The discovery of the proper self.
The first duty of every individual who wishes to act effectively, consists, therefore, in seeking for himself, in exploring his own dispositions, in establishing what aptitudes have been deposited in him by the course of reality, both at the moment of his birth, and during the development of his own individual life: in knowing, that is to say, his own habits and passions, not in order to make of them atabula rasa,but to use them. The search is not easy and the preparatory part of life, namely youth, is spent upon it. Few are the fortunate individuals who have at once a clear and certain knowledge of their own being and of their duty; the majority seek and find it after many wanderings; and if such wanderings sometimes (as is written in the dedication of theScienza nuova) "seem misfortunes and are opportunities," at others they are but a fruitless moving to and fro; hence those that are undecided during the whole of their lives, the eternal youths, those who aspireto all or to many of the directions of human activity and are incapable in all. But when our own being unveils itself and we see our path clearly, then to disordered agitation succeeds the calm of sure and regular work, with its defeats and victories, its joys and sorrows, but with the constant vision of the Aim, that is, of the general direction to be followed. Vainly will he who is endowed and prepared for guiding mankind in political strife and has a clear and lively perception of human strength and weakness, of what can and of what cannot be done, and is furnished, so to speak, with practical sense (with the sense of complications and slight differences), will try (save in the rarest and most exceptional cases, and this reserve is to be understood in all that we are saying here) to acquire a place among those who cultivate the abstract and universal, operations demanding almost opposite aptitudes; vainly will he who was born to sing attempt to calculate; vainly will he whose mind and soul were made to accentuate dissensions in their bitter strife bend himself to be a conciliator and a peacemaker. It is worse than superfluous, it is stupid to weep over one's choleric or phlegmatic temperament. Therehave been choleric saints that have even used the stick, and phlegmatic saints who have succeeded admirably in patient persuasion: the mild Francis, "all seraphic in his ardour," and the impetuous Dominic "whose blows fell on the boughs of heresy." Reality is diversity and has need of both, and each is praiseworthy if he do that well to which he has beencalled.
The idea of "vocation."
This concept of thevocationhas a mystical and religious origin and preserves that form; but it is clear that by means of the previous considerations we have divested it of that form and reduced it to a scientific concept. The individual is not a "monad" or a "real," he is not a "soul" created by a God all in a moment and all of a piece; the individual is the historical situation of the universal spirit at every instant of time, and, therefore, the sum of the habits due to the historical situations. Those modes of conceiving and talking of oneand the sameindividual in twodifferentsituations, or of twodifferentindividuals in thesamesituation, are to be avoided, because individual and situation are all one. But when the individual has been thus defined, it remains none the less true that each individual must direct his life according to pre-existing habits and personal dispositions,and thus we discover the true meaning of the mythologies and religions that have been mentioned, and the struggles to find the suitable employment can be expressed with the words that religion has taught us when we were children: the "vocation" and the special "mission" that is allotted to us in life, until the last giving of accounts and the words of dismissal and repose:Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine!We are the children of that Reality which generates us and knows more than we, the Reality of which religions have caught a glimpse and called it God, father, and eternal wisdom.
Misunderstandings as to the rights of individuality. Evil individuality.
The affirmation of the rights that belong to individuality in the practical field has several times assumed and still assumes (in our time, more than in the past, owing to materialism and naturalism) a form, no longer symbolical and mystical, but wrong and irrational, that it is desirable to remark upon here, always in order to avoid possible equivoques. Indeed many look upon the respect due to their own beings as due to their caprice, that is to say, to what is on the contrary the negation of being: the right of the individual as the right to commit follies, or to a disaggregate individuality. The declared necessity of temperamentfor character is exchanged for admiration of temperament considered in itself, which, as such, is neither admirable nor blameworthy; but when separated from character becomes vice and folly. Hence the admiration that has even become a literary fashion, for the dissolute, for the violent, for homicides, for the criminals of the public prisons, illustrated by a few courageous and energetic souls among them, whereas they are as a rule weak, vile, and turbid.
