 613, 714, 744, 769 Romantic, 36, 46, 70, 145, 156, 164, 417, 496, 510, 532, 554, 564, 584, 587, 610−11, 623, 628, 630, 636, 760 scepticism, 18−20, 33, 35, 40, 44, 52, 73, 75, 87, 90, 101, 130, 132, 211, 246, 248−51, 272, 283−5, 294, 301, 312, 316, 324, 337−8, 346, 353−4, 356, 364−5, 367−8, 390, 393, 396, 399, 409, 451, 508, 516, 549, 577, 579, 608, 624, 677, 683, 692, 700, 739, 745

scholasticism, 6, 18, 26, 37, 62, 87, 149−50, 164−6, 189, 269, 317−18, 321, 333, 353−4, 357−8, 377−8, 380−4, 388, 393−4, 396−8, 409, 412, 569, 579, 586, 591, 647, 656, 696, 719, 743, 746 scientism, 156, 182 Scotism, 272 secular, 9, 25, 87, 118, 161, 165, 269, 399−400 seminary, 49, 168, 629 sensation, 9, 14, 16, 19, 28−9, 31−4, 38, 121, 123, 140, 174, 194−6, 199−202, 211, 215−19, 221, 223−4, 226−30, 236−7, 243, 245−8, 252, 254, 257, 259−62, 271, 288, 291, 323−4, 374, 449, 454, 474−5, 515, 623, 633, 653, 656, 668, 702, 736 sense, 9, 14−17, 27−9, 31−5, 38, 62, 83, 123, 129, 134−5, 140, 147−52, 160, 164, 194−201, 209−16, 220, 223−4, 229−30, 237−42, 247−9, 252−4, 256, 259, 262, 269−73, 286−8, 291, 301, 315−19, 325, 328−32, 335−9, 352−7, 360−2, 368, 402, 404, 407, 412, 424, 426, 433, 454, 480, 489−90, 509, 541, 549−50, 565, 570, 581, 585, 603, 606, 612−13, 617, 646, 652, 655−8, 661, 668, 671, 674−8, 701−5, 709, 716, 720−8, 732, 735−8, 743−4, 747−8, 765; common sense, 27, 32, 34−5, 38, 134−5, 147−52, 160, 164, 166, 247−8, 262, 271, 315−17, 328, 335−9, 368, 480, 606, 720, 722−8, 732, 735−8, 743−4, 765; good sense, 147−52, 160, 273, 541, 668, 720−4, 737−8, 747−8, 765

856

General Index sensibility, 14−16, 22, 195−6, 198, 200−1, 215−17, 221, 224−5, 228, 237−8, 240−1, 249, 270, 317, 655 sensible, 31, 38, 44, 93−4, 111, 115, 123−4, 128, 196, 211, 215−17, 221, 224−6, 228, 230, 233, 236−7, 240−2, 247, 249, 254, 260, 271, 285−7, 291, 293, 307−9, 314, 337, 339, 346, 376, 387, 391, 426, 487−8, 545, 551, 556, 585, 588, 612, 645−6, 651, 653−60, 663−4, 673−4, 703 sensism, 7−9, 23−4, 28−9, 33, 37−8, 45−6, 48, 61, 63, 109, 126, 166−7, 174, 248, 252, 256, 269−72, 276, 285, 287, 301, 324, 335, 337, 373, 402, 411, 474, 507, 539, 562, 570, 581, 597 sensory, 14−15, 18−22, 41, 121−3, 129, 140, 248, 252, 254, 282, 285, 291, 646−8, 653, 655−6, 673−4 sensual, 92−4, 96, 404, 432, 487, 498, 539 sentiment, 60, 63−4, 145, 156, 402, 404, 409−11, 493, 497, 510, 541, 564, 597−8, 608, 611, 613, 622, 662 slavery, 83, 85, 137, 149, 378, 469−70, 472, 560, 565, 717−19, 749, 754 socialism, 4, 78−9, 84, 118−19, 147, 473, 476−7, 479, 483, 561, 620, 640, 642, 662, 669, 706−7, 710, 720, 750, 754, 761 sociology, 73, 80−5, 127, 149−50, 448−9, 453, 463, 468−77, 479, 482, 507−8, 590, 609, 734, 739, 745, 751 solipsism, 137, 148, 689, 704, 747−8 sophism, 9, 23, 35, 149, 157, 164,

