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Brian PA. Copenhaver (Editor) - Rebecca Copenhaver (Editor) - From Kant To Croce - Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800-1950
Brian PA. Copenhaver (Editor) - Rebecca Copenhaver (Editor) - From Kant To Croce - Modern Philosophy in Italy 1800-1950
General Editors
Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella,
University of California at Los Angeles
Honorary Chairs
Honorable Dino De Poli
Mr Joseph Del Raso Esq.
Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti
Honorable Anthony J. Scirica
Advisory Board
Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa
Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia
Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino
Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles
Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia
Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California
John Scott, University of Western Australia
Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago
FROM KANT TO CROCE
isbn 978-1-4426-4266-9
Copenhaver, Brian P.
From Kant to Croce : modern philosophy in Italy, 1800–1950 /
Brian P. Copenhaver, Rebecca Copenhaver.
This book is published under the aegis and with financial assistance of:
Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; the National Italian American Founda-
tion; Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione Generale per la Promozione
e la Cooperazione Culturale; Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali,
Direzione Generale per i Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali, Servizio per
la promozione del libro e della lettura.
Part I: Introduction 1
References 779
Name Index 805
General Index 825
Preface and Acknowledgments
authors, like Croce and Gentile, used versions of texts unknown to ear-
lier authors, like Gioberti and Rosmini. Even for the same author, styles
and motives of citation vary widely in the texts translated here, in part
because they differ so much in genre and format.
When we started this project about six years ago, one of us was working
on Thomas Reid, the other on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Because
Eugenio Garin’s classical study of Pico had been published in 1937,
and because Pico and Garin were both Italian philosophers, questions
emerged about the philosophical background in Italy for Garin’s early
views on Pico. And since Garin had formed his views during the venten-
nio, questions followed about the Fascists, Fascist culture, Gentile and so
on, and these led to more questions about earlier Italian philosophers –
Rosmini, Gioberti, Spaventa, and others – of whom Gentile was an acute
reader and about whom he wrote abundantly. Then it became clear that
in these earlier chapters of Italian philosophy Thomas Reid was remark-
ably influential. We studied Reid’s Italian influence in Copenhaver and
Copenhaver (2006), and in Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008) we
moved on to Croce. We have used both articles for our Introduction.
We thank Remo Bodei, Alexander Broadie, Antonio Capuano, Mas-
simo Ciavolella, Michele Ciliberto, Roberto Esposito, David Glidden,
Harvey Goldman, Emanuele Levi Mortera, Hans Lottenbach, Rosella
Pescatori, and Donald Verene, for their criticism and advice. And for the
inextinguishable fire of inspiration we thank Benedetto Croce, that great
ironist, who, in making the case that history must be brought under the
general concept of art, asked this question: ‘Truly, what psychological
novel is more interesting than the history of philosophy?’
Finally, we have dedicated this book to one mother, one wife, and the
same extraordinary person – Kathleen Copenhaver – who might not
answer Croce’s question as we might like it to be answered.
Brian Copenhaver
Rebecca Copenhaver
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PART I
Introduction
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1
A Strange History
(Bobbio I)
‘he was nominated by the Italian president to one of the five life senator-
ships, and sat in the upper house as an independent socialist. Indeed, in
1992, he came close to being elected president as a compromise candidate.
But he confessed to finding decision-making difficult.’3
It seems to me that the major result of these ten years of free discussion is
that we have discovered – up to the point of considering them intolerable
– our cultural deficiencies. And that’s all. That these deficiencies have then
been healed we lack the courage to affirm. You might actually say that in
looking for remedies … we have fallen back into some of our old mistakes.
I’m talking mainly about philosophy … Fascism fostered our complex of
cultural and moral ‘primacy,’ having found the ground already richly seed-
ed with idealism.5
4
A Strange History (Bobbio I)
from Gioberti’s ideas and their descendants during years that were decisive
for our intellectual development, we learned a strange history of European
thought. According to that theory, philosophy had already blossomed and
matured in Germany with Hegel but withered away there and was trans-
planted to Naples and environs, where it seemed to be acclimatized finally
and permanently, having gained new vigor and having sprouted new shoots,
as it prepared to spread its shadow from that spot over the whole world.7
was most often treated as a heap of nonsense and foolishness, if not just as
boring stupidity. The attitude to different currents of thought was either
pity or impatience. Guido De Ruggiero (my choice of a respectable person
and an anti-fascist is deliberate) took upon himself the thankless task of the
fearless gravedigger. His History of Contemporary Philosophy – I don’t know if it
is still read – was a string of miscarriages, justly interrupted and sagaciously
punished by the Providence of History, as we awaited the splendid era of
Italian idealism. Anything new in the air, and ten pages of summary con-
demnation in La Critica would make the air fit to breathe again.8
5
Part I: Introduction
6
2
Idealism and Sensism
(Rosmini I)
post-Kantian thought in Italy. The thirteen Italians studied here are key
figures in Gentile’s story.12
In this version of the history of Italian philosophy, Antonio Rosmini
(1797−1855) is an ancestor of Gentile’s idealism, along with Pasquale
Galluppi (1770−1846), Rosmini’s most distinguished predecessor, and
Terenzio Mamiani (1799−1885) and Vincenzo Gioberti, his most out-
spoken opponents. All four philosophers were active in the first half of
the nineteenth century, and all but Galluppi lived through the Napo-
leonic Wars, the Restoration, the Revolutions of 1820−1 and 1831, the
more turbulent Revolutions of 1848−9, and their disheartening after-
math. Only Mamiani survived to see Italy become a united nation in
1860, but all four had parts to play, sometimes leading parts, in the birth
of modern Italy.13
Two of these philosophers, Mamiani and Gioberti, wrote extensively
about earlier Italian thought, from antiquity onward, as the root of all
Western philosophy, thus linking current affairs with Italy’s glorious past
and providing the background for Gentile’s later historiography, whose
more immediate inspiration was Bertrando Spaventa, a Hegelian who
wrote mainly after 1860. After Gioberti had announced the primacy
of Italian philosophy, Spaventa offered a more sophisticated view: that
the ancient wisdom revived in Italy during the Renaissance had then
circulated through Europe until Kant and Hegel prepared the way for
another Italian revival in the nineteenth century, coinciding with Italy’s
national unification.14
Consider another list: Aristotle, Berkeley, Condillac, Descartes, Hume,
Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Malebranche, Plato, Reid, Smith, and Stewart.
These are the thirteen non-Italians who figure most prominently in the
historical part of the work that made Antonio Rosmini famous, the New
Essay on the Origin of Ideas, published in 1830.15 The philosophical core
of the New Essay is a theory of ideas, what Rosmini called an ‘ideology,’
presented in the third of its four volumes, after 700 pages of historical
analysis. Rosmini’s history depicts modern, post-Cartesian philosophy as
progressive, moving through two stages of improvement after an initial
collapse when French Cartesians neglected their master’s ‘spiritualism,’
permitting Locke and Condillac to promulgate their disastrous ‘sen-
sism.’ The first effort to overcome this scandal, according to Rosmini,
was the work of ‘the Scottish School,’ led by Thomas Reid and including
Dugald Stewart. The second attempt was Kant’s, building on Plato and
Leibniz.16
Sensism was the main target of Rosmini’s polemics, both philosophi-
8
Idealism and Sensism (Rosmini I)
9
Part I: Introduction
began to publish his lectures in the 1820s. Jouffroy, Reid’s translator, was
also Cousin’s student. Thus, although Reid’s Inquiry had been available
in French since 1768, and hence accessible to Italians, Rosmini’s New
Essay followed another French revival of Reid that was two decades old.
The chronology helps explain Rosmini’s hatred of Condillac, as well as
his admiration for Reid.20
Rosmini’s discussion of Reid and Dugald Stewart fills more than two-
thirds of the first volume of the New Essay, at the end of which Rosmini
asks
‘if there is anything solid, anything that can really be called an addition to
philosophical understanding in the views of the philosophers after Locke
that we have reviewed in this whole volume? … I find nothing that deserves
this status … except the questions raised by Reid about those who accepted
simple apprehension as the first operation of the soul.’21
In the unheroic second phase of his history, which occupies Rosmini for
more than two hundred pages, Thomas Reid turns out to be the only
hero; for that reason, in Rosmini’s view, Reid was also Kant’s most impor-
tant predecessor.
A large part of Rosmini’s motivation for doing philosophy was to
ensure that Roman Catholic theology had a basis in reason; another
powerful motive was resentment of Italy’s intellectual dependence on
foreigners in this critical task. Like other Italians, Rosmini knew that
since Galileo’s time little philosophy done in Italy had won the respect of
other Europeans. Even the brilliant and idiosyncratic Vico came into his
own only in the nineteenth century. In this climate, some of Rosmini’s
immediate predecessors – Melchiorre Gioia, Gian Domenico Romagno-
si, and others – seemed, despite their best efforts, to be mouthpieces for
Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, and the French Idéologues. Rosmini wanted
to silence these ‘materialist and immoral’ ideas and find a native Italian
voice for philosophy.22
10
3
Philosophies Imported and Contested
(Galluppi I)
Born in the northeast of Italy and living most of his life there, Rosmini
looked at first to French rather than German philosophers, even though
Austria had replaced France as the dominant foreign power in Restora-
tion Italy after 1815. Born far to the south, in Calabria, Pasquale Gal-
luppi had meanwhile opened a channel to German thought, though it
was indirect, through French interpretations or translations of German
texts. And this eventual openness to novel influences followed a very
conventional education.23
When Galluppi was born in Tropea, that Calabrian town was part of
the Kingdom of Naples, and Galluppi was the son of an ancient noble
family. His father the Baron sent him to study law at the University of
Naples, but he found the provocative topics of biblical studies and theol-
ogy more attractive. When his elder brother’s death ended Galluppi’s
formal education, family duties called the new heir back to Tropea,
where he married in 1794, eventually fathering fourteen children. Like
many young aristocrats, however, he had also acquired the republican
sympathies that helped make him a local cultural force. He stirred up
a few theological squabbles, but more serious trouble came in 1799
when a failed revolution in Naples caused him to be held hostage as a
republican.24
Galluppi’s first contact with philosophy had come in the local schools
of Tropea, where another Neapolitan, the illustrious Antonio Genovesi
(1713−69), still ruled the Enlightenment curriculum. At first, his deeper
philosophical reading was quite predictable: Wolff, Leibniz, and Des-
cartes were the conspicuous figures from beyond the peninsula. Then
around 1800 he discovered Condillac, who led him to Locke and to
meditating on a philosophy of his own. His first public effort was a short
Part I: Introduction
treatise of 1807, On Analysis and Synthesis, which, despite its title, reflects
no knowledge of Kant. Galluppi’s mature philosophical work emerged
twelve years later, while he also declared himself politically in occasion-
al pieces on freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, and related
topics.25
Beginning in 1819, Galluppi presented his system as a response to
Kant in the six volumes of a Philosophical Essay on the Critique of Conscious-
ness (1819−31). In contemporary terms, his central questions were about
mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology. A stunningly success-
ful companion to the Essay was another six-volume work, the Elements of
Philosophy (1820−7), which saw five editions during Galluppi’s lifetime,
long remained the standard textbook of philosophy in Italy and made its
author famous. But Galluppi’s magnum opus was the Essay, whose title
proclaims its engagement with Kant; it is a long debate with the sage of
Königsberg driven by great historical learning and meant to establish
‘the true philosophy of experience’ in opposition to the critical philoso-
phy. In Galluppi’s story of philosophy prior to his own, the provisional
victor is not Kant but Thomas Reid.26 In 1827 Galluppi followed these
ponderous volumes with something much shorter: his Philosophical Let-
ters on Developments in Philosophy Relating to the Principles of Human Cogni-
tions. Despite its brevity, this original review of modern philosophy from
Descartes through Fichte is of great importance; it has been called the
first substantive history of philosophy written in Italian.27
In 1829, before Rosmini had completed his own New Essay, Galluppi
wrote to tell him that he disagreed with his theory of being, but he cour-
teously sent Rosmini the Elements while explaining that he did not have
a spare copy of his still incomplete Essay. He included another item,
however − the Philosophical Letters in its 1827 version − which Rosmini
then cited in the New Essay of 1830. This shorter edition of the Letters
that Rosmini saw ended with a section on Kant, an early and influential
introduction to the critical philosophy in Italian. But later editions after
1838 added another letter condemning ‘the deeply respected Rosmini’
for obscuring the key point of the objectivity of cognition. Had Rosmini
seen this material before he published in 1830, he might have been less
kind to Galluppi, whom he corrects on a number of points in notes but
treats with great respect in the text of the New Essay.28
Near the end of his life, after two decades of savage battles that eventu-
ally caused the Church to put his books on the Index, Rosmini expressed
regret at Galluppi’s continuing influence on the Catholic faithful. ‘How
can Galluppi be regarded in Rome as a philosopher of sound doctrine
12
Philosophies Imported and Contested (Galluppi I)
13
4
Experience and Ideology
(Galluppi II)
the mind the objects of its thoughts.’ Objects of sensibility are external,
while objects of consciousness are internal to the mind itself and its mod-
ifications. The first object given to the mind is the ‘I that senses objects
outside it,’ and it is given by consciousness. In other words, the primal
moment of consciousness is reflexive – the mind’s conscious sensing of
its own sensory perception of an external object or property.32
There are also two active faculties that operate on objects given by
sensibility and consciousness: analysis and synthesis. Analysis divides and
distinguishes its objects by acts of attention and abstraction. Attention
separates not only objects that are already naturally independent – such
as a person and the tree next to her – but also those that are independent
of one another but contingently connected – such as a person’s body and
her head. Abstraction separates things that are not metaphysically inde-
pendent: modes and substances, for example. Galluppi is a nominalist:
he holds that universals are nothing over and above the particulars that
instantiate them. Nevertheless, by abstraction we can form the ‘universal
idea of man, tree, body, and so on …’ apart from ‘the determinations
without which they cannot exist.’33 Synthesis unites objects presented
by sensibility and consciousness in three ways: real, ideal, and imagina-
tive synthesis. Real syntheses are judgments affirming modes that actu-
ally inhere in various subjects. Ideal syntheses are judgments expressing
merely logical relations – such as the ‘equal to’ relation. Ideal syntheses
may be objective or subjective: objective if the terms of the relation are
existing objects; otherwise subjective. Imaginative syntheses form com-
plex ideas of various objects. If the object is physically and nomologically
possible, the imaginative synthesis is practical; if not, it is poetic.34
Galluppi adds one more active faculty: imagination, of which memory
and recollection are species. Each reproduces a past perception – which
is why it is a species of imagination – plus an additional perception of
having had that past perception and recognizing it as such. The law
of association of ideas governs this recognition. When perceptions are
reproduced directly, as one perception gives rise to another by the law
of association (I perceive the preacher standing before me as the same
preacher I saw last Sunday, for example), the recognition is a memory.
When perceptions are reproduced indirectly by memories of other per-
ceptions (I recall an acquaintance after he reminds me that we have
already met), the recognition is a recollection.35
Up to this point, nothing in the Elements differs greatly from other
accounts of cognition current in the early nineteenth century. Unlike
Galluppi’s psychology, however, his ideology departs markedly from tra-
15
Part I: Introduction
ditional empiricism. He claims that the first object given the mind is
given by consciousness rather than sensibility, and that the cognitions
necessary for human understanding are derived from that first object,
which is the ‘I that senses something outside the I.’36 Such ‘primitive
cognitions’ are data of experience, but not of sensibility.37 Galluppi thus
discards the key distinction between sensation and reflection used by
Hume to argue that we have no legitimate ideas of causation, substance,
identity, and so on. Galluppi’s primitive cognition is experiential because
it involves a sensation that is also a perception inasmuch as it is of something
real. The sensation that directs the mind to the ‘I that senses something
outside the I’ is a sensation of consciousness rather than of sensibility.
Since it directs us to real objects and their relations – primitively, the
I and the something outside the I – this first cognition is the ground
of the objective cognition of substances, modes, and relations, but this is
ruled out, according to Galluppi, by Hume’s system and by Kant’s. If the
primitive cognition and the sensation that directs it are analysed, the
analysis will ground ideas of substance and mode as well as of cause and
effect. The I is a substance, and its sensing of something outside it is a
modification of itself. No mode exists independently of the substance
that it modifies, but analysis abstracts the one from the other and forms
a real cognition of both from the data of experience. Likewise, the I is an
efficient cause of its own willing, and the effects of its willing are given
in experience. No effect exists independently of its cause, but – as with
modes of substances – analysis abstracts one from the other and forms a
real cognition of both from the data of experience.38
According to Galluppi, the only real relations – relations that do not
depend on the mind – are of substances with modes, and of causes with
effects. Logical relations such as identity, difference, equality, and ine-
quality, as well as spatio-temporal relations, are merely ideal in the sense
that they are nothing over and above the mind’s organization of its own
thoughts and the objects of its thoughts. The items organized are real,
but the organizing principles are ideal. Our idea of duration, for exam-
ple, is not derived from an experience of duration; rather it is derived
from experience of a particular type of causal relation: generation. We
experience effects of generative causes, and because effects presuppose
prior causes, we form an idea of duration from these experiences.39
Galluppi’s ideology ends with a proof of the existence of the Absolute,
which depends on other proofs: first, that there is no effect without a
cause; next, that an infinite series of effects is impossible. To establish the
first point, Galluppi uses a proof by cases:
16
Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)
Next comes his proof that there cannot be an infinite series of effects.
For a closed finite series of effects – A, B, C, D, E – wherein each effect
depends for its existence on the item preceding, if we posit the series,
we will posit at least one effect without a cause: in this case, A. But no
effect is without a cause, so such a series is impossible. What is true of
a series of five effects will be true of any other series, including an infi-
nite series. Thus, an infinite series of effects is also impossible. In other
words, whether the series is finite or infinite, its first member cannot be
an effect at all since effects, by definition, have causes.
From these two conclusions, one of them assuming a good analogy
between finite and infinite sequences, Galluppi next infers the existence
of the Absolute:
The third premise, which is meant to follow from the two before it, claims
that the existence of any effect depends ultimately on a first cause. The
fourth premise, writes Galluppi, ‘is a primitive truth of fact,’ derived per-
haps from the primitive cognition of ‘the I that senses something outside
the I.’ The fifth premise requires yet another proof, from the indiscern-
ibility of identicals. In a compressed version: the Absolute is immutable,
but the I is not immutable; therefore, the I is not the Absolute. Finally,
the Absolute is the cause of the I, because, while the Absolute can exist
without the I, the I needs the Absolute for its existence. The I’s exist-
ence is thus contingent rather than necessary; hence, it must have been
brought into being by an Absolute which, according to Galluppi, must
be a volitional rather than a natural cause, and therefore intelligent.41
17
Part I: Introduction
18
Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)
‘This philosophy has two canons: that sensation comes to us from objects;
and that we have no informative communication with objects taken by
themselves, called noumena. I do not understand how these two canons
agree with one another – nor how they can be made to agree.’47
He then criticizes Kant for his reaction to Hume’s problem. His argu-
ment is a reductio:
19
Part I: Introduction
20
Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)
‘subjectivityNO’ are Patricia Kitcher’s labels for the two senses.50 But Kant
did not use ‘objective’ to name a cognition’s having originated in sensory
experience as a property of that cognition. Instead, he called the cogni-
tions that we have by virtue of sensory experience ‘empirical.’ Moreover,
Kant’s core notion of objectivity is not etiological; it is transcendental: a
cognition is objective if it is a necessary condition of the possibility of any
objects of thought and experience at all.
Hence, the differences between Galluppi and Kant are not merely ter-
minological. On Galluppi’s understanding of the terms in play, Kant’s
famous description of the problem of the Transcendental Deduction
becomes a paradox: ‘the difficulty … is namely how subjective condi-
tions of thinking should have an objective validity, that is, yield condi-
tions for the possibility of all cognition of objects.’51 But the problem of
the Deduction (despite its name) is not logical; it is epistemological. It
poses this question: how can cognitions originating in the faculties of a
subject alone have the legitimacy characteristic of objective experience?
For Kant, their legitimacy derives from their being necessary for the
very possibility of objects of thought or experience. Galluppi confuses
his own notion of subjectivity with Kant’s. When Kant claims that cog-
nition of spatio-temporal and causal-substantival features of the world
originates in a subject’s faculties rather than in sensory experience, Gal-
luppi takes Kant’s claim as equivalent to the view that these are not real
features of objects:
21
Part I: Introduction
22
Experience and Ideology (Galluppi II)
straight stick that looks bent in water, and Kant’s transcendental idealism
blocks Galluppi’s lifelong effort to rescue empiricism from the sensists in
a system that would support both theology and science.54
In the end, Galluppi had less success as a champion of bien-pensant
empiricism than as an uncommissioned emissary of the transcendental
philosophy that he opposed. When he began his life-long debate with
Kant in 1819, Born’s Latin translation was the best route to the first Cri-
tique for Italians who could not read German. As more Italians made
direct and indirect contact with Kant, and Galluppi rose to academic
eminence, his persistent engagement with the critical philosophy – espe-
cially in the widely read Elements – gave thousands of young Italians their
first acquaintance with the thinker whom Antonio Rosmini would also
attack as ‘the sophist of Königsberg.’55
23
5
Restoration and Reaction
(Rosmini II)
Galluppi had grown up in the Europe of the ancien régime, of which Ros-
mini had no experience, though he certainly shared Galluppi’s com-
mitment to traditional Christian theism. By the time he entered the
University of Padua to study theology in 1816, Napoleon was on St Hele-
na, and the monarchs of Europe were trying to rebuild what the French
Revolution had destroyed. Like Galluppi’s family, Rosmini’s was noble
and hence in a position to profit from the Restoration. But even after
his ordination in 1821, the young priest was stirred by the Italian patriot-
ism that Italy’s Austrian masters found seditious. Rosmini soon moved
on from his youthful politics to the institutional project that became his
life’s most enduring work. In 1828 he drafted the charter for a new reli-
gious order, the Institute of Charity, grudgingly recognized by Pius VIII
in 1829 and still active today.56
Although followers of Rosmini in contemporary England have trans-
lated a large part of his enormous philosophical output, among profes-
sional philosophers in the anglophone world the readership for it is
small.57 In his own time and place, however, Father Rosmini was a cel-
ebrated figure. His earliest philosophical polemics were aimed at other
Italians – Gioia, Romagnosi, and the poet Ugo Foscolo – judged by the
young priest to have gone over to the Jacobin heresy of sensism. He also
knew some Kantian philosophy even before studying at Padua, and by
the time the New Essay began to appear he had read the first Critique in
Latin.58 This was in the same year, 1828, when he wrote the constitution
for his new order. The shorter philosophical pieces that preceded the
New Essay attracted the attention of reformers in the Catholic Church.
But when he also produced books on moral philosophy, natural law, and
society, Gregory XVI advised him to stick to his writing and stay out of
religious politics, stalling the full approval of the Institute until 1838.
Restoration and Reaction (Rosmini II)
25
Part I: Introduction
his own political generation, as well as the Cavour family, whose time
was still to come. In 1854, the year before the philosopher died, Pius IX
presided over a session of the Congregation of the Index that cleared
Rosmini’s books of blame. But more than thirty years later another pope
– Leo XIII, who declared Thomas Aquinas to be ‘the chief and master of
scholastic doctors’ – extracted forty propositions from Rosmini’s writings
and condemned them once again.60
26
6
The Mother Idea
(Rosmini III)
The reader of the first volume of Rosmini’s New Essay finds herself far
from the turbulence of 1848 and its sad sequel. The scene of this vol-
ume is the Scottish Enlightenment, mainly Reid and other members of
the ‘Scottish School,’ after which the second volume turns to the Ger-
man Enlightenment – to Leibniz and Kant as heirs of Plato. These three
philosophers ‘posited something innate to explain the fact of the ori-
gin of ideas … but what they posited was excessive and arbitrary.’ Plato
was more excessive than Leibniz and Leibniz more than Kant, the most
restrained of the three, who ‘kept as innate only the forms of ideas, leav-
ing it to sense experience to present their matter.’ In another way, how-
ever, Kant went too far, distilling seventeen different forms, by Rosmini’s
count, out of his ‘metaphysical chemistry.’61 Where Kant did too much,
Reid did too little, as Rosmini explains:
‘I have counted Reid among those who put too little of the innate in the
human mind, Kant among those who put too much, even though Kant’s
system is a development of Reid’s. The reason is that Reid did not actually
foresee Kant’s conclusions and posited as innate only an instinct for judg-
ing the existence of bodies, not realizing that it was impossible, once he had
agreed to this, to put a stop to it.62
28
The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)
29
Part I: Introduction
cannot think that the possible idea of a tree is not possible, which con-
vinces Rosmini that ideas are necessary because they are possible.71 From
the two primitive features of necessity and universality, Rosmini briskly
derives two secondary features of ideas, infinity, and eternity. As univer-
sal, ideas are infinite, unlike the finite particulars that instantiate them.
As necessary, they are also eternal: they must be, and so they must always
have been and always will be.
From these exalted properties, Rosmini reminds us, Plato, Augustine,
and Aquinas inferred that ideas are located in God, and on this basis
Malebranche constructed his theory of human knowing as vision in God.
Rosmini describes himself as close to Malebranche – and to Bonaventura
– but he also takes care to distinguish ideas as we have them from ideas
as they are in God. In their divine locale, ideas are identical with God,
so that Christ, who is God, is also God’s Word – simple, infinite, and self-
immediate – while human words and language are discursive, reflecting
the multiplicity and limitations of ideas as received in the merely human
mind. Our ideas retain some features of the divine originals, however,
which persuades Rosmini that ideas must come from God, the long-
sought origin of ideas.72
Rosmini acknowledges, however, that the origin of ideas needs a bet-
ter explanation, especially in light of differences between the human
versions of ideas and the divine. How can such ideas be classified, and
how might classification show how beliefs arise upon judgment from
ideas already intuited? A first classification distinguishes the pure idea of
being, completely indeterminate, from all other ideas, all more or less
determinate. All ideas that are at all determinate must contain the purely
indeterminate idea, which is absolutely without determination and com-
pletely universal. Purely ideal or possible being, in other words, is the
element common to all ideas – including the pure idea itself. Within
the immense but smaller (by one) class of determinate ideas, Rosmini’s
second classification distinguishes completely determinate concrete ideas
from incompletely determinate abstract ideas. A concrete idea of a star,
for example, will include all the star’s properties – its colour, magnitude,
and so on. An incompletely determinate idea of the same star, lack-
ing one or more such properties, becomes more or less abstract. Both
abstract and concrete ideas remain general, however, because both are
universal, not individual. However, if an idea sheds all the properties of
the object presented – if the idea becomes wholly indeterminate – it is
simply the pure idea of being.73
At this point Rosmini divides his quest for the origin of ideas into two
30
The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)
branches, one leading to the purely indeterminate idea, the other to its
determinations. The origin of the pure idea of being is God and only
God. But sensation is involved in the origin of our more or less determi-
nate ideas – both abstract and concrete – of such things as stars, trees,
and books.
Every person has the pure idea of being, along with sensations which
are occasions for forming all other ideas as determinations of the pure
idea. When I see a star, the sensation of light is the occasion for add-
ing the determination of luminosity to the indeterminate idea. Various
sensations thus provide occasions for various ideas, all equally possible
but also determinate in varying degree. These ideas then figure in the
act of judging whether the objects presented as possible actually subsist.
This process of judgment is perception. ‘In the judgment by which we
assert that the star is before my eyes – which is called the perception of the
star – the idea is already contained.’ The order of this process – from
pure idea, to more or less determinate ideas occasioned by sensation, to
perception – is not obvious from the phenomenology of perception. It
emerges only from our ability to universalize and abstract.74
Consider two events: a person sees a particular star and has a sensa-
tion; the same person then forms a judgment, thinking ‘this is a being
that gives light.’ Although the second event is a perception that assumes
an idea of the star, the mind can isolate this idea from the rest of the
perception, the sensible and particular part, by the operation of univer-
salization. Universalizing what was perceived, the mind preserves what
Rosmini calls an ‘image’ of the star but subtracts its subsistence, treating
it instead as possible, a pure but fully determined idea.75 The idea of the
star minus only its subsistence is concrete, determinate but still univer-
sal. Having been occasioned by sensation, it is discovered by the mind,
which treats as possible and universal what the sense of sight presents as
subsistent and particular. Concrete ideas formed by the mental opera-
tion of universalization are specific types that can serve as exemplars of
indefinitely many particular individuals, all identical except when they
are individuated. Ideas formed by abstraction are also determinate, but
not completely so. Subtracting the star’s determinations makes the idea
of it more and more abstract, first lacking colour, then magnitude, and
so on. Such generic ideas are unlike the specific ideas formed by uni-
versalization; they are more like descriptions of classes than images of
individual members of classes.76
Having traced all ideas that are determined, in one degree or another,
to sensation by way of mental operations, Rosmini now faces the harder
31
Part I: Introduction
task of finding the origin of the only fully indeterminate idea, the pure
idea of being, which he will call ‘the Mother Idea.’77 If he succeeds, his
‘ideology’ or theory of ideas will be complete; he will have exhausted
the relevant universe, which contains only the indeterminate idea and
its indefinitely many determinations.78 Before taking the final step, he
states eight corollaries of the foregoing argument; he will need them to
establish the grand principles of psychology, theology, and morality that
derive from his ideology.
These corollaries summarize what Rosmini claims to have demonstrat-
ed: the purely indeterminate Mother Idea of Being, prior to all other
ideas, cannot come from sensation, which is determinate, or from men-
tal operations, which only add or subtract determinations. The Mother
Idea is a requirement for any mental operation, in fact; lacking this Idea,
the mind or intellectual soul cannot really be intelligent or rational. If
the absence of the Idea from the soul deprives it of intelligence, while
the presence of the Idea preserves it, Rosmini concludes that the Idea
must be that light of the mind which everyone assumes and no one
defines. But since this illuminating Idea is what makes the human soul
intelligent, the light of the mind is the form of intelligence in the soul.
Taken absolutely, it is the first idea, the Mother Idea, and the idea per se,
prior to all other ideas, productive of them, and entirely independent of
sensation.79
Common sense acknowledges a light of reason that is natural in
humans and distinguishes them from other animals. Rosmini’s argu-
ment has shown, he assures us, that this light is the Idea of Being. We
know from common sense that the Idea is part of human nature, not
acquired but innate, planted there by the Creator. That the Idea is also
self-evident, and thus accessible to common sense, is one of its necessary
features since evidently it is known even though nothing else – nothing
determinate, that is – can make it known. In fact, it is the Mother Idea
that makes everything else known since everything else known must have
being and must be known to have being. At last Rosmini has found the
fundamental principle of his ideology. All ideas – concrete and abstract,
specific and generic – are born of the same Mother Idea of Being, which
is given in nature. Known of itself and not reliant on sensation, this Idea
enters into the definition of all things but is itself undefined, susceptible
only to the sort of description that Rosmini has provided.