False doctrines as to the connection of virtues and vices.
Various theories are also erroneous, in which it has been sought to establish the relation between the passions and the will, temperament and character, passions and temperament being understood as vicious passions and evil temperament; that is, not in themselves, but in their antithesis to the rational will: hence the vain and paradoxical attempts to join together and harmonize virtue and vice. Thus it has been maintained that in certain vices are foreshadowed the virtues which will or can be developed from them; for instance, military valour in ferocity, industrial capacity in greed; whereas ferocity and greed are wilful acts and contradictions incapable of generating any virtue, as is seen in the customary cowardice of the ferocious andthe ineptitude of the greedy and covetous. Such a connection of virtues and vices has on other occasions been presented as a mixture or co-temperament, and it has been affirmed that the vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as do poisons into the composition of medicines. Finally, virtue and vice have been placed in causal relation, and the causes of civil progress have been found in human vices. But the vices, as they are not the antecedents, so are they neither the ingredients nor the causes of the virtues. These are strength, those the lack of strength. It is generally affirmed that in every individual the virtues are accompanied by their correlative vices, but if this possess some approximate value as an empirical observation, strictly speaking it has none, because men can be conceived and are actually found, whose virtue, far from yielding to excesses and to vices, is eurythmic and temperate. But perhaps that common saying aims at something else that it fails of explaining well; namely, that every power has its impotence and every individual his limit; but this does not mean vice or defect; it is nothing but the tautological affirmation that the part is not the whole and the individual not the universal.
The universal in the individual and education.
But if the individual do not exhaust theuniversal, the universal lives in individuals; Reality in each of its particular manifestations. Therefore the affirmation of the right of individuality does not deny the right of universality; or it denies it only in that abstract form in which, to tell the truth, it is by itself denied. The individual is under the obligation to seek himself, but in order to do this he has also the obligation of cultivating himself as man in universal. A school that represented simply a cultivation of individual aptitudes, would be a training, not an education, a manufactory of utensils, not a nursery of spiritual and creative activities. The true specialism is universalism, and inversely, which means that if the universal do not act without specializing itself, yet specialization is not really specialization if it do not contain universality. If the two terms that are by nature indissoluble be divided, there remains only fruitless generalization or stupid particularization, and if our times have sinned in this latter respect, other times have sinned in the opposite. He is well-balanced who between these two forms of degeneration both knows and fills his own proper and individual mission so perfectly that he fulfils at the same time with it and through it the universal mission of man.
Multiplicity and unity: development.
The demonstration hitherto developed, that evil is negativity or contradiction, and that this contradiction takes place owing to the multiplicity of the desires in respect to the singleness of character of the volitional act, gives rise to the further question: Why should there be such a multiplicity, concurrent with the demand for unity, and thus be generated strife and contradiction? Here it would be fitting to observe that we must have filled our mouths very uselessly for a century with the word evolution, if such a question as this be renewed, or we remain bewildered and embarrassed before it. For the reason of that fact, which seems without a reason, is to be found precisely in the concept of"evolution."This concept resumes most ancient views, and has been substituted in modern times for that of an immovable Reality, of a God who exists perfect and satisfied in himself, and creates a world forhis own transitory pleasure; or for a complex of beings, eternally the same, with variations that are only apparent. The concept of evolution has entered so profoundly into the blood and bones of modern man that even those repeat it who would be incapable of analyzing and understanding it; even the least acute of all, the positivist philosophers who like to call themselves "philosophers of evolution."
Becoming as synthesis of being and not-being.
But before it acquired, as a vague and confused formula, so great a publicity as quite to amount to popularity, a philosopher of genius had analyzed and synthetized it, induced and deduced it in an unsurpassable manner, with the speculative formula of reality asbecoming; that is, as synthesis of being and not-being, being and not-being being thus unthinkable separately, and only thinkable in their living connection, which is becoming anddevelopment(evolution). Reality is development, that is, infinite possibility that passes into infinite actuality and from the multiplicity of every instant takes refuge in the one, to break forth anew in the multiple and produce the new unity. The inquiry into the dialectic of the volitional act enters in this way into the very heart of reality. In order to deny multiplicity, contradiction, evil and not-being, it would benecessary to deny at the same time unity, coherence, good and being.
