other mode is ours, rendered possible by the concept expounded above, of the spatialization of the One, which posits the fact as act, and thereby, being posited in time, leaves nothing at all effectively behind itself. The chronicler's history is history hypostatized and deprived of its dialectic; for dialecticity consists precisely in the actuality of the multiplicity as unity, and as unity alone, which is transcended only in transcending actuality.
When, then, we say " historical process," we must not represent the stages of this process as a spatial and § 8 History temporal series in the usual way in which, without space abstractly, we represent space and time as a line, which, in the succession of its points, stands before us as we intuit it. It is in the intuition of the line, an intuition which constructs the line, by always being and never being itself, that is, never being xni THE TWO CONCEPTS OF HISTORY 209 the complete intuition it would be, that we ought rather to say progress consists. The process is of the subject; because an object in itself cannot be other than static. Process can only be correctly attributed to the object in so far as in being actualized it is re solved into the life of the subject. On the other hand, the subject is not developed by realizing a stage of itself and moving therefrom to the realization of a further stage, since a stage from which the subject can detach itself, a stage which is no longer actuality or act of mind in fieri, falls outside mind: a kind of Lucifer, a fallen angel. Such a stage is an abstraction. It is a past which the mind detaches from itself by making abstraction from itself, and all the while the very abstraction is an act affirmative of itself, and so an embrace by which the mind clasps to itself this fallen Lucifer.
The antinomy, therefore, is solved in the concept of the process of the unity, which in being multiplied remains one. It is the concept of a history the' history0 which is ideal and eternal, not to be conwhich is eternal fused With VlCo's Concept, for that leaves and of the outside itself a history which develops in history in time..,,..., r time, whereas our eternal is time itself considered in the actuality of mind.
The clearest confirmation we can give of the doctrine of the identity of the ideal and eternal history with the history which is developed in time, is that sophy and which in recent years has been formulated history of in Italy in the theory that philosophy and history of philosophy are a circle. Empiri cally we distinguish philosophy from its history; not in the sense in which Plato, or, according to tradition, Pythagoras, distinguished divine philosophy (o-o^i'a), which is the true science of being, and human 210 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY philosophy ((/>t\oo-o</>ta), which is only an aspiration towards that science: the one eternal in its transcend ent position, the other subject to the becoming which infects all natural things. We may say indeed that for Plato a history of science, in the strict meaning, is impossible, because for him either science has a history and is not science, or is science and has no history. The empirical distinction was made when the history of philosophy first began to be a distinct concept (a concept which did not arise before Hegel and the general movement of Romanticism in the beginning of the nineteenth century). It contraposes the history of philosophy to philosophy, as the process of formation can be contraposed to its result. Hegel, who has been charged with having confused the history of philosophy with his own philosophy, and also with having done violence to the positivity of history by the rationalistic logic of his system, did not fail to distinguish his own philosophy from the whole historical process. He conceived his own philosophy as a result, a recapitula tion, or epilogue, an organization and system of all the concepts which had been brought stage by stage to the light, in the time of all the precedent systems. For his method the history of philosophy is the con dition of philosophy, just as no scientific research is conceivable which is not connected with what has gone before and which is not its continuation.
When we have made this distinction, and thereby raised history of philosophy into a condition of _,., philosophy, it is obvious that the relation of philosophy which makes philosophy a conditionate and history of must be reversible. And so we find in Hegel himself, and also in all historians of philosophy who are conscious of the essentially xiii PHILOSOPHY AND ITS HISTORY 211 philosophical as distinct from the philological value of their discipline, the vital need of conceiving philosophy as the necessary presupposition of its history. If philosophy in re require as preparation for it and development of it, the history of philosophy which appears its antecedent, this history cannot but be valued also post rem^ in the mind, as cognition of the history of philosophy, since this cognition has the value that it is the actual preparation for and condition of an actual philosophy. Now were this history of philosophy not what we have learnt and therefore know, what could it be but the empty name of a history which had no subject-matter? And if it be abstracted from present cognition, must it not be after it has been learnt and, indeed, after it has been reconstructed? Or again, if it be reconstructible in itself, must it not be reconstructed with precisely those determinations which will fit it when it is, if it is, reconstructed in act? History, however, is ration ally reconstructible history. How is it reconstructible?