From the Mother Idea, which is the first principle of ideology, follow
the first principles of psychology, theology, and morality. From one of
the corollaries previously stated, we know that ideal being is the form or
32
The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)
essence of the intellectual soul. Since this essence is not spatial or cor-
poreal, it follows that the soul is spiritual and therefore immortal. Since
the Idea of Being is always being in its essence, the same essence that is
non-spatial is also non-temporal, and yet the union of the Idea with the
human soul is temporal. Hence, non-temporal being, the light of the
human soul, must be prior to the soul; it must be the eternal light of the
intellect that is God. God is also the end or purpose of the immortal soul,
which gives the soul its duty and forms the basis of morality.80
Rosmini’s Mother Idea thus arms him with a comprehensive reply to
godless sensism, whose roots he traced to the ‘immoral’ ideas of Locke
and Condillac, regarding their systems as leading inevitably either to a
sceptical or an idealist dead end.81 The obverse of Rosmini’s antipathy
for Locke was his admiration for Reid, whose negative work refuted the
empiricist theory of ideas, while his positive work replaced empiricism
with a better, though still defective system. The genius of Reid’s theory
of ideas, as Rosmini saw it, was ‘not to go beyond the fact. The fact tells
us that the human mind perceives substance and being, things that do
not fall under the senses and are altogether different from sensations,
yet the mind perceives them on the occasion of sensations.’82
Pitting Reid against Locke, Rosmini depicts Reid’s quarrel with the
older theory of ideas as a disagreement about the primary item of mental
activity. To Locke he assigns the doctrine that the primary and original
activity of mind is simple apprehension, to Reid the view that this activity
is judgment. The result, he maintains, is paradoxical. On the one hand,
judgment cannot be prior to simple apprehension because I cannot
judge something of which I have no apprehension. On the other, appre-
hension cannot be prior to judgment because all original operations
of the mind (except imagination) involve belief in the present or past
existence of the object apprehended. Instances in which I apprehend an
object independently of such a belief are products of abstraction from
previous apprehensions in which belief is ingredient.83
Needless to say, Rosmini takes himself to have eliminated the con-
tradiction that arises from his interpretation of Reid. But is that inter-
pretation accurate? On the point that concerns Rosmini, in fact, Reid
does not disagree with Locke: namely, about whether judgment requires
apprehension of the thing judged. The disagreement is about two other
issues: first, whether judgment is comparison of ideas; second, whether
imagination, which does not involve a judgment about the existence
of the object represented, presupposes perception, which does involve
such a judgment. Reid denies that judgment is comparison of simple
33
Part I: Introduction
34
The Mother Idea (Rosmini III)
have been and could be otherwise than they are, that govern only those
beings whose minds happen to be as they are. Such laws of nature cannot
explain our innate knowledge, Rosmini insists. By leaving perception,
memory, imagination, and all other operations of the mind mysterious
and unexplained, Reid condones the scepticism and idealism that he
seeks to refute.87
Reid’s naturalism is also condemned by its inevitable result: Kant’s
transcendental idealism – a pedigree that would have irked the sage of
Königsberg. If Reid’s mistake was to hold that the objectivity of percep-
tion is secured by regular laws of nature, Kant’s was to secure it solely
by the activity of the thinking subject. Adopting Reid’s notion of the
law-like activity of mind, Kant adds that the laws applied in cognition
have their origin in the mind itself. Only by applying such laws can we
cognize objects, so that ‘our understanding is actually what partly creates
its object on its own.’ If Reid’s world is an illusion that lacks the authority
of reason, according to Rosmini, Kant’s world is a self-created delusion.88
Although Rosmini admires Reid as a progressive force in philosophy,
he therefore accuses him of having planted the seed that grew into that
poison tree. Thus, while agreeing with Reid about ‘the fact’ of what com-
mon sense reveals, he parted ways with him when the fact turned out to
be rooted in naturalism. By itself, concedes Rosmini, Reid’s naturalism
and nativism did not add up to full-blown subjectivism; his error was a
venial sin of omission, and it did not complete the task of securing the
objectivity of ideas. In the hands of ‘the sophist of Königsberg,’ however,
nativism became subjectivism of the most corrosive kind – a critical scep-
ticism that turned dogmatic with Fichte. Kant, as Rosmini misunderstood
him, made the objectivity of ideas an arbitrary effect of the mind itself.89
35
7
Primacy
(Gioberti I)
Like Rosmini, Vincenzo Gioberti was a priest who came of age in post-
Napoleonic Europe, but his faith was less settled than Rosmini’s and his
politics more dissident. He was born in 1801 in Torino, which had just
been annexed to France and remained French until Vittorio Emanuele I
was restored in 1814 as King of Sardinia and Piedmont. Since Gioberti’s
family was lower middle class, a career in religion could be a path to suc-
cess. After studies with the Oratorians and then in the theological faculty
of the University of Torino, he found a post as court chaplain, before tak-
ing his theological degree in 1823 and being ordained in 1825. Besides
the usual diet of ancient, Christian, and Enlightenment classics, he read
Alfieri, Chateaubriand, Foscolo, Manzoni, Schlegel, and other Roman-
tics who lit the fire of his fervent patriotism.90
In the midst of revolutionary turmoil in Torino, Vittorio Emanuele
abdicated in 1821, but the revolutionaries had been plotting with Carlo
Alberto, the abdicated king’s younger brother. Carlo Felice, the older
brother, moved quickly to claim the throne and suppress the revolution,
maintaining control until 1831, when he died and Carlo Alberto succeed-
ed him. Meanwhile, secret societies – from the Sublime Perfect Masters
in the north to the Carbonari in the south – had rallied to the banner of
Italian independence and liberal reform, sometimes gathering enough
strength to organize militarily. By the 1830s, Giuseppe Mazzini’s voice in
these conspiracies was loud, and critical of the new king, whose agents
detected sympathy for Mazzini’s Young Italy in young Father Gioberti
and the ‘academy’ that he organized to discuss politics and philosophy.
The police held Gioberti for a few months before forcing him into exile,
first in Paris, then in Brussels. By 1833, he was writing abundantly, both
journalism and philosophy. In 1834 he published a letter in Mazzini’s
Primacy (Gioberti I)
newspaper, Young Italy, turning Vico and Bruno into icons of Italian reli-
gious identity. A theological Theory of the Supernatural followed in 1838;
an Introduction to the Study of Philosophy in 1840; and in 1843 his most
celebrated work, On the Civil and Moral Primacy of the Italians.91
The Primato stirred the hearts of Gioberti’s countrymen and won him
enormous acclaim. It was a manifesto for an independent Italian nation
that would give its citizens constitutional liberties and achieve unity in
a confederation of regional powers headed by the pope and governed
from Piedmont. In this lengthy polemic, Gioberti reviews the many
fields for which he claimed Italian primacy over the centuries, one being
philosophy. But the seventh and current stage of Italian philosophy, in
Gioberti’s view, was a mere imitation of Scottish and German systems: the
upshot was the need for a native Italian reform of the discipline.92
The key to Gioberti’s reform is ‘protology,’ a metaphysical and practi-
cal realism grounded in legends of the ancient Italic teachings of indig-
enous Pelasgians and of Pythagoreans who colonized Italy from Greece.
Their realism enabled the Italic sages of the West to escape the extrava-
gant pantheisms and dualisms that infected the Orient and thus to grasp
the importance of creation as the essence of God’s relationship to the
universe that he brought into being. Firmly rooted in this native wisdom,
Italian thought endured through six more epochs, from (2) the Roman
era, through (3) the Church Fathers, and (4) the scholastics of the Mid-
dle Ages, until (5) the classicists of the fifteenth century tried to revive a
paganism that no longer suited the peninsula. As Gioberti tells the story,
this new classicism failed just at the moment when Luther was hatch-
ing his heresies. The next generations in Italy, led in a decadent age by
Machiavelli, Galileo, and Paolo Sarpi, abandoned pure philosophizing
for politics and science.93
Vico returned to philosophy, but in his own day (6) he was not under-
stood. The teachings of Descartes – ‘Protestantism applied to philosophy’
– had meanwhile deceived even the Italians with rationalist psychology
and sensism, which had been lurking in Christian philosophy since the
days of Abelard – another French dissident. Gian Domenico Romagnosi
managed to temper ‘the servile habit of Gallic theorizing’ but could not
shake off the French yoke, which others traded for servitude to other for-
eigners like the German, Hegel. Of his immediate predecessors in Italy,
the best in Gioberti’s estimation was Galluppi, who fought sensism with
Reid’s system and made the best that could be made of ‘psychologism.’94
‘Such is the final form of Italian philosophy,’ Gioberti decreed, while
dismissing the seventh age of the Italian intellect as
37
Part I: Introduction
a clever imitation of Scottish and German teachings. Our brave and hon-
oured Galluppi is the Reid of Italy, drawing people back to the truth …
by deep analysis, but without breaking through the boundaries of observa-
tion and experiments. Armed with these implements, Galluppi gloriously
vanquished the sensism of his predecessors … with that shrewd forbear-
ance, experimental and inductive, that produces useful discoveries in the
sphere of internal facts – the application of Galileo’s method to psychology.
But direct sensation is not enough for philosophy to be a science. Sensi-
ble phenomena cannot be completely explained without rising higher and
entering the secret sanctuary of reason. Thus, as the Scottish School was
displaced by the Critical School in the previous period, in our time Rosmini
succeeded Galluppi … cleverly reviving the errors and pretensions of Ger-
man Cartesianism – of Kantianism, in other words.
In Gioberti’s eyes, Reid once again surpasses Kant, not to speak of Ros-
mini, whose second-hand Kantianism he saw as abandoning Reid’s com-
mon sense but gaining nothing in the bargain, producing nothing better
with its subjectivism than the defective empiricism that it sought to
replace. ‘To substitute German rationalism for French sensism,’ Gioberti
concluded, was ‘to leap from the frying pan into the fire, which should
give pause to those few who still see some good in Rosminianism.’95
While in exile, Gioberti had written a book to survey the Philosophical
Errors of Antonio Rosmini (1841−4) and to correct Rosmini’s followers,
but he also drew a polemical portrait of Rosmini’s enemies in The Modern
Jesuit (1846−7), responding to an attack on himself by the flamboyant
Carlo Curci, S.J. After the enormous success of the Primato, Gioberti’s
attack on the Society as the main impediment to unification attracted
Catholics who were encouraged by his very different vision of national
religion as a framework for national politics. The policy was called ‘Neo-
Guelf’ in reminiscence of pro-papal and anti-German positions taken by
Italians in the Middle Ages. And when Carlo Alberto decided that The
Modern Jesuit could be published in Torino, it was a sign that its exiled
author could return, as he did in 1848, elected to the new Assembly and
then acclaimed as its president. But the Neo-Guelf project dissolved in
1849, and Gioberti resigned his office, about a month before the Pied-
montese army was routed at Novara. He died in 1852, once again an
exile in Paris.96
Before all was lost, when Gioberti still thought he could create a uni-
fied Italy with help from the pope, he chose Rosmini as his spokesman
in this crucial negotiation. But when the transactions were philosophical
38
Primacy (Gioberti I)
rather than political, his view of his compatriot was negative – hostile,
in fact, and friendlier to ‘the perception of the Scots.’ Gioberti thought
that he needed Reid and the Scots to support his own ‘Ideal Formu-
la,’ which he had previewed in the Primato and envisioned as displac-
ing Rosmini’s system. Like Rosmini and Galluppi, he also saw himself
as building on Reid’s refutation of the empiricist theory of ideas. Faced
with the claim that ‘a mental entity is the object of our thought,’ he
explained, ‘Reid has thoroughly exposed the falsity of this notion with
regard to knowledge of bodies.’ Reid’s treatment of ideas encouraged
Gioberti to ‘extend his doctrine to the whole intuitive truth, standing
on the same basis as the Scottish philosopher – on direct and objective
evidence, in other words.’ ‘After the direction given to psychology by the
Scottish School,’ Gioberti insisted, the claim ‘that the idea is a subjective
unknown’ is impossible to maintain.97
39
8
The Ideal Formula
(Gioberti II)
Gioberti recorded the brunt of his assault on that claim in the fourth
chapter of his Introduction: ‘The Ideal Formula.’98 His goals there are
two: first, to derive a formula that expresses a judgment which is founda-
tional both ontologically and epistemically; and second, to explain why
the philosophical method of his day (which he calls psychologism) had
failed to find such a formula.
Psychologism, according to Gioberti, depends on reflection, concep-
tual analysis, and imaginative synthesis of ideas to reach ontological con-
clusions about extra-mental reality. This method, he maintains, leads to
sceptical and idealist mistakes in epistemology and naturalist and pan-
theist errors in ontology. By starting with ideas in the mind and confining
philosophy to analysing, synthesizing, and reflecting on ideas, psycholo-
gism reverses the order of nature, making the mind, its activities, and its
contents prior and primitive, when, according to Gioberti, psychology
actually presupposes a deeper ontology. Nonetheless, because Gioberti
needs not just ontological but also epistemic foundations, he certainly
wants the Ideal Formula to be a mental item – a judgment made by a sub-
ject and residing in the subject’s mind. Contrary to psychologism, how-
ever, this judgment is not produced by mental activity; it is revealed to
the mind. Gioberti’s search for an ideal formula is the search for a primi-
tive, foundational, revealed truth that has been obscured by a defective
method, putting psychology where ontology ought to be.99
A successful exposition of this revealed truth, Gioberti concedes, will
need a reflective psychology. But at the centre of that psychology he puts
a distinction between intuition and reflection, and a view of their distinct
roles in the origin of concepts of the real and the possible. Cognizing
possibilia presupposes cognizing realia because an idea of the possible
The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)
abstracts from an idea of the real. I cognize the real by intuition, but
I cognize the possible by reflecting on ideas presented in intuition.
When I reflect on an idea of the real as an idea, I abstract from it to an
idea of the possible, which lacks concreteness and individuality, thereby
transforming a concrete and particular idea of something real into an
abstract and general idea of something possible.100 Gioberti’s illustration
is the familiar one of a triangle. Having seen that triangle over there, I
acquire an idea of a particular real triangle. Then I reflect on that idea,
as an idea, to get to another idea – an idea of a possible triangle, and of
those there are infinitely many. Having first acquired a concrete idea of a
real triangle, in other words, I then reflect on it to form an abstract idea
of possible triangles. This abstract and general idea, which is of triangles
in general, has none of the particularity of the concrete idea presented
in sensory intuition.101
These distinctions reveal the origins of concrete and abstract ideas
grounded in realia, ideas given first as particular by sensory intuition and
then abstracted and generalized by reflection to form ideas of possibilia.
But Gioberti identifies another type of non-sensory intuition, the ‘primi-
tive intuition’ that presents us with pure reality: Being. Like sensory intu-
ition, this other kind is immediate and direct. It is also non-inferential,
non-discursive, and not the product of any mental activity. Present to this
simple and autonomous intuition are objects as they are in themselves.
Unlike objects of sensory intuition, moreover, these objects are substanc-
es, not properties of substances.102
According to Gioberti, I am presented in primitive intuition with
a judgment that expresses the idea of real Being: ‘Being is necessarily.’
This judgment is unlike others in two important ways: first, it does not
predicate the necessity that it asserts but clarifies it as a property already
inherent in Being; second, it is not my spontaneous and autonomous act
but a revelation to me by Being itself in unmediated primitive intuition.
The judgment that Being reveals in intuition then becomes an object
of my reflection, which – unlike my absolute receptivity to the primi-
tive intuition – requires voluntary, active judgment.103 When I reflect on
the judgment revealed in primitive intuition, Gioberti argues, I form the
reflective judgment that ‘Being is.’ But my reflective judgment gets its
epistemic standing from the judgment already expressed in primitive
intuition. The primitive intuition – as divinely revealed – is objective, cer-
tain, and truth-making for the reflective judgment. The reflective judg-
ment is the primitive human judgment because it is the human mind’s
first act upon being given the primitive judgment as a revelation. Both
41
Part I: Introduction
42
The Ideal Formula (Gioberti II)
43
Part I: Introduction
44
9
A Natural Method
(Mamiani)
Gioberti was not the first Italian of his day to look to Scotland for philo-
sophical salvation, nor was he the first to follow Vico in exhorting Italy to
revive past intellectual glories of her own. When Count Terenzio Mami-
ani della Rovere published his Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Philosophy
in 1834, he had been writing for more than a decade. Born in Pesaro in
1799, he made contact in the 1820s with the Florentine literary circle
established by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, a businessman of Swiss family
who began to publish his Antologia in 1821. Mamiani’s reviews appeared
regularly in this influential new journal, multiplying his personal con-
tacts and building the base for a long life in public affairs.111
The scene of Mamiani’s first success was the Papal States, a large band
of the Italian peninsula that ran diagonally from south of Rome to north
of Bologna. In these papal lands the Restoration was very harsh. Govern-
ment was entirely ecclesiastical, and a reactionary gang called Sanfedisti
opposed the revolutionary Carbonari with their own weapons of terror.
When the repressive Leo XII died in 1829, Austria found a replacement
for him in Pius VIII, a choice that naturally annoyed the French and pro-
voked the young Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to hatch his own conspiracy
in Rome. This juvenile plot failed, but it sparked protests and fortified
resistance in the northern Papal States, where a revolutionary govern-
ment in Bologna greeted a new pope in 1831 by declaring its independ-
ence. One of the members of the Bologna Assembly was Mamiani, who
became a minister and then an exile when Austria quickly crushed the
uprising.112
The book that Mamiani published in Paris in 1834 was both ideologi-
cal and historical. Like Galluppi, he wanted to embrace idealism and
reject sensism without entirely abandoning empiricism, and he saw a
Part I: Introduction
46
A Natural Method (Mamiani)
47
10
Revolution and Recirculation
(Spaventa)
If many Italians thought that the antidote for sensism had to be some
kind of idealism, something more modern than the Platonic kind was
already available from the prolific Hegel, who had begun his career
with the Phenomenology in 1807 and died in 1831. Another decade
passed, however, before Italian thinkers took much notice of Hegel,
and by then his reputation was declining elsewhere in Europe. Few Ital-
ians could read him in German, and in any language his books were
hard to find on the peninsula. Some learned about Hegel by travel-
ling and teaching abroad, others from personal contacts with foreign-
ers. Cousin was a crucial agent in these international communications,
but in Italy the first important advocate of German idealism was Ottav-
io Collechi (1773−1847), a defrocked Dominican who had worked
in Russia and Germany before returning to teach privately in Naples.
Collechi was a critic of Galluppi and a devout Kantian who saw Hegel
as a pantheist, but not so the students whom he attracted in the years
before 1848.118
One of these young people was Bertrando Spaventa, who recalled dec-
ades later that ‘even before 1848 Hegel and the earlier German philoso-
phers were known – perhaps better then than now – in Naples; besides
Galluppi, old Collechi studied him, also Cusani, Ajello, Gatti and my
dear friends Tari and Calvello.’ Besides Spaventa himself, other lead-
ers of this first generation of Italian Hegelians, including some outside
Collechi’s Neapolitan circle, were Stefano Cusani (1815−46), Francesco
De Sanctis (1817−83), Stanislao Gatti (1820−70), Domenico Mazzoni
(1783−1853), Giambattista Passerini (1793−1864), and Augusto Vera
(1813−85).119
Spaventa was born in solid, middle-class circumstances in Bomba,
Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa)
near Chieti in the Abruzzi, in 1817. To prepare their careers, the fam-
ily sent him and his younger brother, Silvio, to a local seminary until
places opened at the prestigious Montecassino around 1838. Although
Bertrando had no wish to be ordained, he deferred to the family’s needs,
and in 1840 he left Montecassino for Naples as a priest, teaching private-
ly there while also learning German and English. He soon made contact
with Collechi’s group and heard his new teacher defend Kant against
Galluppi, but the real excitement among his peers was about Hegel.
When Collechi died in 1847, his students turned the funeral into a polit-
ical demonstration, displaying the kind of Hegelianism that agitated the
authorities in those troubled months before Marx and Engels published
their Manifesto of 1848. Father Spaventa’s eulogy showed more respect
by praising his teacher as the most expert Kantian of his day.120
The official Italian philosopher of the moment, however, was Gal-
luppi, and in Naples his main advocate was Luigi Palmieri (1807−96),
who inherited Galluppi’s chair in 1847. This distinguished appointment
made Palmieri secure, while the younger Spaventa had to open a private
school to earn his living. What Palmieri heard about Spaventa’s teaching
scandalized him, moving him to complain in his prolusione (inaugural
address) that ‘today we are thoroughly infected with Teutonic influences
because there are those among us who would like to inoculate our youth
with German pantheism, especially as it is garbed in the grand and noble
cloak provided by the works of G.F. Hegel.’ Having lost his school to
these complaints, Spaventa turned to private tutoring, and then he lost
his brother’s support as well when the police ran Silvio out of Naples.
Early in 1848 Silvio returned to found an opposition newspaper and win
office in the new government, but when the government collapsed a year
later, he was the first of the former deputies to be arrested. Bertrando,
despite his quieter habits, was then accused of plotting regicide, and
in 1850 he fled to Florence and then Torino, leaving Silvio still behind
bars.121
During the next decade, Bertrando’s career as a political journalist was
meteoric. In 1852 he joined a new magazine, Il Cimento, which took on
the Jesuits and their new periodical, Civiltà Cattolica. Spaventa made him-
self Cimento’s most powerful weapon, and when the magazine folded he
moved his guns in 1855 to a political daily, Il Piemonte, which published
his ‘Jesuit Saturdays’ on a schedule that tracked the Saturday publication
date of the Jesuit journal. Each of his satirical pieces opens with a tel-
egraphic digest – mocking analogous items in Civiltà Cattolica – of recent
Jesuit achievements and insights, such as the following:
49
Part I: Introduction
50
Revolution and Recirculation (Spaventa)
from the life of the world’s peoples, nor captives bound to the triumphal
chariot of a particular people, but a nation free and equal in the communi-
ty of nations – this, gentlemen, has always been my life’s desire and pursuit.
When the call soon arrived for Spaventa to bring his stirring vision to
Naples, it came from his old friend, De Sanctis, who was now minister
of education. And brother Silvio was running the police. Times had
changed.123
And yet changing times had not eliminated Neo-Guelf opposition to
Hegel in Naples. Since Hegel was a foreigner and Spaventa a Hegelian,
the Giobertians there – including his old nemesis, Palmieri – complained
that he was un-Italian, replying to every objection with Gioberti’s Ideal
Formula, which Spaventa mocked as an amulet or an incantation. ‘There
is no corner of life and existence,’ he wrote,
‘to which they have not applied it, hammering it in by force, like a nail in a
plank. And they think that having this nail in your pocket is enough to solve
every problem. If they need to say that it’s raining or getting hot, they do
not know how to say so except by starting with the Formula. Being creates
the existent: therefore it rains. Being creates the existent: therefore it’s hot.
And so on and on.’124
51
Part I: Introduction
52
11
Facts and Laws
(Villari)
phy to the arts and economics, and political ambition of the same scope
brought him elected offices and ministerial appointments. After 1873
he held elective posts several times; in 1891 he was minister of educa-
tion; in 1898 he became president of the Italian Historical Institute and
a member of the Crusca, a very prestigious academy; and in 1902 he was
named president of the Lincei, living fifteen more years to enjoy these
exalted honours.129
Positivism, however, the philosophical position that Villari advocated,
had been in decline since the early 1890s, having reached its peak in
Italy in the previous decade.130 And Villari spoke for only one type of
Italian positivism, the kind promoted by historians and philologists who
wanted to make their scholarship scientific. Other positivists – like And-
rea Angiulli (1837−90) and Salvatore Tommasi (1813−88) – were more
interested in psychology, medicine, biology, evolution, and Darwinism,
especially the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820−1903). The
later career at Padua of the long-lived Roberto Ardigò (1828−1920) was
a persistent focus of contention: he left the priesthood in 1869 when
his commitment to a naturalist theory of cognition compelled him to
break with the Church. Later, in an 1891 essay on ‘Naturalist Positiv-
ism in Philosophy,’ Aristide Gabelli (1830−91) reasserted the claims of
a humanist positivism against the evolutionist naturalism that he found
dogmatic. In the same year, this was also Villari’s aim when he asked, Is
History a Science?131
Villari’s answer starts in a measured way, recalling the rush of enthu-
siasm for Buckle’s effort ‘to transform history into an exact science’ but
also noting how quickly the excitement died. Realizing that history can-
not be a social physics, he nonetheless argues for a scientific historicism
in which positivism is a method rather than a systematic science. It is
this method, unburdened by metaphysical commitments, that historians
must bring to bear on moral and social problems. But just as Spaventa
had denounced Villari’s first positivist declaration of 1865, so Spaventa’s
cousin, Benedetto Croce, was ready to demolish this later statement, at
first dismissively in a work translated here, ‘History Brought Under the
General Concept of Art,’ and then more thoroughly in later works on
historiography.132 Before Villari became a patriarch of positivism in his
later years, he had been its prophet in his youth, a record that made him
too tempting a target for Croce to resist. Generations later than Croce’s
would still remember Villari’s 1865 speech as a manifesto for ‘the ideol-
ogy of the new progressive Italy,’ in the words of Eugenio Garin. Villari
himself noted that ‘at the time I was the first to discuss positivism in Italy,
54
Facts and Laws (Villari)
55
Part I: Introduction
Astronomy had once been astrology, after all, and chemistry had once
been alchemy. Perhaps, by historical analogy, something more sensible
might also come out of philosophy, if some other science could be a
model for it. Such a model could not be a mathematical science, how-
ever, because the origins of mathematics are unknown (leaving no basis
for historical comparison) and its methods of proof and calculation
are useless to the philosophy of Villari’s conception, which had never
proven anything and did not calculate. Perhaps a good model for phi-
losophy would be scientific but not mathematical.137 Another analogy
that is developmental, not just historical, sustains this suggestion. Since
sciences are products of the human mind, all sciences – even philosophy
– should reflect patterns of development that are evident not only in the
lives of human persons but also in the histories of human peoples, as in
the ‘ideal eternal history’ derived by Vico from his studies of antiquity.
A recent theory of the same type was Comte’s positivism, which Villari
treats as the equal of John Stuart Mill’s positivism in its influence on
him.138
Comte, as summarized by Villari, had divided human development
into three stages: theological, metaphysical, and positive. In the primi-
tive theological stage, everything later called ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ was
done by priests who addressed natural phenomena as if they were divine
persons or gods. In the next metaphysical stage, philosophers interpreted
the same phenomena as products of metaphysical principles, but since
they could never agree on those principles, contradictory metaphysical
systems proliferated. Philosophy, according to Villari, is retarded in its
development, and the philosophers who practise it are still stuck at the
metaphysical stage, unlike the real scientists whose work has advanced to
the highest or positive stage.139
When natural science was at the metaphysical stage – still part of phi-
losophy, in fact – it was all just warring systems and no progress, just like
philosophy as Kant found it. Natural philosophy was not yet science in
the modern sense, but the delay was not from any lack of observing or
reasoning, either inductively or deductively. Speaking of leading Italian
thinkers of the Renaissance, and thinking of them in comparison with
Francis Bacon, Villari notes that they ‘observed, induced and deduced’
without results, until Galileo ‘took the cart of the natural sciences, put
it on wheels and pushed it down the road at high velocity so that the sci-
ences have still not stopped and perhaps will never stop again … [follow-
ing] one of the most extensive revolutions in the history of the human
spirit.’140
56
Facts and Laws (Villari)
‘One philosopher says: being creates the existent, and this is the point of depar-
ture for building a system. But another philosopher says: possible being, and
from here starts a voyage toward a second system. And so it goes with many
other words – the Absolute, the idea, nature, substance – that give rise to just as
many other systems.’
But all was not darkness in Villari’s picture of philosophy. Logic (except
Hegel’s metaphysical logic) had always been capable of clear and certain
conclusions, though with small application to practical human prob-
lems. Villari seems to have thought of logic as an empirical science that
‘observed facts and looked for laws in them,’ a description that applies
more convincingly to the philosophical psychology of the day, in which
he detected signs of progress.142
Nonetheless, after so many centuries of metaphysical web-spinning,
some critics wanted to have done with it and simply eliminate metaphys-
ics as a failed science like astrology or alchemy. Although Villari was
more inclined to reform than to liquidate, he knew that reform would
be difficult. Like any science, philosophy must submit its findings to veri-
fication. But the only means of verification are mathematical and experi-
mental. Since he could find no mathematical proofs or experimental
tests in philosophy, verification seemed impossible. What to do? Should
philosophy just be abandoned as hopelessly pre-positive? Or might it be
possible to repeat Galileo’s scientific revolution in the case of philoso-
57
Part I: Introduction
‘After what Vico found – that the laws of the world of nations are the same
as the laws of the human spirit that created this social world – from the one
you can get the science of history and from the other the science of man,
tested and demonstrated. For if history somehow gives you the external
world on which to experiment and verify the inductions of your psychol-
ogy, the psychology then becomes a torch that illuminates history. The laws
of the one, if they are true, must be checked against the other, and vice-
versa.’146
Thus armed with the mutually verifying facts of history and psychology,
Villari had hopes of solving a very large problem for human society, espe-
cially in Italy: namely, ‘to find the institutions that are the better aids to its
progress.’ In this quest, his methodological convictions were as strong as
can be imagined. ‘We are all convinced,’ he claimed, ‘that society’s laws
are as inviolable as those of nature, and that … we should … manage
and make use of them, just as we make use of natural laws and agents.’147
‘Examining the whole human being,’ he continued, ‘from era to era
and year to year, we will find that its life has a constant counterpart in
the life of society and in the history of the human race. Every new idea,
58
Facts and Laws (Villari)
every faculty that we observe in the human person, inevitably gives rise
to a new series of social facts,’ and on the basis of those facts we can
proceed scientifically. Metaphysics has never progressed in this way, and
yet the metaphysical ideas pondered by philosophers have been realized
in society as religion, providing data that can be studied historically and
psychologically. From such research we will ‘not get absolute and full
knowledge of God, something … renounced for the present. But [we]
can experiment and use history to test how the idea of God emerged.’ In
this way, we may achieve ‘a practical, positive but also progressive knowl-
edge of the human heart.’148
This positive knowledge will come only from applying ‘the historical
method to the moral sciences … giving that method the same stand-
ing that the experimental method has in the natural sciences. Hence,
positivism is a new method, definitely not a new system.’ It is certainly
not traditional philosophy and does not try to answer all of philosophy’s
questions. Unlike philosophy as previously practised, the positive meth-
od ‘renounces all absolute conclusions,’ limiting itself to the human case
and studying ‘only facts and social and moral laws by patiently checking
the inductions of psychology against history and finding the laws of the
human spirit in the laws of history.’149
59
12
Real and Ideal
(De Sanctis)
Although Villari was a conspicuous target for the young and ambitious
Croce, one of Croce’s heroes was Villari’s teacher, Francesco De Sanctis,
remembered today as the first great literary historian and critic of mod-
ern Italy – above all for his History of Italian Literature (1870−1). Like oth-
er intellectuals of his generation, De Sanctis lived a life fractured by the
epochal events of 1848 and 1860, which compelled him to think about
human affairs in a broader and deeper way. Born in 1817 in the region
of Avellino, east of Naples, he moved to the city in 1827 to pursue liter-
ary studies, meeting Leopardi and founding his own school there at the
age of twenty-two, while also participating in Collechi’s Hegelian group.
In 1849, having joined the failed insurrection in Naples of the previous
year, he fled to Calabria and was arrested as a conspirator in Mazzini’s
Young Italy. He then spent three years reading Hegel while jailed in the
Castel dell’Ovo.150
Released in 1853, he went north to Torino, avoided active politics for
a while, studied Dante but also wrote a poem about his imprisonment,
‘La prigione,’ whose sentiments were both revolutionary and Hegelian.
He then began to produce the essays and journalism that marked him as
a man of the Left and therefore unemployable. To find a job, he left for
Zurich, where he taught literature and wrote until returning triumphant-
ly to Naples in 1860, as governor of Avellino and minister of education,
appointed first by Garibaldi and then by Cavour. He was also elected to
the first national Parliament and raised his public profile by editing a
daily newspaper. The first collection of his essays appeared in 1866, just
before he started work on the History of Italian Literature, which is still in
print. One of his best-known pieces from this period, ‘Science and Life,’
started as a prolusione, following his appointment to the University of
Real and Ideal (De Sanctis)
Naples in 1871. By 1875, however, the Left’s electoral success called him
away from teaching to full-time politics, until bad health made him with-
draw from ministerial duties as well in 1880. He was elected again as a
deputy in 1882 and died in 1883.151
By the time De Sanctis passed away, the academic study of literature
had turned positivist and unfriendly to idealism, even his moderate
kind. Even the young Croce disliked his historicism, though he admired
the criticism nonetheless – thinking better of the many essays than of
the imposing History. It was Croce, however, followed by Gentile, who
made De Sanctis a revered figure for Italian idealists of the twentieth
century. And yet De Sanctis had insisted on limits to Hegelianism: no
dogmas, no triads, nothing a priori, only the two experiential principles
that he thought basic to modernity: ‘becoming as the basis of evolution
and existence as the basis of realism.’ What he meant by ‘realism’ was
much affected by his reading of Émile Zola’s naturalist fiction, which
had begun to appear in 1867. The ‘relentless painter of that vast French
corruption’ understood literature as aiming ‘to approach nature and
reality’ because life itself – not the Beautiful or the Good or the True – is
the object of art. The living always includes both the real and the ideal,
and valuing them both is the critic’s task.152
The occasion for De Sanctis to write in philosophical terms about
‘The Principle of Realism’ was that he had read a book with that title
by Julius von Kirchmann (1802−4), a distinguished German jurist who
also became president of the Philosophical Society in Berlin in 1846.