Nature as becoming. Its resolution in the spirit.
But if by the theory that has been recorded we have explained the necessity of evil for good, or the necessity of the not necessary for the necessary in the volitional act of man, the identification of the volitional act, which is man's, with reality which is of the universal whole, might seem to be too audacious. For (it will be said) the complex of other beings, that we are wont to separate from the complex of human beings and to oppose to it as nature, either is motionless and does not develop, or develops without any consciousness of good and evil, of pleasure and pain, of value and disvalue. Both theses have been maintained and nature has been represented, now aswithout history, now as developing itself in an unconscious or mechanical manner.But the contradictions and absurdities of both theses have been together perceived. "Motionless beings" is a phrase without meaning, to such a degree that even empirical science has everywhere pushed its way into history, and has talked of the evolution of animals and vegetables, of the chemical elements, and even of a history of light and heat. The other expression, "unconscious beings," is not less empty, because being andactivity are not otherwise conceivable save in the way that we know our being, which is consciousness; and although empirical science certainly points to more and more rudimentary and tenuous forms of consciousness in beings, always differently individualized, yet it has never been able to demonstrate the absolutely unconscious. If so-called nature be, it develops, and if it develop, cannot do so without some consciousness. This deduction is not a matter of conjecture, but a logical and irrefutable consequence. What is there, then, that persists in men's souls, as an obstacle to the acceptance of this consequence, in accordance with the profound belief of humanity in a community of all beings with one another and with the Whole, as manifested in philosophies and in religions, in the speculations of the learned and in ingenuous popular beliefs? A scholastic prejudice, an idol of the intellect, the hypostasis of that concept of "nature" that Logic has taught us is nothing but the abstract, mechanicizing, classifying function of the human spirit; a prejudice arising from the substitution of the naturalistic method for reality, by which a function is changed and materialized into a group of beings. Those idealists were also slaves of the error of a like hypostasis,who, though they thought everything as an activity of the spirit, yet stopped when face to face withNature,making of it an inferior grade of the Spirit, or, metaphorically, a spirit alienated from itself, an unconscious; consciousness, a petrified thought, and creating for it a special philosophy (as though all the other did not suffice), entitled precisely,Philosophy of nature.But modern thought knows henceforth how man creates for his use that skeleton ormannequinof an immobile, external mechanical nature, and he is no longer permitted to fall back into equivoque and substitute this for entity or for a complex of entities. Nor should he find any difficulty in discovering everywhere activity, development, consciousness, with its antitheses of good and evil, of joy and sorrow. Certainly the stars do not smile, nor is the moon pale for sorrow: these are images of the poets. Certainly animals and trees do not reason like men; this, when it is not poetry, is gross anthropomorphism. But nature, in her intimate self, longs for the good and abhors the evil, she is all wet with tears and all a-shiver for joy; strife and victory is everywhere and in every moment of universal life.
Optimism and pessimism; critique.
This conception of reality, which recognizes theindissoluble link between good and evil, is itself beyond good and evil, and consequently surpasses the visual angles of optimism and pessimism—of optimism that does not discover the evil in life and posits it as illusion, or only as a very small and contingent element, or hopes for a future life (on earth or in heaven) in which evil will be suppressed; and of pessimism, that sees nothing but evil and makes of the world an infinite and eternal spasm of pain, that rends itself internally and generates nothing. It confronts the first with the fact that evil is truly the original sin of reality, ineliminable so long as reality exists, and therefore absolutely ineliminable as a category: the second, with the other category the good, equally ineliminable, for without it evil could not be. And it is easy to show how the optimist declares himself a pessimist, the pessimist an optimist, out of their own mouths. The setting free from individuality and from will, which the pessimist proposes as a radical remedy, is the remedy that reality itself applies at every moment, for we free ourselves from the contradiction of individuality and of wilfulness by the affirmation of the rational will, with which the same pessimist cannot dispense, for the effectuation of his programme of ascesis or of suicide, which, according as it isunderstood, is either not a programme, or a programme altogether capricious and without universal value. In truth, there is no need to oppose a eulogy of Life with a eulogy of Death, since the eulogy of Life is also a eulogy of Death; for how could we live, if we did not die at every instant?