For Hegel the history of philosophy is reconstructible, because, indeed, the philosophy is his own: so, too, with every other philosopher, the philosophy whose history he reconstructs is his own. Well, then, what will each include in his own history as matter which belongs to the history of philosophy? A choice of material is inevitable; and a choice requires a criterion. And the criterion in this case can only be a notion of the philosophy. Again, every history disposes its own materials in an order and in a certain perspective, and each disposes its materials so that what is more important stands out in relief in the foreground and what is less important and more remote is pushed into the back ground, and all this implies a choice among various 212 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY possible orders and dispositions. And this choice of order and disposition of the already chosen material itself also requires its criterion, and therefore the intervention of a mode of understanding and judging matter which here can only be a philosophy. So we reach the conclusion that the history of philosophy which must precede philosophy presupposes philo sophy. And we have the circle.
For a long while it was suspected that it was a vicious circle. Were it so, it would be necessary to § 12. identity choose between a history of philosophy and a solid which presupposed no philosophy but was itself presupposed by it, and a history of philosophy not presupposed by philosophy nor a basis of it. But more accurate reflexion has shown that the circle is not logically vicious, it is rather one of those which Rosmini in his Logica calls solid circles (circoli solidi), that is, circles which are unbreakable, or regresses (regressfy as they were termed by Jacopo Zabarella, the Italian sixteenth century philosopher.1 1 Who wrote with insight: " Sicut rerum omnium, quae in universo sunt, admirabilis est colligatio et nexus et ordo, ita in scientiis contingere necesse fuit, ut colligatae essent, et mutuum sibi auxilium praestarent " (" De Regressu,1' in Rosmini, Logica, p. 274 n.). Rosmini, who founds his concept of the solid circle on the " synthesizing character of nature " (sintesismo della natura], formulates it thus: " The mind cannot know any particular thing except by means of a virtual cognition of the whole," the mind therefore has " to pass to the actual cognition of the particular by means of its virtual acquaintance (nottzia) with the whole; and to return from actual particular cognition to the actual acquaintance, that is with some degree of actuality of the whole itself" (p. 274). But the untenable distinction between the virtual and the actual prevents Rosmini from perceiving the deeper meaning of the circle. He will not let us take it as the identity of the two terms bound together by the circle. It was impossible, indeed, for him to give up the distinction of actual and virtual, because he had not attained to the concept of process in which distinction is generated from within identity itself. Hegel, on this matter more exact than Rosmini, had said: " Philosophy forms a circle: it has a First, an immediate, since ROSMINI'S LOGICAL CIRCLE 213 And it has been shown that no philosophy is con ceivable which is not based on the history of philosophy, and no history of philosophy which does not lean on philosophy, since -philosophy and its history are together one as -process of mind. In the process of mind it is possible to distinguish empirically an historical from a systematic treatment of philosophy and to think of either of the two terms as presupposing the other, since speculatively the one is itself the other, although in a different form, as the various stages of the spiritual process considered abstractly are always different. 1 There is a difficulty, and it will meet us continually, the difficulty of seeing clearly the identity of the § 13. Objection process in which philosophy and history and reply. of philosophy are identical and at the same time, and while always maintaining their identity, also different. It comes from the habitual error we commit when, instead of conceiving the two terms in the actuality of the thought which thinks them, we presuppose them abstractly. It is because both are conceived as external to the thinking in which alone their reality consists that the necessity arises of conceiving philosophy as external to the history of philosophy and this as external to philosophy. Instead, the history of philosophy, which we must in general we must begin with something unproved, which is not a con clusion. But what philosophy begins with is a relative immediate, since from another end-point it must appear a conclusion. It is a consequence which does not hang in air, it is not an immediate beginning, but is circulating" (Grundlegen der Phil, des Rechts, § 2, Zusatz). On the circularity of thought consult the theory expounded by me in Sistema di Logica, vol. i. pt. ii., and the " Superamento del logo astratto," in the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, i. (1920), pp. 201-10.
