infinity or eternity by virtue of which the work of art at once soars above the empirical individual, be coming a source of joy to all minds, conquering the force of ages and endowed with immortality? The impersonality uf which Gustave Flaubert,1 an exquisite 1 Cf. Antonio Fusco, La filosofia dell' arte in Gustavo Flaubert, Messina, 1917.
224 ART, RELIGION AND HISTORY CH.
artist who reflected deeply on the nature of art, who had no doubt his exaggerations and prejudices, speaks, was this universality of mind as a transcendental I," constituting the present reality of every " I." The personality which must be excluded from art is rather that which characterizes the empirical I, the Self withdrawn from the perfect light of self-conscious ness, which in art must prevail in all its effulgent power.
Self-consciousness is consciousness of self; but with a difference. Consciousness of self is one side § « The indi- on^y? tne thesis, in the spiritual diaviduality of lectic in which consciousness of the object artistic work. ^s other than self is the antithesis. Art is consciousness of self, a pure, abstract, self-con sciousness, dialecticized it is true (for otherwise it could not be realized), but taken in itself and in abstraction from the antithesis in which it is realized. Thence it is imprisoned in an ideal, which is a dream, within which it lives feeding on itself, or rather creat ing its own world. Even to common sense, for which the real world is not created by mind, the art world appears a subjective creation. And the art world is in fact a kind of secondary and intermittent creation made possible by the creation which is original and constant, that in which mind posits itself in spatializing itself, in the absolute meaning of that term.
Since, then, the most characteristic feature of art is the raising of self-consciousness in its abstract im-§ 6. History of mediacy to a higher power, it thus deart as history taches itself from general consciousness and withdraws into the dream or fantasy. Hence it is clear that a history of art, in so far as it is art, is inconceivable. Every work of art is a self-enclosed INDIVIDUALITY OF ART 225 individuality, an abstract subjectivity empirically posited among all other such in an atomistic fashion. Every poet has his own aesthetic problem which he solves on his own account and in such wise that it withdraws him from any intrinsic relation with his contemporaries and successors. Moreover, every poet in each of his works propounds and solves a particular aesthetic problem, so that his works, so far as we regard exclusively their character as art, are the expression of a spiritual reality fragmentary in its nature and from time to time new and incommensur able with itself. There is no genre, there are only particulars. Not only is there not an aesthetic reality such as literature, constituting for the historian of literature a genre, the development of which he sup poses himself to trace, but there is not even an aesthetic reality answering to such a phrase as, for example, "the art of Ariosto." Each of Ariosto's comedies, satires, poems or other works, is an art by itself.
It is true we write histories of literature and of the single arts, and, as we said in the last chapter, to understand Ariosto is to understand his language, and to do this we must get away from his poem, and from himself as a definite individual, and go back and immerse ourselves in the history of the culture out of which has germinated his whole spirituality, the spiritu ality expressed to us in the poet's words. But when we have learnt the language and can read the poem, we have to forget the whole of the long road we have had to travel in order to learn it. Then there is our own mentality acquired by what we have learnt and what we have been, we have to loosen that and forget ourselves in the poet's world and dream with him drawing aside with him out of the high road along which Q in history spiritual reality travels, just as when we are dreaming the world is forgotten and all the bonds which bind us to the reality of the objects in which dialectically our real life is made concrete are broken.
So though it is true that a history of the literature or art of a people is possible, such as we have, for example, in De Sanctis's Storia delta letteratura italiana^ one of our noblest historical works, one in which we feel as it were the very heart-beat of the dialectical life of mind, yet if such a history would be something more than a gallery or museum in which works of art are collected which have no intrinsic artrelation to one another, — unless it be the light thrown on them by the proximity of kindred works of the same school or of the same period and therefore generally of the same or similar technique,1 — if it would be more than this then it can only be a history of mind in its concreteness, out of which art bursts forth as the plants spring from the soil. So that a history of art in its aesthetic valuations must always necessarily break the historical thread, and when the ends are reunited the thread ceases to be a pure aesthetic valuation. Aesthetic valuation is fused in the general dialectic of history, the standpoint of which is the unique value of mind as the constructor of history. In short, when we are looking at art we do not see history and when we are looking at history we do not see art.2 Much the same, conversely, holds of religion. Re ligion is not philosophy. We saw this when treating § 7. Religion, of the immortality of the soul. Religion may be defined as the antithesis of art. Art is the 1 Technique is an antecedent of art. In art technique is overcome and annulled. This is clearly shown in B. Croce, Problemi di estetica, pp. 247-255.