Dialectic optimism.
The dialectic conception of reality as development, that is, as a synthesis of being and not-being, can certainly be termed optimistic, but in a very different signification to that of abstract optimism. The synthesis is the thesis enriched with its antithesis, and the thesis is the good, being, not the bad or not-being. But who will wish seriously to oppose this logical consequence? Is it not a fact that men hope and live, although in the midst of their sorrows? Is it not a fact that the world is not ended and does not appear to have any intention of ending? And how would that be possible, if the moment of the good did not prevail, just because the positive prevails upon the negative and Life constantly triumphs over Death?
Concept of cosmic progress.
This continuous triumph of Life over Death constitutescosmic progress.Progress, from the point of view whence we have hitherto regarded it, that of individualized activity, is identicalwith activity; it is the unfolding of this upon passivity. Every volitional act, like every theoretical act, is therefore to be considered in itself, that is, only in relation to the given situation from which it breaks forth. In every new situation the individual begins his life all over again. But from the cosmic point of view, at which we now place ourselves, reality shows itself as a continuous growing upon itself; nor is a real regress ever conceivable, because evil being that which is not, is irreal, and that which is is always and only the good. The real is always rational, and the rational is always real. Cosmic progress, then, is itself also the object of affirmation, not problematic, but apodictic.
Objections and critique of them.
The difficulties that can be and are opposed to this thesis all arise from the confusion of the truly rational with that which is falsely so called, between the true real and that which improperly assumes this name, that is, between the real and the unreal. Thus will be remembered the instance of the end of the great Græco-Roman civilization, without adequate parallel in universal history, followed by the return of barbarism in the Middle Ages; or the common example of the shipwreck of noblest enterprises; or (to remain in the field that more nearly interestsus) the philosophic decadence, owing to which, a mean positivism was able to follow the idealism of the beginning of the nineteenth century, which stands to the former as the eloquence of an Attic orator to the stuttering of an ignorant school-boy. Did the Middle Age, then, represent an advance upon that Rome, whose memory lingered in the fancy as an image of lost dignity during that same Middle Age? Was the victory of European reaction over the citizen civilization of the Revolution and of the Empire progress? and in Lombardy, the new Austrian domination following upon the Kingdom of Italy? or in the Neapolitan provinces the Bourbon restoration after the Republic of 1799 and the French Decanate? Was Comte an advance upon Kant, Herbert Spencer upon Hegel? But different points of view are confused under the same name in these questions, and, therefore, we do not succeed in immediately arranging those facts beneath the principle that has been established. It is therefore necessary to analyze. It will then be immediately seen that ancient civilization, in what it possessed of truly real, did not die, but was transmitted as thought, institutions, and even as acquired aptitudes; hence it kept reappearing in the course of the centuries and stillkeeps reappearing: it certainly died in what it had of unreal, that is to say, in its contradictions, for instance, in its incapacity to find political and economic forms answering to the changed conditions of spirits. In like manner, the Middle Age, which was evidently in part progress, because it solved problems left unsolved by the preceding civilization, posed others that it did not solve and that were solved in the succeeding centuries; but if the posing of these new problems, which, while destroying the old, failed to substitute provisionally anything, was apparently not progress, neither was it regress, but the beginning of new progress. The same is to be said of precursors, conquered in their time, but conquerors in history, of the restorations and reactions that are so only in name, because they contain in themselves that with which they contend, if for no other reason, then for the very reason that they contend: of heroes and initiators, who were conquered and martyrized, yet knew that they were triumphing and did triumph in dying; the cross and the pyre will become symbols of victory:in hoc signo vinces.And finally, if the positivism of the second half of the nineteenth century seem as a whole so greatly inferior to idealism, that comes from its not being philosophy at all, but ahybrid jumble of natural sciences and metaphysic, thus intensifying an error that already existed in germ in idealism, and fecundating the problem for a better solution. Many philosophers living to-day are inferior to Socrates, because they have not even risen to the knowledge of the concept; but those who in our day have attained to the level of Socrates, are superior to him, because besides his thought they contain in themselves something that Socrates had not; and those philosophers who are logically on a level with Protagoras, surpass him, just because they are the Protagorases of the twentieth century. There is therefore never real regression in history; but only contradictions that follow upon solutions given, and prepare new ones.