1 See on this argument chapter iii. and iv. of my Riforma delta Dialettica hegeliana, and also one of my contributions to La Critica, 1916, pp. 64 ff. Cf. Croce, Logica, pp. 209-21.
2i4 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY keep in view if we are to see it as identical with philosophy, is the history which is history of philo sophy for us in the act of philosophizing. If from that standpoint we should maintain the difference to be pure difference, it is evident we should not be able to think the history of philosophy at all, for it would be different from his thinking who is the philosopher philosophizing. Moreover, it cannot be denied that the whole history of philosophy consists in what has been philosophized, it is only history of philosophy through philosophizing. So, on the other hand, in making the history of philosophy we imperil a system of concepts which is the historian's philosophy. If I compare Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with F. A. Lange's History of Materialism (to instance the history of a Kantian philosopher), Kant's philosophy is not Lange's history. And yet the Kantian philosophy is the whole of Lange's his tory, the whole history, that is, which is seen from within the horizon of that definite thought which is realized in the Critique. And, on the other hand, Lange's History is Lange's system of thought, that is, the whole philosophy which is such for him within the ambit of the problems he propounds. Neither in the one philosophy is there the whole of history nor in the one history the whole of the philosophy, but there is no specific difference which distinguishes history of philosophy from philosophy. There are, indeed, differences common to all parts, as we say, or rather to all the determinations and individualizations of philosophy. We may distinguish them, for example, as aesthetical, or ethical, or logical; not one of them is the whole of philosophy, yet each of them is a philosophy always and whenever in the thinking xni THE PHILOLOGICAL CONCEPTION 215 of a universal aspect of reality it really succeeds in thinking systematically, however superficially, the inner reality in its unity. For the totality of philosophy does not consist in the scholastically encyclopaedic completeness of its parts so much as in the logically systematic character of the concepts in which it is realized. A system embracing organically universal reality may be contained in a most specialized essay and altogether wanting in a voluminous encyclopaedia. The identity of philosophy with its history is the typical form and culminating point of the resolution of temporal into eternal history, or indeed history of or the facts or mind into the concept or philosophy as spiritual act. It is the culminating point, eternal history. because philosophy is the highest and at the same time the concretest form of spiritual activity, the form which judges all the others and can itself be judged by none. To judge philosophy, in fact, is to philosophize. He who looks at the history of philo sophy with a philologist's eyes sees nothing in it but facts which once were and no longer are thought; or regarding which the one thing that matters is that they were, not that they are, thought with the value of thought in the historian's eyes.1 But this philological conception is absurd because it postulates an objectivity in historical fact, or rather it postulates the object of historical knowledge, completely outside the subject, a postulate there is no need for us now to criticize. As actual fact there is no historian who does not take a side in his history, bringing into it his own categories of thought. These categories are indispensable not 1 By philology is meant the " knowledge of the known," to quote F. A. Boeckh's definition, one which is in complete accord with Vico's (except that in Vico the thought is profounder) " conoscenza del certo."
2i6 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY CH.
merely for such judgment as he may bring to bear on the facts after they have been presented in their strictly objective configuration, but for the very intuition and presentation of the so-called facts. The historian who shows himself no partisan in indicating any particular speculative direction is the sceptic who believes no philosophy. But in the end, even the sceptic believes his own sceptical philosophy and therefore in his way takes a side, for scepticism indeed is itself a philosophy. The sceptic judges all philosophies, and to judge philo sophies is, as we have said, to philosophize.