248, 316, 328, 451, 457, 473, 549, 608, 719, 725, 754 soul, 10, 14, 32−3, 68, 114, 141, 194−5, 198, 200−3, 218−19, 236−8, 241, 246, 254, 261−3, 272, 274, 310, 349, 351, 353, 355, 358−9, 363, 373, 383, 386, 397, 402−5, 407, 411, 415, 418−20, 425−6, 433, 513, 557, 559−60, 566, 569, 574, 613, 666, 668−9, 679, 681, 698−9, 703, 705−6, 708, 715, 725, 753, 755 Spirit, 93, 99, 103, 107, 113−17, 121−2, 125−32, 136−41, 151, 155, 157, 165−70, 344−9, 355−69, 419, 426−7, 451, 454, 456, 496, 510, 516, 518−21, 524−5, 529, 531−2, 535, 537, 550, 553−63, 566−87, 591−5, 601, 610, 613−23, 626, 633−6, 639, 652−6, 659−61, 666−81, 685, 690, 692, 695−705, 740, 742, 753, 755, 769, 773 squadrons, 144, 158, 708 state (physical, metaphysical, moral), 14, 29, 43, 46, 51, 64, 84−5, 158, 200, 208−9, 216, 218, 236, 284, 291, 297, 304, 307, 315−16, 360, 365, 367, 375−7, 382, 390, 402−4, 412, 414, 426, 461, 464, 467, 469, 475, 478, 480−1, 493, 531, 536, 545, 548, 567, 574, 586, 603, 644, 651, 654, 685, 723, 728, 731, 742, 745, 759, 762, 766, 770, 773 state (political), 51, 85, 114, 144−5, 149, 151, 157−8, 160, 169, 267, 349−52, 358, 361, 408, 460, 476, 479, 561−5, 574−5, 580, 594, 600, 610, 614, 630, 632, 706−10, 719, 734, 742, 746, 753−4, 757−9, 763, 767, 775

857

General Index style, 321, 333, 546, 720, 765 subaltern, 730, 750 subject, 15, 20−1, 28−9, 35, 40, 72, 78, 81, 84, 121, 123−4, 132, 135−7, 140, 194, 197−8, 202−6, 209, 213, 215, 218−20, 227, 229−35, 238, 240, 243, 249−50, 253−6, 282, 299, 301, 304, 307, 312−13, 316, 318, 320−1, 324, 327, 333, 338, 355, 366−7, 369, 371, 373−4, 385, 388, 391, 395, 400, 404, 407, 409, 413, 423−4, 436, 446, 449, 464−5, 475, 477, 479−80, 503, 511, 517, 532, 537, 548, 551, 553, 557, 570, 578, 585, 587, 610, 612, 615, 618, 638, 651−3, 658, 661, 667, 677, 684−5, 688−90, 696−7, 703−4, 717, 759, 772 subjectivity, 13, 15, 19−22, 29, 35, 38−9, 44, 46, 81, 121, 125, 140, 197−8, 204, 213−21, 224−33, 237, 240−1, 248−50, 252, 271, 288−9, 294−5, 306, 316, 324, 332, 367, 381, 386, 420, 443, 449, 454, 459, 463, 467, 478, 512, 544, 547, 553, 564, 570, 574, 578, 594, 601−2, 613, 646, 648−9, 653, 655, 661, 668, 674, 696, 699−700, 737 subsistence, 28−9, 31, 34, 202, 206, 255−6, 258, 260, 262, 280, 284−8, 290, 297, 303, 309, 311, 347, 408 substance, 14−16, 21, 33, 41, 43, 57, 73, 77, 129, 141, 196, 200, 202−3, 206, 208, 219−20, 227−30, 237, 239, 243, 247−8, 250, 252, 268−9, 274−5, 279−80, 282, 288−9, 291, 297−9, 301, 304, 308, 310, 318, 336, 346−7, 356−8, 361, 367, 377−9, 384, 404−5, 422−3, 425,