Individuals and History.
The solutions, once attained, are acquired for ever; the problems that have once been solved, do not again occur, or, which is the same thing, they recur in a different way to those of the past. The web of History is composed of such labours, to which all individuals collaborate; but it is not the work and cannot be the purpose of any of them in particular, because each one is exclusively intent on his particular work, and only inrem suam agere,does he also do the business of the world. History is happening, which, as has beenseen, is not to be judged practically, because it always transcends individuals, and to these and not to history is the practical judgment applicable. The judgment of History is in the very fact of its existence: its rationality is in its reality.
Fate, Fortune, and Providence.
This historical web, which is and is not the work of individuals, constitutes, as has been said, the work of the universal Spirit, of which individuals are manifestations and instruments. In this way are implicitly excluded those views which attribute the course of things to Fate, to Fortune, or to Chance, that is, to mechanism or caprice, both of them insufficient and one-sided, like determinism and free will, each one invoking the other when it becomes aware of its own impotence. The idea of mechanical origin, of an evolution that takes place by the addition of very minute elements, is now being abandoned, even for that fragment of history calledHistory of Nature(the only true and possible Philosophy of Nature), in which is beginning to reappear the theory of successive crises and revolution, and the idea of freedom, whose creations are not to be measured or limited mathematically. But the supreme rationality that guides the course of history, should not, on the other hand, be conceived as the work of a transcendent Intelligenceor Providence, as is the case in religious and semi-fanciful thought, which does not possess other value than that of a confused presentiment of the truth. If History be rationality, then a Providence certainly directs it; but of such a kind as becomes actual in individuals, and acts, not on, but in them. This affirmation of Providence is not conjecture or faith, but evidence of reason. Who would feel in him the strength of life without such intimate persuasion? Whence could he draw resignation in sorrow, encouragement to endure? Surely what the religious man says, with the words "Let us leave it in God's hands," is said also by the man of reason with those other words: "Courage, and forward"?
The infinity of progress and mystery.
The Spirit, which is infinite possibility passing into infinite actuality, has drawn and draws at every moment the cosmos from chaos, has collected diffused life into the concentrated life of the organ, has achieved the passage from animal to human life, has created and creates modes of life ever more lofty. The work of the Spirit is not finished and never will be finished. Our yearning for something higher is not vain. The very yearning, the infinity of our desire, is proof of the infinity of that progress. The plant dreams ofthe animal, the animal of man, man of superman; for this, too, is a reality, if it be reality that with every historical movement man surpasses himself. The time will come when the great deeds and the great works now our memory and our boast will be forgotten, as we have forgotten the works and the deeds, no less great, of those beings of supreme genius who created what we call human life and seem to us now to have been savages of the lowest grade, almost men-monkeys. They will be forgotten, for the documents of progress is inforgetting; that is, in the fact being entirely absorbed into the new fact, in which, and not in itself, it has value. But we cannot know what the future states of Reality will be, in their determined physiognomy and succession, owing to the "dignity" established in the Philosophy of the practical, by which the knowledge of the action and of the deed follows and does not precede the action and the deed.Mysteryis justthe infinity of evolution: were this not so, that concept would not arise in the mind of man, nor would it be possible to abuse it, as it has been abused by being transported out of its place, that is to say, into the consciousness of itself, which the spiritual activity should have and has to thefullest degree, that is, the consciousness of its eternal categories.
Illegitimate transportation of the concept of mystery from history to philosophy.