Having heard a good deal of loose talk in his own country about realism,
De Sanctis set about to reduce the confusion, starting with a declaration
of what realism is not: neither materialism nor sensism nor empiricism.
Although Hegel had condemned empiricism, he would now be obliged
to respect realism because it ‘puts thinking in as lofty a position as the
Idealists do.’153 Idealists go astray, however, when they regard ‘thinking
as the unique and direct source of being because what is highest and first
in being can be learned only from thinking.’ Realists correctly object
that being ‘can be known only by perceiving’ and that ‘the only purpose
of thinking is to elaborate the content of perception.’ Knowledge needs
two instruments, in fact, both thinking and perceiving. But both tools
are forged in experience, which alone gives us our mental objects and
their extra-mental referents – all the being that we can know. Only per-
ception gives us the content of being, however, without which its forms
would be empty thoughts.154
One perverse consequence of this realization, that both thinking and
61
Part I: Introduction
62
Real and Ideal (De Sanctis)
63
Part I: Introduction
lowers its sights, ‘many are discouraged and talk about the end of meta-
physics … [and] poetry,’ while his hopes for both are eternal. ‘What are
natural selection, the principle of heredity and evolution, the uncon-
scious and the internal states of atoms but attempts at metaphysics,’ he
asks, adding that ‘these concepts do not come from constructs of pure
speculation, as they used to do … As results of long and patient observa-
tion … they are tools of Realism that construct new kinds of metaphys-
ics … [that] can go nowhere without Realism as [their] passport.’ ‘We
are deep in Realism,’ De Sanctis concludes: ‘the new generation runs
after us with the same passion that made … us … run after Hegel.’162
Realism is the new Hegelianism, De Sanctis suggests. Hegel was surely
an idealist, however, and De Sanctis has been hard on idealism. ‘The
Ideal is dead.’ But wait. ‘The Ideal has risen!’ This paradoxical pair
of ejaculations ends a short piece on ‘The Ideal’ which is even more
occasional than ‘The Principle of Realism,’ but long enough to hedge
a little on realism. Speaking – without much preparation, perhaps – to
the Philological Circle of Naples in 1877, De Sanctis first observes that
the members of the society are bound to do good for one another by a
‘feeling of duty,’ which is a ‘feeling of the Ideal.’ But this sentiment, he
fears, must reflect a split personality. What is this talk about the Ideal, he
wonders, ‘at a time when everything is Real … [and] the Ideal is dead
and buried?’ He responds with a little eulogy for ‘the companion of my
youth … [that] has stirred my heart many times.’163
De Sanctis assumes universal assent to the first premise of his speech:
that infants and savages behave like animals; they differ from civilized
adult humans in acting merely to preserve their lives, in not experiencing
those lives as human. Only the human feeling of belonging to human-
kind will lead to reflection on that feeling, and thus to the moment ‘when
a person conceives an idea of what was a feeling for him the day before.’
The generalizing of human qualities – patriotism, for example – is the
birth of ideas. But ‘ideas become the Ideal … only when … imagination
takes hold of ideas and … produces feeling … in such a way that the idea
becomes like the pillar of fire that guides the human race … taking dif-
ferent forms in art, religion, philosophy and history.’164
How does this becoming come to be? Where does the Ideal come
from? From the Real. By observing real things that are beautiful or ugly,
for example, we think the corresponding ideas, from which we ‘then
create the Ideal of art, which is the Greco-Latin Ideal.’ De Sanctis sup-
poses that because ideals have cultural and temporal boundaries – Egyp-
tian, Greco-Roman, Christian – they may decay if those boundaries break
64
Real and Ideal (De Sanctis)
down. But when the decadent ideal turns into a prison, thinking aspires
to freedom, a new ideal. And when freedom is not just for the individual
but for all people, the still higher ideal of humanity emerges. We will
have created ourselves by realizing the progress of history.165
Nonetheless, De Sanctis finds it an odd feature of his time that ‘we
believe that the Ideal no longer exists. And I find not just … Realism …
A still stranger phenomenon … [is our] looking more lovingly today
on our animal part than on the human … thinking more of the mon-
key than of man.’ After Lavoisier and Darwin, the Ideal had faded into
an illusion. Thinking was a residue of chemical reactions, morality an
afterglow of metabolism, so that ‘all the qualities that are really human
appear to be bestialized.’ Ideas are instincts, imagination is a mechanism,
passion is just appetite.166 Peering through the gloom of a re-bestialized
humanity, De Sanctis spots a glimmer of the Ideal. What cheers the old
revolutionary is that modern people have found modern ways to protest
the animal negation of the human. When all ideals have been banished
from reality, the cries of pain must still compete with irony, laughter,
and eruptive rage. And those cries are not the swan song of the Ideal.
They are screams of birth: ‘in laughter, in the grotesque, in comedy, in
pain and in indignation we see nothing more than the sign of something
laboring that will bear is own fruits. At one time’ – before the Revolution,
to be precise – ‘we used to shout, “The King is dead. Long live the King!”
Now I say, “The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is risen!”’167
65
13
Resurgence
(Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
(and Michelet) had made canonical, this first extensive study of Renais-
sance philosophy by an Italian claims to be about a Risorgimento, which
now, both in Italian and in English, is the name not of the period that
Fiorentino studied but of the era in which he lived. Only in the early
twentieth century, while Gentile was reformulating the history of Italian
philosophy, would the current usage of ‘Rinascimento’ and ‘Risorgimen-
to’ become the norm in Italy. In effect, it was Risorgimento politics and
philosophy that made the Renaissance a modern Italian property, dec-
ades after Spaventa had embraced the period that Gioberti disclaimed.
Fiorentino’s book on Quattrocento philosophy was the sequel to Spaven-
ta’s rejection of Gioberti’s historiography, and Fiorentino’s heirs in this
regard were Gentile and Eugenio Garin.169
Fiorentino began to turn Spaventa’s theorizing into concrete histo-
ry in 1868 with his detailed studies of Pomponazzi, Telesio, and other
Renaissance philosophers. As an original thinker, however, he promoted
views that were as much Kantian as Hegelian, aiming at a critique of the
findings of positive science, especially evolutionary biology. The essay on
‘Positivism and Idealism,’ translated here, shows Fiorentino evaluating
the claims of these competing positions.170 Earlier, in letters written from
Bologna in the Spring of 1865, Kant’s was one of the systems that he
sought to relate to Vico’s New Science.171 If Italian philosophy was to have
a voice in the international conversation that Spaventa had described, a
philosophical Vico who not only revises Descartes but also adumbrates
Kant would have something to say to contemporary philosophers who
could make little sense of a merely antiquarian Vico.
On the other hand, Fiorentino realized that his syncretizing view of
Vico’s thought would also annoy the Italian nationalists who needed
their hero to be a complete original – as Descartes, the founding hero
of French philosophy, had claimed to be. For almost a century after Vico
died, in 1744, only a few innovators like Hamann, Herder, and Jacobi
had paid much attention to the great Neapolitan, whose masterpiece
found a German translator only in 1822, followed by the bestselling
French abridgement of 1827 by Jules Michelet. Meanwhile, Cuoco and
other Neapolitan progressives were making the case for Vico to their cor-
respondents in other parts of the peninsula. The result of the ensuing
Vico craze, according to Fiorentino, was uncritical adulation. He inter-
rupted the applause with analysis of links and isomorphisms between the
New Science and other ways of doing philosophy – not just philology.172
The medium for Fiorentino’s message was a series of epistolary essays
addressed in 1865 to the Marchesa Marianna Florenzi Waddington, who
67
Part I: Introduction
was sixty-two when she published her own Essays on Psychology and Logic
in 1864. Born in 1802 to the noble Bacinetti family of Ravenna, she
first married an Italian, the Marquis Ettore Florenzi of Perugia, in 1819.
When her first husband died in 1833, she married a Protestant expatri-
ate, Evelino Waddington, in 1836. Meanwhile she had cultivated a long
friendship with Ludwig I of Bavaria, who abdicated in 1848. (The King
commissioned one of the several portraits of his companion that sur-
vive.) Although she befriended princes, the Marchesa was an untypical
aristocrat: like few Italian woman of her time, she studied science – at
the University of Perugia. She also organized salons and did risky work
as a political journalist and a translator of foreign texts that the authori-
ties disliked – a career that won her election (she was the first woman so
honoured) to the Philosophical Academy of Naples in 1865, five years
before her death in 1870.173
Her 1864 Essays open with schematic introductions to logic and psy-
chology before proceeding to the special topic of the soul’s immortality.
She examines the soul in the framework of German philosophy, nam-
ing Kant and Schelling but looking for a Hegelian solution to a topic
that she thought not well handled by Hegel: the soul’s purpose and des-
tiny. She finds immortality to be not just compatible with Hegel’s system
but required by it. Importing Hegel into Italian philosophical culture
for this purpose was benign: what harm could come of finding support
from abroad for a key tenet of Roman Catholic faith – the immortality
of the soul – whose career in philosophical theology had been long and
troubled?174
The Marchesa’s private thoughts in the years just before she corre-
sponded with Fiorentino were more threatening to conventional piety.
She read his book on Bruno’s pantheism, and in a draft essay on that
notorious doctrine, she not only endorses it but also attributes it to St
Paul – the unholy nightmare of Spinozism revived in the previous cen-
tury by Jacobi’s quarrel with Mendelssohn about Lessing. She explicitly
denies the dogma of creation ex nihilo and identifies her impersonal God
with the material universe, citing Bruno, an executed heretic, as her
authority. Along the way, however, she makes use of Spinoza’s arguments
before rejecting the version of divinity that she found in Schelling – an
undeveloped deity that remains unaware of itself until it is fully realized
in human reason. Although she mentions Gioberti only once, it is clear
that she has read him as well as his great rival, Rosmini, who accused one
another of the pantheism that she embraces.175
Although Schelling had published a book called Bruno oder über das
68
Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
göttliche und natürliche Prinzip der Dinge in 1802, he actually seems not to
have read Bruno’s majestic Italian dialogues. Nonetheless, it was proba-
bly the appeal of Schelling’s title to an Italian readership that persuaded
the Marchesa to translate it, and then to publish it in 1844 in the face of
official resistance. A few years later, Spaventa drafted (but did not pub-
lish) the first modern Italian monograph on Bruno, thinking of him as
the Italian Spinoza. To follow up his monograph on Bruno’s pantheism
– dedicated to the Marchesa – Fiorentino also planned a large study of
Giordano Bruno and His Times that he did not live to publish.176
In the year before her translation of Schelling’s Bruno appeared,
Florenzi Waddington had launched her career as a philosopher with a
collection of Various Thoughts that Mamiani encouraged her to publish.
At this time of her life, however, she was as much a political agent as a
philosopher. Despite her first husband’s official obligations to the papa-
cy, in a city where papal rule was still a threat, she had long shared the
anti-clerical instincts of the liberal circles in which she moved, always
distrusting the Pope’s assertion of temporal power. She was never a
republican, however, and thought Italy unready for democracy, but her
commitments to nationalism and constitutional monarchy were passion-
ate and openly declared, starting with the disturbances of 1830 in Italy
and the rest of Europe. When Pius IX turned his back on the liberals
after 1848, her private words were to ‘damn the butcher who usurps the
name of the Vicar of Christ on earth! Pius IX has given us the hearts of
tigers,’ while publicly concluding that ‘on the principles of reason the
Protestant religion … is more plausible, more acceptable.’177
After the disillusionments of 1848 and their sorry sequel for local
affairs in Perugia, the Marchesa found politics less attractive than philos-
ophy in the next decade. She had known Fiorentino before 1861, when
he dedicated his first book to her – and elicited her delight that this
Italian thinker knew some German. Her own international network in
philosophy was large and well established by this time. She had improved
her German on visits to King Ludwig in Munich, where Schelling was the
court philosopher. In 1860 she corresponded about Schelling and Bru-
no with Baron Karl Bunsen, who was her second husband’s (Evelino’s)
cousin and the Prussian ambassador to Rome, Bern, and London.
Evelino’s extended family was renowned in France as well. Charles Wad-
dington-Kastus (probably a cousin) taught philosophy in Paris and wrote
a study of Aristotle’s psychology that the Marchesa translated into Italian
in 1856. One of Charles’s cousins became prime minister of France in
1879, and another was a distinguished politician. Such family and politi-
69
Part I: Introduction
70
Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
metaphysics history
ideal real
abstract concrete
reason will
contemplation action
true certain
71
Part I: Introduction
philosophy, which they imported from Greece. In his third letter, Fioren-
tino explains how Vico’s struggle with this problem led him to revise his
earlier views and discover his New Science, after surviving his critics and
emerging from various blind allies. It was useless to shift the hunt for
primitive language to the Etruscans, for example, because no one could
(or can) read Etruscan. Intelligible and abundant evidence of Roman
law, however, was as old as Rome itself.183 The laws of the Twelve Tables
are crude, but law by its nature generalizes: since one general rule covers
many particular deeds, law is ‘the natural mediator between theory and
practice.’ But since the earliest Romans were not truly primitive, Vico
began to use his data – the findings of philology – to go ‘back even far-
ther, to the cave-dwellers … to the crude savage rites that inaugurated …
the first civilization.’ The primitive was so alluring to Vico because it
seemed to unveil the universal, the anthropological constants that ought
to constitute human nature, thus making his new enterprise the human
science which explains that nature.184
Vico’s philological quest for a new science was persistent and produc-
tive, in Fiorentino’s view, but not reflective. Unlike Kant, he ‘lacks the
awareness of his own path … [which] is why the foundation of his philos-
ophy constantly conflicts with his own teaching.’ Before writing the New
Science, Vico had restricted human intellectual certainty to mathematics
as the only science made by humans, but his masterwork expands the
scope of the made to the natural, moral, and aesthetic sciences. Kant
would also encounter contradictions that impeded his progress and
made him slumber dogmatically, but he attended to them philosophi-
cally as antinomies. His aim, like Vico’s, was to give knowledge a stable
foundation, but Vico had proceeded unreflectively. Hence, he only got
glimpses of the findings that Kant would derive from the well-meditated
arguments of his first Critique.185 ‘Kant completes Descartes by putting
Vico’s presentiment into effect,’ according to Fiorentino, whose own dil-
igence in the libraries had clarified Vico’s distinction between the cogito
as a sign of the subject’s existence, on the one hand, and as a cause of
that existence on the other. Certainty of S’s existence by way of S’s irre-
fragable conviction that S is thinking does not show that thinking makes
S (or anything else) exist. Hence, the Cartesian project was incomplete
when Vico took it up, not as a philosopher but as a philological prophet.
Kant completed this vatic work when, like Vico, ‘he went beyond Carte-
sian consciousness,’ and then, unlike Vico, ‘moved up to … transcenden-
tal consciousness.’186
Fiorentino’s conclusion is an Italian historian’s platform for idealist
72
Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
philosophy: ‘Vico teaches how the human being makes history, Kant how
the mind makes knowledge, and in this they both reveal that thinking
is the supreme maker.’ This was in 1865. But in 1866 Villari brought
his powerful advocacy of positivism into the philosophical conversation,
and the effects of his prolusione were still strong a decade later when
Fiorentino addressed the issue in ‘Positivism and Idealism.’ Like much
Italian philosophy of the period, Fiorentino’s Pisa prolusione is self-con-
sciously – and in his case – brilliantly rhetorical. It is a stunning piece of
prose, setting a standard of eloquence that only Croce would surpass.
The occasion, of course, demanded oratory: Fiorentino’s task was a for-
mal address to the students of his new university, which he would help
make the most distinguished in the new Italy.187
Fiorentino warns that positivism in Italy has been like an earthquake
that makes a shaky building collapse all at once: the ruined edifice was
speculative philosophizing about ideas; facts are the new seismic force;
and Auguste Comte engineered the cataclysm. But Fiorentino looks at a
side of Comte that Villari had ignored by focusing on the famous theory
of stages. At first, Comte had treated quantification as the foundation
of all science, which he saw ascending from mathematics through pro-
gressively more complex sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology to
sociology, the implication being that the human science at the top of the
ladder will be reductive, tracking its data down through the same hier-
archy until it becomes as quantitative as physics. Because Comte later
reversed himself to rule that ‘higher forms cannot be explained by lower
forms,’ Fiorentino is friendlier to him than to the real villains of positiv-
ism: the British.188
Since, from Fiorentino’s perspective, the British philosophical tradi-
tion had long been suspicious of substances and causes and was now
spellbound by utility, it was the perfect seedbed for the positivism that
crossed the Channel from France. ‘If, as Macaulay said, the glory of mod-
ern philosophy lies in seeking the useful and shunning ideas, then, from
Bacon until now, no nation has done more to make this maxim effec-
tive.’ Reductionism in the early Comte was as nothing, however, com-
pared to the sceptical assassination of ideas attempted by John Stuart
Mill. In Mill’s logic, Fiorentino could find no deductions, causes, laws, or
definitions, only associations, sequences, conformities, and descriptions.
He regards Mill’s inductive method as just bookkeeping with data, the
‘impoverishment of reason.’189
Mill’s positivism ‘is the genius of his nation, so horrified by ideas, so
anxious to corner the facts.’ But the instinct feeds on ignorance of Kant’s
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Part I: Introduction
74
Resurgence (Fiorentino and Florenzi Waddington)
The bar to further progress was the difference between natural induc-
tion and historical induction, as Fiorentino sees it. Because the facts of
nature are stable, he claims, ‘exactly identical as long as circumstances
are the same,’ they are always ready for the scientist to assemble, disas-
semble, and test. The historian’s mental facts, by contrast, are fleeting,
always changing in time and constantly altered by context, providing no
basis for reliable induction or controlled experiment. Life, the object
of the moral sciences, is a ‘fickle, gabbling Proteus that has no constant
face.’194 Émile Littré, France’s great positivist lexicographer, had pro-
posed treating historical data about the words of modern languages as a
matrix of natural facts in which the sequence of linguistic forms would
guide induction. What about the missing links? This was Fiorentino’s
question, which made him even more sceptical about studying primitive
languages, and, in general, about all ‘researches into origins,’ which are
just guesswork. Such inquiries have no real method because there is no
‘equivalent of natural facts’ that can take the place of concrete observa-
tions. The results are more poetic than scientific.195
By Mill’s standards of positivity, in fact, there is little positive evidence
of a kind that might lead to historical equivalents of the gas laws. ‘Unlike
the … gases that surround the body … the moral and intellectual envi-
ronment is not always given. It grows in the course of history … [as]
both producer and product of that history.’ Because historical facts are
mental, they are always mutable. In the end, they may be useless for sci-
ence. But even Mill, in all his positivist parsimony, regarded ‘intellectual
activity and the search for truth … [as] the chief cause that determines
social progress.’ If thinking means so much to society, can the moral sci-
ences do without a science of thinking?196
Fiorentino’s Kantian reply is that ‘Idealism can be empty and Positivism
can be blind if one is detached from the other … What lights up the fact
is the idea shining inside it, raising it from … mere accident to … lasting
reality.’ Over the centuries, many people had seen many lamps swinging
in many churches. The facts had always been there, long before Galileo
grasped the law of the pendulum. And to discover such laws, observing
and compiling facts are not enough. We used to choke on syllogisms;
now it is mindless catalogs of data that crush us. The philosopher’s duty
is to cure the disease and end the destruction that will continue unless
the two monisms reform themselves.197 Fiorentino promises his students
to promote reform by avoiding the ruinous extremes: ‘True Idealism
must not neglect the results of the positive sciences nor neglect history,
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Part I: Introduction
and true Positivism must remember that the most important of all facts is
human thinking.’ His own method will be historical rather than positive
– at least in the British sense – combining a deductive ‘internal history’
with an inductive ‘external history,’ respecting both ‘strict discipline of
argument’ and ‘careful inquiry into the facts.’198
76
14
Matter and Idea
(Labriola)
Antonio Labriola was born the son of a school teacher in 1843 in Cas-
sino, and in 1861 he went to Naples to study philosophy. Working with
Spaventa and other Hegelians, he began by criticizing Eduard Zeller’s
version of Kantian epistemology; then he studied Socrates, Spinoza, and
Feuerbach. Despite the long shadows cast in Naples by Spaventa and
De Sanctis, Labriola was never comfortable with Hegel. He aimed one
of his early efforts at Augusto Vera’s Hegelian Lectures on the Philosophy
of History, but this should be seen in the context of coolness between
Vera and Spaventa. Like his father, Labriola taught school before ris-
ing through the ranks of the university, winning his first appointment
at Rome in 1874, where he taught moral philosophy and education.
Although he travelled in Germany and read German philosophy, it was
probably his continuing interest in pedagogy that attracted him to one
of the great German authorities in that field, Johann Friedrich Herbart
(1776−1841). And Herbart’s moral psychology gave Labriola more rea-
sons to dislike Hegel.199
Herbart belonged to an earlier generation. He had succeeded to
Kant’s chair at Königsberg in 1809 and moved to Göttingen in 1833. His
Psychology as Science (1824−5) and General Metaphysics (1828−9) appeared
in Hegel’s lifetime but took a much different, psychological approach to
post-Kantian problems. Some of Herbart’s psychology is quantitative and
empirical, but much of it is metaphysical and leads to a theory of value.
His starting point for philosophy is reflection on empirical information –
including the misleading information that makes us see simple monadic
substances (of a Leibnizian kind) as subject to real change. Philosophy’s
initial task is to clarify such unreliable reflections by applying tools of
logic. But logical clarification reveals contradictions that can be resolved
Part I: Introduction
only at the next stage by metaphysics, which makes thinkable what logic
clarifies. The real objects of metaphysical analysis belong to the extra-
mental world, but the problems of aesthetics, left unresolved by logic
and metaphysics, are values that stand outside reality and emerge from
our thinking.200
Herbart convinced Labriola that human activity must be studied
empirically and psychologically, not just sketched in grand Hegelian ges-
tures, but this conclusion left him perplexed about idealism’s larger role
in philosophy. He thought that the basis of morality had to be a kind
of interior freedom, and yet it could not be the interiority of a pure
transcendental subject. On the one hand, a theory of knowledge had to
encompass concrete psychological processes governed by scientific laws.
On the other hand, without guidance from ideal reason, psychological
processes could not produce knowledge. Neither epistemology nor eth-
ics could be reduced to psychology, and experience would always require
the corrective of metaphysics.
In 1887, when Labriola moved up a step in the university hierarchy,
he marked the occasion with a prolusione on ‘The Problems of the Phi-
losophy of History,’ which summarized his worries about idealism and
applied them to this key Hegelian topic. Responding to German hopes
for a human science (Geisteswissenschaft) whose rigour and results might
match those of natural science, Labriola doubted that history could be a
science of any kind. He was suspicious of Hegel’s proto-evolutionism and
thought that positivist Darwinism could never account for complexities
of value, meaning, and culture. In the end, history registers transforma-
tions of the human spirit that cannot be reduced to material change.
And yet it seemed both necessary and possible to study the human con-
dition genetically through a social psychology of the spirit. Applying the
model of developmental embryology, researchers should study homolo-
gies of myth, custom, and language in a search for informative gener-
alizations. A social psychology working along such lines would produce
something sounder than a Hegelian philosophy of history, but – in Her-
bartian terms – metaphysics must always be available as a corrective to
experience.201
Until the 1890s, the undogmatic Labriola had more questions than
answers. But for some years he had been talking with the radicals and
socialists who would give his politics a harder edge – with a mature phi-
losophy of historical materialism undergirding the politics. After his
formative experience in Naples in the early days of the unified nation,
Labriola’s sympathies had been with the Historical Right, drifting left-
78
Matter and Idea (Labriola)
ward only later and gradually. By the late 1880s, he was running for
office and publicly active, much engaged in the movement to raise a
statue of Giordano Bruno in Rome. Erected in 1889 on the spot where
the Church had burned Bruno in 1600, the Roman statue is a late stage
of Bruno’s iconography. The martyred philosopher had first entered
Risorgimento politics as a hero of Spaventa’s historiography and as an
icon of anti-clerical resistance – a rebuke to the treason of Pius IX that
Florenzi Waddington abhorred. Three decades after unification, howev-
er, a subversive Bruno was no longer pleasing to the Roman authorities,
so the new statue shows us a hooded prophet and a mystic seer. Mysti-
cism was nowhere on Labriola’s agenda, but his treatment of politics and
philosophy was always provisional, always correctible by experience – like
the plans for Bruno’s statue.202
In the same year that a somber Bruno took his place in the Campo
de’ Fiori, Labriola taught a course on the French Revolution that caused
riots in Rome and had to be suspended. By this time, just before the
foundation of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), he had also begun to cor-
respond with Friedrich Engels and other eminent communists, quizzing
them about the theory behind their practice. One of his correspondents
was the syndicalist Georges Sorel, whose new journal published Labrio-
la’s In Memory of the Communist Manifesto in 1895. Quickly republished by
Croce, this essay became a charter document of the intellectual left in
Italy.203
Engels and Marx had finally convinced Labriola that historical expla-
nation could be scientific, objective, and naturalist, where the funda-
mental theorem of naturalism is that material conditions of production
constrain all human activity. Nonetheless, human activity occurs not just
in a material landscape but also in an ‘artificial terrain,’ which, like all
artifice, is a human product. The scene of historical inquiry is this arti-
ficial environment that includes humanity itself as a human creation.
Human beings make themselves, both as distinctly human members of
society and also as individual agents. Philosophically sensitive material-
ism will help humans discover what must be done by humans, and that
obligation will be the content of a philosophy of praxis based on histori-
cal development in a material world.
In such a world, ideas by themselves are powerless; it is the human
environment that gives the conditions of possibility of moral thought
and action. Not as abstract rules but as regulative ideas, progress and
perfectibility are nonetheless accessible to the historical materialist. And
yet Labriola acknowledged the difficulty of bridging the theoretical gap
79
Part I: Introduction
between the material and the ideal, and he recognized the positivist
account of this problem as a step forward in its time. His honest respect
for philosophical dispute isolated him to some extent from other radical
thinkers whose theorizing was more in the service of politics. Perhaps for
this reason, in his later years he avoided the grand problems of Marxist
metaphysics – the nuances of dialectical materialism, for example – and
applied himself more to political economy. After an illness of several
years that deprived him of his voice, he died in 1904.204
Labriola’s ‘History, Philosophy of History, Sociology and Historical
Materialism’ dates from his last years, a decade after Croce had studied
the same problems from a different perspective in his first major pub-
lication, ‘History Brought Under the General Concept of Art.’ Labrio-
la’s influence on Croce was strong, certainly one of the reasons for the
younger scholar’s growing interest in Marx during the 1890s, when he
and Gentile formed their famous partnership. Like both those thinkers,
Labriola wanted to improve the understanding of history. His essay of
1902−3 on the topic – actually notes for a course on the philosophy of
history – is clearer than Croce’s 1893 effort, perhaps because Croce’s
apprentice piece had cleared some of the ground.205
The word ‘history’ is ambiguous, he warns, because it refers both to
events (history1) and to accounts of events (history2).206 Historia, the
original Greek word, means ‘inquiries’ about past facts and thus belongs
to history2, but by etymology the German Geschichte, from geschehen or
‘happen,’ refers to past happenings themselves, or history1. Although
history1, the object of historical materialism as a philosophy of history, is
Labriola’s topic, he does not ignore the attendant problems of history2,
history as recorded, researched, and narrated. When people ask if his-
tory is a science, he notes, the question cannot be answered until one
knows which history they have in mind.
There is no autonomous science that produces history2. The required
skills and techniques come from other special sciences, mainly philol-
ogy, and obviously not from history1. Asking whether history1 is science
or art involves a category mistake, like asking that same question about
metabolism rather than about physiology as the study of metabolism.
History1 might be the object of such a special science, but according to
Labriola it is not: it belongs not to a special science but to a division of
philosophy, the philosophy of history. That part of philosophy under-
stands history1 as ‘an objective sum of events,’ neither random nor provi-
dentially planned but moved automatically by an internal development
that drives and is also constituted by human activity, which includes all
80
Matter and Idea (Labriola)
81
Part I: Introduction
82
Matter and Idea (Labriola)
83
Part I: Introduction
84
Matter and Idea (Labriola)
for Labriola it is ‘a settled empirical certainty’ that this was the primitive
human condition, from which individual consciousness emerged only
recently. He finds this illuminating, but not a reason to follow certain
positivists in distilling metaphysical constructs – ‘the social organism, the
collective spirit and so on’ – from sociology. A simpler view is that people
are born into nature as social, not individual, with socially determined
faculties of emotion, language, practical action, and so on. From this
social ground the I eventually emerges, an I that can overrate its capabili-
ties. Likewise overreaching were ‘all those scientists – idiots, more or less
– who used to deduce language, law, justice and the state from choice,
inventiveness and individual will.’220
Nonetheless, individuality is a momentous gain for human devel-
opment that history will not discard because the progress of history
empowers the individual. In fact, if a communist society were to arrive
– ‘meaning only … that the means and instruments of production could
no longer be private property but would belong to the collective through
the exercise of labor needed for the production of material goods’ –
more individuals, out of the many whom the bosses now enslave, would
be free. This is not a utopian fantasy about a primitive golden age,
Labriola insists, since it is grounded in the historical materialism which
understands that ‘every society depends on the material conditions of its
existence.’221
Those conditions – ‘the basic framework of society [that] depends on
relations … among those who produce material goods directly by their
labor’ – have varied throughout history, but the variation is rhythmic, not
random, constituting the order and direction of history1. The first prin-
ciple of the historical materialism that knows where history is headed is
that humanity’s ‘various schemes of organization,’ especially the political
kind, are ‘always in keeping with the corresponding state of the eco-
nomic framework.’ The second principle is a more tenuous correspond-
ence of myth, religion, morality, and other such forms ‘to a particular
social condition.’ A third key point is ‘that the social framework … is a
hierarchy … [of] families and classes in various relations of dependency
and superiority,’ which explains why society is inherently unstable as the
site of class struggle and the locus of the revolutions that move human-
ity forward. In its simplest and barest form, the historical materialism
that applies these principles to history1 will suffice to account for world-
historical events in their broad outlines, including their happening at
particular times and places. But it will take a technically proficient and
artfully constructed history2, a work of skill and imagination, to repre-
sent such events in competent and compelling narratives.222
85
15
No Speculative Movement
(Barzellotti)
‘The evil … was that, whereas for the Germans Absolute Idealism was the
last stage of one of the … most liberal speculative movements on record, for
us, on the other hand, it was only an importation, accepted … for no other
87
Part I: Introduction
reason than that it represented a faith opposed to that which had hitherto
been preached to them … Bertrando Spaventa saw this more clearly than
any of the other Hegelians.’
88
No Speculative Movement (Barzellotti)
sion [with] the one … exclusively Italian … [and] the other … foreign….
Attempts … to naturalize the philosophy of Hegel among us have been
attended, as yet at least, with no general or lasting results … either because
our minds were already exhausted, surfeited or distracted, or because we
altogether lacked that spirit of application and discipline which has contrib-
uted so much to the progress of science in Germany.229
As the nineteenth century entered its last quarter, anyone who read this
bleak assessment of the state of philosophy in Italy would not have pre-
dicted that the twentieth century would begin with a titanic display of
application, discipline, and genius from Benedetto Croce and Giovanni
Gentile, who naturalized idealism so thoroughly in Italy that it towered
over its rivals there for fifty years and more.