427, 448, 453, 486, 517, 541, 551, 556−7, 560, 568, 578, 605, 609, 612, 615, 618, 657, 671, 677, 694, 699, 714, 776 supernatural, 37, 50, 86, 111, 166, 177, 352−4, 366, 437, 556−7, 670 superstition, 150−1, 376, 391, 654, 714, 720, 736, 745, 769 syllogism, 50, 75, 149, 194, 243, 289, 320, 326, 407, 449, 537, 574, 582, 589, 603, 612−13, 634 syndicalism, 79, 106 theism, 24, 279, 566, 618 theocosm, 275, 277 theology, 10−11, 14, 18, 23−4, 32, 36−7, 56, 68, 87−8, 121, 149, 160, 165−6, 193, 257, 263, 275, 277, 298−9, 310, 318, 350, 353−6, 376, 399−400, 421, 464−6, 503, 554, 597, 618, 628, 634, 645, 672, 739, 749, 752, 761, 768−9 tradition, 50, 84, 148−9, 170−1, 273−4, 343−5, 368, 445, 447, 456, 460, 478, 492, 648, 704, 707, 709, 715, 738, 758 tragedy, 97, 493, 500, 558, 609 transcendence, 14, 19−21, 23, 29, 35, 71−2, 78, 84, 117, 129, 138, 140− 1, 149, 155, 157, 160, 166, 194, 212−14, 216−17, 221−4, 226, 229− 33, 236−9, 243, 249−51, 253, 332, 336, 345, 366−8, 443, 478, 536, 553, 555, 560, 563, 577−8, 618−19, 645, 657, 661, 676, 691, 696−7, 700, 739, 746, 756, 768−9, 774 transcendental aesthetic, 216−17, 237−8 transcendental analytic, 238

858

General Index transcendental deduction, 21 transcendental idealism, 20, 23, 35, 117, 166, 229, 250−1, 253 transformism, 161, 666−7, 678−80, 775, 778 triad, 61, 93, 114, 505, 526, 543−4, 550−1, 553, 558, 571, 574−5, 581−2, 610−13, 617−18 unconscious, 64, 94, 347−8, 359, 395, 409, 411−12, 427, 444, 456, 485, 489, 500, 527, 564, 614, 617−18, 644, 679, 720 universal, 15, 18, 22, 28−31, 34, 42, 62, 72, 99−100, 102, 107−9, 116, 123, 137, 145, 176−7, 197, 212, 214, 217−18, 220, 222, 225, 234, 238, 256−8, 260−1, 280, 292, 300, 302, 307, 313, 324−5, 329, 331−2, 336, 341, 347−50, 352, 355, 357, 361−2, 380−1, 383, 387, 394, 397, 404, 409, 419−20, 425−7,

431, 438−9, 441−3, 445, 498, 507−9, 516, 519−20, 522, 526, 530, 535−8, 541−3, 545, 547, 549, 555−6, 560, 568−70, 572−4, 586, 588, 591−3, 601, 610−11, 614, 616, 619−20, 640, 645, 648, 657, 660, 687−9, 708−10, 713, 715, 719, 722, 740, 747, 763, 773 universality, 22, 29−30, 97, 102, 105, 214−15, 220, 237, 239, 256−7, 266, 349, 357, 434, 520−1, 523, 530, 560, 573, 582, 617, 657, 687−8 universalization, 31, 112, 159, 260−1, 704, 718 university, 3−4, 11, 24, 36, 52−3, 60, 68, 73, 77−8, 90, 112, 118, 126, 131, 147, 164, 343, 355, 369, 444, 460, 462, 469, 477, 481, 485, 508, 630, 664−5, 714, 734, 751 verism, 127, 498, 511, 669, 680

859