The neglect of the moment of mystery is the true reason of the error known as thePhilosophy of history,which undertakes to portray the plan of Providence and to determine the formula of progress. In this attempt (when it does not affirm mere philosophemes, as has very often happened), it makes the vain effort to enclose the infinite in the finite and capriciously to decree concluded that evolution which the universal Spirit itself cannot conclude, for it would thus come to deny itself. In Logic that error has been gnoseologically defined as the pretension of treating the individual as though it were the universal, making the universal individual; here it is to be defined in other words as the pretension of treating the finite as though it were the infinite, of making the infinite finite.
Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of history.
But the unjustified transportation of the concept of mystery from history, where it indicates the future that the past prepares and does not know, into philosophy, causes to be posited as mysteries which give rise to probabilities and conjectures, problems that consist of philosophical terms, and should therefore be philosophically solved. But if the infinite progress and the infinite perfectibilityof man is to be affirmed, although we do not know the concrete forms that progress and perfectibility will assume (not knowing them, because now it imports not toknow,but todothem), then there is no meaning in positing as a mystery the immortality of the individual soul, or the existence of God; for these are notfactsthat may or may not happen sooner or later, butconceptsthat must be proved to be in themselves thinkable and not contradictory, or to determine in what form they are thinkable and not contradictory. Their thinkability will indeed be a mystery, but of the kind that it is a duty to make clear, because synonymous with obscurity or mental confusion. What has so far been demonstrated has been their unthinkability in the traditional form. Nor is it true that they correspond to profound demands of the human soul. Man does not seek a God external to himself and almost a despot, who commands and benefits him capriciously; nor does he aspire to an immortality of insipid ease: but he seeks for that God which he has in himself, and aspires to that activity, which is both Life and Death.
The relation of desires and actions; and two problems of Historic and of Æsthetic.
From the consideration of the practical activity in its dialectic, and in particular from the theory relating to desire and to action, shines forth, if we mistake not, the full light that has hitherto perhaps been invoked in vain upon certain capital points of Historic and Æsthetic, which, when treating of those disciplines, we were obliged either hardly to touch upon, or to develop in a manner altogether inadequate. The reason of this was that an adequate development, to be convincing, demanded as presupposition, a minute exposition as to the nature, the relations and the constitution of the practical activity, all of them things that could not be treated incidentally.
History and art.
History or historical narrative is, as we know, very closely related to art, in contradistinction to the abstract sciences, since both art and historydo not construct concepts of class, but represent concrete and individuated facts. History, however, is not art pure and simple, but is distinguished from it, because artistic representation is in it continually illuminated with the critical distinction between the real and the possible, what has happened and what has been imagined, the existing and the inexisting, with the consequent determinations connected with them, as to this or that particular mode of reality, event, and existence, that have taken place. In every historical narrative are always to be found, understood or implied, the affirmations that the narrative is real, that a different narrative would be imaginary, that the reality of the event in question properly belongs to this or that concept of politics, rights, war, diplomacy, economy, and so on. All this is quite absent from art, which is by nature ingenuous and free of critical discernment; so much so, that hardly have its representations become objects of reflection, than they are dissolved as art, to reappear with a changed appearance (no longer youthful, but virile or senile), as history.
The concept of existentiality in history.
But if this distinction between art and history be precisely determined gnoseologically, when it has been said that in history the predicate ofexistentiality is added to mere representation (and, therefore, all the other predicates connected with the case, referring to the various forms of existence), and that therefore, the representative and artistic form of history contains in itself rational and philosophical method as precedent, yet there always remains the ulterior philosophical problem: What is the origin of that predicate of reality or existentiality on which all the others lean? We have already demonstrated that it was altogether inadmissible to derive it from a mysterious faculty calledFaith,or to consider it as the apprehension of something extraneous to the spirit in universal, asa datum or position.And we also stated that if the spirit recognize its existence, yet it cannot attain to the criterion elsewhere than from itself; which criterion was nothing but the first reflection of the spirit upon the practical activity itself, giving rise to the duplication of reality that has happened and reality only desired, or of reality and irreality, of existing and inexisting.
Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and the existing, desires and the unexisting.
All this now becomes a simple consequence of the connection that has been made clear between desire and action. The cognoscitive spirit, when it apprehends and ideally remakes this connection, has, in enunciating it, also enunciatedfor the first time the couples of terms that we have already mentioned and that variously express the criterion of existence. To distinguish desires from actions is tantamount to distinguishing the unreal from the real, the existing from the unexisting, and to think the practical act is tantamount to thinking the concept of existence and of effectual reality. For the determination of the relation between desire and action, and only for that, the criterion of existence is not necessary, because that relation is itself that criterion. To say "this is a desire" means, "this does not exist"; to say "this is an action" means, "this exists." The desires are possibility; the resolutive and volitional act or action, is actuality. And it is also evident that existent and inexistent are not separable, as though the inexistent were heterogeneous to the existent; the inexistent exists in its way, as possibility is possible reality; the phantasm exists in the fancy and desire in the spirit that desires. Thus the posing of the one term is also the posing of the other, as correlative. What is repugnant and contradictory is the introduction of the one term into the other. This takes place, for instance, when in narrating the history, reality that has happened is mingled as one singlething with reality dreamed of or desired, and history is turned intolegend.
History as distinction between actions and desires, and art as indistinction.
It can be said that history always represents actions, and in this is implicit that it represents at the same time also desires, but only in so far as it distinguishes them from actions: history, therefore, is perception and memory of perception, and in it fancies and imaginations are also perceived as such and arranged in their place. And it would also be possible to say that art represents only desires, and is therefore all fancy and never perception, all possible reality and never effectual reality. But since to art is wanting the distinctive criterion between desires and actions, it in truth represents actions as desires and desires as actions, the real as possible, and the possible as real; hence it would be more correct to say that art is on the near side of the possible and the real, it is pure of these distinctions, and is therefore pure imagination orpure intuition.Desires and actions are, we know, of the same stuff, and art assumes that stuff just as it is, careless of the new elaboration that it will receive in an ulterior grade of the spirit, which is indeed impossible without that first and merely fantastic elaboration. Likewise when art takes possession of historical material, it removesfrom it just the historical character, the critical elements, and by this very fact reduces it once more to mere intuition.
The purely fantastic and the imaginary.
It must further be noted that the purely fantastic, which is the representation of a desire, must not be confounded with the mechanical combination of images, that can be made idly, for amusement, or for practical ends. This operation (analogous to that of the intellect upon the pure concepts and representations, when it arbitrarily combines them in the pseudo-concepts), is secondary and derivative; and it presupposes the first, which provides it with the material that it cuts up and combines. Nothing is more extraneous and repugnant to poetry than this artificialimagining,precisely because it is external and repugnant to reality. Hence his would be a vain objection who should coldly and capriciously combine the most different images and ask for an explanation of the whole, with desire as the fundamental principle. Such combinations as these, since they do not belong to poetry, are void of real psychical content.
Art as lyrical or representation of feelings.
But if the relation between desire and action be the ultimate reason for the distinction between art and history, and this distinction be the theoretical reflection of that real relation, the conceptionof art as representation of volitional facts, taken in their quite general and indeterminate nature, in which desire is as action and action as desire, reveals why art affirms itself asrepresentation of feeling,and why a work of art does not seem to possess and does not possess value, save from itslyricalcharacter and from the imprint of the artist's personality. The work of art that reasons or instructs as to things that have happened, and finds a substitute for intimate and lyrical connections in historical reasonings and connections, is justly and universally condemned as cold and ineffectual. We do not ask the artist for a philosophical system nor for a relation of facts (if all this is to be found in his work it isper accidens),but for a dream of his own, for nothing but the expression of a world desired or abhorred, or partly desired and partly abhorred. If he make us live again in this dream the rapture of joy or the incubus of terror, in solemnity or in humility, in tragedy or in laughter, that suffices. Facts and concepts, and the question as to the metaphysical constitution of reality and how it has been developed in time, are all things that we shall ask of others.