2 Cf. " Pensiero e poesia nella Divina Comedia," in my Frammenti di estetica, Lanciano, 1920.
xiv THE MOMENT OF RELIGION 227 exaltation of the subject released from the chains of the real in which the subject is posited positively; and religion is the exaltation of the object, released from the chains of the mind, in which the identity, knowability and rationality of the object consists. The object in its abstract opposition to knowing is the real. By that opposition knowing is excluded from reality, and the object is therefore eo ipso unknowable, only affirmable mystically as the immediate adhesion of the subject to the object. It is the position of Parmenides, and from it Gorgias derived the first motive of his negation of the possibility of knowing.1 In its absolute unknowability the object not only will not tolerate the presence of the subject but will not even tolerate the presence of other objects. And as there is no atomism which does not necessarily resolve itself into unity, so there is no pure polytheism which does not lead to the idea of a higher divinity which confers the divine power on all the others. The strictly religious moment of religion can only be the moment of mono theism, for in that the object is posited in its opposition to the subject, and the subject cancelled, and there remains no possibility of passing from it and positing other objects, or of differentiating it in any way as first.2 If, then, we accept this position of the divine, as the absolute, immobile and mysterious object, c g Im_ is it possible for us, from the religious possibility of a point of view, to conceive a history, a history of development? But a development can only be of the subject, and religiously the subject has no value. On the other hand it is 1 Cf. Sistema di Logica, i. pp. 151-153. 2 Cf. / discorsi di religione, Firenza, Vallecchi, 1920.
impossible that the mind should fix itself at the simple religious standpoint by annulling itself as subject, because the very annulling cannot occur without an affirmation of the activity of mind. Mind is borne, as by its own nature, from time to time aloft above every religious standpoint, shaking itself free in its autonomy by criticizing its concept of the divine and thereby proceeding to ever more spiritual forms of religion. So that in its religious ness mind is immobile, it moves only by continually overcoming its own religious moment and absorbing it in philosophy.
The history of religion accordingly either takes a rationalistic form, and then it depreciates the true and . essential religiousness of every particular religion as religion, by annulling the value which history of each religion in claiming for itself cannot philosophy. but deny to Qthers> History of religion then becomes the history of the human mind, the mind polarized in the moment of its antithesis, withdrawn from its true dialectic, and dialecticized abstractly as a consciousness in which the moment of free selfconsciousness is suppressed. It is then no longer a history of religion but a history of the fundamental dialectic of the mind, which is a synthesis of con sciousness and self-consciousness in which religion is deprived of its abstract religiousness and becomes philosophy. Or the history of religion takes a form which maintains the specific value of religion; and then it no longer finds matter for history. History means development, that is a unity of a multiplicity, whereas the religious consciousness admits no multi plicity, it admits neither preparatory theophanies, nor increase and progress such as a dogmatic HISTORIES AND HISTORY 229 development which is other than a merely analytical commentary.1 As with art, so with religion, in each case his tory is constructed by bringing it into the universal history of the dialectical development of mind. In this development art and religion are spiritual positions, concepts of reality, and in being such are, essentially, history of philosophy. So that a history of art and a history of religion, in so far as they are really con ceivable and therefore possible to carry out, are histories of philosophy, and even so they are histories in time which are resolved into an ideal history just to the extent that they are shown in their own nature to belong to the history of philosophy.
1 See Gentile, // modernismo e i rapporti tra religione e filosofia, Bari, Laterza, 1909, pp. 65-78. For the whole of the discussion in this chapter on the abstractness alike of art and of religion and of their concreteness in philosophy, cf. Gentile, Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, Bari, Laterza (1913-1914), vol. i. part iii. chap. 4, and vol. ii. part ii. chaps. 2 and 4.