89
16
A Revelation
(Croce I)
It was this practical disappointment that sent him back to Labriola and
Herbart, and then on to Vico, Windelband, Simmel, Dilthey, and other
philosophers of history and historical method. The same research intro-
duced him to the many Germans who had written or were still writing
about aesthetics – always a provocation to positivists.232
The product of Croce’s enormous diet of books was what seemed at
the time to be a philosophical detour from a career in history. ‘Then,
after much hesitation and a series of provisional solutions,’ he tells us,
‘in February or March of 1893, having thought it over intensely for a
whole day, in the evening I drafted an essay that I titled “History Brought
Under the General Concept of Art.” It was like a revelation of myself to
me.’ He delivered his revelation to the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples
on 3 March 1893.233
91
17
History under Art
(Croce II)
Croce begins by dividing all cultural production into two domains: sci-
ence and art. If the two are mutually exclusive, and if history is not one
of them, it must be the other. But the question framed by this distinc-
tion– ‘Is history science or art?’ – is vague and has led to weak answers,
the commonest being that ‘history is science and art all at once.’ Only
the recent German thinkers who have philosophized about history have
replied in a rigorous way, maintaining that real history is strictly scientific
and must always exclude art. Science seeks knowledge, art seeks pleas-
ure, and the truly scientific historian will never confuse the two quests.234
The notions in play are really three, however – art, science, and his-
tory – and Croce suspects that the experts on history think too narrowly
about art, too broadly about science. Their double error makes them
devalue the more popular view, that ‘history shares the nature of art.’
After all, more than many other disciplines, history is tied to art – espe-
cially to literary art. Meditating on his own experience of reading and
writing history, the young mandarin will side with the common folk to
refute the German professors. He will also refute Villari – by snubbing
him. Although the form of Croce’s question best known to Italians of the
day – Is History a Science? – was the title of Villari’s recent lectures, Croce
takes this formulation to have missed the point by failing to ask about
art. He names Villari only in two footnotes, dismissing him as obtuse
and irrelevant.235 A different error confounds other critics who discuss
art but suppose that it aims at pleasure, when its real goal is ‘producing
the Beautiful.’ Sizing up that lofty goal requires knowing what the word
‘beautiful’ means. ‘Heaven save me,’ Croce wails, ‘from getting into the
endless and subtle disquisitions … of aesthetic science,’ and then he
plunges into those very disputes on four fronts, against the sensualist who
History Under Art (Croce II)
Theory Practice
reduces beauty to pleasure; the rationalist who mistakes it for the True
and the Good; the formalist who detects it in formal relations of pleasure;
and the idealist who sees it as the Idea manifesting itself sensibly.236
Croce is confident that Kant has already put his first two opponents
out of action. He simply decrees that sensualism is French or English
pseudo-philosophy, but in passing he makes a substantive, prophetic,
and yet muffled point against rationalism: that the Beautiful cannot be
the same as the True and the Good because among all three items, ‘the
highest idealities of the human spirit,’ the relations that obtain are of
distinction, not identity. Although a footnote tells us that this ‘triad has
become a bit ridiculous,’ a cheap target for ‘windy philosophers,’ it was
good enough to hold Croce’s attention for more than half a century,
which was long enough for the trio to evolve into a quartet.237 This is how
he described his conception in 1948, four years before he died:
‘Over the centuries, and as if by consensus of the nations, the highest val-
ues, the forms or categories of reality and the Spirit, were gathered into the
triad of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, which to me seemed integral
with a fourth term, the Useful or the Economic or the Vital or whatever else
it should be called.’238
Ultimately, among Croce’s four forms of the Spirit, two will be theoreti-
cal and two will be practical, each with its own science.
Just as ethics and economics will be his practical sciences of the Good
and the Useful, so will logic and aesthetics be his theoretical sciences of
the True and the Beautiful. But in 1893, when Croce had yet to make
his name by reducing history to art and thereby confuting the positivists,
these large systematic thoughts were still to come.239
Aesthetics was the first of the four sciences to which Croce would give
93
Part I: Introduction
full expression, and it was aesthetics that would make him famous, first
in his Aesthetic as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics of 1902,
preceded by the ‘Fundamental Theses of an Aesthetics’ of 1900, a sketch
prepared for the same hometown academy that published his ‘History
Brought Under the Concept of Art.’ Despite its protests against aesthetic
theorizing, that early essay on history and art put Croce on the path
to his mature work as a philosopher, a path that led through art and
aesthetics. Naturally, he wanted to clear the ground and eliminate com-
petitors, the easiest marks being the sensualists and rationalists, leaving
more time for the formalists and idealists.240
Croce identifies formalism with followers of Herbart who tried to
extend his moral psychology into a full-blooded aesthetics, and no doubt
it was Croce’s teacher Labriola who had taught him to respect Herbart.
Croce saw the aesthetics of Herbart’s students as a mere anomaly, how-
ever, contrived and unproductive. Herbart’s rigour and his insights into
the ‘simplest aesthetic facts’ had given him a plausible basis for formal-
ism: although the primitive elements of music − for example, individual
tones – have no aesthetic value in themselves, such values emerge in
their relations to other tones, relations that can be formalized. But when
left to his disciples, according to Croce, Herbart’s starting points turned
into blind alleys.241
After the demise of sensualism, rationalism, and formalism, Hegelian
idealism ruled the day in aesthetics, and Croce took his bearings on
aesthetic idealism from the German Aesthetics of Eduard von Hartmann
(1842−1906), best known for his Philosophy of the Unconscious, a post-
Kantian and Hegelian response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism: although
a blind dynamism drives the world and makes it wretched, Hartmann
allowed that beauty, unlike pleasure, may be a remedy. Noting that ide-
alism ‘locates the Beautiful in the expression of some thing, called the
‘sensible manifestation of the ideal’ in Hegelian terminology,’ Croce
insisted that this cannot be just the psychological experience of expression
and must be the expression of a content – of a meaning. Formalism is vacu-
ous because forms without content are empty, and idealism would also
be vacuous if – per impossibile – the idea were detached from its content.
Objects of aesthetic judgment are beautiful as tokens of a type – manifes-
tations of an idea or members of a kind – though it is always the token
that is beautiful.242
Judging an object to be ugly or beautiful assigns it to a category, so
that the Iago who is repulsive as a moral agent can also be seductive as a
dramatic character. But the ideas that Shakespeare made manifest in his
94
History Under Art (Croce II)
alluring Iagos and Calibans, according to Croce, are not natural kinds,
whose members would be natural individuals with particular contents.
‘The ideal … – the content that we want to see represented – is sim-
ply reality in general … [giving rise to] the distinction which, though
not at all abstruse, is not easy to express,’ though at this point Croce
does not try to express any distinction at all. Instead, having introduced
the notion of representation in the framework of aesthetic idealism, he
makes a crucial point about history: if art is ‘a representation of reality …
most of the reasons … [for] denying that history is a product of art disap-
pear.’243 Having located the link between history and art in representa-
tion, Croce still needs to answer the critics who would weaken that bond
by confining it to the trivial task of writing good prose, which is possible
for prose of any kind, not just the historical. History is no more an art
than any other scientific study expressed in artful words. Written well or
written badly, history is a science, the historians insist, forcing Croce to
ask what a science is.244
Science is not just data or information. Science generalizes data to
form concepts. But if history is a science, what are its distinctively his-
torical concepts? Croce excludes the concept of development because
it belongs to the philosophy of history, not to history. He then turns to
Schopenhauer’s famous distinction between coordination and subordi-
nation, echoed by Burckhardt and others. Science, whose proper object
is the type rather than the token, subordinates individuals under con-
cepts. History, whose proper object is the token, coordinates individuals
in narratives without subordinating them, which shows that history is not
science.245 Croce preferred the psychological variant of Schopenhauer’s
point proposed by Moritz Lazarus (1824−1903), who had also learned
from Herbart. Science wants its general laws to cover all the facts, valu-
ing each fact only insofar as it instantiates a law. Hence, science abstracts
general concepts from particular facts, while history condenses facts into
concrete representations, searching the facts not for laws but for coher-
ent ensembles (narratives, for example) of particulars. History wants to
tell the whole story, but that story is nothing general. ‘I agree entirely
with these observations,’ Croce declares; ‘history has only one aim: to
narrate the facts … History narrates.’246
To accept the arguments of Schopenhauer and Lazarus and still call
history a science, but a science unlike other sciences, a descriptive science,
is an evasion, Croce charges, noting that the best novels are full of such
descriptive science. But he does not want to surrender to Schopenhau-
er’s pessimism or end with other counsels of despair or folly: such as that
95
Part I: Introduction
96
History Under Art (Croce II)
97
Part I: Introduction
98
18
What Is Distinct?
(Croce III)
100
What Is Distinct? (Croce III)
covered and listed were all the concepts? If there are ten of them, why
could there not be twenty, a hundred, or a hundred thousand, if we took
a closer look?’260
Another response to the manifold of experience is the type of atom-
ism (or monism) that simply denies any multiplicity of concepts and
deploys just one – a single, simple, unified concept. But this solution
has its own fatal flaw, according to Croce. Regarding reality as organic
and unified, he agrees that what we think about reality will be prey to
scepticism unless it too has an organic unity. But if this unity is absolute
simplicity, he argues, ‘the unity obtained thereby is an empty unity.’ In
fact, the very notion of unity is incompatible with absolute simplicity:
unity is just the unification of distinct elements, something not simple
but composite.261
Unity cannot not be absolutely simple, then, because it needs what
Croce calls distinti – ‘distincts.’ This technical term, for which there is
no good English word, is at the heart of Croce’s logic, where it will be
defined (see below) by contrast with the term oppositi − ‘opposites.’262 Just
as an organism depends metaphysically on the physical and functional
operations of the organs that compose it, so too any real and organic
unity will depend metaphysically on the parts that articulate (compose)
it. The concept by which we can think about a unified reality is also a uni-
ty, and as such is itself articulated by distinctions on which the concept
depends metaphysically in order to be the concept that it is. Because
Croce recognizes that his notion of distinction and his use of ‘distincts’ is
non-standard, he warns us not to take his words in the standard way. His
point is not that the components of a unity, were there nothing unifying
them, would be logically or metaphysically distinct – in the usual sense
of ‘distinct.’ What Croce has in mind is a unity exhausted by logical and
metaphysical entailments among its components, which, while they are
‘distincts’ in his sense of the word, are not distinct from one another, or from
the unity that they constitute, in the standard sense of ‘distinct.’263
Distincts (like opposites) are plural in number, but that does not
mean that we can classify them as numerically finite or infinite. When we
speak of a numerical series as finite or infinite, according to Croce, we
do not have in mind that its members stand to one another as distincts.
In particular, they are not related by the mutual entailments that unify
distincts. Concepts that are distincts constitute a unity or a whole just
because they are not distinct in the standard way. To regard concepts
both as distincts and as numerically finite or infinite would be a category-
mistake about relations. Relations among distinct concepts belong to a
101
Part I: Introduction
102
What Is Distinct? (Croce III)
103
Part I: Introduction
104
What Is Distinct? (Croce III)
tinct concepts; and (iii) its individual relations to other distinct concepts.
Thinking is just making concepts explicit in this way. But for purely heu-
ristic purposes, says Croce, we can capture the notion of thinking by
appealing to a law that he calls the ‘principle of identity and contradiction,’
which is that ‘A is A (unity) and A is not B (distinction).’275 Since Croce
wants this law (Lc) to capture his theory of unity in distinction, we should
read its central connective (‘and’) not as a conjunction but as a logi-
cal conditional. ‘A is not B’ is a necessary condition of ‘A is A’ in that
A’s identity with A requires A and B to be distinct in Croce’s sense of
‘distinct.’ But Croce warns that his law is just heuristic; it does not really
govern thinking. At best, it helps us find a description of thinking.
Croce contrasts his own law of identity and contradiction (Lc), which
is fine as far as it goes, with a different law (Ld) that expresses the doc-
trine of opposition in unity that he rejects. One might think that Croce’s
law (Lc), ‘A is A entails that A is not B,’ is equivalent to Lo, ‘A is A alone
and definitely not not-A, its opposite, as well.’ Yet, Croce insists, it is not
just that the two laws are not equivalent: Lo is actually ‘a perversion of
the principle of identity and contradiction.’276 Resisting that perver-
sion, some thinkers – Croce is thinking of Hegel – have proposed their
own dialectical principle (Ld): ‘A is at the same time not-A.’ While Croce
agrees that Lo must be resisted, resistance by way of Ld, by the dialectical
claim that everything is contradicted in itself, only obscures the theory
of unity in distinction and nullifies the key doctrine that opposites of dis-
tinct concepts are not themselves distinct. Because the unity of distincts
is holistic, the infinity of relations among distincts is a closed system of
mutual logical and metaphysical entailments. By contrast, if we adopt Ld,
‘the eternal law of opposition,’ we are committed to Hegel’s ‘bad infin-
ity,’ an open infinite series: ‘it would be necessary for the thinking that
negates the intuition to be negated in turn, and for the negation to be
negated again and so on to infinity.’277
Finally, although the dialectical principle (Ld) is more destructive of
Croce’s aims than the principle of identity and contradiction (Lc), he
regards even the latter as a mere device for expressing an activity – think-
ing – whose nature just cannot be adequately expressed by principles.
Thinking is not governed by rules or laws; it does not represent truths or
facts; it is not representation. Rather, thinking is making truths explicit by
conceiving of them in their singularity, universality, and particularity.278
105
19
What Is Living?
(Croce IV)
While taking his Logic through several drafts, Croce was also doing the
work that led to his most memorable statement about philosophy, What
Is Living and What Is Dead in Hegel’s Philosophy? Published in 1907 (the
preface is dated March 1906), it was the first of many books by Croce
to be produced by Giovanni Laterza, head of the new, and soon to be
distinguished, publishing house that still bears his name. Laterza had
just taken over the new journal, La Critica, that Croce launched with
Giovanni Gentile in 1903. The initial plan for this enormously produc-
tive partnership was for Croce to handle the history of modern Italian
literature, leaving the philosophy of that era to Gentile.279
Croce’s early friendship with Gentile was shaped in part by the deep
interest in Marxism that they shared, starting in the mid-1890s when
Gentile was doing research not only on Rosmini, Gioberti, and other
Italian philosophers but also on historical materialism, a topic much
studied by Labriola. In 1895 Croce had published Labriola’s In Memory
of the Communist Manifesto at his own expense, while more and more of
his reading was about economics and Marx. Another journal on which
he collaborated during these years was Devenir social, also begun in 1895
by Georges Sorel, the French syndicalist. Although Croce, as a relative
of Spaventa, had a Hegelian in his family tree, this new curiosity about
Marx made Hegel even more important. In fact, Croce’s early encounter
with Hegel soon turned into an immense project of translation, working
with Gentile to put Hegel’s Encyclopedia into Italian.280
It was Hegel’s metaphysical logic, however, rather than his aesthetics,
ethics, or politics that most interested Croce at the turn of the century.
His 1907 critique of Hegel grew out of his own Outlines of Logic, first
presented to the Accademia Pontaniana in 1904 and published the next
What Is Living? (Croce IV)
year. Since the finished Logic as Science of the Pure Concept was to become
the second part of the Philosophy as Science of the Spirit – the three other
parts being the Aesthetics, the Philosophy of Practice, and the Theory and His-
tory of Historiography – Croce’s work on the Hegel essay of 1907 came at a
crucial moment in his long intellectual voyage.281 After he had finished
his huge job of translating, Croce described an irresistible consequence
of the experience, his ‘desire to put into writing the critical-philosophi-
cal introduction to Hegel’s work that has taken shape in my mind – my
views on the merits and demerits of Hegel’s philosophy.’ He hoped that
‘the translation of the Encyclopedia, along with these critical inquiries of
mine, might help reawaken in Italy the study of a philosophical giant like
Hegel.’ But the giant was not just asleep: according to Croce, only part
of Hegel’s philosophy was alive; another part he pronounced dead.282
The living part of Hegel’s philosophy, as Croce saw it, sprang from
a great insight: that philosophy must have a method all its own, apart
from the methods of the other disciplines – art, science, history, and eth-
ics – to which it contributes a distinctively philosophical understanding.
Hegel’s insight was that philosophy uses a special form of thought: the
concept.283 Accordingly, the language that Croce himself uses to describe
the thinking that is distinctively philosophical is peculiarly Hegelian and
technical. In normal anglophone usage, a concept is what a term, espe-
cially a predicate, refers to; it is what we understand by such a term. Hav-
ing a concept enables us to do certain things, like making judgments, or
picking out what a term applies to. Kant, who was an architect of this view
of concepts, had described them as universals and as representations of
what several objects have in common.
One sign of the distance between those notions and Hegel’s is that he
does not put any clear boundary between concepts, on the one hand,
and the ‘I’ and objects on the other. Moreover, Hegel sometimes speaks
of the Concept as if it were an immanent God, suggesting that everything
is just the realization of a divine concept of all that there is and can be.
But Hegel’s concepts are neither the objects that come under concepts
nor the ideas that unite concepts with objects. Hegelian concepts con-
stitute objects; they do not represent objects; nor do they indicate some-
thing that some objects have in common. They may be, but need not
be universal. Croce, a severe critic of Hegel as well as a disciple, comes
closest to him in treating concepts as systematically interdependent, in
an extravagant version of what Sellars called a ‘conceptual framework’
and Davidson called a ‘conceptual scheme.’284 According to Croce, it is
distinctive of philosophical thinking to proceed by concepts rather than by
107
Part I: Introduction
108
What Is Living? (Croce IV)
good, being, and so on rule out – or negate – false, evil, nothing, and
so on.288 The metaphor of logical space, and recalling that the concept
is something logical, may help: a distinct concept like true just is its
location in such a space of entailments unified by all the other distinct
concepts, like good and being. What makes a concept the concept that
it is are the entailments entered into with all the other distinct concepts
that form a unity with it. Logical space is a map of all the entailments in
such a unity. But a unity that includes true cannot include any concept
negated by true. Instead of distinct concepts embedded in an organic
unity, such oppositions of negation generate dualisms: as Croce puts it,
‘two universals everywhere, one confronting the other, one threaten-
ing the other.’ Opposites are a problem because, wrongly handled, they
will undermine a unified, coherent, and systematic understanding of
reality.289
According to Croce, familiar philosophical mistakes arise as proposals
for solving the problem of opposites. Proposals of one type – Croce lists
sensism, empiricism, materialism, and mechanism – deny the existence
of one side of each opposed pair. In contemporary terms, eliminative
materialism would be such an approach. A different possibility is to let
both members of a grand ontological pair exist in complete contrast to
one another. There have been many such dualisms, like the Cartesian
version famously described by Gilbert Ryle as reifying the mental con-
trastively as just like the physical – lawlike, causally efficacious, structured,
and so on – in all ways except for being physical.290 Croce views all such
strategies as unstable. While declaring the mental to be mythical, for
example, materialism actually reintroduces the mental part of dualism
by insisting upon the distinction between the illusory and the real. By
declaring the mental and the physical to be two incomplete yet incom-
patible presentations or explanations of a single reality, dualism likewise
reintroduces monism.291
Hegel’s solution to the problem of opposites is the dialectic, in which
unity and opposition are not mutually exclusive and each is retained.
In the dialectic, as interpreted by Croce, opposites stay opposed to one
another, and yet opposites taken together are not opposed to the unity
that depends upon them for its coming-to-be. Resolved by the dialectic,
the problem of opposites no longer threatens the philosophical concept.
The concrete and universal unity of the philosophical concept is safe
because the dialectic comprehends reality both as united and as divided,
all at once, and because the concept depends upon the persistence of
oppositions for its unity.292
109
Part I: Introduction
110
What Is Living? (Croce IV)
111
20
What Is Dead?
(Croce V)
Croce thinks that Hegel was right to locate the synthesis of opposites in
the philosophical concept but wrong not to see that the concept also
requires the unity of distincts. The concept is more than the synthesis
of opposites; it is also those mutually interdependent domains which,
just because they are distinct, cannot oppose one another. Logic, ethics,
aesthetics, and history, for example, are distinct domains whose relations
cannot be captured empirically by classification or dialectically by oppo-
sition. It makes no sense to think of them as fitting together into a single
classificatory scheme like that of family, genus, and species. Nor does it
make sense to treat any of them as the opposite of another, logically or
metaphysically: logic is not the opposite of ethics; aesthetics is not the
opposite of history.301
Croce diagnoses Hegel’s confusion about distincts as what anglophone
philosophers since Ryle have called a ‘category mistake.’ To think of a
piece of art as evil, an intellectual achievement as useful, or a properly
functioning object as beautiful is like thinking of the university as an
additional building on campus, team-spirit as an another player on the
team, or the Average Tax Payer as a fellow-citizen. But it is also a category
mistake to think of a work of art as the opposite of evil, an intellectual
achievement as the opposite of useful, or a broken machine as the oppo-
site of beautiful. Because knowledge, morality, beauty, and utility belong
to distinct domains – ‘categories’ in Ryle’s language – judging any of
them by criteria appropriate to another is a mistake in logic.302
The generalizing method of the natural sciences, which classify indi-
viduals into species and other types and sub-types, creates distortion if it
is used to universalize, which is the philosophical task of the concept. In
the case of opposites, Croce concedes, Hegel’s dialectic eliminates the
What Is Dead? (Croce V)
113
Part I: Introduction
Thus, there is natural soul (thesis), sensitive soul (antithesis) and real soul
(synthesis) in his anthropology; theoretical spirit (thesis), practical spirit
(antithesis) and free spirit (synthesis) in his psychology, and also intuition
(thesis), representation (antithesis) and ethics (synthesis); or likewise, in
this last area, family (thesis), civil society (antithesis) and state (synthe-
sis); in the sphere of absolute Spirit, art (thesis), religion (antithesis) and
philosophy (synthesis) … And so on … This is the first case of that abuse
of the triadic form in Hegel’s system that has so greatly offended and still
offends … For who will ever be persuaded that religion is the non-being of
art and that art and religion are two abstractions that possess truth only in
philosophy, the synthesis of both?307
114
What Is Dead? (Croce V)
Each philosophical sect in turn isolated its own abstract moment and
then committed the besetting philosophical sin of that moment. Like-
wise, by perversely turning opposed concepts into distincts, the Hegelian
dialectic treats abstract pseudo-concepts – philosophical mistakes – as if
they were concrete concepts in a unity of distinct, yet interdependent
and therefore genuine philosophical concepts.308
Second, distincts come to be treated as opposites ought to be treated,
as abstractions that when taken in isolation are engines of philosophical
error. Applying the dialectic to distincts mistreats autonomous domains
– such as aesthetics, history, and ethics – as abstract, partial, and provi-
sional in relation to the philosophical concept. Accordingly, Hegel treats
them as imperfect forms of philosophy – in effect, as philosophical mis-
takes. One case, according to Croce, is Hegel’s view of art as a failed
attempt to grasp the Absolute: art’s purchase on that sublime item seems
sordid and incomplete because its apprehension is merely and necessar-
ily sensible; once philosophy has grasped the Absolute in the purity of its
thinking, art as a distinct domain is reduced to a philosophical mistake,
making philosophy the true art.309
History’s fate is similar by Hegel’s account – as Croce understands
Hegel. Philosophical thinking produces historical knowledge, when, for
example, we better understand Dante’s having written the Divine Comedy
(a fact of history) by deploying the (philosophical) concepts of poetry
and artistic creation. Conversely, historical knowing produces philosoph-
ical thought when, for example, we move from historical accounts of the
past to the theorizing that makes those accounts intelligible. Although
both these transactions occur all the time and do no harm, Hegel’s mis-
conceived philosophy of history subordinates history to philosophy and
thereby violates the autonomy of both history and philosophy as distinct
domains. History becomes just another philosophical mistake, a mere
pseudo-philosophy that annihilates history.310
The authentically distinct domains of science and mathematics go
the same ruinous way in Hegel’s system, becoming no more than flawed
attempts at philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy of nature is as unjust to phi-
losophy and to nature as his philosophy of history is unfair to history. By
viewing the empirical sciences in the warped mirror of his logic, Croce
writes, ‘Hegel completely rejected them and absorbed them into phi-
losophy, which thus took on all their rights and all their duties.’311
As each distinct domain is absorbed into the misbegotten philosophy
that treats it dialectically, the erroneous scope of that philosophy grows
ever wider. Having misappropriated the sciences, philosophy acquires
115
Part I: Introduction
‘But no caricature could equal what the author himself did unconsciously
when he tried to think of Africa, Asia and Europe or the hand, nose and ear
or family patrimony, paternal power and testament in the same rhythm of
thought that he used for being, nothing and becoming.’313
to preserve the living part of the philosophy, meaning the new concept of
the concept, the concrete universal, along with the dialectic of opposites
and the theory of levels of reality;
to reject, on the basis of that new concept and its development, all panlogi-
cism and any speculative construction of the individual and empirical, of
history and nature;
to recognize the autonomy of the various forms of the Spirit, even in their
necessary connection and unity;
and finally, to reduce all philosophy to a pure philosophy of the Spirit (or a
metaphysical logic, if one preferred to give it that name).315
116
What Is Dead? (Croce V)
The ‘pure philosophy of the Spirit’ that Croce sought would have left
natural science beyond the reach of philosophical discourse. Insofar
as idealism was a corrective for positivism, this antagonism to natural
science spoke to the last moments of the old century, when an enfee-
bled positivism had invited the proto-Fascist activism, pragmatism, and
irrationalism of young iconoclasts like Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe
Prezzolini. At first Croce himself saw their cultural journalism in the
fashionable pages of La Voce and Leonardo as a Florentine accessory to his
own aims in La Critica, whose accent was southern and Neapolitan. But
the real prophets of the dawning century would be Planck and Einstein,
not Peirce or Bergson, and Croce was all but deaf to those voices of a new
and powerful world view.316
Led by Ernst Cassirer, the neo-Kantian heirs of transcendental ideal-
ism kept themselves at the centre of debate about the new science until
Hitler shut down the discussion in the 1930s. Italian idealism, as Croce
and Gentile expressed it, let most of those conversations pass by. Of the
two, the professorial Gentile was the less fastidious on this point. He did
not share Croce’s aesthetic disdain for the unlovely speech of scientists.
More important, his own new philosophy was to be an immanent ideal-
ism which, more or less like Spinoza with his Deus sive Natura, aimed to
naturalize the divine while divinizing nature.317
117
21
Materialism
(Gentile I)
Croce’s superb essay on Hegel is his clearest public statement of the phil-
osophical issue that did most to put him at odds with Giovanni Gentile:
his theory of distinction and opposition. Much more than philosophy,
of course, was involved in their famous controversy, which took decades
to ripen and grew out of a relationship of patronage, partnership, and
friendship. Croce, the older of the two, had made his name as a public
intellectual while Gentile was still just another university student, and
Croce was one of the first to spot Gentile’s stunning talent.318
Gentile was born in 1875 – nine years after Croce – in Castelvetrano,
in a middle- class Sicilian family. He started school in 1881 and would
later describe his early education as positivist in spirit. He won admission
in 1893 to the Scuola Normale and went north to Pisa, where he studied
Italian literature with Alessandro d’Ancona, history with Amedeo Crivel-
luci, and philosophy with Donato Jaja. He was closest to Jaja, his per-
sonal link to Fiorentino, Spaventa, and, ultimately, Hegel. But erudition
was as prominent in his education as philosophy, and many ideologies
were also on offer: positivism, pragmatism, secularism, anticlericalism,
socialism, liberalism, and, above all, the nationalism of a new nation.
The thesis that he started in 1894 – a study of Rosmini and Gioberti – is
a chapter in the longer story that would become the grand narrative of
modern Italian philosophy. Another of his lifelong interests, education
and pedagogy, is visible in his earliest publications at Pisa, which awarded
him its degree in 1897.319
At that time, Villari was still teaching in Florence at the Institute for
Advanced Studies, where Gentile went next to prepare his thesis for
publication and extend his education. He taught a course on historical
materialism and studied with Felice Tocco, an eminent Neo-Kantian, a
Materialism (Gentile I)
student of Spaventa, and the editor of the Latin Bruno. Gentile finished
his thesis with Tocco in 1898: this account of Italian philosophy, From
Genovesi to Galluppi, provides the background to his study of Rosmini and
Gioberti. With his formal education complete, he returned to Sicily, but
not before meeting the person who would take Jaja’s place at the cen-
tre of his intellectual life: Benedetto Croce. The two young intellectuals
began to correspond in 1896 and met a year later in Naples to discuss
their mutual interest in history, art, and Labriola’s Marxism.320
Gentile’s political instincts in his student years were, roughly speaking,
the ideals of the Historical Right (Destra storica) – the generation that
came to power in 1860 – blended with a cultural populism, and such atti-
tudes were unfriendly to socialism and Marxism. Croce too was a critic
of socialist theory by the time he met Gentile: both doubted (though in
different ways) Labriola’s claim that historical materialism is a coherent
philosophy. Gentile joined the public debate on this topic in 1898 with
a ‘Critique of Historical Materialism,’ which had also been his secondary
thesis at the Normale.321
Labriola, Gentile, and Croce were all anti-positivist, but the concep-
tion of history that the younger thinkers shared was broader and deeper
than Labriola’s committed Marxism. Gentile charged that Marx misun-
derstood Hegel: Marx accused Hegel of detaching ideas from reality,
when, in fact, Hegel had insisted on the strongest possible union of the
ideal with the real. Gentile also disagreed with Croce, who regarded
socialism as a practical possibility even though its theoretical basis was
flawed – even though it was no historical necessity in the Hegelian sense.
In that case, Gentile objected, the socialism that is not necessary is also
not possible. In 1899 he combined his essay on historical materialism
with a companion piece on ‘The Philosophy of Praxis,’ publishing them
together as The Philosophy of Marx and dedicating the book to Croce.322
Gentile’s account of praxis starts with the writings of 1845 in which
Marx and Engels sketched their critique of the Hegelian Left, especially
Ludwig Feuerbach’s account of religion. In this framework, Gentile asks
whether Marx’s materialism qualifies as a genuine philosophy. While
acknowledging Labriola’s authority on such questions, he wants to get
back to Marx himself as the author of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ and
thus as the critic of a ‘degenerate Hegelianism of the Left.’ He sees Feuer-
bach as having denied the harmony that Hegel had posited between phi-
losophy and religion, as finding them opposed in the way that thought
is opposed to feeling or imagination. Philosophy seeks to understand;
religion aims to satisfy needs, and those needs are essentially physical
119
Part I: Introduction
‘if what can be known is one’s own work … the natural world must be
entrusted to the knowledge possessed by God, who is its only maker. But
the historical world, a product of human activity, is the object of which
humans can gain knowledge because they have made it.’ For Vico, however,
this human activity is an activity of the human mind.
History for Vico is about artifacts of human minds, whereas for Marx it is
about the needs of embodied humans in society. Marx wants to replace
Vico’s mental praxis with a material praxis.325
Labriola confirms Vico’s insight: ‘we understand well only what we
ourselves are capable of producing – by thinking, working, trying and
trying again, always in virtue of powers that are our own in the social
context.’ But Gentile observes that ‘this making or re-making is not
always … material … more often … it is simply making … by thinking,’
as reflected, for example, in Friedrich Froebel’s pedagogy of learning by
doing, which is idealist rather than materialist. Froebel was inspired by
Fichte’s effort ‘to derive all our science from the primitive making of the
I,’ but Marx’s goal was to keep praxis embedded in bodily agency and
120
Materialism (Gentile I)
then ‘to move this principle over from abstract idealism into concrete
materialism.’326
Marx also objected to the subject/object relation as understood in
the empiricist philosophies of his day, wherein the object of sensation or
intuition is not made but given. If, per impossibile, subject and object were
uncorrelated, if the subject did not make the object, the two would be
isolated, abstract, and dead. But in fact – according to Marx as explicated
by Gentile – not only is the object made by the subject but also without
the object there is no subject, and the subject itself makes itself by mak-
ing the object.