Identity of ingenuous reality and feeling.
It may seem that in this way the field of art has been much restricted and the ingenuousrepresentation of the real excluded from it. But this ingenuous representation is just the representation of reality as dream. For reality is nothing (as we henceforth know) than becoming, possibility that passes into actuality, desire that becomes action, from which desire springs forth again unsatiated. The artist who represents it ingenuously, produces the lyric for this very reason. For him there is no necessity to reach it from without, as a new element: if he do this, he is a bad artist, and will be blamed as a hunter of emotions, emphatic, convulsive, wearisomely sentimental, forcedly jocose, an introducer of his own caprice into the coherence of the work, a confounder of his empirical with his artistic personality, which exists in the empirical individual, but is not equivalent to it. The feeling that the true artist portrays is that of things,lacrymae rerum; and by the identity of feeling and volition, of volition and reality already demonstrated in the Philosophy of the practical, things are themselves that feeling. The characteristic that Schelling and Schopenhauer noted in music, of reproducing, not indeed the ideas, but the ideal rhythm of the universe, and of objectifying the will itself, belongs equally to all the other forms of art, because it is the essence itself of Art, or of pure intuition.
Artists and the will.
An obvious confirmation of this theory is also the empirical observation often made, that the men who lose themselves in desires are rather poets than men of action, dreamers rather than actors; and in respect to this, that poets who seem to have the soul overflowing with energetic plans, magnanimous loves, and fierce hatreds are the most incapable in the field of action, and the worst of captains in practical struggles; because those plans, those loves and hates, are not will, but desires, and desires already weakened as such, because they are no longer in process of volitional synthetization, but have become the objects of contemplation and of dream. He who reads the biographies of artists, or has dealings with artists in daily life, almost always has the impression that their gusts of passion are nothing but poetryabout to break forth,as a green bud that opens and breaks the brown sheath. And if this process be painful, that is because every travail of birth is painful. One sees, indeed, how everything generally endspar des chansons.A fine poem and the sufferer is calm again.
Actions and myths.
This also explains why individual actions and practical collective movements are accompanied with hopes, beliefs, andmyths.These have nological or historical truth, but it is on the other hand impossible to criticize them, because they are not error, but fantastic projection of the state of soul of individuals and groups of individuals in action, and testify to the existence of desires ready to transform themselves into will and action. Utopias are poetry, they are not practical acts; but beneath that poetry there is always the reality of a desire that is a factor of future history. Hence it also happens that poets are thought of asseers,when the utopia of to-day becomes the reality of the morrow. The Utopian and semi-poetic Address of the Italian patriots to the Directory of June 18, 1799,[1]the not less Utopian Proclamation of Rimini of 1815, the song of Manzoni, in which rang out the fateful verse,
We shall not be free if we are not one,
will become, for the Italians of 1860, effective action andhistorical event.
Art as the pure representation of becoming and the artistic form of thought.
Pure intuition, ingenuous representation of reality, representation of feeling, lyricism and personal intonation, are then all equivalent formulæ, all of them definitions of the æsthetic activity and of art. And it would be superfluous to repeat that art thus characterized remainsthe concrete form of the superior theoretical grades of the spirit. In fact, logical thought or concept is also volition, owing to the unity of the spirit, and the representation of such volition is the logos made flesh, the concept that incorporates itself in language, palpitating with the drama of its becoming. What word of man is there that is not personally and lyrically coloured, whether he communicate the truth of science or narrate the incidents of life? And how could we deny a place among the dramas that agitate human life and art portrays, to that drama of dramas, which is the drama of thought and of the historical comprehension of the real?
[1]B. Croce,Relazioni dei patrioti napoletani col Direttorio e col Consolato e l' idea dell' unità italiana,Napoli, 1902, pp. 69-73.
[1]B. Croce,Relazioni dei patrioti napoletani col Direttorio e col Consolato e l' idea dell' unità italiana,Napoli, 1902, pp. 69-73.