CHAPTER XV SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY WE not only distinguish philosophy from art and religion, we also distinguish it from science. Although § i. Science science has the cognitive character of philoand philo- sophy yet stricto sensu it is not philosophy, sophy. jt j^g not t]ie universalit;y of its object which philosophy has, and therefore it has not the critical and systematic character of philosophy. Every science is one among others and is therefore particular. When a particular science transcends the limits of its own special subject-matter it tends to be transformed into philosophy. As particular, that is, concerned with an object which itself is particular and can have its own meaning apart from other objects which coexist with it, science rests on the naturalistic pre supposition. For it is only when we think of reality as nature that it presents itself to us as composed of many elements, any one of which can be made the object of a particular investigation. A naturalistic view is the basis, then, of the analytical character of every science. Thence the logically necessary tend ency of science in every period towards mechanism and materialism.
Again, every science presupposes its object. The science arises from the presupposition that the object CH.XV PRESUPPOSITIONS OF SCIENCE 231 exists before it is thought, and independently alto-§ 2. Character- gether of being known. Had science to isdcs of apprehend the object as a creation of the subject, it would have first to pro pound the problem of the position of the real in all its universality, and then it would no longer be science, but philosophy. In presupposing the object as a datum to be accepted not proved, a natural datum, a fact, every particular science is necessarily empirical, unable to conceive knowledge otherwise than as a relation of the object to the subject extrinsic to the nature of both. This relation is sensation or a knowing which is a pure fact on which the mind can then work by abstraction and generalization. Science, therefore, is dogmatic. It does not prove and it cannot prove its two funda mental presuppositions: (i) that its object exists; (2) that the sensation, the initial and substantial fact of knowledge, which is the immediate relation with the object, is valid.1 Philosophy, on the other hand, proposes to prove the value of the object, and of every form of the § 3. Character- °DJect) in the system of the real, and its istics of why and how. It gives, or seeks to give, philosophy. an account not only Of the existence of the objects which the particular sciences dogmatically presuppose, but even of the knowing (which itself also is at least a form of reality) whereby every science is constituted. And therefore philosophy, in being systematic, is critical.
In science, in so far as it is particular, with the naturalistic and materialistic tendency and by reason 1 On the dogmatic and non - systematic character of science cf. Sistema di Logica, vol. i. Introduction, chap. i.
232 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.
of it, there goes part passu the tendency to empiri-§ 4. The cism and dogmatism. Through these two philosophy of tendencies science has continually come to set itself up as a form of philosophy and arrayed itself against the philosophy which has sought by overcoming mechanism, empiricism and dogmatism, to set forth the universal concept of the world in its metaphysical ideality. And so science, in the very spirit which rejects and opposes philosophy, is the partisan of a philosophy: the feeblest and most naive form which philosophy can assume.
In calling science naturalistic we do not mean to identify it with the sciences of nature alone. Besides § 5. Science and the natural sciences there are what are naturalism. called the mental and moral sciences. The moral sciences are equally naturalistic, in so far as they also fail to attain the universality and system of philosophy and have a particular and presupposed object as a fact. All the moral sciences have this character. This is why they are sciences and not philosophy. They build upon an intuition of the reality to which their object belongs, identical with the naturalist's intuition of nature, and therefore, albeit under another name, they conceive reality as nature. Their reality is positive, in the meaning that it is pre supposed and not posited by mind, it is therefore outside the order and unity which belongs to mind, pulverized in the inorganic multiplicity of its elements. The value of mind is therefore for these sciences inconceivable.
Even philosophy of mind ceases to be philosophy any longer and becomes simply science when it seeks to explain mind, both in its wholeness and in the elements of which empirically it appears to be con- THE MORAL SCIENCES 233 stituted, as a de facto reality. So, too, what is called the general theory of law falls outside the proper ambit of the philosophy of law, because it regards law as simply a diversified phenomenology, a complex of experiential data. The science with this subjectmatter must comport itself just as every natural science comports itself towards the class of phenomena to which it refers, determining its general characters and de facto rules.1 We may say then that strictly philosophy has mind and the sciences have nature for their object.