Here, in one of Gentile’s earliest works, we find other roots as well, those
of his later philosophy of actual idealism, with its intense – not to say
obsessive – focus on thinking as unmediated activity.327
As Gentile speaks on Marx’s behalf, what he means by the false
‘abstract position of materialism’ is a kind of empiricism, the illusion of
a mental tabula rasa passively written on by its objects. Although he finds
such a relation between a pure subject and pure objects unintelligible,
he allows that the desire for objective knowledge – for knowledge unsul-
lied by anything subjective – suggests that the empiricist delusion is not
altogether unhealthy. But Marx’s response was to derive a contrary and
far healthier subjectivity from his concept of praxis. His reality is not
a remote array of windowless objects that somehow pass through the
shutters of the mind: ‘reality is a subjective product of mankind, but a
product of sensory activity … not of thinking, as Hegel and other ideal-
ists believed.’328
Nonetheless, it was Hegel’s virtue to have understood our knowledge
of reality as ‘a continuous producing, a making that never stops, a prax-
is that originates,’ leaving it to Marx to ‘transfer this principle … from
an abstract, idealist notion of the Spirit to real, concrete, sensory human
activity.’ Although Feuerbach’s analysis of religion in The Essence of Christi-
anity had inspired Marx, what the great revolutionary found in that book
was inconsistency: religious praxis turns up only in the ‘filthy Jewish forms’
of Christianity, while theory and theology – the materially grounded ideol-
ogy of Christian faith, in Marx’s view – remain entirely idealized.329
121
Part I: Introduction
When the making is united with the knowing, the objects that belong to
knowing are also the objects of making, and vice-versa, so that finally there
is just a single class of objects related to praxis (which is making and know-
ing together) and produced just by it. And if materialism is good enough
to explain objects that are made, it must also be good enough to explain
objects that are known … Instead, Feuerbach explains his doctrinal con-
structions by the abstract activity of the Spirit – for him, the real human
activity – and so he leaps back into the idealism that he wished so firmly to
deny.330
122
Materialism (Gentile I)
‘Praxis means a relation between subject and object – thus neither the indi-
vidual subject nor the individual object as such and simpliciter, but the one
123
Part I: Introduction
as necessarily related to the other, and vice versa: thus, to put it another way,
the identity of opposites. Not teachers on one side … and on the other side
those who are taught, but teachers who are taught and, as teachers, those
who are taught.’336
The essential mutuality of praxis also required Marx to reject what Gen-
tile calls ‘naturalism,’ including any of the purely biological accounts of
mankind that proliferated in the century of Darwin. The human animal
is unlike the others in a number of ways – in being by nature political,
for example, and thus developing along paths outside the borders of bio-
logical evolution. Like Darwin’s theory of biological life, however, Marx’s
theory of human praxis needs to be dynamic – a materialist theory of
change. In the human domain, where such things as politics are on the
table, a materialist theory of change will be a historical materialism. ‘But
here,’ Gentile claims,
Gentile’s view is that a consistent materialism can never account for the
dynamic character of reality, especially as manifest in human history,
because the matter of materialism can only be static: ‘matter as such is
always self-identical: it never changes.’338
The most persuasive materialism is the historical kind that Marx pro-
moted, decreeing that ‘history is the only true mistress of all us humans
and that we are as history lives us.’ But in the end all materialism – and
any allied account of praxis – is defective, according to Gentile, and any
attempt to solve its problems will end in ‘a more or less Platonic dualism,
not a materialist monism.’ At this early stage of his career, before he had
developed a more robust notion of immanence – one that might sustain
a naturalist monism that is not physicalist – Gentile still looked back to
Plato for the answer that Marx could not find, the answer to the most
persistent question about matter:
‘What is the source of the energy that makes it come to be incessantly? One
might say there is a force immanent in it, but this force that transforms mat-
124
Materialism (Gentile I)
‘Hegel’s stunning critique of the abstract intellect. Yes to matter, then, but
matter along with praxis (the subjective object). Yes to matter, but matter
in continuous becoming … Yes to materialism, but historical materialism.
Except that the irony of logic answered the best intentions of his realism
with a gross contradiction as the result.’
So Marx failed the test that opens Gentile’s essay. At best, his is a flawed
philosophy, ‘an eclecticism with contradictory ingredients.’340
125
22
Idealism
(Gentile II)
127
Part I: Introduction
ence were scandalized, but resistance was futile. Others took up the cry,
complaining that materialism is naïve, that naturalism gives no account
of mind, that experimentalism has few uses, and that positivism erodes
morality. In response, philosophers in England and America have begun
‘a sort of neo-Hegelianism.’347 ‘What people are looking for and what
they want,’ Gentile explains,
‘is unity, the animating idea of nature and history. They are looking for
the fullness of life and knowledge … They want to put God back into the
deserted and desolate temple … Eyes turn naturally to the past, to times
when the present torment was not felt, and … [to claims] that fundamental
problems of thinking are neutral for reason, turning away from it toward
what is called “feeling” or the “inspiration of feeling” – which is then sup-
posed to be religion’s theoretical content. But this is a critical moment that
contains the seed of its own destruction.’348
‘Our idealism never denies the rights of the Spirit asserted by Neo-Kantian-
ism and by … mysticism, though when they offer an agnostic justification of
those rights, our idealism rejects this as irrational. It also departs from natu-
ralism by asserting the reality of ideas. But it differs from Neo-Kantianism
and mysticism by aiming to clarify the intrinsic and unbreakable connec-
tion between ideas and nature…. Since both nature and Spirit derive from
the real, nature gains the same intelligibility and transparency that belongs
to the Spirit.’349
128
Idealism (Gentile II)
Those who wish to escape the trap of materialist naturalism need a way
out, but
‘either [this is] idealist monism, which solves the problem by denying its
existence, or else dualism, which acknowledges the problem but declares
itself powerless to solve it. In neither case is there any real understanding of
idealism … Real idealism is missing in both cases,’
It will not be enough for the young idealists whom Gentile wants to edu-
cate simply to pledge allegiance to the Ideal; they must also
‘account for the value of the ideas that they use to understand reality …
such idealists establish the point where contraries coincide, and the unity
thereby established is not … of nature alone nor … of the Spirit alone but
the complete unity of the duality of nature and the Spirit. Spinoza’s sub-
stance … is the expression of this basic problem of philosophy. But it is the
expression, not the solution.’354
129
Part I: Introduction
130
23
Actualism
(Gentile III)
We are told that when a subject thinks some thought, P, she is indefeasi-
bly convinced that P is true. To put it another way, no subject can think a
thought of whose truth she is not entirely convinced:
132
Actualism (Gentile III)
holds for the actual concrete thought that is one’s own. As Gentile puts
133
Part I: Introduction
it, ‘what we think actually, if we think it, we think as truth.’ Error, on the
other hand, has no rights: error is what I cannot think; it may be what I
once thought, or what someone else thought or thinks, but I simply can-
not think it.365
In Gentile’s system, error just is abstract thought, always opposed to
actual concrete thinking. Though I may make a thought that I regard as
erroneous the object of my thinking, I cannot actually think it. In order to
think the thought rather than just think about it, I must negate its abstract
objectivity, and to do that I must affirm the thought, which requires that
I regard the thought as unshakably true – in no way an error. Finally, if
errors are thoughts that I can no longer think, or just cannot think, then
truths are thoughts that I must think, thoughts that I cannot not think.
Just as thinking that P is a sufficient condition for thinking that P is true,
thinking that P is true is also necessary for thinking that P. When I make
a thought my own concrete and absolutely actual thinking, I both affirm
it in its concrete objectivity and negate it in its abstract objectivity. And
when I become aware that a thought is mistaken, I can no longer think
it: as my own thinking it is negated. Once an error is negated in this way,
my own thinking is again affirmed as my own, actual and concrete. Gen-
tile calls this process the ‘dialectic … thinking as activity that posits itself
by negating itself,’ and he argues that it should replace the principles of
identity, non-contradiction, and sufficient reason.366
When I become aware of an error, I do so by thinking about some
thought that is no longer my own; I am thinking about the mistaken
thought, not thinking it. But when I negate that thought, I affirm my
own thinking. Hence, the applicable principle of thought is dialectical,
A = ¬A,
134
Actualism (Gentile III)
Here is how Gentile might describe the same events, where the ‘thinks-
true’ relation captures believing some proposition, and the ‘thinks-
about’ relation captures merely entertaining it:
S thinks-true P at t1;
S thinks-true Q at t2;
S’s thinking-true Q at t2 is equivalent to its not being the case that S thinks-
true P at t2, though S may think-about P at t2.
A = ¬A,
A=A
and
A ∨ ¬A,
135
Part I: Introduction
which are abstractions that cannot be rules of thought. Such false princi-
ples abstract away from the unity of the actual, depicting the world as con-
sisting of particulars that oppose one another and rule one another out,
thus giving birth to life’s conflicts – ‘between man and nature, life and
death, idea and reality, pleasure and pain, science and mystery, good and
evil and so on.’ If these principles are applied to thinking itself, philoso-
phers may be tempted to regard the associated oppositions as conceptual
or metaphysical, which may produce such results as Kant’s antinomies.369
Since the ‘logic of identity,’ to use Gentile’s phrase, requires opposites
to exclude one another, we must choose either being or non-being and
must therefore profess either dualism or monism, both of them leading
to unsolvable antinomies. The logic of dialectic, by contrast, tells us that
‘truth is not of the being that is but of the being that annuls itself and, by
annulling itself, really is’: the dialectical principle expresses the activity
of actual thinking as thought that posits itself by negating itself. Hence,
when we see how affirming thought as concrete negates it as abstract,
we understand how the dialectical affirmation of any opposite, which, in
the logic of identity, excludes a corresponding opposite, is, dialectically,
just the negation of that other opposite, and vice versa. Accordingly, to
affirm happiness, goodness, and understanding in actual concrete think-
ing is to negate pain, evil, and error.370
Such negations are made possible by transforming the thinking of
pain, evil, error, and so on into thoughts – thoughts that are no longer
one’s own, thoughts which, qua thoughts, are not thinking and thus are
not real. In Gentile’s system, knowing a truth is getting rid of an error;
doing actual good is moving beyond evil; and pleasure is leaving pain
behind. Once pain, evil, and error have become mere thoughts, they
are no longer one’s own thinking and have ceased to be real. They are
the dead past that we can no longer think because the past is not actual,
because it is not
136
Actualism (Gentile III)
War Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Strength.’
But its author surely had some responsibility for what others in Fascist
Italy may have extracted from his rhapsodies on actualism.372
Absolutely actual concrete thinking just is thinking and must neces-
sarily be thinking – a necessity, Gentile argues, that also makes actual
thinking universal. He is careful to distinguish this universal character of
thinking from the universals that are mere elements of abstract thought,
and, as such, are not actual. Obviously, actual thinking affirms itself as
universal not by thinking about particulars, even particular thoughts, but
by thinking thoughts simpliciter. And the subject that actually thinks can-
not be the empirical I, the I formed abstractly as against the not-I, against
the other things and other subjects that must be thought about just in
order to conceive of an empirical I. That I negates itself in opposition to
the not-I that Gentile calls Nature. By contrast, the absolute I, the One I
or the Spirit, negates itself as thinking about either the empirical self or
the manifold instances of the not-I against which the empirical I negates
itself. Because the absolute I is not the empirical I – indeed, because it
negates itself as thinking about the empirical I – true idealism as Gentile
conceives it cannot be charged with solipsism: it is only the empirical I –
the one that is not actual because it is abstract – that is abstractable from
others and thus conceivable as a singular I.
The empirical I is also part of Gentile’s Nature, the abstract reality that
is thinking in abstract rather than concrete objectivity. This Nature is
thought, but under principles of individuation that destroy the unity of
actual concrete thinking. Because Nature is what is governed by the prin-
ciples of identity and contradiction, these cannot be rules of thinking,
which Nature negates. Being governed by such principles makes Nature
manifold and not a unity, and since Nature is subject to causal laws, we
think about the natural manifold deterministically, as a mechanism.
Actual concrete thinking, on the other hand, is free. The only possible
limit on thinking is Nature itself, but since Nature is a mere abstraction,
its natural determinism is just an accident of an abstraction. By contrast,
thinking itself is necessary and necessarily free – never bound by the
137
Part I: Introduction
138
Actualism (Gentile III)
139
Part I: Introduction
140
Actualism (Gentile III)
141
24
Manifestos
(Croce and Gentile)
In 1914 the idealist Gentile succeeded the idealist Jaja at the Faculty of
Letters in Pisa. Gentile was still doing the work that produced his major
statements on actualism, and four years later he was called to a chair in
Rome when Barzellotti died. There he made two crucial decisions: first,
to start his own journal as the official organ of actualism – and competi-
tion for Critica – the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana; second, to accept
appointment as the Director of Public Education for the Commune of
Rome. During this period he wrote extensively on the most contentious
issue in Italian politics: the recent war and its effects on Italy. Unsurpris-
ingly, he and Croce often disagreed about the war, as by then they disa-
greed about many things.382
Croce himself had long been involved in politics and government,
sometimes in the same debates on education that helped make Gen-
tile famous, though increasingly not on Gentile’s side. Croce’s political
experience, and his great distinction as a voice of high culture, led to his
appointment as Minister of Public Instruction in 1920 in the last Giolitti
government. He made proposals for national educational reform, only
to resign in 1921 when Giolitti lost his majority.383 Shortly afterward,
when Mussolini came to power in 1922, Gentile had remarkable success
in the same office that Croce vacated. He was Minister of Public Instruc-
tion under Mussolini for nearly two years, and the result was the famous
‘Gentile Reform’ whose effects are still felt in Italy today. Although he
held this post only for a short time, other top appointments followed:
the national Senate, the Fascist Grand Council, the presidency of the
Fascist Institute of Culture, commissions on constitutional reform, the
academic directorship of the Enciclopedia Italiana, the directorship of the
Scuola Normale, and so on. Until the early 30s, Gentile was intensely
Manifestos (Croce and Gentile)
and effectively involved in party and governmental affairs, and even later
he never stopped overseeing cultural projects. As late as 1943, the year
before his assassination, he accepted the presidency of the Italian Acad-
emy when Mussolini offered it.384
Croce’s fortunes during the same period were very different. At first
he thought of the Fascists as disorganized, ineffective, but well-meaning
patriots. While declining any appointment by the regime and declaring
himself a liberal, he defended Gentile’s educational reform. Even after
a notorious political murder in 1924, he voted for Mussolini in the Sen-
ate. His full public breach with the Fascists – and with Gentile – came in
1925, as author of the ‘Reply by Italian Authors, Professors and Journal-
ists,’ written in response to the ‘Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals’
published on 21 April of that year – the birthday of the city of Rome,
capital of Mussolini’s new Empire.385
Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ was the product of a Conference for Fascist
Culture held in Bologna a few weeks earlier to show that the Party was
not just a club for ignorant criminals: a few hundred pliable intellectu-
als, journalists, and artists were assembled in Bologna to acclaim this
thesis. Then Gentile produced the keynote document, which gathered
signatures from figures as respected as Filippo Marinetti, Luigi Piran-
dello, and Gioacchino Volpe. Giovanni Amendola, the liberal editor of Il
Mondo, persuaded Croce to write a counter-manifesto, signed by Rodolfo
Mondolfo, Luigi Einaudi, Guido De Ruggiero, and other leading intel-
lectuals, which appeared on the following May Day.386
Gentile was bitter about Croce’s response for years, but the conse-
quences for Croce were very much harsher, starting with vicious attacks
in the Fascist press, intrusive police surveillance, exclusion from official
academic organizations, and suppression of his writings. In 1926, when
Croce’s house in Naples was vandalized at night, the international outcry
was loud. Amendola, whose idea it was to put out a counter-manifesto,
died as a victim of Fascist brutality in the same year; what saved Croce’s
life may have been his international fame and the worldwide support
that came with it. Despite the danger, he continued to fight the regime
in the pages of Critica, while also producing his most celebrated works of
history and thus making the case for liberalism.387
Croce’s ‘Reply’ of 1925 is also a defense of liberalism; it assails the Fas-
cist violence that Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ glorifies. Hegelians, as Bertrand
Russell remarked, ‘love a synthesis,’ so it is no surprise that Gentile starts
by giving himself a contradiction to resolve: as a ‘movement of the Italian
spirit,’ Fascism is both novel and ancient, we are told, although the rest
143
Part I: Introduction
of the document sticks mainly to current affairs. Since the Fascist Party
was a young organization with a brief but troubled record to defend,
Gentile had no choice but to focus on the present.388
Undoubtedly, the greatest cataclysm of the recent past was the First
World War, and Gentile explains Fascism as a response to mistakes made
by other parties and politicians in assessing the war’s consequences.
Because the catastrophe of the war and its aftermath was essentially
moral, not material, Italy’s leaders were wrong to see it from ‘a petty
individualist and utilitarian point of view,’ behaving as if there were some
‘tally of sacrifices’ by which to calculate the compensation due to each
single person. Corrupt and selfish individualism of this kind falsely pits
the citizen against the state.389 As a moral movement, Fascism makes
no such concessions to individualism. It has been ‘a gymnasium of self-
denial, as it campaigned for the sacrifice of the individual to an idea.’
Indeed, Fascism is a religion, and, in Gentile’s view, the religious charac-
ter of the new party explains the intransigence of its struggle against the
old liberal state, its main opponent. Unlike the heroic ideology of the
Risorgimento, the liberalism of the most recent Italian government is
agnostic, acquiescent, mechanical, and merely external. Such liberalism
is no match for a Fascism which, in the tradition of Mazzini’s Young Italy,
is a ‘party of the young’ representing ‘the faith of all Italians.’ This faith
At first, people were amazed by the new party; then they came to admire
it; finally their acclaim was unanimous. And popular support now grows
stronger and stronger, Gentile declares, because moral, social, and finan-
cial order have been restored. The lawbreaking has stopped because Fas-
cism has given the state the discipline needed to make the laws that the
people really need. This work goes on in a ‘perfect public order’ which
is the envy of foreign nations. Meanwhile, for all Italians the fatherland
of the Fascist is
… a school for the subordination of the particular and inferior to the uni-
versal and immortal. It is respect for law and discipline. It is liberty … won
144
Manifestos (Croce and Gentile)
Despite the false charges against it, however, Fascism is not reactionary,
certainly no enemy of the workers, and not even of genuine liberals. Its
real opponent is the old political machinery whose lies about democracy
and universal suffrage sold the people out to professional office-seek-
ers. Far from giving up on constitutional government, Fascism makes it
stronger. Then why the complaints about eliminating civil liberties, espe-
cially freedom of the press? There is really no question of principle here,
says the ‘Manifesto.’ One need only examine the hard facts that forced
the state to silence the seditious literature that disrupted public order,
thus depriving citizens of the ‘guarantee of a law that truly expresses
their real, organic, concrete will.’392
The duplicity of false liberals shows that word ‘liberty’ itself is ‘entirely
elastic.’ Since most ordinary Italians know this, they simply ignore the
opposition groups: the ‘Manifesto’ transmutes this political quietism
into a paradoxical endorsement of an activist politics intent on ‘driving
forward.’ As their old silent majority withers away, the democrats, radi-
cals, and Masons will go the way of all political flesh, macerated in the
jaws of the dialectic. Since they have no real ideal of their own with which
to oppose Fascism, only a lower ideal, history’s unforgiving law will liqui-
date them. Were there any principled opposition to Fascism, a genuine
opponent armed with it would be an antithesis to the party’s thesis, and
in a higher synthesis both would be overcome. As things stand in 1925,
however, ‘when one of two principles is lower and the other higher …
the first must necessarily succumb,’ and Fascism will triumph alone until
the cunning of history produces a real opposite for it.
Although Gentile’s ‘Manifesto’ lacks the clockwork rationalism of his
philosophical writing, the theory at the core of the special pleading is
dialectical and hence philosophical, obviously not meant for the ordi-
nary citizens whom the document writes off as passive. Gentile’s elitist
message was for Italian intellectuals who lived in a world of books, ideas,
and culture, but there is really not much in it to appeal to them, and a
good deal to put them off: sentimentalism, religiosity, romantic violence,
and not a little dishonesty. Even in 1925, and especially among intellec-
tuals, the nearly unanimous support for Fascism claimed by Gentile was
less than that, as he certainly understood. He also knew that the thug-
gery had not stopped and that public order was far from perfect. But did
145
Part I: Introduction
146
25
Common Sense and Good Sense
(Gramsci I)
In 1926, the year when Amendola died of his injuries and Croce’s house
was attacked, the Fascists arrested another prominent member of the
Italian legislature, Antonio Gramsci, who had been general secretary of
the Italian Communist Party (PCI) since 1924. By the time Gramsci was
‘conditionally’ released in 1934, his health was so bad that he could not
leave the hospital, where he died in 1937 at the age of 46. He was born
in Sardinia in 1891 in a middle-class family, but he had to go to work in
his teens because his father got into political trouble and ended up in
prison. After school in Sardinia and early contacts through his brother
with the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), he won a scholarship to the Uni-
versity of Torino in 1911, where he studied philosophy and linguistics
but did not finish a degree. Instead, he became a professional journal-
ist, writing for the socialist press, supporting the Russian Revolution of
1917, rising through the ranks of the PSI hierarchy in Torino and even-
tually splitting with the Socialists to help form the PCI.
When Mussolini came to power in 1922, Gramsci was in Moscow,
where he made contacts with the Soviet leadership and also met his wife,
Giulia Schucht. Giulia moved to Rome after her husband’s arrest there,
but he never saw her again after she returned to Russia in the same year.
He grew very close to her sister Tania, however, who followed Gramsci
around Italy as he was taken by his jailers from city to city, facing a sen-
tence of more than twenty years. The only concession was that he was
allowed to read, though not at first to take notes. Eventually he wrote
abundantly, the main product being the Prison Notebooks, which in the
Italian edition fill nearly 2,400 pages. After Gramsci died, Tania had the
twenty-nine notebooks sent to Moscow. Once they were published in
Italy after the Second World War, in six installments between 1948 and
1951, their influence on Italian politics and culture was immense.396
Part I: Introduction
148
Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I)
ative side his main opponents are Gentile, Croce, and Nikolai Bukharin.
In the new Soviet Union of 1921, Bukharin had published The Theory
of Historical Materialism: A People’s Manual of Sociology. Gramsci charged
that this guidebook for revolutionaries, despite its impeccable commu-
nist pedigree, gave the masses bad guidance. As he was criticizing the
Manual, Josef Stalin was on his way to power in the international com-
munist movement, so it is no surprise that Gramsci’s inclination to speak
truth to power, even on the left, later got him into trouble with his jailed
comrades: his offense was to reject their prophecy that Fascism was about
to fall in 1930 and usher in the revolutionary millennium. In and out of
jail, his disagreements with Croce and Gentile were less personal, and
also more predictable.400
Gentile and Labriola, who had both written about praxis, were disap-
pointments to Gramsci, especially as followers of Spaventa, who had not
been guilty of the ‘vulgar evolutionism’ of the two later thinkers – their
extraction of an ontogeny of culture from its phylogeny: since all of us
have ancestors who were slaves, the story goes, slavery is a stage through
which all peoples must pass. Gramsci detects political interests behind
such theorizing. A concession that had to be made in order to secure
Gentile’s educational policy, for instance, was the teaching of religion in
state primary schools. Accordingly, Gentile’s declaration that religion is
good for the people is less than high-minded, just another cynical excuse
to keep them away from real education. In broader terms, ‘the histori-
cism of Labriola and Gentile is … the historicism of lawyers who say that
the knout is not a knout when the knout is “historical’’’ – when arbitrary
violence is justified on the grounds of custom and tradition.401
Taken as a whole, Gramsci’s view of Labriola is less harsh than these
words suggest: his own ideas about praxis owed a great deal to Labriola
as a reader of Marx and Engels. But Gramsci is never impressed by Gen-
tile’s austere abstractions, where ‘wit and polished phrases substitute for
thinking’ and ambiguous language is a cover for ‘ideological opportun-
ism.’ He even prefers the shopworn syllogisms of the neo-scholastics to
‘the banal sophisms of … actual idealism,’ a system that he describes
as ‘completely contrary to common sense,’ despite Gentile’s claims to
speak straightforwardly to the man on the street. Understanding Gen-
tile’s enormous power as commissar of Fascist culture, Gramsci holds
him responsible for ‘an environment of louche culture in which all cats
are grey, religion embraces atheism, [and] immanence flirts with tran-
scendence … If Gentile’s words meant what they say … actual idealism
would have become ‘the manservant of theology.’’402
149
Part I: Introduction
150
Common Sense and Good Sense (Gramsci I)
151
Part I: Introduction
152
26
The Religion of Liberty
(Croce VI)
Croce began to study the past professionally around the time when
Gramsci was born, starting at home with research on theatre in Naples.
Eventually he made monumental contributions in many genres of his-
torical writing, mainly literary, cultural, and political history, as well as
autobiography. He also theorized about history in works on aesthetics,
historiography, and what must be called – despite Croce’s reservations
and for want of a better term – philosophy of history. The quarter-cen-
tury after the First World War, when Fascism triumphed and declined in
Italy, was the time of his greatest achievement in history and its theory,
which was where he found his voice as Italy’s liberal conscience. These
are the words of an eyewitness, Federico Chabod, speaking of the con-
tinued publication of La Critica after its editor had publicly defied the
regime in the late twenties: ‘the cultural form (meaning a journal of
philosophy, history, and literature) will mask the political content, and
in that way Croce becomes the living banner of the ideals of liberty and
antifascism. The rest is silence.’412
Croce’s most memorable reflections on the past are recorded in
Croce dedicated this History to Thomas Mann, the author by that time
of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain, and also of an
allegorical novella, Mario and the Magician, which attacks Fascism. Before
Mann left Germany in 1933, he had received Croce’s dedication – lines
taken from Dante in the passage where he and Vergil are chased by
demons on their way down to the pit of the hypocrites:
Croce had long since made his choice to resist Mussolini while preserv-
ing a position of cultural leadership in Italy. The History of Europe, espe-
cially its opening and closing chapters, is a profession of the liberal faith
for which he risked everything.
The History of Italy that preceded it by four years was even more auda-
cious, from an Italian perspective, because it confronted Mussolini on
the native ground of recent politics. In 1927, the year before Croce’s
book appeared, Gioacchino Volpe, an eminent historian who had signed
the Fascist Manifesto of 1925, published Italy on the Road, a nationalist
celebration of Italian power and progress. Although it was not Croce’s
intent to reply to Volpe, what the Italian public witnessed was a debate
in print between Liberalism and Fascism: Volpe’s book sold 10,000 cop-
ies in several printings, but Croce’s sold four times as many, frustrating
the regime’s efforts at a boycott. While Croce was working on his History
of Europe in 1931, Volpe prefaced a new edition of Italy on the Road with
hostile remarks about him. By the time Croce’s new book was ready early
in 1932, Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany was bringing Fascism onto
the international stage.415
The History of Europe begins after the collapse of another failed empire,
Napoleon’s, when some Europeans who still honoured the ideals of the
Revolution that created the Emperor also remembered its promise of
liberty, though others feared that promise and tried to stifle it. Oppo-
nents of reaction responded with lists of demands: equality before the
law and the rule of law; a written, public constitution; representative gov-
ernment; freedom of speech and association; self-determination; and,
154
The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI)
The grandeur of the modern concept was precisely in its having trans-
formed the meaning of life from the idyllic … or elegiac to the dramatic,
from hedonism … and pessimism to activity and creativity, and this turned
liberty itself into a … continual battle in which a final and defining victory
is impossible.417
Once spirituality was embodied and the body spiritualized, the only ulti-
mate meaning lay in the ever-expanding freedom at which all life aims.
Despite widespread and bitter resistance, liberals kept working towards
that goal, which had to keep changing. In political terms, this meant that
governmental and institutional gains made by liberalism could never
be permanent. ‘Liberal institutions, in the final course of their history,
155
Part I: Introduction
156
The Religion of Liberty (Croce VI)
157
Part I: Introduction
of liberty, the only condition in which human society flourishes and bears
fruit, the only reason for humans to live on earth.
Even though the October Revolution was a necessity of history, its ideo-
logical residue was a pseudo-communism that could only degenerate
and was therefore doomed to fail when exported.424
‘Those who get drunk on action for the sake of action’ worried Croce
more than the communists – a predictable view for an Italian victim of
Italian Fascism. The reflexive violence of thugs like the squadristi was ‘a
fever, and not an ideal,’ and the same verdict applies, by implication, to
the sublimated violence of actualist philosophy. If the worst were full of
passionate intensity in Mussolini’s Italy, those of them who read books
could find cover in a philosophy that put spontaneous, self-constituting
action at the core of reality.425 Croce understands the virtues of the activ-
ist and the revolutionary, who, in the ideal case, ‘always faces up to the
future.’ But he also acknowledges the strength of Catholicism, admiring
the constancy which, in its decadent state, becomes rigidity and reaction.
‘Liberty is the only ideal,’ he concludes,
that has the solidity that Catholicism once had and the flexibility that it
could not have; it is the only ideal that … stands up to criticism and …
constitutes the point where equilibrium always reasserts itself amid society’s
continuing oscillations … Hence, when we hear people asking whether lib-
erty can achieve what they call the future, we must answer that it has some-
thing better – it has eternity.426
158
27
Philosophy in Prison
(Gramsci II)
prose.’ The simple and powerful language of his brief essays on pressing
public issues is never pedantic, which makes his ideas accessible to an
enormous audience – as Galileo’s had been. Like Goethe’s style as well,
Croce’s matches his personality in its
160
Philosophy in Prison (Gramsci II)
lives the thesis and the antithesis of the historical process and insists on
“practical reasons” in the one and in the other because he sees the future in
the present … Priests are the custodians of tomorrow. At bottom, there’s a
good dose of moral cynicism in this ethical-political notion. It’s the current
form of Machiavellianism.434
Those are harsh words, and yet Gramsci never underestimates Croce:
he objects, in fact, to Tania’s remark that Croce has become isolated in
Mussolini’s Italy. On the contrary, Croce has given Gramsci reason to
hope that in the Fascist Fatherland a new ‘transformism’ is at work. What
Gramsci has in mind is not Giolitti’s dreary cycle of fatuous compromises
but a much older practice, going back to the decades of Restoration and
Revolution, when
a small leadership group managed … to absorb into its circle all the political
personnel produced by originally subversive mass movements … Indeed,
even after 1876, the process continues … Absorbing them is difficult and
burdensome, but … Croce’s energy seems to be the most powerful machine
for ‘conforming’ the new forces to the vital interests … of the group domi-
nant today.435
161
Part I: Introduction
religion … The origins of this doctrine are already there in Hegel and
Vico … the common heritage of all Italian idealist philosophy.’ Gram-
sci’s verdict, then, is that idealism made this amazingly effective thinker
less effective than he might have been.436
162
28
Still a Strange History
(Bobbio II)
Croce lived to the age of 86. By the time he died in 1952, the Fascist
regime had been gone for nearly a decade, Italy was still recovering from
another calamitous war, and Gramsci’s works had been published. Gen-
tile was assassinated in 1944, and Mussolini met the same fate in 1945.
Three years after Croce’s death, Norberto Bobbio wrote his article on the
cultural politics of idealism, more than half a century after Gentile had
declared idealism reborn. The ‘strange history of European thought,’
the autobiography of Italian idealism during that half-century, had been
a self-deception, according to Bobbio.437 What was the real story? If one’s
perspective is the canonical history of Western philosophy in the anglo-
phone world, the real story was also a strange one.
Between 1687, when Newton published his Principia, and 1781, when
Kant brought out his first Critique, great changes in Western philosophy
mirrored the larger cultural transformations of the European Enlight-
enment. The pre-eminent heroes of the philosophical Enlightenment
– Locke, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant – were British,
French, and German. The only Italian of the period who ranks with them
is Vico, but even in Italy Vico found few readers until Jules Michelet
translated the New Science into French in 1827. In Vico’s Italy and later
in the eighteenth century, there had been no philosophical Enlighten-
ment to equal events north of the Alps. Among native Italians, the most
eminent Enlightenment philosopher after Vico was Antonio Genovesi.
But when Galluppi, Rosmini, and Gioberti looked back from their own
century for philosophical motivation, they found little in Genovesi or
other Italians: the thinkers who most provoked or inspired them were
Locke, Reid, Condillac, and Kant.
Not until the very end of the nineteenth century could Gentile begin
Part I: Introduction
164
Still a Strange History (Bobbio II)
165
Part I: Introduction
166
Still a Strange History (Bobbio II)
167
Part I: Introduction
168
Still a Strange History (Bobbio II)
169
Part I: Introduction
of what Kant had started in 1781. Quite the reverse in Italy. Although
Croce, Gentile, and their acolytes quarrelled about what was alive and
what was dead in Hegel, each remained committed to a form or a version
or a derivative of Hegelian idealism – rival philosophies of the Spirit.
