Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, Benedetto Croce [read e books online free TXT] 📗

not correct, then, to conceive of the amoral man as also the anti-economical man, or to make of morality an element of coherence in the acts of life, and therefore of economicity. Nothing prevents us from conceiving (an hypothesis which is verified at least during certain periods and moments, if not during whole lifetimes) a man altogether without moral conscience. In a man thus organized, what for us is immorality is not so for him, because it is not so felt. The consciousness of the contradiction between what is desired as a rational end and what is pursued egoistically cannot be born in him. This contradiction is anti-economicity. Immoral conduct becomes also anti-economical only in the man who possesses moral conscience. The moral remorse which is the proof of this, is also economical remorse; that is to say, pain at not having known how to will completely and to attain to that moral ideal which was willed at the first moment, but was afterwards perverted by the passions. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. The video and the probo are here an initial will immediately contradicted and passed over. In the man deprived of moral sense, we must admit a remorse which is merely economic; like that of a thief or of an assassin who should be attacked when on the point of robbing or of assassinating, and should abstain from doing so, not owing to a conversion of his being, but owing to his impressionability and bewilderment, or even owing to a momentary awakening of the moral consciousness. When he has come back to himself, that thief or assassin will regret and be ashamed of his inconsequence; his remorse will not be due to having done wrong, but to not having done it; his remorse is, therefore, economic, not moral, since the latter is excluded by hypothesis. However, a lively moral conscience is generally found among the majority of men, and its total absence is a rare and perhaps non-existent monstrosity. It may, therefore, be admitted, that morality coincides with economicity in the conduct of life.

[Sidenote] The merely economic and the error of the morally indifferent.

There need be no fear lest the parallelism affirmed by us should introduce afresh into the category of the morally indifferent, of that which is in truth action and volition, but is neither moral nor immoral; the category in sum of the licit and of the permissible, which has always been the cause or mirror of ethical corruption, as is the case with Jesuitical morality in which it dominated. It remains quite certain that indifferent moral actions do not exist, because moral activity pervades and must pervade every least volitional movement of man. But this, far from upsetting the parallelism, confirms it. Do there exist intuitions which science and the intellect do not pervade and analyse, resolving them into universal concepts, or changing them into historical affirmations? We have already seen that true science, philosophy, knows no external limits which bar its way, as happens with the so-called natural sciences. Science and morality entirely dominate, the one the aesthetic intuitions, the other the economic volitions of man, although neither of them can appear in the concrete, save in the intuitive form as regards the one, in the economic as regards the other.

[Sidenote] Critique of utilitarianism and the reform of Ethic and of Economic.

This combined identity and difference of the useful and of the moral, of the economic and of the ethic, explains the fortune enjoyed now and formerly by the utilitarian theory of Ethic. It is in fact easy to discover and to show a utilitarian side in every moral action; as it is easy to show an aesthetic side of every logical proposition. The criticism of ethical utilitarianism cannot escape by denying this truth and seeking out absurd and inexistent examples of useless moral actions. It must admit the utilitarian side and explain it as the concrete form of morality, which consists of what is within this form.

Utilitarians do not see this within. This is not the place for a more ample development of such ideas. Ethic and Economic cannot but be gainers, as we have said of Logic and Aesthetic, by a more exact determination of the relations that exist between them. Economic science is now rising to the animating concept of the useful, as it strives to pass beyond the mathematical phase, in which it is still entangled; a phase which, when it superseded historicism, was in its turn a progress, destroying a series of arbitrary distinctions and false theories of Economic, implied in the confusion of the theoretical with the historical. With this conception, it will be easy on the one hand to absorb and to verify the semi-philosophical theories of so-called pure economy, and on the other, by the introduction of successive complications and additions, and by passing from the philosophical to the empirical or naturalistic method, to include the particular theories of the political or national economy of the schools.

[Sidenote] Phenomenon and noumenon in practical activity.

As aesthetic intuition knows the phenomenon or nature, and philosophic intuition the noumenon or spirit; so economic activity wills the phenomenon or nature, and moral activity the noumenon or spirit. The spirit which desires itself, its true self, the universal which is in the empirical and finite spirit: that is the formula which perhaps defines the essence of morality with the least impropriety. This will for the true self is absolute liberty.

VIII EXCLUSION OF OTHER SPIRITUAL FORMS

[Sidenote] The system of the spirit.