Even the mathematical sciences, which have them selves established the postulates by which the world of pure quantity is constituted, do not treat even their own postulated reality in any way differently from the natural sciences. They have in common the particu larity of the object and the dogmatic character of the propositions, a dogmatic character which results from conceiving the object as self-subsisting in its absolute necessity, confronting the subject which can do no more in regard to it than presuppose it and analyse it.
Such being its nature, can there be a history of science in the true meaning of history? It is evident § 6 impossi- *kat ^or sc^ence there is no alternative, it bilityofa must exclude the concept of a unique history of history of science, for the very reason that science breaks up into sciences, each of which, in so far as it is science and not philosophy, is separated from the others and has therefore no essential relations with them. But besides being particular, every science is, as we have said, empirical and dog matic, because it presupposes the known to the 1 Cf. my Fondamenti della filosqfia del diritto, Pisa, Spoerri, 1916, chap. i.
234 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY ea.
knowing, precisely as Plato presupposed the ideas, which are purely the objects of its knowing, to the mind which knows them. And for the same reason that it is impossible to conceive a dialectic of the Platonic ideas and therefore in the Platonic theory a history of philosophy, it is impossible even to conceive the history of science. There being a definite reality to know, either we know it or we do not know it. If it is partly known and partly not, that can only mean that it has separable parts, and then there is a part which is completely known and a part which is completely unknown. Beyond truth, which is posited in a form which has no degrees, there is nothing but error, and between truth and error the abyss. The history of the sciences in fact for the most part assumed the aspect of an enumeration of errors and prejudices, which ought to be relegated entirely to the pre-history rather than to the history of science. History ought to be the development of science, and science as such can have no development, because it presupposes a perfect truth which we cannot reach by degrees but to which we suddenly leap. Therefore the concept which completely fits the naturalistic sciences is discovery, intuition, substantially identical with the Platonic concept of the primitive and tran scendent intuition of the ideas.
A history of a science is only possible on one condition: it must not treat the science as a science Th hi *n *ts particularity and in its dogmatic tory of science character. Just as the history of art and as a history of religion is rendered possible by resolving the abstractness of each in the concreteness of philosophy, so in the same way a history of a science is possible. Every rational attempt at a history xv DISCOVERY 235 of the sciences takes each particular science as a development of the philosophical concepts which are immanent in the science itself, by studying every form of these concepts, not for the value the particular form may have at a particular time for the scientific student as an objective determination of reality, but as a degree of mentality in perpetual formation by which the single scientific problems are continually being set and solved. The object it sets before itself is no longer the object which is presupposed by the mind, but the life of the mind. And it then becomes clear that the greater concreteness of this history will not depend on the single histories of the special sciences included in it, but on its being a unique history, representing the dialectical process of the thought which comes to be realized as the thought of nature or as empiricist philosophy.
When we reflect on the necessity which causes the history of science to become identified with the history § s. Analoo-ies °^ philosophy we see that it has its root in between science the fundamental identity of the epistemoand religion. logical position of scientific knowing with art on the one hand and religion on the other. Science, in so far as it is particular and non-systematic, is, in regard to reality, in the position of art, for art, as we have seen, is not philosophy because its reality is a particular reality and therefore purely subjective. On the other hand, in so far as science does not posit its object but presupposes it as already existing, it makes mind confront a real, whose reality excludes the reality of the mind. Thereby it is in its very nature agnostic, ready to say not only ignoramus, but also, and primarily, ignorabimus, as religion does before its unknown and fearfully mysterious god.
236 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.
Ignorant of the true being of things, which is inscrut able, science knows only what it calls the pure pheno menon, a subjective appearance, as one-sided and fragmentary as the poet's fantasies which only shine forth in the imagination, in a dream in which the mind is estranged from the real. Science, therefore, oscillating between art and religion, does not unify them, as philosophy does, in a higher synthesis, but combines the defect and one-sidedness of each, the defect of art in regard to objectivity and universality with the defect of religion in regard to subjectivity and rationality. Science claiming to be science in so far as it abstracts from the one side or the other of the concrete unity of mind, finds itself unable to actualize itself unless it can overcome its abstractness. This it can only do in the spiritual act which alone is real as the inseparable unity of subject and object, the unity whose process is philosophy in its history.