Both also wrote a great deal of history, while thinking deeply about its
making and its meaning, and this kept the Italian intellectual environ-
ment hospitable to Hegelian historicism, which found the English-speak-
ing world less and less welcoming.
The two foremost Italian philosophers of pre-war Italy were prolific
historians, and all their nineteenth-century predecessors had helped
write the new history of Italian philosophy that evolved in this period.
The whole post-Kantian enterprise in Italy was strikingly different from
its anglophone counterpart, especially after 1870, just in its deep regard
for the past. A related difference was Italian philosophy’s greater cul-
tural breadth, of which Croce was the prime exemplar – a thinker who
spoke with grace and authority about as many issues outside the bound-
aries of philosophy as within them. And Croce was no isolated excep-
tion: think of De Sanctis on literature, Labriola on economics; think of
Gioberti, Spaventa, and Gramsci as journalists, and Villari or Fiorentino
as historians.
Because they were expected to write professionally for large and mixed
audiences, some of these philosophers became brilliant writers: Croce
comes first again, and then Spaventa, Villari, and Fiorentino. Literary
achievement of their kind has been less common among anglophone
philosophers: few have written as well as Mill, James, or Santayana. Yet
it must be said that graceful writing and grandiloquent speaking some-
times occluded philosophy in the texts that modern Italy produced: cul-
tural imperatives and institutional habits sometimes put rhetoric ahead
of its ancient rival. Cicero was an Italian, after all, and so was Girolamo
Savonarola. Thunderous speechmaking and passionate sermonizing lay
deep in the strata of Italian cultural memory. The philosophical prolu-
sione – Fiorentino’s Pisa inaugural of 1876 is a splendid example – was
a residue of those venerable effusions of learned language, and in the
anglophone world there has been nothing quite like it.456
Near the start of Fiorentino’s speech come some lines that suggest a
conclusion:
170
Still a Strange History (Bobbio II)
most people is not an issue. But then – as with a building whose walls tum-
ble down all at once, and no stone is left upon a stone – not one principle
or doctrine in this whole mental world any longer has any value or author-
ity at all. It must be completely rebuilt, completely redone from the start,
and reconstruction begins with a preconceived dislike for anything from
the past.
In order to dislike the past enough to bother rejecting it, one should
first learn something about it: this is a minimal motivation for explor-
ing an unfamiliar region of philosophy’s history. A better reason lies in
the ‘aggregate of traditions, principles, and doctrines’ that Fiorentino
mentions.457 For us, these will be our own cultural property. If we inspect
this real estate again, but look at it now in a fresh way, set against the
alien landscape that Fiorentino has in mind, perhaps we too can pro-
voke the instability that philosophy thrives on. Strangers in the strange
land of modern Italian philosophy, we anglosassoni will notice its distinc-
tive externalities: the Catholic spirituality that suffused it; the national-
ist exultation that inspired it; the historicism that gave it direction; the
cultural breadth that enriched it; and the political isolation that shack-
led it. More important, we will notice and honour its core philosophi-
cal achievements in the work of the remarkable thinkers described in
this book, among many others in an embattled age that would not cease
from mental fight.
171
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Notes to Part I
1 Bellamy (2004).
2 Bobbio’s autobiography, with a chronology by the editor of the English edi-
tion, has been translated: Bobbio (2002); for the complexities of Bobbio’s
politics during the Fascist period and afterward, see also Zolo (2008).
3 Bellamy (2004).
4 For an earlier statement of the same theme, see Spaventa (1972a), I, 331:
‘Italy abounds in genius for theorizing; what is missing is agreement of
theory with experience’; see section 10 of this Introduction.
5 Bobbio (1955).
6 Below, section 7.
7 Bobbio (1955).
8 Bobbio (1955); Garin (1966b), II, 532−40; (1996): 105−7.
9 Below, section 19.
10 Garin (1966b), II, 3859; De Felice (1985): 11−61; Turi (1995): 202−7;
Santucci (1996); Rossi (2002), (2009); Bassi (2005); and below, sections 11
and 20.
11 Parts of this section, and of sections 3−9, are based on Copenhaver and
Copenhaver (2006).
12 Gentile’s extensive writings about the history of philosophy fill 25 volumes
out of 59 in his collected works. His vast historical project started with a
thesis, Rosmini e Gioberti, in Gentile (1899a). The other historical works by
Gentile which are most relevant here are Gentile (1917), (1930), (1957),
(2001), and (2003).
13 For Galluppi, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Mamiani, see below, sections 3 to
9; for accounts in English of the history of Italy in the period covered by
this book, see Beales and Biagini (1981), Clark (1996), Duggan (1994),
Hearder (1983); and for a recent Italian survey of the Risorgimento, its
origins, and its aftermath, see Banti (2004); also Turi (1998): 925.
Part I: Introduction
174
Notes to Part I
175
Part I: Introduction
176
Notes to Part I
Rosmini claims, he thereby rejects universal ideas, and the result is nomi-
nalism; see also Sciacca (1935): 83−6, 95−6, 230−1, 236.
88 Rosmini (1830), II, 253−4.
89 Rosmini (1881): 316, 319−21; Garin (1966a), III, 1115−19.
90 For the biographical information that follows, see Garin (1966a), III,
1149−54, 1176−8; Giusso (1948); Intini (2002); Palhoriès (1929); Rumi
(1999); Stefanini (1947).
91 For an analysis of the Theory of the Supernatural, see Garin (1966a), III,
1159−62.
92 Gioberti (1843) is the first edition of the Primato; (1938−9) is the Edizione
nazionale; see II.3 of our Translations; also Garin (1966a), III, 1152−4;
Casini (1998): 272−93; Bagnoli (2007): 176−208; Irace (2003).
93 Gioberti (1938−9): 37−44.
94 Gioberti (1938−9): 42−5; Garin (1966a), III, 1162−3.
95 Gioberti (1938−9): 44−5.
96 Gioberti (1846−7); (1841−3); Curci (1845); Garin (1966a), III, 1153−4;
Intini (2002): 7−14.
97 Gioberti (1938−9): 44, 49; (1840): 9, 28, 58, 61.
98 Gioberti (1840): 9−143; see II.4 of our Translations; also Garin (1966a),
III, 1162−76.
99 Gioberti (1840): 14−23.
100 Gioberti (1840): 16−20.
101 Gioberti (1840): 19.
102 Gioberti (1840): 34−5, 38−9.
103 Gioberti (1840): 39−40.
104 Gioberti (1840): 40−2.
105 Gioberti (1840): 41−2, 64.
106 Gioberti (1840): 42−5; Garin (1966a), III, 1168−9.
107 Gioberti (1840): 48−54.
108 Gioberti (1840): 56−7.
109 Gioberti (1840): 52−3, 57−60; Garin (1966a), III, 1169.
110 Gioberti (1840): 60−3.
111 Gentile (1917): 87−109: Pincherle (1973); the first edition of the Renewal
is Mamiani (1834), but the edition cited here is Mamiani (1836); see II.5
of our Translations.
112 Hearder (1983): 104−8.
113 Cuoco (1804−6); Casini (1998): 238−62.
114 Mamiani (1836): 11−12; Malusa (1977): 46−9.
115 Dante, Purgatorio, 18.55; Gioberti (1938−9): 42−5; Mamiani (1836): 320;
Rosmini (1836); above, section 7.
177
Part I: Introduction
116 Gentile (1917): 109−37; Garin (1966a), III, 1197−9; Hearder (1983):
113−19.
117 Mamiani (1836): 5, 7, 14, 18−21, 28, 37, 42, 47, 53, 56−7, 159−60; section
3 of this Introduction.
118 Gentile (2001): 14−21; (2003), I, 222−9; Garin (1966a), III, 1091−3; Ras-
chini (2001): 82−92.
119 Spaventa (1972a), III, 19−20; Gentile (2003), I, 187−269; Garin (1966a),
III, 1225−6; (1966b), I, 14−19; Raschini (2001): 84−6.
120 Gentile (2001): 9−19.
121 Gentile (2001): 19−28, with Palmieri’s speech on pp. 20−1; Garin (1966a),
III, 1229−30.
122 Gentile (2001): 29−100, with the passage from ‘Jesuit Saturdays’ on p. 58;
‘Introduction’ by Rascaglia and Savorelli in Spaventa (2000): 9−54; Malusa
(1977): 50−4; Grilli (1941).
123 Spaventa (1972a), I, 293−5; see II.6 of our Translations; also Gentile
(2001): 100−7; Savorelli, ‘Introduction,’ in Spaventa (2003): v−xxxviii;
Malusa (1977): 73−80; Garin (1966a), III, 1233−8.
124 Gentile (2001): 108−16, with the passage quoted on p. 108; Savorelli,
‘Introduction,’ in Spaventa (2003): xxiii−iv, 7−8.
125 Gentile (2001): 116−44.
126 Gentile (2001): 145−74.
127 Spaventa (1972a), I, 295−332.
128 Villari (1859−61); (1877−82); (1888); (1892), I, 1−230; Martirano, ‘Intro-
duction’ in Villari (1999a): 11−32; Martirano and Cacciatore, ‘Introduc-
tion’ in Villari (1999b): 25−33; Gentile (1957): 53−61; Garin (1966a), III,
1246−7; Malusa (1977): 461−7; Buckle (1857); Breisach (1994): 268−75.
129 Villari (1868); see II.7 of our translations; also Malusa (1977): 461−2;
Martirano and Cacciatore, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999b): 25−33.
130 Garin (1966a), III, 1273−6.
131 Gentile (1957); Martirano, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999a): 11−32;
Poggi (1999): 144−8, 185−205; Santucci (1996): 7−8, 29−39; Cacciatore
(1997); for Ardigò and the other positivists mentioned here, see also Garin
(1966a), III, 1244−59, 1265−73; (1966b), I, 1−14.
132 Villari (1999a); below, section 17 on Croce.
133 Garin (1980): 12; Martirano, ‘Introduction’ in Villari (1999a): 17−18; also
p. 148.
134 Villari (1868): 2−5, 18−21, 27−9.
135 Villari (1868): 3−5.
136 Villari (1868): 4−6.
137 Villari (1868): 6−7.
178
Notes to Part I
179
Part I: Introduction
180
Notes to Part I
181
Part I: Introduction
230 This section and the next two are derived from Copenhaver and Copen-
haver (2008). Croce (2000a) is an autobiography, circulated privately after
1918 and translated into English by R.G. Collingwood in the year after it
was published commercially: Croce (1927). For biographical and histori-
cal accounts, see Bonetti (2000); Galasso (2002); Cingari (2003); Garin
(1966a), III, 1282−7.
231 Croce (2000a): 26−7; above, section 14, on Labriola and Herbart.
232 Above, section 11, on Villari; Garin (1966a), III, 1290−1; (1966b), I,
179−95; Cingari (2003), I, 19−31.
233 Croce (2000a): 15−32; the original version of the essay is Croce (1893),
followed here and in II.15 of our Translations; the final revision appears
in Croce (1951a). See also Garin (1966a), III, 1288−90, 1297−8; Galasso
(2002): 114−26; Bonetti (2000): 3−7, 145−6; Cingari (2003): 15−37.
234 Croce (1893): 1−2; Bernheim (1889); Droysen (1977); Ullmann (1885).
235 Croce (1893): 2−4, 18; Cingari (2003), I, 15−24.
236 Croce (1893): 4−5.
237 Croce (1893): 5−6; below, section 18, on Croce’s notion of distinction.
238 Croce (2005). 24.
239 Garin (1966a), III, 1311−16; Galasso (2002): 150−7.
240 Croce (1900), (1902), (1956), (1992); Garin (1966b), I, 222−44.
241 Croce (1893): 6−7; Zimmermann (1858), (1862−4); Nahlowsky (1863).
242 Croce (1893): 7−8; Hartmann (1878), (1886).
243 Croce (1893): 9−10.
244 Croce (1893): 11.
245 Croce (1893): 11−12; Schopenhauer (1859), II, 500−1 (3.38); Burckhardt
(1979): 32.
246 Croce (1893): 12−13; Lazarus (1865).
247 Croce (1893): 13−15, criticizing the scientism and pessimism in Buckle
(1857), Delfico (1814), Wundt (1888), and Gumplovicz (1883), while sid-
ing with Simmel (1892).
248 Croce (1893):15; cf. (1951a): 21−2.
249 Croce (1893): 16.
250 Croce (1893): 17−21, citing Lazarus (1865) on condensation and substitu-
tion and then criticizing Droysen (1977), Schopenhauer (1859), and
Lecky (1865).
251 Croce (1893): 21−3.
252 Croce (1893): 23−4; Köstlin (1869): 53−62 (1.2.2).
253 Croce (1893): 24−5.
254 Croce (1893): 26−7.
255 Croce (1893): 27−9.
182
Notes to Part I
183
Part I: Introduction
280 Hegel (1907); Bonetti (2001): 3−14, 146−7; Galasso (2002): 127−40; Turi
(1995): 54−68.
281 Croce (1905); (1907): 105, 131, 149; (1909a); (1909b); (1917a); above,
section 17.
282 Croce (1907): v−vi.
283 Croce (1907): 1−5.
284 Davidson (2001); Sellars (1965): 172−3.
285 Croce (1907): 5−6.
286 Croce (1907): 6−8.
287 Croce (1907): 9; above, section 18.
288 Croce (1907): 9−11; Raschini (2001): 107−9.
289 Croce (1907): 10−11; on ‘logical space,’ see especially Wittgenstein
(1974), 1.13, 3.4, 42; Sellars (1997): 57−68.
290 Croce (1907): 11−12; Ryle (2000a); also Broad (1925); Rorty (1965);
Lycan and Pappas (1972); Churchland (1981).
291 Croce (1907): 13−18.
292 Croce (1907): 18−20.
293 Croce (1907): 20−1.
294 Croce (1907): 21−4.
295 Croce (1907): 24−30.
296 Croce (1907): 30−1.
297 Above, section 18.
298 Croce (1907): 32−5, 51−4.
299 Croce (1907): 54−6.
300 Croce (1907): 56−8.
301 Croce (1907): 81−4; Pardo (1972): 73−84.
302 Ryle (2000b): 16−17.
303 Croce (1907): 81−4; see also the notes in chapter 4 of our translation of
Croce’s ‘Philosophy of Hegel.’
304 Croce (1907): 85−8.
305 Croce (1907): 88−93; Sasso (1994−2000), I, 35−47.
306 Croce (1907): 93−4.
307 Croce (1907): 94−6.
308 Croce (1907): 97−114.
309 Croce (1907): 115−27.
310 Croce (1907): 129−43.
311 Croce (1907): 145−64.
312 Croce (1907): 164−70.
313 Croce (1907): 184.
314 Croce (1907): 185−7.
184
Notes to Part I
185
Part I: Introduction
186
Notes to Part I
187
Part I: Introduction
396 For the biography and chronology, see Fiori (2008); Romano (1965);
Garin (1997a): 3−40; Jones (2006): 14−26; Gramsci (1975), I, xliii−lxviii;
(1985): 1−15; (1996a), I, xxix−xli; (1996b): 1−28; (2000): 17−25.
397 Gramsci (1975), II, 1363−1509.
398 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8.
399 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−6, 1383−94, 1485−90.
400 Gramsci (1975), I, lxiv−lxv, II, 1396−7; (1996a): xxxvi−vii; (2000): 22;
Bukharin (1925).
401 Gramsci (1975), II, 1366−8; Garin (1966a), III, 1286−7.
402 Gramsci (1975), II, 1370−1, 1399−1401.
403 Gramsci (1975), II, 1398−9, 1462−6; see chapter 11 of Croce’s ‘Philoso-
phy of Hegel,’ and on Gramsci and Croce in an earlier period, see Garin
(1996): 343−60; also (1997a): 41−4, 59−61.
404 Gramsci (1975), II, 1462−6.
405 Gramsci (1975), II, 1418−20, 1466−7; Russell (1922): 113−14.
406 Gramsci (1975), II, 1446−7; Bukharin (1927).
407 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8, 1380−1, 1465−7.
408 Gramsci (1975), II, 1378−94.
409 Gramsci (1975), II, 1384−6, 1396−8, 1481−2.
410 Gramsci (1975), II, 1375−8, 1380−97; Garin (1996): 289−342; Belardelli
(2005): 174−91.
411 Gramsci (1975), II, 1392.
412 Chabod (2002): 81−2, 105−7.
413 Croce, (1917a), (1918), (1921), (1925), (1928), (1929), (1931), (1932),
(1938); Croce (1991), followed here, is Galasso’s edition of Croce (1932);
Garin (1966a), III, 1335−7; (1966b), I, 252−6, II, 275−87; Galasso (2002):
183−249, 371−89; Bonetti (2001): 73−101; Rizi (2003): 196−204.
414 Croce (1991): 9, and the ‘Nota del curatore’ by Galasso, pp. 453−7; Dante,
Inferno, 23.28−30.
415 Croce (1928); Volpe (1991); Sasso (1979); De Felice (1985): 205−8; Rizi
(2003): 146−54; Cingari (2003), II, 357−64; Di Rienzo (2004): 112−53;
Belardelli (2005): 97−140.
416 Croce (1991): 11−20.
417 Croce (1991): 20.
418 Croce (1991): 20−5.
419 Croce (1991): 25−30: the notion of a religion of liberty itself is Hegelian
(Religion der Freiheit); see Hegel (1986), 17.203−4, where the full achieve-
ment of truth and freedom comes with the arrival of the ‘consummate’ or
‘absolute’ Christian religion – which, of course, is not what Croce has in
mind. See chapter 9 of Croce’s ‘Philosophy of Hegel.’
188
Notes to Part I
189
Part I: Introduction
449 The reproduction in Vico (1975): 2−26 is one of the clearer ones in stand-
ard editions.
450 Sections 7 and 13 above.
451 Gramsci, ‘Letters,’ #302; Bobbio (1955).
452 Gentile, ‘Actual Idealism,’ section 4.
453 Popper (2006); Belardelli (2005): 3−48; E. Gentile (2005): 101−4.
454 Copenhaver and Copenhaver (2008).
455 Russell (2004).
456 Above, section 14.
457 Fiorentino, ‘Positivism.’
190
PART II
Translations
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1
Baron Pasquale Galluppi of Tropea
Elements of Philosophy1
Young People,
Q What is psychology?
A Psychology is the science of the soul. Psyche means soul in Greek.
Q Can we know the soul, and how can we know it?
A Certainly we can know the soul since it shows itself to us.
Q Please explain this to me more clearly.
A The soul is the subject of all our sensations, of all our affections, and
of whatever thoughts we may have. But each of these modifications
of ours is constantly accompanied by a sensation of it. The soul not
only thinks and has modifications, then, but also becomes aware of
whatever particular thoughts and particular modifications there may
be. This awareness of what goes on in the soul is called consciousness
or inner sense – internal sense.
Q From what you say, it seems that the soul has a sensation of what
goes on in it, but not of itself.
A No. The soul also has a sensation of itself since it senses its modifica-
tions as its modifications, as things inhering in it, which amounts to
saying that it senses itself modified.
Q But does the soul distinguish itself from its modifications, regarding
itself as the subject of these modifications?
194
Galluppi, Elements
A The soul distinguishes itself from its modifications. But it does not
make this distinction in the first moments of its consciousness of
itself, only later on.
Q Since the various modifications of which the soul has consciousness
must have a cause, can you tell me what sort of cause this is?
A There are two kinds of modifications in us: some are actions; oth-
ers are passions. Accordingly, willing, judging, and reasoning are
actions. Passions are sensations of pain following a blow or of pleas-
ure following a different movement – eating tasty food, for example.
The efficient principle of actions is the soul itself; for passions the
action of an object outside the soul is necessary. The soul’s suscepti-
bility to being affected in such a way is also necessary.
Q What are faculties of the soul?
A Faculties of the soul are potencies that the soul has either to pro-
duce certain actions or to accept certain modifications. The first are
active potencies of the soul. The second are passive potencies.
Q Might these faculties be something other than the soul itself?
A The faculties of the soul are the soul itself considered in relation to
its various modifications.
Q What sorts of faculties does the soul have?
A The primary faculties of mind are those that give it the objects of
its thoughts, since the objects of our thoughts are an indispensable
condition of thinking and since these objects must be given to the
mind and are not created by it,
Q What are these faculties that give the mind the objects of its thoughts?
A They are sensibility and consciousness. The first gives the mind
external objects; the second gives it its own I and the modifications
that occur in the I. We cannot get back beyond this fact. The I that
senses objects outside it is the first object shown to the mind.
Q How can objects outside the mind be shown or made present to the
mind itself?
A By acting – by modifying the mind, in other words, which is to say by
producing various sensations in it.
Q Sensations are internal modifications of the mind, then?
A Exactly.
Q From this it seems one can infer that our sensations cannot reveal to
us anything external.
A Such an inference would be false. Since our sensations, in acting
to modify our soul, must at the same time be perceptions of some
external thing, they reveal an external world to us.
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Galluppi, Elements
other things what cannot have existence apart from these things.
In this way, modes are treated as separate from the subject, and the
subject as separate from the modes that determine it, without which
determinations the subject cannot exist. Physicists treat motion as
separate from the body; moralists treat virtues and vices as separate
from the mind of which they are modes; the universal idea of man,
tree, body, and so on separates from these objects the determinations
without which they cannot exist. The first type of abstraction is called
modal abstraction; the second can be called abstraction of the subject.
Q Explain the different kinds of synthesis.
A Three kinds of synthesis can be distinguished: real synthesis, ideal
synthesis, and imaginative synthesis. The first is what unifies any real
objects whose unity is real; accordingly, this is the kind that deter-
mines the real relations of things. The second is what unites things
ideally when they are not really united; accordingly, it determines
the logical relations of things. The third is what forms imaginary
objects by uniting several things in thought.
Q Give me examples of these three kinds of synthesis.
A All judgments in which a real subject affirms in itself a real mode of
itself are examples of real synthesis. ‘The ivory ball that I hold in my
hand is heavy’: given the weight combined with the ivory ball that I
hold in my hand, this is a judgment that contains a real synthesis. If
news of my friend’s death makes me sad, I will be right to say ‘I am
saddened by news of my friend’s death.’ This judgment unites the
real mode of sadness with the I as real subject, and it achieves this
unity in reality because the sadness mentioned is a mode that really
inheres in the I. ‘God is the cause of the existence of the universe’
expresses the synthesis of effect with cause, and this synthesis is real.
‘Tizio is equal in height to Sempronio’: this proposition expresses
an ideal synthesis because the relation of equality in height between
Tizio and Sempronio is not a real relation at all but a logical rela-
tion. ‘Two triangles erected on equal bases between the same paral-
lel lines are equal to each other’ is also a proposition that expresses
an ideal synthesis. The first can be called objective ideal synthesis and
the second subjective ideal synthesis because the terms of the logical
relation are real in the first proposition but ideal in the second. It
is correct, therefore, to divide ideal synthesis into objective ideal
synthesis and subjective ideal synthesis.
The idea of a building to be built is the product of an imaginative
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198
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199
Part II: Translations
200
Galluppi, Elements
Q What is an idea?
A The idea is the result of thinking about objects present to the mind
from sensibility and consciousness.
Q Is there no difference between the first operation of the intellect,
called simple apprehension or perception, and the idea in the proper
sense?
A The idea can be regarded as the terminus of the act called perception
or simple apprehension, or else as an internal modification of the soul
deriving from the act of perceiving.
Q What is ideology?
A Ideology is the science of the origin of our ideas, and thus of their
nature.
Q Ideology deals with what sorts of ideas?
A With ideas essential to human understanding.
Q Please explain this more clearly.
A There are ideas essential to human understanding and some that
are not, and thus they can be called accidental to understanding. The
first are found universally in all people, which cannot be said of the
second. No person can be without the idea of his own body and of
something outside it, whatever it may be, nor of his own thinking I.
But a person can do without the idea of a crocodile or an elephant,
and, if he is born blind, even of the starry sky.9 The ideas essential to
human understanding are those that thinking, which is the use of
the faculties of analysis and synthesis, develops naturally out of the I
that senses something outside the I.
Q Since the idea of one’s own body is an idea essential to human
understanding, tell me how people distinguish their own bodies
from external bodies.
A Our own body is the one in which we seem to sense and to be, in
which movements can be produced directly just by our willing them.
It is also the one that is present without interruption.
Q What is the soul, which seems to rule its own body?
A The soul is what has sensations and thoughts of some kind.
Q From that it seems we must regard the soul as something distinct
from sensations and from thoughts of any kind. This conclusion
seems to follow from the idea of the soul that we have formed for
ourselves. Is that right?
A It is right and indisputable.
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Q But this thing that constitutes the soul and is usually also called the
substance of the soul or essence of the soul – what might that be?
A We have no determinate or particular notion of it, but we under-
stand that it is a subsistent thing, and to a subsistent thing we give
the name substance, as we give the names quality, accident, mode, modi-
fication, and so on to something that inheres in substance.
Q We have a general notion of substance, then?
A Certainly. If we had no notion of substance, we would have none of
quality, which is the correlate of substance. The distinction between
substantive and adjectival names, which is found in all languages,
shows that all people have the idea of substance and of quality.
Q But where do we get the idea of substance and its correlate of
quality?
A From experience, or rather from analysis of sensations or percep-
tions of the I or of something outside it. It is an objective notion
with respect to both origin and meaning.
Q The human soul is a substance, but since a body also appears to us
as a substance, might the human soul be a body?
A It is not possible that the human soul is a body. When one analyses
the consciousness of the thinking I, it is plainly seen that the human
soul, the I, shows its itself to be rigorously one in all functions of
thinking – to be absolutely simple and indivisible, in other words.
Q What did we call this absolute simplicity of the thinking I?
A We called it the metaphysical unity of the I.10
Q Give me a clearer picture of this metaphysical unity of the thinking
subject.
A In reasoning the thinking subject deduces a judgment from other
judgments. But this deductive act belongs necessarily to a simple
and indivisible subject because there is no dividing the deduction.
The deduction belongs to and inheres in the same subject to which
each element of the conclusion and each element of the premises
belong.11 Thus in reasoning there is no plurality of subjects, but
rather absolute identity and unity of the same subject.
Q Are there different kinds of unity?
A Two kinds can be distinguished: metaphysical unity and synthetic
unity. This second kind can be divided into the synthetic unity of
thought and physical unity. Metaphysical unity is absolute. Synthetic
unity is conditional (Ideology, sections 15−16, 20−24).12
Q We have already recognized (1) the substantiality of the soul; (2) its
metaphysical unity, also called spirituality; and (3) its various modi-
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fications or modes of being. Now from this it seems not only that the
soul is a substance, but also that it is an efficient cause of any modifi-
cations that it has – even though Hume denies the existence of the
notion of efficient cause. What should one think of this theory of
Hume’s?
A Hume’s theory of causality is false. Consciousness attests that the
soul is the principle or efficient cause of its own willing. In all lan-
guages, there are expressions that point to causality, such as dunque,
percio, in conseguenza, perchè, and so on in Italian.13
Q It seems that the notions of action and passion, which are linked to
that of causality, are also notions essential to human understanding.
A So they are. The distinction between active and passive verbs, found
in all languages, derives precisely from these notions.
Q From what you have said about substance and cause, it seems that
the relation between quality and substance and that between effect
and cause are both objective relations and therefore real.
A What you say is true. There are two real relations between items that
exist: one is of the modification or quality to the subject; the other is
of the effect to the cause. A modification has two real relations with
the substance: one is of the modification to the subject; the other is
of the effect to the cause. The cause of the modification can be the
subject itself of the modification or a different subject.
Q These two truths – (1) there can be no quality without a substance
in which the quality inheres; (2) there can be no effect without a
cause – are they contingent truths or, rather, necessary?
A They are necessary truths and therefore identical.
Q Please help me understand this clearly.
A Quality is an existence that inheres. A quality without substance,
therefore, would be at the same time an inhering and a non-inher-
ing existence. Moreover, quality is a mode of being, and without the
being a mode of being would be both a mode of being and not a
mode of being. Thus, it is an identical and necessary truth that there
can be no quality without a substance.
Q Demonstrate with the same clarity that there can be no effect with-
out a cause that makes it exist.
A The effect is what comes to be. Everything that exists either exists
independently of any assumption, or it may depend on some
assumption. In the first case, it exists absolutely, does not come to
be, and hence is not an effect, which is contrary to the hypothesis.
In the second case, the existence that is assumed and on which the
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seeks to make all objects arise from the synthetic combination of these
subjective elements together with objective elements. But Kant’s ‘objec-
tive’ is not the ‘objective’ of other philosophers; his is not real in itself,
but rather an appearance, a phenomenon. And humans can cognize
nothing outside of appearances.23
The transcendental philosophy therefore supposes (1) that some ele-
ments of our cognitions are in us a priori, independently of any experi-
ence whatsoever; (2) that the philosophy that tries to discover them must
be wholly established a priori. These elements of our cognitions, which
the mind possesses independently of experience, are called pure, mean-
ing primitive and somehow purified of any impression at all foreign to
us. Calling the complex of all these principles pure reason, the philosophy
that discovers them a priori also calls itself a critique of pure reason.24
But what means shall we use to help us uncover the pure elements of
our cognitions? By what sign shall we recognize them? The philosophy
that I am investigating declares the following basic principle: what is nec-
essary, invariable, and universal in our cognitions is subjective, pure, and
a priori; by contrast, the accidental, contingent, and variable will belong
to the object, will be an objective element.25
The first fact that strikes us from outside is extension; the second is
motion. In these perceptions we see what is necessary and universal,
and, in keeping with the principle declared above, we will succeed in
uncovering the pure elements of these perceptions. If I abstract from
all bodies, if I make every trace of them disappear, space still stays with
me – infinite, indeterminate, absolute space. If we abstract from space,
we annihilate all bodies and the possibility of any external perception.
If extension were a thing that experience makes us recognize in bodies,
we would be able to conclude only that all objects that we have perceived
until now by means of the external senses are extended and in space.
Nothing would assure us that we would not perceive some object outside
of us that was not extended. But to make such a judgment is beyond our
power. All objects that we can perceive by means of the external senses
must be extended and in space. Therefore, space is a representation that
rigorously carries with it the features of absolute necessity and universal-
ity; hence, it is a subjective element of our cognitions.
Motion represents body to us successively in various parts of space;
therefore, a succession of ideas must be produced in us in order for us to
be able to perceive motion. But is this succession objective or subjective?
Suppose all the things that follow one another in succession are anni-
hilated; the idea of duration or time remains with us, as we have seen.
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just as they are not fragrant, sweet, bitter, and so on. Likewise, in things
taken by themselves there is no succession, which is a mode of sensing
our internal affections. At a certain moment a cannon fires a shot, then
fires another shot at another moment. We judge that one shot was fired
before, the other afterward, but the judgment arises from a subjective
element. In the things themselves there is neither before nor after.
If you object to Kant that it follows from this that inner sense deceives
us by making us see within us a succession of modifications that do not
exist, he answers that both internal sense and the external senses give us
only appearances; that just as space is apparent outside, so time is appar-
ent inside and thereby also apparent outside; that consequently internal
sense has no privilege over the external senses, and both proceed in the
same way. Kant calls his theory of sensibility the transcendental aesthetic.27
Kant’s school recognizes, as do we, a passive state and an active state
in the cognizing being, a passivity and an activity.28 The first consists of
external and internal sensibility, each of which sensibilities has its form a
priori, independently of experience. These forms are also called laws of
sensibility, its primitive conditions; they are space for external sensibility,
time for internal sensibility. The products of sensibility are called intui-
tions or seeings. But these intuitions are not yet the notions that are the
elements of judgment. For them to become so, the action of understand-
ing is needed to elevate intuitions into concepts. The products of passiv-
ity are intuitions; the products of activity are concepts.29
The activity of the understanding consists of analysis or synthesis. This
is the first question that presents itself, then: ‘Is analysis or synthesis the
first act of the cognizing being?’ To answer the question posed, let us
examine the state in which sensibility leaves us as we form our concepts.
Our sensations, which are the empirical part or the matter of our sen-
sible intuitions, are distinct and separate from one another. Thus, even
though sight and touch often excite different sensations at the same
time – as when one sees colours with the eyes, feels hardness or softness,
weight or heat with the hand, or sound with the ears – sensations are
nonetheless distinct from one another and not blended in the sensing
being.