The facts which enter into the history of philosophy are all links of a chain which is unbreakable and which in its wholeness is always, in the thought of the philo sopher who reconstructs it, a whole thought, which by a self-articulation and self-demonstration, that is, a self-realization, becomes of itself a reality, in and through the concrete process of its own articulations. The facts of philosophy are in its past; you think them, and they can only be the act, the unique act of your philosophy, which is not in the past, nor in a present which will be past, since it is the life, the very reality of your thought, a centre from which all time irradiates, whether it be past or future. History, then, in the precise meaning in which it is in time, is only concrete in his act who thinks it as eternal.
Is there, then, another history besides the history of philosophy? Were there no other histories, it is clear that our doctrine of the circle problem of the of philosophy and its history would not special be a special case of the identity of history in time and eternal history, but would be its full and absolute demonstration. Yet we do distinguish from philosophy, (i) Art; (2) Religion; SPECIAL HISTORIES 217 (3) Science; (4) Life (that is, the will and practice as distinct from the intellect and theory). So, then, besides the history of philosophy, we have got, it seems, to find a place for four other kinds of history; with this proviso, however, that each of these forms of mind, in so far as it is distinct from the philosophical, strictly has no history. This leads to an inquiry of no slight interest in regard to the whole theory of DO » mind.
NOTE In section 14 of this Chapter I say that the unity of the history of philosophy as forming a thinking which is one whole, belongs as of right to the history of philosophy whose reality is in the thinking of the philosopher who reconstructs it. This important consideration must, I believe, have escaped the notice of my friend, Benedetto Croce, when he disputed the difference here expounded between history of art and history of philosophy, denying that " men have been exercised over one unique philosophical problem, the successive and ever less inadequate solutions of which form one single line of progress." (Teoria e storia della storiografia, 2nd ed. Bari, Laterza, 1920, pp. 126-35 ' dnalogia e anomalie delle scienze specially It is true that men have worked at problems which are always different; but man, mind, the spirit which is actually working in the history of philosophy, works at one problem which is its own and unique. System is not to be sought in a history in itself, which has no existence, but in that real history of which Croce himself speaks with such insight in the book referred to (p. 5), the history, as he says, " which is really thought in the act which thinks it " (che realmente si pensa nell' atto che si pensa): in the historian's mind who writes it. The historian can only determine his object as the development of his own concept, that is, of himself.
And I do not see how that endless multiplicity of philosophical problems, each individually determined and therefore each different from any and every other, which he finds rightly enough in the history of philosophy, destroys the unity of the philosophical problem which every historian finds and must always find in that history. Even for Croce the difference of the distinctions does not exclude but rather requires and implies the unity. So, too, when in his article " Inizio, 2i 8 THE HISTORICAL ANTINOMY periodi e caratteri della storia dell' Estetica" (in Nuovi Saggi di Estetica, Bari, 1920, pp. 108 ff.), he speaks of the different problems into which from time to time the problem of art is transformed, it does not affect the fact that out of all these distinct and various problems, by their development, has come the concept of art, or rather, strictly, the con cept which the historian of aesthetic has of art when he proposes to write the history of aesthetic, and which is then the " unique " problem of aesthetic, analogous to the unique problem of philosophy.
To deny the unity of the problem would compel us to reject the doctrine of the concept as development; and this is impossible. It would even compel us to deny the unity of each of the single problems among those, however many they be, which constitute the series; because every single problem is also complicated with many particular problems, in knotting and unravelling which the thought of the whole is articulated. Otherwise they would not be a thought but an intuition beyond our grasp. But Croce certainly does not wish to take this path, and to show how firmly he holds to unity we need only refer to the chapter of his book entitled " La distinzione e la divisione," in which he insists on the necessity of not separating the various special histories, which in the concrete are all one history: general history (p. 107). This, in its turn, is no other than philosophy in its development, since history coincides with philosophy, that is, just with the history of philosophy.