We have still to consider one term distinctive of philosophy, — life, practical activity, will. Were this T reality something with a history of its own opposition different from that of philosophy, it would between theory seriously impugn our whole position of and practice. ^ identity Qf philosophy with its history, because it concerns our fundamental concept, and our principle, the concept of mind as unconditioned reality.
But if we set aside the fantastic relations supposed to exist between the will and external reality, relations which empirical psychology tries in vain to rationalize, making volitional activity intervene as a causality of movement in a physical world presumed as transcend ing psychical reality, — if we set these aside, what criterion of distinction is there between knowledge and KNOWING AND WILLING 237 will? Every time we contrapose the theoretical to the practical we find we have first of all to presuppose the reality intellectualistically, just as empiricism does and just as Greek philosophy continued to do through out its course, so precluding every way of identifying mind with practical activity. For theory is opposed to practice in this, that theory has reference to a world which presupposes, whereas practice has reference to a world which presupposes it. So that from the theoretical point of view reality is either nature, or idea which is not mind and cannot therefore be valued otherwise than as nature. If, then, morality is the value of a world which has its root in mind, it cannot be conceived outside of the spiritual life. A philosophy which does not intuitively apprehend reality as spiritual — and before Christianity no philosophy did — has no place for morality, nor indeed is it possible for it to conceive practice in general.1 Apart from the whole course of our inquiry so far, it is now easy to prove that if we admit this twofold view of mind, theoretical and practical, and maintain that for mind as theoretical activity reality is not mind but simple nature, the result is that we destroy the possibility not only of conceiving the practical activity but even of conceiving the theoretical. The Pauline doctrine presents most vividly the conscious ness of the opposition between the spirit (object of practical activity) and the flesh or nature (object of theoretical activity); but Paul makes shipwreck over the concept of grace, a concept which has its origin in the impossibility of really conceiving the creativeness 1 I have dealt with this subject in A. Rosmini, II principio delta morale, Bari, Laterza, 1914; the Fondamenti della filosofia del diriito, chap. ii.; and the Discorsi di religione, Firenza, Vallecchi, 1920, chap. iii.
238 SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.
of mind as will, once the concept of nature is set up. Indeed, if there is a world which already is all it can be thought to be (and can we conceive anything which, in being thought, is not assigned to the object of the cognitive activity?), and if we declare this world to be a presupposition of mind and hence a reality which must already exist in order that the mind shall be and work, we can then no longer possibly think that it is brought into being by the action of mind. From the naturalistic standpoint (which is necessarily an intellectualistic standpoint, so far, that is, as mind is conceived as the merely theoretical intellect) there is no place for a reality which has its roots in the mind. And yet, on the other hand, if the intellect be merely cognitive and if the whole of reality is posited as its presupposition, how is it itself con ceivable? Lying outside the whole it cannot but be nothing.
In all this there is nothing new. We are but looking back and recapitulating an age-long argument, clear §10 'Solution to demonstration in the history of philoofthe sophy, that a concept of mind as wholly antithesis. or partially theoretical, in the meaning in which theory is contraposed to life, is absolutely untenable. Life, natural or spiritual, is the reality: theory is merely its contemplation, extraneous to its process, hovering over the world when its long-drawn day is advanced towards evening. The concept is an impossible one. There is no way of conceiving know ledge except as a creation of the reality which is itself knowledge and outside which other reality is incon ceivable. Reality is spiritual, in self-creating it creates will, and equally it creates intellect. The one creation is identical with the other. Intellect is will and ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE 239 will has no characteristics which can (speculatively, not empirically) make it a thing distinct from the intellect.