Sensibility thus gives us distinct sensations but does not bind them
together. It also gives us two indeterminate subjective elements, an infi-
nite space and an infinite time. But what will bring these sensations
together and surround them in a determinate space and a determinate
time? What must produce this union is the activity of the mind. There-
fore, the first operation of the activity of understanding is to unify the
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various sensations that sensibility gives to it. Its first operation, then, is
synthesis. Sensations of yellow given by vision; of sound given by hearing;
of hardness, weight, and ductility given by touch − sensations isolated in
themselves − are taken by the activity of the mind and joined together
with the form of a determinate space and a determinate time into the
single representation that we call ‘gold.’ Therefore, the first operation of
the understanding is synthesis.
Suppose you object that the qualities corresponding to the sensations
united in the representation of gold are found united in the gold itself,
which is the object of your representation, and that this is because you
perform an analysis, revealing them one by one – no synthesis at all. The
philosophy that we are explaining will reply that things taken absolutely
by themselves and independently of our representations can never be
cognized by us, and that they are outside the sphere of activity of our
knowledge. Consequently, the objects of our cognitions are formed by
us, and these objects are our representations themselves. The data, the
elements with which we form these representations, are our sensations
– external impressions and internal impressions; therefore, sensible
objects are formed by the synthesis of these sensations. The sensible tree
or the sensible animal is nothing more than a batch of sensations joined
together by the activity of the understanding. According to the transcen-
dental philosophy, then, synthesis is the first operation of mental activity.
The concepts that are the elements of judgment are formed by it.
The transcendental philosophy must determine a priori the subjective
elements of our cognitions. The result of the transcendental aesthetic
was that space and time are subjective elements of the products of sensi-
bility. What will these subjective elements of the products of synthesis be?
We said that judgment is a product of synthesis. Hence, by discovering
a priori the subjective elements of our judgments, we will find the sub-
jective elements of the synthetic products, and hence of our concepts,
which are the first products of synthesis.
There are four forms needed for all our judgments, and they are quan-
tity, quality, relation, and modality. With regard to quantity, all our judg-
ments must be singular, particular, or universal: ‘the moon is opaque’;
‘some bodies are transparent’; ‘all bodies are heavy.’30
But in saying that the moon is opaque, we must regard various quali-
ties of the moon – the various sensations and representations by which
we are affected in representing the moon to ourselves – as constituting
just one whole. We regard this body called ‘moon’ as one. This concept
of unity is therefore necessary for the mind to be able to form a singular
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judgment, since it must treat the subject of this judgment as one. This
concept of unity is therefore a subjective element of these singular judg-
ments. In the batch of sensations by which you are affected in regard to
the moon, you will not be able to find any sensation of which you can say,
‘this sensation is exactly the concept of unity.’ This necessary element of
all singular judgments is therefore a subjective element.
Likewise in this judgment, ‘some bodies are transparent,’ you will find
no sensation that corresponds to the word ‘some,’ the concept denoted
by this word being plurality. Such a concept is in us a priori, then, a sub-
jective element of particular judgments. In the judgment ‘all bodies are
heavy,’ there is no sensation corresponding to the word ‘all.’ The con-
cept denoted by this word, which is the concept of totality, is therefore in
us a priori and is a subjective element of all universal judgments. Hence,
the concepts of unity, plurality, and totality are pure concepts.31 They are
in the understanding independently of any experience. They are subjec-
tive elements of all judgments of quantity, and these judgments are not
possible without these concepts.
With regard to quality, all our judgments are either affirmative, nega-
tive, or infinite: ‘all bodies are heavy’; ‘the rock is not sensitive’; ‘the
soul is not-mortal.’32 Infinite judgments combine the two ways of judg-
ing, according to Kant, the affirmative and negative. This is because we
treat the object as being in a certain mode whereby it lacks some quality,
and we judge that it is in a mode different from that in which certain
others are; in the universe of objects this sets a limit, a divide, on one
side of which objects have such a quality, while on the other side they do
not have this quality. To say ‘the soul is not-mortal’ is a judgment whose
meaning equates to this other negation, ‘the soul is not mortal,’ because
the complex notion that corresponds to the first is the same as the one
that corresponds to the second; the one and the other both represent
the soul as not mortal. Nonetheless, the first sets up a class of mortal
things from which the soul is separate, but the second does not set up
this class. In the first it is affirmed that the soul is in a state different from
that in which many other things are, which is not said in the second. In
judgments viewed according to quality, then, the mind either affirms or
denies or limits.
According to Kant, the mind can neither affirm nor negate nor limit
unless it has antecedently in it the concepts of affirmation or reality, of
negation or privation, and of limitation.33 When the mind says ‘all bodies
are heavy,’ what corresponds to the word ‘are’ is the concept of reality.
The mind regards bodies as having the reality of weight. Therefore, the
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unsupported body necessarily falls; but the body is heavy; therefore, the
unsupported body necessarily falls’ – the first judgment is problematic
because the heavy body is still treated as something merely possible. The
second judgment – ‘the body is heavy’ – is simply assertoric or contin-
gent because weight is treated simply as real in the body, clearly not as
necessary. The third judgment – ‘the unsupported body necessarily falls’
– is necessary, or, as they usually say, apodictic, because falling is attributed
necessarily to the unsupported body.
The mode of regarding the suitability or unsuitability of the predi-
cate to the subject of the judgment is nothing more than a mere mental
outlook, a mere mode of our thought. Nothing objective corresponds
to it. The terms possible, actual, necessary, and contingent merely express
concepts to which nothing physical corresponds. Yet these concepts are
necessary to form judgments of modality. Therefore, they are in the
understanding a priori. They are subjective elements of our cognitions.38
The pure concepts of unity, plurality, and totality; reality, privation,
and limitation; substance-and-accident, cause-and-effect, and commerce;
possibility-and-impossibility, existence-and-non-existence, necessity-and-
contingency, Kant calls categories. And these twelve categories are the sub-
jective elements of all our judgments.39
We said that the signs for discovering what is subjective in our cogni-
tions are necessity and universality. Let us apply this principle to judg-
ment. I do not know what I will think tomorrow nor at all the later
moments of my life because I do not know what objects will be given
to me by my senses. But if I am ignorant of the objects of my thinking,
I am not ignorant of the how of my thinking. I cannot foresee the mate-
rial, which is given to me from outside, but I do foresee the form, which
resides in me a priori. Everything that I will think must necessarily be
clothed in the four forms of quantity, quality, relation, and modality.
For me it is absolutely necessary that I conceive what I think (1) as
one, many, or all; (2) as real, negative, or limited; (3) as substance or
accident, cause or effect, action or reaction; and finally (4) as possible or
impossible, existent or non-existent, necessary or contingent. No object
conceived by me can take any other form. These four forms, therefore,
are found universally and necessarily and in all our judgments. The
twelve categories that correspond to them, then, are subjective elements
of all our judgments. Every judgment, in order to be determined, must
belong necessarily to one of the three modes of the four forms. Thus, the
judgment that ‘all bodies are heavy’ is universal in quantity, affirmative
in quality, categorical in relation, and assertoric in modality.
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sad, could there ever be a single feeling of heat and cold together with
happiness and sadness? Empirical unity of consciousness assumes syn-
thetic unity of thinking, but synthetic unity of thinking assumes a centre
of unity in which the various elements of thinking are united. This sim-
ple centre of unity I have found in the real I. Where does Kant put it? In
an a priori representation.
But how does he manage to determine this representation, which is
the basis of his synthesis? Since this representation is a priori, it must
necessarily be found in every synthesis. As soon as we have a representa-
tion, we can say ‘I think of this representation.’ Thus, when I have the
representation of a person’s foot, I can say ‘I have the representation of
a person’s foot,’ or rather, ‘I think of the person’s foot.’ The represen-
tation ‘I think’ is therefore necessary so that it can be united with any
other possible representation.44
Hence, this representation is found necessarily and universally in eve-
ry synthesis of the understanding, making it the centre of unity of all oth-
er representations. Accordingly, this representation is a priori. It is not
given to us but is the first act of the spontaneity of the understanding.45
It is independent of experience, since all representation, being my rep-
resentation, necessarily assumes the representation ‘I think.’ Kant calls
this representation the transcendental unity of consciousness, or rather the
transcendental unity of apperception. The synthesis of understanding starts
from the unity between each particular representation and the represen-
tation ‘I think.’
One must not confuse the transcendental unity of consciousness with
the category of unity: the second serves to produce the synthetic unity
of representations, but it cannot do this without the first. The cognizing
being unites each representation – of each part of a person, for example,
or of a tree, and so on – with the representation ‘I think,’ and applies the
category of unity to the entirety of these representations, thus constitut-
ing the synthetic unity of the representation of a person, a tree, and so
on.46 From this synthetic unity arises the empirical unity of conscious-
ness, or the single act of consciousness that embraces all the represen-
tations united in the synthetic unity that we are describing. By means
of the categories, therefore, the transcendental unity of consciousness
establishes the synthetic unity of our representations, from which arises
the empirical unity of consciousness of these same representations. It is
by dint of this consciousness that we can say, ‘I am conscious of the rep-
resentation of a person, a tree,’ and so on.
In the Ideology I also discussed the physical unity of bodily objects, say-
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ing that if it arises from the synthetic unity of thinking, it still assumes in
objects something that determines the synthetic unity of thinking and
supplies us a legitimate ground for qualifying it with the metaphysical
adjective ‘one.’47 The transcendental philosophy absolutely rejects this
view. It forbids any communication whatever with objects taken by them-
selves. For this reason, objects are products of the synthesis of the under-
standing, according to the canons of this philosophy. Hence, it must
believe synthetic unity of thought to be the same as physical unity. But
synthetic unity of thought depends, as we have said, on the transcenden-
tal unity of consciousness, which therefore is the origin and basis of the
formation of objects – an object being nothing more than the synthetic
unity of certain representations, according to the transcendental phi-
losophy. And for this reason the transcendental unity of consciousness is
also called objective unity.48
According to the transcendental philosophy, just what is a tree or an
animal? It is the entirety of certain representations embraced by con-
sciousness. But this entirety is formed by the synthesis of the under-
standing with the help of the categories, and this synthesis assumes the
representation ‘I think.’ This representation is therefore the basis and
source of all objects, and no object would be possible without it.
A difficulty will surely emerge as you think about this. The transcen-
dental philosophy, you will be entitled to say, allows some objective ele-
ments in our cognitions. Sensations, which are the material of empirical
intuitions, come to us from outside. How, then, can any connection with
objects taken by themselves be banned? At present I am only explaining
to you the basic principles of the transcendental philosophy. But this
philosophy has two canons: that sensation comes to us from objects; and
that we have no informative communication with objects taken by them-
selves, called noumena. I do not understand how these two canons agree
with one another – nor how they can be made to agree.
However that may be, the question that the transcendental philoso-
phy proposes to answer by examining the understanding is this: ‘How
does the understanding form objects of experience by the synthesis of
sensations?’49 And here, despite any difficulty you might encounter, I
ask you to note that the question is a general one and certainly involves
the object of internal sense, the I perceived by empirical consciousness
and called the empirical I to distinguish it from what is real in itself or the
noumenal I. This will be made clearer to you as we go on.
The results of our inquiries have been: (1) the first operation of the
mind is synthesis; (2) the centre of unity of the elements of synthesis is
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products are simpler than those that come after. But the more general
the ideas are, the simpler they are, as we said in the third chapter of the
Logic.54 Synthesis of the understanding must therefore form the concept
of number in general before that of a determinate space in general.
Let us see how this forming proceeds. Imagine a moment, an instant
in the pure seeing of time. To this instant, united with the representa-
tion ‘I think’ by the understanding, apply the category of unity, and you
will say ‘one.’ Imagine a second instant, joined like the first with the
representation ‘I think,’ and applying the same category of unity will
again cause you to say ‘one.’ Apply the category of plurality to the two
moments formed in this way, and you will say ‘two,’ and then ‘three,’
‘four,’ and so on in succession.55 In this way arise sensible concepts of the
various numbers. But note that the understanding, according to Kant,
must form the primitive concept of any number – which is to say the uni-
versal concept – before forming concepts of particular numbers. Such a
concept is formed by applying the categories of unity and plurality to the
series of moments, and thus arises the general notion of number, which
is adding one to one in succession.
Before thinking of two people, according to Kant, one must first think
of two, and before thinking of two, one must think of number in general
– one must form the universal concept of number, in other words. This
concept is called the schema of the categories of quantity, and it arises
from the application of the categories of quantity to the pure intuition of
time. Time is therefore the means by which the categories are joined to
the other elements of our cognitions, and in synthesis the first products
of the understanding are the schemata – that is, the combination of sub-
jective elements of the understanding, either thinking combined with
subjective elements of sensibility, or these elements combined directly
with the element of time in the first instance.
Once the understanding thinks of two, it makes the universal concept
of number more determinate and stable. In the philosophy that we are
explaining, this is called forming an image, so that two, three, and so on
are images of number, as when you put five points • • • • • on a piece
of paper and get the image of the number five.56 The image is to the
schema what species is to genus. But just as the five points printed on
paper are a species in relation to five, they are an individual in relation
to number in general, and in Kant’s philosophy they are called an object
when regarded as an individual. In this way the synthesis of the under-
standing forms schemata first, images next, and then objects. Thus,
when it needs to form the figure of a tree, synthesis first forms the genus
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of this figure, next the species, and then it forms the object or individual
by uniting with this species something empirical – colours, for example
– that we discern in the tree.
But let us turn back and take another look at how the understanding
constructs the figure of sensible objects, referring to the example of the
cube that I mentioned. Geometers take lines to be formed from the flow
of a point, while surfaces come from the lateral movement of lines, and
solids come from moving surfaces up or down. On that assumption, a
point is conceived to flow and to produce a bounded line; if the line
is then conceived to flow laterally and to produce at its two extremes
two other lines equal to itself and perpendicular to it, we will have the
schema of a square. Assuming that this square rises along a line perpen-
dicular to it and equal to the generating line, you will have the schema
of the cube.
But let us see what elements enter into the construction of the cube
constructed a priori by the understanding. This construction posits a
manifold or rather a number, and the number arises from applying the
categories of quantity to time, as we said above. But the construction
occurs in pure space, the space assumed in all geometrical construc-
tions. Pure space is an element of this construction, then, and the cat-
egories are therefore also applied to pure space, but they are applied to
it because they are applied to time. Hence they are combined directly
with time and indirectly with space.57 Note here also that the mind, after
constructing the cube, treats its various elements as parts and the entire
cube as a whole. The category of totality therefore also enters into this
synthesis of the understanding.
Now here are the elements of this synthetic product: (1) the pure form
of time and that of space; (2) the categories of unity, plurality, and total-
ity. The centre of unity of the synthesis is the representation ‘I think,’ or
the transcendental unity of consciousness. The order of synthesis is the
application of the categories directly to time and indirectly to space.
Up to this point synthesis combines only subjective elements; its prod-
ucts are not yet objects of experience. It is necessary to add an objective
element to these a priori combinations, and this element is sensation.
Unite sensations with the cube that the mind has formed a priori, and
you will have a die, a cube of ice, or a cube of wood – which is to say an
object of experience. This, then, is how the synthesis of the understand-
ing forms all the objects of sensible nature, all the empirical and indi-
vidual concepts – concepts of a dog, for example, a horse, a cherry, the
sun, the moon, and so on. But this needs still more clarification.
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not have objective value except as forms of the objective and thus in
combination with them. In themselves they have no reality. Hence, Kan-
tian thought is defined as a transcendental idealism and an empirical realism
since it admits no reality a priori, only in experience. So space, time,
cause, substance, and so on have no reality when these things are consid-
ered a priori and in themselves. But they get a reality in experience or in
phenomena because they constitute the forms of experience.
Subjective elements found in our empirical concepts are of two types:
some are in objects inasmuch as objects are sensed; others are in them
inasmuch as they are thought. Thus, if you say ‘the sun is extended,’ the
word ‘extended’ expresses a subjective element of the sun inasmuch as
the sun is sensed; if you say ‘the sun is one,’ the word ‘one’ expresses a
subjective element of the sun inasmuch as the sun is thought. The first
elements are the pure intuitions of space and time; the second are the
categories.
The activity of the understanding consists of synthesis and analysis.
Analysis assumes the object that is to be taken apart, and this object
must be formed by synthesis. Synthesis therefore comes before analysis.
Furthermore, when analysis takes the object apart, no elements can be
found in it except those that synthesis has put there in forming it. There-
fore, when philosophers of Locke’s school take the idea of a body apart
and find there the idea of space or of extension, plurality, number, sub-
stantiality, and so on, if these philosophers decide on that account that
these notions come to us a posteriori and from experience, they draw a
false conclusion. All these elements are found in the complex idea of a
body, but one must first examine how the object taken apart is formed
or – which strictly amounts to the same thing – the representation of the
body that is analysed. Thus, synthesis forms objects, and analysis takes
them apart. And this analysis is necessary to form human knowledge and
comes about as a consequence of synthesis. With the alphabet of sen-
sation synthesis composes the great book of nature; analysis reads and
studies it; and there you have all of human knowledge.63
All objects of nature subject to experience are formed by the synthe-
sis of the understanding. This synthesis produces and can produce only
our representations – meaning phenomena, appearances. Beyond these
appearances our knowledge cannot reach. Thus, if there is some reality
beyond the phenomena that affect us and independent of them, it is
inaccessible to human knowledge.
The canons of transcendentalism are general. Having said that all
objects of experience are formed by the synthesis of the understanding,
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one must not exclude the object of internal experience – the I of con-
sciousness. What might the I of consciousness be? It is a substance that
endures, and many internal sensations and affections come into it one
after another. But the notion of enduring substance is the schema of the
category of substance, combining two subjective elements – a category
and the pure intuition of time. Furthermore, sensations have a degree,
and this degree is also a synthetic product of subjective elements – time
and the category of quality. Like all natural objects, then, the I is a phe-
nomenon, an appearance, a representation and nothing more.
We have seen how reason succeeds in discovering the existence of
the Absolute, but we have also shown that this notion of the Absolute
is a product of the synthesis of reasoning, by no means a product of
the analysis of sensations.64 In this the transcendental philosophy agrees
with us. But there is disagreement on a point of the greatest importance,
which is that the transcendental philosophy removes from the notion
of the Absolute the reality that we grant to it. If the subjective elements
of our cognitions acquire objective value only in the synthesis by which
objects of experience are formed, how, according to the philosophy that
we are explaining, can objective value ever be given to the Absolute,
which does not enter into the synthesis of any sensible object? Elements
that enter into the formation of an object through synthesis can be taken
out through analysis. Try to analyse any sensible object at all, and you
will never get the Absolute as a result. According to the transcendental
philosophy, then, the Absolute remains a simple idea of reason, deprived
of any reality. Kant nonetheless admits God’s existence, but on other
grounds that I lack the space to describe.
I have explained to you the theory of the transcendental philosophy
on the origin of ideas; it is directly opposed to the theory that I have
adopted and have previously explained to you. In the latter theory no
notion is posited a priori in the understanding, independently of experi-
ence. The ideas of space, time, and the categories are derived a posteri-
ori from thinking about sensations. They all arise from the sensation of
the I that senses something outside the I. Thinking derives them all from
this primitive fact. We admit that the notion of the Absolute is a product
of the synthesis of reasoning, but we grant reality to this notion just as we
grant it to the perception of the I.
This reality rests on the following principles: (1) the data of experi-
ence give us some real cognitions, meaning cognitions that reveal to us
the existence of some thing real in itself – a noumenon, speaking Kant’s
language – as, for example, the sensation of one’s own being, of the I;
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NOTES
1 Galluppi (1846a), the version used here, is the fifth edition of the Elements,
whose first edition was finished in 1827: see the Introduction, section 3; the
text is erratic in typography and orthography, and our translation aims at
consistency rather than mirroring its variations.
2 Galluppi (1846a), I, 24: ‘Prior to experience, if snow became present to
your eyes for the first time, you could not have known whether it was hot or
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cold. What happens with the following judgment is different: “of two quanti-
ties equal to a third, one is not greater than the other.” I deny that the
predicate belongs to the subject because I notice an absolute incompatibil-
ity between them. Judgments of the first kind are called empirical, experimen-
tal, physical, a posteriori, and contingent. The second are named pure, rational,
metaphysical, a priori, and necessary. The feature that distinguishes one from
the other is this: an affirmative judgment is contingent when denying the
predicate does not destroy the idea of the subject; a negative judgment is
contingent when affirming the predicate does not destroy the idea of the
subject; if it is destroyed, the judgment is necessary.’
3 Influenced by Locke and Condillac, Count Antoine Destutt de Tracy
(1754−1836) attracted followers who came to be called Idéologues from the
name that he gave to his radically empiricist psychology. Active in French
revolutionary politics and educational reform, he published his Eléments
d’idéologie between 1801 and 1815. For the Idéologues in Italy, see the Intro-
duction, sections 2 and 3.
4 Galluppi (1846a), I, 68−70, 132: ‘the principle of identity is “what is is” or
“what is not is what is not’’; The mind cannot know all the relations of its
ideas directly; it makes use of reasoning to compare two ideas with a third
and thus to extend the sphere of its cognitions. In this task, the mind does
not move beyond identity. Idea A as compared with idea B, and the idea of
the relation of A to B, are identical. The problem that we posed is already
solved. If someone asks how reasoning can be instructive without moving
beyond identity, this is our answer: because it discovers those relations of
our ideas that we cannot know directly, and knowing a relation that was not
known is surely progress on the road of knowledge.’
5 Galluppi (1846a): 105−7: ‘The idea of man is more universal than that of
Peter; the idea of animal is more universal than that of man; that of a thing
that has an organic body is more universal than the idea of animal; and the
idea of a mortal thing is more universal than the idea of a thing that has an
organic body … [But] the order of deduction of our ideas is not the same as
that of the deduction of our cognitions … Reasoning consists in deducing
one judgment from other judgments … [But] in pure reasoning one cannot
conclude from the particular to the universal, only from the latter to the
former. On the other hand … universal ideas are parts of particular ideas.
And the mind, starting with the latter, moves up from abstraction through
abstraction to the former, and thus it arrives at the most universal and the
simplest ideas. From all that, you may conclude that the order of deduction
of our ideas is different from the order of deduction of our cognitions, and
that the logical doctrine of Destutt-Tracy, which confuses these two orders
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of deduction, is false … [If so,] you should be on your guard against the two
following false arguments: you should not say with other philosophers that
since all ideas come from experience, all cognitions derive from experience;
you should not say with certain others that because we have some cognitions
a priori, we also have some ideas a priori.’
6 Galluppi (1846a), I, 156−69.
7 For Galluppi on analysis and synthesis, see the Introduction, sections 3 and
4.
8 See n61 below.
9 Alluding perhaps to Kant, KpV, A289: ‘Two things fill the mind with ever
new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we
reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within
me.’
10 Galluppi (1846a), I, 312−13, 324−5: ‘Consciousness of the synthetic unity
of thinking includes … consciousness of the unity of the thinking subject …
which I call the metaphysical unity of the I…. Without the metaphysical
unity of the I, the synthetic unity of thinking would not be possible, and
without the synthetic unity of thinking, no knowledge would be possible for
mankind. Get this basic truth of ideology well planted in your intellect and
memory. To the one, simple thinking subject I give the name mind [spirito].
Thus we have explained the origin of the notion of mind … The metaphysi-
cal unity of the I … is an absolute unity … and synthetic unity assumes the
indefinable metaphysical unity of the I.’
11 The thinking or psychological subject, not the logical subject of a proposi-
tion.
12 Galluppi (1846a), I, 308−13, 319−29.
13 Therefore, for that reason, consequently, because.
14 Galluppi (1846a), I, 362−3.
15 Throughout this section, ‘ground’ corresponds to Galluppi’s motivo and
motivare; see below, n46, in Galluppi’s discussion of Kant.
16 Galluppi (1846a), II, 102−4.
17 The first parts of the Essay appeared in 1819, for which see Galluppi
(1819−32), but we have used Galluppi (1846b): for Kant, see especially III,
202−325; V, 45−376; see also Galluppi (1843): 208−70.
18 Kant’s texts are cited here, following the translation by Guyer and Wood
in Kant (1997), only to illuminate Galluppi’s terminology, not to indicate
passages that may have been his sources: KrV, A571−2: ‘Every thing …
stands under the principle of thoroughgoing determination [Bestimmung];
according to which, among all possible predicates of things, insofar as they
are compared with their opposites, one must apply to it’; A50: ‘Our cogni-
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tion arises from two fundamental sources in the mind [Gemüts] …’; A484:
‘Your object is merely in your brain … hence all you have to worry about
is … avoiding the amphiboly that would make your idea into a putative
representation of something given empirically, and thus of an object to be
cognized [erkennenden Objeckts] in accordance with the laws of experience
[Erfahrungsgesetzen]’; A46: ‘raindrops … as appearances [Erscheinungen], are
already empirical objects [empirische Objekte]’; A239−40: ‘One need only take
as an example the concepts of mathematics … Although all these princi-
ples, and the representation of the object [Vorstellung des Gegenstandes] with
which this science occupies itself, are generated in the mind completely
a priori, they would still not signify anything at all if we could not always
exhibit their significance in appearances (empirical objects) [Erscheinungen
(empirischen Gegenständen)].’ Here, both conoscenza and conoscenze are taken
to stand for Erkenntnis (cognition), as distinct from Wissen (knowledge),
Wissenschaft (science), or Denken (thinking). Although spirito in philosophi-
cal Italian often corresponds to the German Geist, Galluppi is thinking of
Gemüt, meaning ‘mind,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘mental state,’ which Kant preferred in
the first Critique. Galluppi’s oggetto had to cover both Objekt and Gegenstand.
In general, the latter object of experience becomes the former object of
knowledge through the transcendental unity of apperception – a distinction
both elusive and important.
19 Galluppi (1846a), I, 280−1.
20 Galluppi (1846a), I, 423−8; Kant, KrV, B67-8: ‘… the form of intuition …
since it does not represent anything except insofar as something is posited
in the mind [Gemüte], can be nothing other than the way in which the mind
[Gemüt] is affected by its own activity [eigene Tätigkeit].’
21 Galluppi (1846a), I, 29−31, 424−5.
22 Kant, KrV, A832: ‘Since systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary
cognition [Erkenntnis] into science [Wissenschaft] … architectonic is the
doctrine of that which is scientific [Scientifischen] in our cognition [Erkennt-
nis] in general;’ B2: ‘We will understand by a priori cognitions … those that
occur absolutely independently of all experience [schlechterdings von aller
Erfahrung unabhängig];’ A267: ‘But if it is only sensible intuitions in which
we determine all objects merely as appearances, then the form of intuition
… precedes all matter (the sensations), thus space and time precede all
appearances [Erscheinungen] and all data of experience [datis der Erfahrung;
cf. Guyer and Wood, ‘data of appearances’], and instead first make the latter
possible.’
23 If Galluppi is implying that ‘appearance’ and ‘phenomenon’ are synony-
mous, he ignored Kant’s distinction; KrV, A19: ‘The undetermined object
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238
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tion all together belong to me means, accordingly, the same as that I unite
[vereinige] them in a self-consciousness.’
42 Kant, KrV, B130: ‘The manifold of representations [Mannigfaltige der Vorstel-
lungen] can be given in an intuition that is merely sensible … Yet the combi-
nation [Verbindung] (conjunctio) of a manifold in general can never come to
us through the senses … All combination [Verbindung] … is an action of the
understanding, which we would designate with the general title synthesis
in order … to draw attention to the fact that … among all representations
[Vorstellungen] combination [Verbindung] is the only one that is not given
through objects but … only by the subject’
43 Kant, KrV, B140: ‘The empirical unity of consciousness [empirische Einheit des
Bewußtseins], through association of the representations, itself concerns an
appearance, and is entirely contingent … The original [ursprünglichen] unity
of consciousness … through the pure synthesis of the understanding …
grounds a priori the empirical synthesis. That unity alone is objectively
valid; the empirical unity of apperception … has merely subjective validity.’
44 Kant, KrV, B132: ‘The I think must be able to accompany all my representa-
tions.’
45 Kant, KrV, A51: ‘If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive repre-
sentations … sensibility, then on the contrary the faculty for bringing forth
representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition [die Spontaneität des
Erkenntnisses], is the understanding [Verstand].’
46 Kant, KrV, B112: ‘… in all disjunctive judgments the sphere (the multitude
of everything that is contained under it) is represented as a whole [Ganzes]
divided into parts … coordinated with one another, not subordinated, so
that they do not determine each other unilaterally, as in a series, but recip-
rocally, as in an aggregate [Aggregat] … Now a similar connection is thought
of in an entirety [Ganzen] of things, since one is not subordinated, as effect,
under another, as the cause of its existence, but is rather coordinated with
the other simultaneously and reciprocally [zugleich und wechselseitig] as cause
with regard to its determination.’
47 Kant, KrV, A699: ‘The greatest systematic and purposive unity, which your
reason demands as a regulative principle to ground [zum Grunde] all inves-
tigation of nature, was precisely what justified [berechtigte] you in making
the idea of a highest intelligence the ground [Grunde] as a schema of the
regulative principle; and however much purposiveness you encounter in the
world in accordance with that principle, so much confirmation do you have
for the rightness [Rechtmässigkeit] of your idea.’ Elsewhere (A85) Kant treats
deduction as a technical legal concept, confirming the sense of Rechtmäs-
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sigkeit as ‘legitimacy’ or ‘lawfulness’; see above, the first part of the ‘Mixed
Logic,’ for ‘ground,’ motivo and motivare.
48 Kant, KrV, B141−2: ‘A judgment is nothing other than the way to bring
given cognitions to the objective unity [objektiven Einheit] of apperception.
That is the aim of the copula is in them: to distinguish the objective unity
[objektive Einheit] of given representations from the subjective.’
49 Kant, KrV, B161: ‘All synthesis, through which even perception [Wahrneh-
mung] itself becomes possible, stands under the categories, and since
experience [Erfahrung] is cognition through connected perceptions
[Wahrnehmungen], the categories are conditions of the possibility of experi-
ence [Erfahrung], and are thus also valid a priori of all objects of experience
[Gegenständen der Erfahrung].’
50 Kant, KrV, A140−1, B179−81: ‘Pure concepts a priori … must contain a
priori conditions of sensibility … that contain the general condition under
which alone the category can be applied to any object. We will call this for-
mal and pure condition of the sensibility, to which the use of the concept of
the understanding is restricted, the schema [Schema] of this concept of the
understanding, and we will call the procedure [Verfahren] of the understand-
ing with these schemata [Schematen] the schematism [Schematismus] of the
pure understanding … It is not images of objects but schemata that ground
[liegen … nicht Bilder der Gegenstände, sondern Schemata zum Grunde] our pure
sensible concepts … The concept [Begriff] of a dog signifies a rule [Regel]
in accordance with which my imagination [Einbildungskraft] can specify
the shape [die Gestalt verzeichnen kann] of a four-footed animal in general
…. This schematism [Schematismus] … is a hidden art in the depths of the
human soul … We can only say this much: the image [Bild] is a product
of the empirical faculty of productive imagination [produktiven Einbildung-
skraft], the schema [Schema] of sensible concepts (such as figures in space
[Figuren im Raume]) is a product and as it were a monogram [Monogramm]
of pure a priori imagination [Einbildungskraft].’ The ‘monogram’ to which
Kant compares a schema is not, of course, an initial sewn on a garment;
it is a bare figural outline, a ‘schematic’ image without colour or shading.
Galluppi, perhaps unsure what Kant had in mind, would certainly have
known the Greek etymology of ‘mono-gram’ – ‘one’ + ‘line’ or ‘letter’ – and
he probably used tipo (‘silhouette’ unfortunately inverts the image) not
abstractly, to mean ‘type’ or ‘model,’ but in some concrete sense.