Analogous considerations are suggested by some of the corollaries Croce deduces from the historical concept of philosophy. As when, for example, he denies the concept of a fundamental or general philo sophical problem, as almost a survival of the past, for the reason that philosophical problems are infinite and all form an organism in which " no single part is the foundation of all the others, but each by turns is foundation and superstructure" (pp. 139-40). He himself cannot but make a distinction in philosophy between a secondary and episodical part and a principal and fundamental part (as he does at least for ancient and medieval philosophy. Nuovi Saggi, p. 104); and he even speaks of a philosophy in general or general philosophy (in genere o generale, p. 88), and of a "fundamental philosophical inquiry" (p. no), which with him, as we know, becomes an inquiry concerning " the forms of the mind, and their distinction and relation, and the precise mode of their relation to one another "; and he cannot conceive philosophy proper otherwise than as " the foundation and at the same time the justification of the new historiography " (p. 285). It is true that, having established the unity of philosophy and historiography xiii CROCK'S THEORY OF HISTORY 219 and admitted even the legitimacy of the partition of this unity into its two elements, he does not think he is attributing other than a literary and pedagogical value to this partition, it being possible " to bring together on the same plane in verbal exposition now one now the other of the two elements " (p. 136). But setting verbal exposition aside, the logical position remains that philosophy, which Croce calls a methodology of historiography, in its role of elucidating the categories constitutive of historical judgments or rather of the directing concepts in historical interpretation, is the basis and presupposition of philo sophical historiography. And in a form relative and adapted to the degree of philosophical reflexion possessed by the historian, it is always the basis and presupposition of every definite historiography. This surely means that what is fundamental in thought does not precede it chronologically; therefore it lives and develops in the dialectical unity of thought itself together with the concurrent elements. Thus, to say that the act of the subject is a synthesis of the position of the subject and of the object does not affect the fact that the object may be posited by the subject. What is true of philosophy is true of historio graphy, not because the one is constituted before the other, but because the unity which stands at the foundation of both when we distinguish them one from another is philosophy and not historiography. It is, that is to say, the active understanding, and not the object under stood, in which that activity is made manifest. To say it is the latter is, I am always insisting, to view the matter from the tran scendental point of view.
CHAPTER XIV IN introducing the concept of art in its distinction from the concept of philosophy, I will first direct § i. The char- attention to what appears to me the acterofart. crucial point in this distinction. A philo sophical system excludes nothing thinkable from the field of its speculation. It is philosophy in so far as the real, which the mind aims at understanding, is the absolute real, everything whatever which it is possible to think. On the other hand, a work of art, although it, too, expresses a world, expresses only the artist's world. And the artist, when he returns from art to life, feels that he returns to a reality different from that of his fantasy. The poet courts life, but a life whose value consists precisely in its not being inserted into the life which the practical man sets before him as his goal, nor into that which the philo sopher tries to reconstruct logically in his thinking. The impossibility of such insertion lies in the fact that the poet's " life " is a subjective free creation detached from the real, a creation in which the subject himself is realized and, as it were, enchained, and posits himself in his immediate abstract subjectivity. The kind of dream situation described by Leopardi in his poem " Alia sua Donna," and in his " Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare," is what every poet CH.XIV THE SUBJECTIVITY OF ART 221 and every artist experiences in regard to his own ideal, and, in general, to every creature of his imagination.1 1 The stanza of the poem is: Viva mirarti omai Nulla spene m' avanza; S' allor non fosse, allor che ignudo e solo Per novo calle a peregrina stanza Verra lo spirto mio. Gia sul novello Aprir di mia giornata incerta e bruna Te viatrice in questo arido suolo lo mi pensai. Ma non e cosa in terra Che ti somigli; e s' anco pari alcuna Ti fosse al volto, agli atti, alia favella, Saria, cosi conforme, assai men bella.
(Henceforth to behold thee living no hope remains, unless it should be when my spirit, naked and alone, sets forth on new, untravelled ways to seek its abiding-place. When my earthly sojourn newly opened, dark and drear, even then I had my thought of thee, a wanderer on this barren waste. Yet on earth is nothing which resembles thee, and were there anything even to compare to thee in face, in action and in speech, however like it be to thee, it still falls short of thy beauty.)