Theory is different from practice, and science is other than life, not because intellect is not will, 8 ii. Meanino- or w^l ^s not intellect, but because of the thought, the real and living act of mind, is taken at one time in the abstract, at another time in the concrete. As the proverb says, it is one thing to speak of death, another to die. So too, the idea of a good action is one thing, the good action another. But the difference between the idea of the good action and the good action itself is not that one is a simple idea, the other an idea actualized, because indeed they are different both as ideas and as actions. The difference consists in this, that in the one case the idea is abstract, in the other concrete. In the first case we have in mind the idea which is a content or abstract result of thought, but not the act by which we think it, and in which its concrete reality truly lies. And in the second we have in mind the idea, not as an object or content of thought, but as the act which actualizes a spiritual reality. An act is never other than what it means. But when we com pare two or more acts we ought to notice that we are not in that actuality of the mind in which multiplicity is unity, for in that actuality the comparison is impos sible. When an act is an action which is opposed to an idea, the idea is not a spiritual act, but merely the ideal term of the mind which thinks it: an object, not a subject. And equally when an action is com pleted and we survey it theoretically, the action is no longer an act of the subject but simply an object on which the mind now looks, and which is therefore 24o SCIENCE, LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY CH.XV resolved into the present act of awareness of the action. This awareness is now its real action.
The spiritual life, then, which stands opposed to philosophy is indeed abstractly as its object a different § 12. Conclu- thing from philosophy, but it lives as sion. philosophy. And when it is posited before consciousness as a reality already lived, consciousness resolves it into knowledge in which it reassumes it, and holds it as philosophy.
In such wise, then, philosophy is truly the immanent substance of every form of the spiritual life. And as we cannot conceive a history of philosophy on which philosophy turns its back, it becomes clear that in the concept of the identity of philosophy and its history, and of the eternal reconciliation of one in the other, we have the most perfect and the most open confirma tion of the absoluteness of the spiritual reality, incon ceivable as limited in any one of its moments by conditions which precede it and somehow determine it. In this concept, if we are not misled, is the strongest proof and the clearest illustration of spiritual freedom.1 1 In regard to the identity of knowledge and will, see also Gentile, Sommario di pedagogia, i. part i. chap. 14, and part ii. chap. i.
CHAPTER XVI REALITY AS SELF-CONCEPT AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL WE may sum up our doctrine as the theory that mind, the spiritual reality, is the act which posits its object § x. The in a multiplicity of objects, reconciling beginning and their multiplicity and objectivity in its own SubJeCt lt is a theor7 Which withdraws from mind every limit of space and time and every external condition. It declares that a real internal multiplication which would make one of its moments a conditionate of anterior moments is inconceivable. Hence history is not the pre supposition of present spiritual activity but its reality and concreteness, the basis of its absolute freedom. it starts with, and is summed up in, two concepts, which may be regarded the one as the first principle, the other as the final term, of the doctrine itself.
The first of these concepts is that, strictly speaking, there are not many concepts, because there are not § 2. The many realities to conceive. When the concept as self- reality appears multiple it is because we see the many and do not see the root of the multiplicity in its concreteness in which the whole, however many, is one. Hence the true concept of a multiple reality must consist, not in a multiplicity of concepts, but in one unique concept, which is in trinsically determined, mediated, unfolded, in all the multiplicity of its positive moments. Consequently, since the unity is of the subject who conceives the concept, the multiplicity of the concepts of things can be no more than the superficial shell of the nut whose kernel is one concept only, the concept of the subjectcentre of all things. So that the true concept, that \ which alone has a right to be called the concept, is \the self-concept (conceptus sui). And since we can only speak of reality, in the universal, by means of concepts, so that the sphere of the real osculates with the sphere of the concept, the necessity of conceiving the concept as conceptus sui carries with it also the necessity of conceiving reality as conceptus sui. That is, the subject who in conceiving the whole conceives himself is the reality itself. It is not, as Schelling, following out in all its consequences the neo-Platonic speculation, supposed, first reality and then concept of self (first Nature, and then Ego), but only selfconsciousness or the self-concept, precisely because the concept cannot be understood except as conceptus sui. The concept of natural reality, which is not yet I, would not be the concept of self but of other.