In this summary sketch that we have given, of the entire philosophy of the spirit in its fundamental moments, the spirit is conceived as consisting of four moments or grades, disposed in such a way that the theoretical activity is to the practical as is the first theoretical grade to the second theoretical, and the first practical grade to the second practical. The four moments imply one another regressively by their concretion. The concept cannot be without expression, the useful without the one and the other, and morality without the three preceding grades. If the aesthetic fact is alone independent, and the others more or less dependent, then the logical is the least so and the moral will the most. Moral intention operates on given theoretic bases, which cannot be dispensed with, save by that absurd practice, the jesuitical direction of intention. Here people pretend to themselves not to know what at bottom they know perfectly well.

[Sidenote] The forms of genius.

If the forms of human activity are four, four also are the forms of genius. Geniuses in art, in science, in moral will or heroes, have certainly always been recognized. But the genius of pure Economic has met with opposition. It is not altogether without reason that a category of bad geniuses or of geniuses of evil has been created. The practical, merely economic genius, which is not directed to a rational end, cannot but excite an admiration mingled with alarm. It would be a mere question of words, were we to discuss whether the word “genius”

should be applied only to creators of aesthetic expression, or also to men of scientific research and of action. To observe, on the other hand, that genius, of whatever kind it be, is always a quantitative conception and an empirical distinction, would be to repeat what has already been explained as regards artistic genius.

[Sidenote] Non-existence of a fifth form of activity. Law; sociality.

A fifth form of spiritual activity does not exist. It would be easy to demonstrate how all the other forms, either do not possess the character of activity, or are verbal variants of the activities already examined, or are complex and derived facts, in which the various activities are mingled, or are filled with special contents and contingent data.

The judicial fact, for example, considered as what is called objective law, is derived both from the economic and from the logical activities.

Law is a rule, a formula (whether oral or written matters little here) in which is contained an economic relation willed by an individual or by a collectivity. This economic side at once unites it with and distinguishes it from moral activity. Take another example. Sociology (among the many meanings the word bears in our times) is sometimes conceived as the study of an original element, which is called sociality. Now what is it that distinguishes sociality, or the relations which are developed in a meeting of men, not of subhuman beings, if it be not just the various spiritual activities which exist among the former and which are supposed not to exist, or to exist only in a rudimentary degree, among the latter? Sociality, then, far from being an original, simple, irreducible conception, is very complex and complicated. This could be proved by the impossibility, generally recognized, of enunciating a single sociological law, properly so-called. Those that are improperly called by that name are revealed as either empirical historical observations, or spiritual laws, that is to say judgments, into which are translated the conceptions of the spiritual activities; when they are not simply empty and indeterminate generalizations, like the so-called law of evolution. Sometimes, too, nothing more is understood by sociality than social rule, and so law; and thus sociology is confounded with the science or theory of law itself. Law, sociality, and like terms, are to be dealt with in a mode analogous to that employed by us in the consideration of historicity and technique.

[Sidenote] Religiosity.

It may seem fitting to form a different judgment as to religious

activity. But religion is nothing but knowledge, and does not differ from its other forms and subforms. For it is in truth and in turn either the expression of practical and ideal aspirations (religious ideals), or historical narrative (legend), or conceptual science (dogma).

It can therefore be maintained with equal truth, both that religion is destroyed by the progress of human knowledge, and that it is always present there. Their religion was the whole patrimony of knowledge of primitive peoples: our patrimony of knowledge is our religion. The content has been changed, bettered, refined, and it will change and become better and more refined in the future also; but its function is always the same. We do not know what use could be made of religion by those who wish to preserve it side by side with the theoretic activity of man, with his art, with his criticism, and with his philosophy. It is impossible to preserve an imperfect and inferior kind of knowledge, like religion, side by side with what has surpassed and disproved it.

Catholicism, which is always coherent, will not tolerate a Science, a History, an Ethic, in contradiction to its views and doctrines. The rationalists are less coherent. They are disposed to allow a little space in their souls for a religion which is in contradiction with their whole theoretic world.

These affectations and religious susceptibilities of the rationalists of our times have their origin in the superstitious cult of the natural sciences. These, as we know and as is confessed by the mouth of their chief adepts, are all surrounded by limits. Science having been wrongly identified with the so-called natural sciences, it could be foreseen that the remainder would be asked of religion; that remainder with which the human spirit cannot dispense. We are therefore indebted to materialism, to positivism, to naturalism for this unhealthy and often disingenuous reflowering of religious exaltation. Such things are the business of the hospital, when they are not the business of the politician.

[Sidenote] Metaphysic.

Philosophy withdraws from religion all reason for existing, because it substitutes itself for religion. As the science of the spirit, it looks upon religion as a phenomenon, a