The following is the passage from the " Dialogue between Torquato Tasso and his familiar Spirit."
Tasso. Were it not that I have no more hope of seeing Leonora again, I could believe I had not yet lost the power of being happy.
Spirit. Which do you consider the sweeter, to see the loved lady, or to think of her?
Tasso. I do not know. When present with me she seemed a woman; far away she appeared and appears to me a goddess.
Spirit. These goddesses are so amiable, that when any of them approaches you, in a twinkling they doff their divinity, detach their halo and put it in their pocket, in order not to dazzle the mortal who stands before them.
Tasso. What you say is only too true. But does it not seem to you a great fault in ladies, that they prove to be so different from what we imagine them?
Spirit. I do not see that it is their fault that they are made of flesh and blood and not of nectar and ambrosia. What in the world possesses the thousandth part or even the shadow of the perfection which you think ladies have? I", surprises me that you are not astonished to find men are men, creatuico of little worth and unlovable, since you cannot under stand why women are not angels.
Tasso. In spite of this I am dying to see her and speak to her again.
Spirit. Well, this night I will bring her to you in your dream. She shall This is the deep ground of truth to which Manzoni has given expression in an essay in which he subjects § 2. Art and to criticism the historical novel as a form history. of art (Del romanzo storico e in genere de componimenti misti di storia e d* invenzione). He rightly rejects the romance which mingles invention with history as poetry, because the poet's invention or rather his creative subjective freedom is the very essence of poetry, and poetry can allow no limitation in the adjustment of it to the facts of historical reality. Yet he is wrong in so far as he would deduce from this an aesthetic defect in every his torical romance. The poet can idealize history with no greater restriction of his freedom than any other abstract material taken as the object of his artistic contemplation imposes on him. Has not Manzoni himself idealized history in / promessi sposi? The history, indeed, or whatever the material of art be, is not prized for any value it may possess in itself considered in separation from the art which invests be beautiful as youth and so courteous in manner that you will take courage and speak to her more freely and readily than you have ever spoken to her. And then you will take her hand and look her full in the face, and you will be surfeited with the sweetness that will fill your soul. And to-morrow whenever you think of this dream you will feel your heart overflowing with tenderness.
Tasso. What consolation! A dream in exchange for truth.
Spirit. What is truth?
Tasso. I know no more than Pilate knew.
Spirit. Well, let me tell you. Between knowing the truth and the dream there is only this difference, that the dream is always and many times sweeter and more beautiful than the truth can ever be.
Tasso. Is a dreamed pleasure then as good as a real pleasure?
Spirit. It is. Indeed I know a case of one who, when his lady has appeared to him in a kindly dream, the whole next day he avoids meeting her and seeing her, because he knows that the real lady cannot compare with the dream image, and that reality dispelling the illusion from his mind, would deprive him of the extraordinary delight the dream gave.
ART ESSENTIALLY LYRICAL 223 it. The material of art has worth, means, is what it is, by reason of the life it lives in the poet's soul. The matter is not there for its own sake but for the soul's life, for its feeling. It represents the " I " as it stands in its subjective immediacy.
This is Croce's meaning when he says that art is always and essentially lyrical. And it is what De § - The Sanctis meant when he said, with equal lyrical character truth, that art is form in which the con tent is fused, absorbed, annulled. But philosophy also is form, as thought, in whose actuality is the object's life. The difference is that art is the form of subjectivity, or, as we also say, of the mind's immediate individuality. Therefore in Leopardi we are not to look for philosophical thought, a world concept, but for Leopardi's feeling, that is, his person ality, the very Leopardi who gives concrete life and soul to a world — which is yet a system of ideas. Take Leopardi's soul from his world, go to his poems and prose not for the expression of his feeling but for a philosophy to be discussed and made good by rational arguments and you have destroyed Leopardi's poetry.
This individuality, personality, immediate sub jectivity, is not opposed to the impersonality which § 4. The im- ^as Deen rightly held to be an essential personality of character of art. Without this impersonart- ality where would be the universality,