51 Kant, KrV, A426: ‘We can intuit an indeterminate [unbestimmtes] quantum
as a whole [Ganzes], if it is enclosed within boundaries, without needing
to construct its totality [Totalität] through measurement, i.e., through the
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successive [sukzessive] synthesis of its parts’; A220: ‘In the concept of a figure
(Figur) that is enclosed between two straight lines there is no contradiction’;
B154: ‘We cannot think of a line without drawing it in thought … and we
cannot even represent time without, in drawing a straight line (which is
to be the external figurative [figürliche] representation of time), attending
merely to the action of the synthesis of the manifold through which we suc-
cessively determine [sukzessiv bestimmen] the inner sense, and thereby attend-
ing to the succession [Sukzession] of this determination in inner sense’;
A308−9: ‘Whether the principle that the series [Reihe] of conditions (in the
synthesis of appearances …) reaches to the unconditioned, has objective
correctness or not … or whether it … is only a logical prescription in the
ascent [im Aufsteigen] to ever higher conditions to approach completeness
in them …’
52 Kant, KrV, A520−1: ‘The world has no first beginning in time and no outer-
most boundary [Grenze] in space. For in the opposite case … a perception
of boundedness [Begrenzung] through absolutely empty time or empty space
would have to be possible.’
53 Kant, KrV, B203: ‘The consciousness of the homogenous manifold … is
the concept of a magnitude [Größe] (Quanti) … The appearances are all
magnitudes [Größen], and indeed extensive magnitudes [extensive Größen] …
as intuitions in time and space’; A527: ‘The infinite division [of an appear-
ance in space] indicates only the appearance as quantum continuum, and is
inseparable from the filling of space [Raumes] … But as soon as something
is assumed as a quantum discretum, the multiplicity of units in it is deter-
mined; hence it is always equal to a number [Zahl].’
54 Galluppi (1846a), I, 48−9.
55 Kant, KrV, A201: ‘The principle of sufficient reason is the ground of pos-
sible experience, namely the objective cognition of appearances with regard
to their relation in the successive series [Reihenfolge] of time.’
56 Kant, KrV, A140−1: ‘Now this representation of a general procedure of the
imagination [Einbildungskraft] for providing a concept with its image [Bild]
is what I call the schema for this concept. In fact it is not images of objects
[Bilder der Gegenstände] but schemata that ground [liegen … zum Grunde] our
pure sensible concepts.’
57 Kant, KrV, A732−3: ‘A synthetic principle … can never be immediately
[unmittelbar] certain from mere concepts because I must always look around
for some third thing, namely the condition of time-determination in an
experience, and could never directly [direkt] cognize such a principle imme-
diately [unmittelbar] from concepts alone.’
58 Kant, KrV, B207: ‘In all appearances the real [das Reale], which is an object
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244
2
Antonio Rosmini
1. Locke. Locke took it upon himself to solve the problem of the origin
of ideas. He said that all ideas come from sensation and from reflection.
By reflection he meant the operation of the faculty of the human mind
on sensations. Consequently, he denied that there are innate ideas in the
mind. By innate ideas are meant cognitions that a person has in himself
naturally.
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Rosmini, A Sketch
cause. They know sensations before and after, but they reason falsely if
they believe that what comes before must be the cause of what comes
after, which is the fallacy of hoc post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Therefore, when-
ever people talk about things that they take to be causes of the sensible
world, they presume to do what they cannot do since it is impossible to
start from sensations and arrive at knowledge of any cause. This system
is plainly wicked because by denying causes or putting them in question
it also denies or puts in question the existence of the first cause, which
is God himself.
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has in its very nature an instinct that leads it this far. This instinct was
accepted as a primitive faculty for which no further explanation could
be given. Therefore, according to Reid, there is a natural suggestion (as
he puts it) that makes it necessary for a person who receives sensations
not to stop there but to move on by the act of thinking to the belief
that there are real beings, called bodies, which are causes of the same
sensations.
By means of this primitive faculty that asserts or perceives bodily sub-
stance itself, Reid thought that he had refuted Berkeley’s idealism and
secured the existence of bodies, as he also thought that he had refuted
Hume’s scepticism by relocating the criterion of certainty in the primi-
tive faculty of human nature. He also supposed that he had harmonized
philosophy with mankind’s common sense, from which the English phi-
losophers had strayed.
The merit of the Scottish school lies in having made the first attempts
to lead philosophy out of the sensist system of Locke and Condillac.
6. Kant. While it appeared that the Scottish school had finally established
solid foundations for philosophical knowledge, the sophist of Königs-
berg rose up to overturn them again and compound the damage. Taking
the father of Scottish philosophy at his word, Kant reasoned in roughly
this way:
You are right to say that our conviction of the existence of bodies does
not come from sensations but from an entirely different faculty with a
nature of its own, so that the very nature of the human mind obliges it
to assert that there are bodies whenever its sensory faculty receives sensa-
tions. Now if this is the case, the belief we have in the existence of bodies
is an effect of the nature of our minds. If our minds were differently con-
stituted, then, it would not be necessary for us to assert that bodies exist.
The truth of the existence of bodies is therefore subjective – relative to
the mind that states it and not at all objective. We are obliged to acknowl-
edge that there are bodies, in other words, because of how we are built
and because we cannot resist the impulse of our nature that leads us to
this conclusion. But this does nothing to show that bodies exist in them-
selves, that they have an objective existence independent of us.
Kant generalized this thought to all human cognitions, saying that,
since they are all acts and products of a mind that cannot reach beyond
itself, they could have no truth or certainty except the subjective kind,
and so the mind could never be assured that things are as they appear.
He observed that all beings act according to the laws of their own natures
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Rosmini, A Sketch
and that their products bear the stamp of those laws. Thus, if cognitions
are products of the human mind, they too must be shaped according
to the nature and laws of that mind. And if there were another mind
constructed differently than ours, he added, who knows whether it
would observe things entirely unlike those that appear to us? He used
the example of a mirror that produces an image according to the shape
of things as they are reflected in the mirror, so that a convex mirror, on
this example, makes all objects elongated, while a concave mirror makes
them shortened.
Thus, the human mind gives its own forms to the objects of its cog-
nitions; it does not get the forms from the objects themselves. So the
philosopher’s task is to discover what these forms are, to list them one
by one, and describe each one with its own determinations. For that
purpose, the only requirement is to consider all the objects of human
knowledge, moving the forms of these objects into the human mind and
thus removing the transcendental illusion that makes people believe that
forms are of the object when they are of the mind itself. Kant undertook
this labour in his work titled The Critique of Pure Reason, and he carried it
out in the following way.
He said that there are two forms [of sensibility]: one of external sense,
called space, the other of internal sense, called time; that there are four
forms of the understanding, which are quantity, quality, modality, and
relation; finally, that there are three forms of reason, which are absolute
matter, absolute whole, and absolute mind – matter, world, and God, in
other words.
Then he claimed to reconcile all the completely antagonistic systems
devised by philosophers. He divided them into two large classes, calling
them dogmatists and sceptics. The dogmatists were those who accepted the
truth and certainty of human cognitions; the sceptics were those who
denied all truth and certainty to human cognitions. He said that both
were right. The dogmatists were right because there is a truth and a cer-
tainty, but it is subjective or relative to the human subject. The sceptics
were right because there is no objective truth and certainty belonging to
objects taken in themselves, since no human can know anything as it is
in itself.
Kant called this system of his critical because it makes a critique of
other systems and of human reason itself. He called it transcendental phi-
losophy because it transcends the senses and experience and submits to
its critique everything that people think they know about the sensible
world outside.
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7. Fichte. Fichte was a follower of Kant. By publishing the work titled The
Science of Knowledge, he believed he had given a scientific explanation of
Kant’s system.7 But in this exposition Kant refused to recognize his own
system, so then Fichte realized that he had invented a new one.
Here is the difference between the critical philosophy and transcendental
idealism, as Fichte’s system is still called. Kant certainly said that people
cannot know whether objects that appear to them are as they appear, but
he did not exclude the possibility that they are as they appear: they might
exist independently of the person, but the person cannot be sure of this.
Fichte denied this possibility altogether, maintaining that objects can be
nothing other than products of the person.
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8. Critique of the Foregoing Systems. The observation that Reid made about
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the sensism of Locke, Condillac, Berkeley, and Hume was correct because
it rested on a more thorough examination of the phenomena of the
human mind. The fact is that if a person had only the sensory faculty, he
would sense but would not think. Thought goes beyond sensation because
we also think things that do not fall under the senses, as we think about
substance, cause, and spirits. Therefore, the objects of human thinking
are not merely sensations.
But what is more difficult to understand well – obvious though it is – is
that the way in which sensations are thought is different from the way in
which they are sensed. And in fact, the thought asserts the sensation in
itself, and therefore asserts it whether it is present, past, or future. I will
think of the pleasant smell of the rose that I sniffed yesterday, for exam-
ple; the sensation is no longer present, but the thought is present; there-
fore, the sensation and the thought of the sensation are not the same
thing. The same applies to a future sensation. I keep thinking about the
pleasant sensations that I will enjoy tomorrow while hunting or dining;
the sensations do not yet exist, yet the thought already exists. Therefore,
the essence of the thought is different from that of the sensation. That
being the case, I must conclude that even where the sensation as well as
the thought of the sensation are both present to me, the two still differ
from one another, and the one is independent of the other.
And how often does a person experience sensations without thinking
of them, especially if the sensations are not very lively or are habitual
and manifold, like those that a person has at every moment of exist-
ence? They pass unnoticed: the mind, especially if distracted and busy
at something else, pays them no attention. Hence, it is not at all hard to
grasp that there are some things that are purely sensory and others that
combine thought with sensation. The first are the lower animals and
the second are human beings. This suffices to explain why the funda-
mental principle of Locke and his school is entirely demolished. Locke
confused sensation with thought and claimed to be speaking of the latter
when everything that he said could apply only to the former.
Although Reid easily succeeded in refuting sensism, he then hit a brick
wall. While he recognized the need to establish a philosophy of thinking
and to offer a specific explanation of this phenomenon that could never
be explained by referring to the senses, he also clung to the choice of
declaring this phenomenon to be an instinct with its own special char-
acter, and that human nature is endowed with it. In this way, he recog-
nized only the subjective part of thought and forgot the objective part.
Accordingly, he did not succeed in understanding the true nature of
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thought itself. The reason is that thought occurs precisely where there is
an object present to the subject in such a way that the object is never con-
fused with that subject but remains distinct. And since thought depends
on this continuing and necessary distinctiveness, if the object could ever
be confused with the subject, the thinking would be altogether lost.
Kant availed himself of this error of Reid’s by calling into question
again not only the existence of bodies but indeed all objects of human
cognition, claiming (as mentioned above) that all these objects are just
products of the subject arising from an irresistible and natural human
instinct. From this came Fichte’s transcendental idealism, which is only
the logical development of Kant’s system.
Now to comprehend this huge error, this seedbed of other errors and
ultimately of German pantheism, we must reason as follows: I know that I
am not the objects of my thought. I know that the objects of my thought
are not me. I know that I am not the bread that I eat, for example, or the
sun that I see, or the person with whom I speak. This is obvious to me
because I am known to myself so that, were I not so known, I would not
be myself. Therefore, no thing can be me unless I know it to be me. But
I do not know that the bread, the sun, and the person with whom I talk
are myself, and so I know that they are not me.
Kant cannot reply that I am mistaken, that the other things could be
myself without my knowing it, precisely because, if I did know it, I would
no longer be myself, the reason being that the I includes conscious-
ness of itself. Without this consciousness of itself, the I would not be I
but would be something else. Therefore, the objects that stand before
thought are essentially distinct from the I. For the same reason, moreo-
ver, they cannot be modifications of the I because modifications of the I
exist as such in the consciousness that constitutes the very nature of the
I. Whatever the objects of thought may be, then – which remains to be
seen – it remains beyond doubt that they are neither the I nor a modifi-
cation of it.
Here the idealists raise this question: What is the bridge of communi-
cation between the I and its objects? Can the I go out of itself and reach
a thing outside it?
This is the reply to their question: Can your query, no matter how dif-
ficult it is, even if the problem were insoluble, destroy the assertion of
fact that we have already proved? Logic demands that when we have a
truth of fact, even if we do not know how to explain it, we still must not
abandon it. The only conclusion we would have to draw would be the
need to confess our own ignorance. But this is not our situation.
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From what has been said, it appears that the object known is something
entirely different from the knowing subject. The knowing subject is a
person; the object as such is impersonal. Nonetheless, there is a sense
in which one can say that the known object is a subject that knows, with-
out in the least confusing object with subject or mixing up their natures
– in fact, by keeping them distinct in such a way that the distinction
is one of the essential features of cognition. But there is no cognition
where there is not a distinction between subject and object. The ques-
tion, then, comes down to finding out where the object of knowledge
comes from. This is the question of the origin of ideas and of human
cognitions.
Human cognitions are divided into two groups, called cognitions
by intuition and cognitions by assertion. Cognitions by intuition are
those that have to do with the nature of things in themselves, things
in their possibility. Ideas are just those things considered in themselves
as possibly subsisting or not subsisting. Cognitions by way of assertion
or judgment are those that we acquire in asserting or judging that a
thing subsists or does not subsist. From this definition follow two con-
sequences:
i. That we cannot have this second type of cognition unless the first
precedes it because we cannot assert that a thing subsists or does
not subsist unless we already know the thing itself in its own possible
nature; for example, I cannot say that a tree subsists or a person sub-
sists unless I first know what a tree is or what a person is. But knowing
what something is amounts to the same thing as knowing it in its pos-
sibility, since I can know what a tree is and yet not know that this tree
also subsists.
ii. That the objects belong only to the first kind of cognition because
nothing happens in the second kind but asserting or denying the sub-
sistence of an object known in the first kind. Whence it follows that
this second way of cognizing does not supply a new object to the mind
but only declares the subsistence of the object that is already known.
The first way of cognizing is what presents possible objects to us, then,
and these are called ideas. The second way does not present new possi-
ble objects, new ideas, but shows us beliefs about known objects. Hence,
there are two terms of cognition, ideas and beliefs: with the first we know
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the possible world, with the second we know the real world that subsists.
Thus there are two categories of things: possible things and subsistent
things – ideas and things, in other words.
We have seen that the objects of our cognitions are essentially distinct
from ourselves, that we are the subject who knows them. Whether these
objects are purely possible or likewise if they subsist, they are distinct
from us just the same and independent. This sheds new light for our
understanding of the nature of ideas since we are logically obliged to
conclude, on the one hand, that ideas are not nothing; on the other,
that they are not ourselves nor modifications of ourselves; and, finally,
that they have their own way of existing, entirely unlike that of real or
subsistent things.
This mode of existence of ideal objects, or rather of ideas, is such that
it does not fall under our bodily senses. This is why ideal objects entirely
escaped the notice of many philosophers, who went about philosophiz-
ing with a built-in prejudice that led them to suppose that anything that
did not fall under sense is nothing. But it is a fact that possible objects
do not fall under sense, and so there is no way to explain cognition of
them by referring only to bodily senses – a new and conclusive refutation
of sensism.
So, then, if ideas – ideal and possible objects, that is – are not supplied
by the senses, what is their origin?
It helps to state in advance an observation about the special features of
ideas. These are chiefly two: universality and necessity. An ideal or mere-
ly possible object, in fact, is always universal in the sense that by itself it
makes known the nature of all the unspecified individuals in which it is
realized. Take the idea of man, for example. The idea of man is, as we
have said, the ideal man. Realized human individuals can exist in what-
ever number one likes, and in all of them there is still the same human
nature: the nature is one, the individuals are many. Now what does the
idea of man, the ideal man, express and make known to me? The nature.
Hence, whoever possesses the idea of man, had he the power to create,
could produce as many men as he pleased by the idea alone. In the same
way, he would know them all by the idea alone.
In this way, a sculptor who had conceived the idea of a statue could
reproduce this idea in marble time after time without ever leaving the
idea exhausted. The ideal statue would be always one and the same,
keeping an exemplary type of this kind always before the mind. Material
copies would be many, all shaped and known by the same idea. This is
what is called the universality of ideas and what distinguishes them cat-
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egorically from real objects, which are always particular, and from sensa-
tions, which are also particular.
The feature of necessity is likewise obvious: ideas are possible objects,
and it is clear that what is possible cannot be other than possible, and is,
therefore, possible necessarily. The possible is what does not involve con-
tradiction: therefore, every object that does not involve contradiction is
possible of necessity. Now all finite and real beings are, in their reality,
only contingent and not necessary, as opposed to possible beings. This
is because we can think of any finite and real object either that it is, or,
equally, that it is not, while, for the possible object, we can never think
that it is not – that it is not possible, in other words. By way of example,
man in his possibility is necessary because nothing can make man not
possible; a real man, by contrast, is contingent because he can be and
can not be, can happen to be or happen not to be.
Universality and necessity, therefore, are the two primitive features of
ideas, but from them come two others, which are infinity and eternity.
Ideas have in themselves an infinity because they are universal. No real
and limited being is universal but is of itself determinate and incom-
municable to others. Therefore, ideas do not belong to the class of real
limited beings. Ideas are also eternal just because they are necessary, for
what is necessary always was necessary and always will be, and what always
was and always will be is eternal.
Having contemplated these lofty features of ideas, Saint Augustine,
followed by Saint Thomas and preceded by Plato, concluded that ideas
reside in God, as in their source and foundation. From this opinion Mal-
ebranche derived his system: that man, and every finite intelligence, sees
everything that he sees in God. And His Eminence Cardinal Gerdil ulti-
mately defended the system against theological charges brought against
it. We do not accept this system entirely, and here it would take too long
to develop a critique of it.8 But we recognize in it a basis for truth, and
the difference between Malebranche’s system and ours involves only
various particulars.
We take great care to distinguish ideas as they are in God from ideas
as they are seen by our intellect. Ideas are in God in a different way than
they shine on our minds. In God ideas have a mode of being that does
not differ from that of God himself, and this is the mode of the divine
Word. This Word is unique, without any real distinction in itself, and it is
God himself. But ideas do not shine on our minds in this way.
In our minds ideas are manifold, and by themselves they do not con-
stitute the human word because that word, or speech, expresses a judg-
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a given book. This is the determinate idea of a book, and yet this idea
is still general because it is a pure idea, not a real book. It is a type, an
exemplar that stands before my mind, from which an indefinite number,
a real number, of books – all alike – can be formed.
By contrast, I can also have the idea of a book which is indeterminate
in some respect, as happens when I think of a book with its essential ele-
ments but leave out accidents of size, shape, typeface, and so on. Now
ideas that are wholly determinate are called concrete ideas, while ideas
that are indeterminate in some respect are called abstract ideas. But if I
take away all its determinations, both accidental and essential, from the
idea of book, the book vanishes from my mind, and all I have left is the
idea of a wholly indeterminate being.
Ideas, therefore, are distributed in our minds in the form of a pyramid
that ends in a point. The first layer of this pyramid is formed by con-
crete ideas, wholly determinate, which just for that reason form a larger
number. The other layers are composed of ideas ever less determinate,
which decrease in number as more determinations are removed from
them. The point of the pyramid is the idea of being alone, indeterminate
in all respects.
Wishing to give a satisfactory explanation of the origin of ideas, then,
we need to account for two things; first, the origin of the indeterminate
idea; second, of its determinations. And in regard to determinations of
the idea of being (which is precisely the idea taken as indeterminate), we
find their origin easily by way of the following observation. Suppose that
a person has the idea of being – that he knows what being is, in other
words: it is immediately understood that he can turn sensation into an
idea. The reason is that when he experiences sensations, he can say to
himself, ‘Here is a being limited and determined by sensation.’ Seeing
a star, for example, he can say in his thoughts, ‘This is a being that gives
light,’ and so on.
Sensations, then, provide him the first determinations of being, so
that when he thinks about a luminous being that acts on his visual sense,
at that point he no longer thinks only about indeterminate being but
about a being with the determination of luminosity, of varying intensity,
of magnitude, of shape, and so on. All these qualities make the being
determinate, and all are provided by sense. But this does not mean that
such determinations of the idea are themselves sensations. We under-
stand this by distinguishing the various operations that the human mind
performs in this process.
In fact, when a person seeing a star says in his thoughts, ‘Here is a
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seen, these are nothing but this same idea of being that the human mind
clothes with determinations on the occasion of sensations and as the
mind experiences various feelings.
To reach an explanation of such a problem it helps, first of all, to
notice the corollaries that derive from this account, which are:
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first idea in order to get determinate ideas from the idea; finally, it
is the light of understanding because it is knowable in itself, whereas
sensations are knowable by means of it as they become its determina-
tions and are known as such.
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NOTES
1 Rosmini (1881), the text followed here, is the first edition and posthumous:
see the Introduction, section 2, n15; section 6, n61.
2 For Condillac in Italy, see the Introduction, section 2.
3 In 1758 Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715−71) published his controver-
sial physicalist psychology, De l’Esprit, which influenced Jeremy Bentham
(1748−1832) and the utilitarians.
4 Bishop George Berkeley (1685−1753) called his famous work Three Dia-
logues between Hylas and Philonous, but Rosmini has ‘Filylas’ for ‘Hylas’; see
Berkeley (1713).
5 For Reid in Italy, see the Introduction, sections 2 and 6.
6 For ideology, see the Introduction, sections 2, 4, and 6.
7 The only full presentation of the ever-mutating Wissentschaftslehre published
in the lifetime of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762−1814) is Fichte (1794).
8 The eminent Savoyard theologian, Cardinal Hyacinthe Gerdil (1718−1802),
fervently opposed Enlightenment materialism and became famous as a
critic of Rousseau. He defended Father Nicolas Malebranche (1638−1715)
not only against Locke but also against Catholic enemies, including Antoine
Arnauld. Through Gerdil, who nearly became pope when Rosmini was an
infant, Malebranche remained influential for Italian thinkers, especially
Gioberti, even though some of his books had been put on the Index of Forbid-
den Books; see Gerdil (1748).
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the one hand mixing up what is different, on the other making vari-
able what is the same – exactly the reverse of a thoughtful and scientific
approach. The pantheist forces the reflective distinction of cognition so
far back into the confusion of intuition, which by itself is powerless to
give order to science, that he actually eliminates those first, crude out-
lines of intuition that provide a guiding thread for later reflection. They
are like emplacements or parapets marking an accessible route on which
thoughtful people can reach the goal by a direct path without wandering
randomly. Pantheism can thus be compared to that ultimate and abso-
lute chaos imagined by certain atheist philosophers. Not only would this
reduce the world to primeval disorder, it would also preclude any further
cosmogony, killing the seeds of life that float in the primeval night and
bring forth from its womb the wonders that we see.
The efforts of the dualist are even more futile and paltry. He not only
splits the concept of God in half; he also eliminates the essence of knowl-
edge, which lies in the order, the rhythm, and the placement and system-
atic linkage of principles and conclusions. Just as these things require
number and harmony, they also need unity.
The problems of pantheism and dualism cannot be solved by combin-
ing them and balancing one against the other – as some of the ancients
tried to do, especially Pythagoras, and the famous Hegel among the
moderns. Hegel’s system, to mention it in passing, is basically a renewal
(a worsening, in part) of Pythagoreanism and a return to the infantile
philosophy of paganism. In Hegel’s theory, contrariety is eliminated by
identity, and dualism is corrected and remedied by pantheism – a cure
worse than the disease. The brilliant German was not aware that the
reconciling dialectic must operate on the concept of creation, not on
that of sameness. Nor did he see that one should look not in absolute
thought for the substantial coexistence of contraries but in absolute will
for the cause that produces them.
The principle of creation is the hinge on which the first science must
turn. And this is possible only where the Catholic word resounds in its
purity, where pantheistic teachings in every era have been a scandal –
even stranger than they were rare. Exactly such a place is Italy, whose
philosophy, first-born in the Occident, has renewed itself many times
in different forms, following various political events on the peninsula
but always keeping itself clean of the infection of pantheism – or less
infected than the philosophies of other regions.
Before Christ, all dissenting philosophies vacillated between the pan-
theist system and dualism, producing from these two systems either a
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ended among us.8 Still, those who have lived some time among foreign-
ers and have largely forgotten the thought of the fatherland find it hard
to take it up again, choosing to return home only after having sampled
other regions. In the same way, after the Italian mind has shaken off
the French yoke and forsaken the site of servitude, it wishes to try other
countries, wandering in the wilderness before returning to rest in the
promised land, held by the fathers of old. Italy’s is a strange destiny. Hav-
ing lost her self-awareness for many centuries, she gropes her way to find
it again, looking where it is not nor can be, yet believing that she can
have peace without returning, like the prodigal son of the Gospel, to the
bosom of her parent.
Such is the final form of Italian philosophy as it still persists in the
present – a clever imitation of Scottish and German teachings. Our brave
and honoured Galluppi is the Reid of Italy, drawing people back to the
truth by correct understanding improved by deep analysis, but with-
out breaking through the boundaries of observation and experiments.
Armed with these implements, Galluppi gloriously vanquished the sen-
sism of his predecessors, combating it with these weapons of his. He
made our thinkers familiar again with that shrewd forbearance, experi-
mental and inductive, that produces useful discoveries in the sphere of
internal facts – the application of Galileo’s method to psychology.
But direct sensation is not enough for philosophy to be a science. Sen-
sible phenomena cannot be completely explained without rising higher
and entering the secret sanctuary of reason. Thus, as the Scottish school
was displaced by the Critical school in the previous period, in our time
Rosmini succeeded Galluppi. From terminology to incidental themes
and beyond, the sect that he founded cleverly revived the errors and
pretensions of German Cartesianism – of Kantianism, in other words.
Renewed and Italianized by the illustrious Roveretan, in one respect
this Kantianism is inferior to the teachings of the Scots and Galluppi
because it moves away from the reliable guidance of common sense and
experience.9 On the other hand, it provides no remedy for the defects of
the aforementioned schools since the reason to which it has recourse is
a sham, empty and sterile. Reason for Rosmini and Kant is purely subjec-
tive, however they may name or define it, and a subjective faculty cannot
be the foundation of science. It neither helps the mind escape the limits
of psychology nor provides a firm basis for that same psychology. No
wonder, then, that Rosminianism has shown itself up now to be so unpro-
ductive in the hands of its author. He has been able to extract nothing
more from it than an insubstantial ethics bristling with the spines and
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voluntary exile of ten years only to end his days suffering from a long
and painful illness.10 He was skilled in many fields of learning and quite
expert in Greek, but he directed all this knowledge towards philosophy
and religion, the apex of all his thoughts. He lived and died in love with
the Idea and found consolation in contemplating it, imitating Galileo
and Homer, whose blindness afflicted him in the last years of his life. I
thought it not out of place to mention this man, whose modesty and mis-
fortune deprived him of the fame he deserved, because it seems fitting
to me that Italy should measure her gratitude not so much by results,
which often depend on chance, as by the noble efforts and great-souled
intentions of her sons.
The reform conceived by Vico and pursued by Mamiani cannot be
brought to completion unless the ancient Pelasgian tradition is joined
with the Christian and both are reduced to a single principle whose sub-
stance is based on reason while the expression that gives meaning to it
belongs to revelation. This is the principle of creation, the only act that
comprehends and controls all knowledge, infusing it with a new breath
of life.
The idea of creation is as old among mankind as the truth that corre-
sponds to it. But since it was first obscured and then lost by the dissenting
peoples, this idea has not had sovereign power until now in Christian
philosophy, nor has it gained the supreme place that it would need to
inform every part of the encyclopedic enterprise. There are various caus-
es to which one might attribute the decline of ancient Pelasgian realism
and of the realism that flourished in the two Christian periods of the
Fathers and the Middle Ages. In any event, philosophical opinions based
on truth do not decay or decline except when the method used to devel-
op and establish them does not correspond to their intrinsic truth and
goodness. And since imperfection in methods prevents good teachings
from taking root, they cannot flourish again unless the old flaw is fixed,
and, as the truth unfolds, new supplements and new levels of subtlety
and splendour are added to it.
The Fathers and the most distinguished masters of the schools served
the Pelasgian philosophy very well, to be sure, cleansing it of every stain
of pantheism and handling many parts of it with mastery. Their work was
incomplete, however: the principle of creation as it actually informs the
thoughts and writings of these outstanding figures was not put formally
at the head of their science, so the principle was not established and inte-
grated by means of a scientific formula. One cause of this, I believe, was
that the Christian schools conferred supreme authority on the names of
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Plato and Aristotle. They repudiated their errors but did not improve
their methods. The other cause was the difficulty – almost a moral impos-
sibility – of making a new blueprint for an enterprise as all-encompassing
as the totality of human knowledge.
When false religions and flawed civilizations die, they leave behind
them a clear trail that usually lasts as long as the eras when they pre-
vailed. Hence, since paganism was rooted in Europe’s soil for so long,
many traces of it have naturally survived and still remain in the present.
With these residues so conspicuous in the arts, literature, and laws, in
customs and institutions and even in the names of people and objects,
no wonder that the situation has been no different in the philosophical
disciplines. Therefore, one can truly state – without insulting even the
holiest and most eminent names – that even when European philosophy
was orthodox in substance, it preserved some part of pagan heterodoxy
in its methods and procedures.
Briefly, this heterodox element can be traced to the lack of a genuine
ontologism. Even in full flight, pagan philosophy was psychological or
cosmological, taking mankind or the world as points of departure, or
in any case marrying these two concepts to the supreme and absolute
Idea as the start of its theorizing. Thus, the Prime of the most ancient
Italic school was the duality of the Doric Theocosm, like the Cronoto-
pos of Iran or Chaldaea among the Orientals.11 The pantheism in the
Pythagorean concept was tempered, through its Pelasgian character, by
the distinction between Theos and Hyle – a distinction that preserved
the decree of religion, up to a certain point, at the loss of scientific unity.
With the doctrine of creation, Christianity reduced the Prime of faith
to its ontological simplicity and purity. But Christianity professed not
to intervene directly in the human disciplines, contenting itself with
authoritative instruction about true belief without telling how to explain
or demonstrate it by a scientific method. For this reason, the psychologi-
cal Prime was not rigorously discussed in the Christian schools. Many dis-
tinguished it from the ontological Prime. Others, realizing that the two
Primes are identical, set the concept of Being apart from that of creation
and thereby deprived the protological formula of the most essential con-
dition of its integrity.
These scientific mistakes did not prejudice the essence of doctrine as
long as theology took precedence over theory and religion played the
propaedeutic role – doing duty for intuition, as it were, in relation to
reflective cognition and science in general. But when philosophy was
detached from its leader and chose to go its own way, the defect in the
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protological principle bore fruit. Within a short span of years, the psy-
chologism of Descartes gave birth to pantheism, biblical rationalism, sen-
sism, fatalism, and immoralism, which were seen combined and unified
as a system in the work of Spinoza.
Today, therefore, we need to construct the fundamental formula of
knowledge. Other philosophical questions are of little moment in com-
parison to it. This question is the basis and meaning of them all, since
the whole structure of science depends on its resolution. Protology is
the primary theoretical need of the current era and is well-suited to its
character.12 It matches today’s aspiration to restore ancient orthodoxy in
the field of reality and knowledge by driving resurrected paganism back
to the grave, while at the same time giving new order to the encyclopedia
and to Europe, shaken and shattered as they are by three centuries of
political and religious schism.
For this reason, the establishment of principles and sources is of the
greatest consequence in every sphere. Today, this is the unanimous
instinct of popular desire, of learned research, and of serious thinking in
the various domains of action and inquiry. But the only possible protolo-
gy is the one that is based on the Ideal Formula, which expresses the first
origin of things and produces the first principles from which cognitions
emerge.13 The doctrine of the Formula is both old and new. It is old in
that its seeds are included in the principle of creation, written by God’s
hand on the frontispiece of the book of revelation. It is new because no
such principle has been scientifically explained until now.
This should cause us no surprise. As I have just noted, Christian philos-
ophy retained part of the procedure of pagan science until the sixteenth
century (beyond the damage done by nominalists, even among the ranks
of the realists), and from then on it was weakened by Cartesianism, which
is a second paganism. This is now throwing off its last sparks, which fore-
tells the coming triumph of Christian ontologism. Burning below the
surface and consuming all their tinder, these fires are naturally dying
out to leave a firm and fertile soil ready for the human industry that
soon produces fruitful fields and populous cities, the nesting-ground of
science and civilization.
NOTES
1 Gioberti (1843) is the first edition; Gioberti (1938−9), III, used here, is the
Edizione nazionale.
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2 Gioberti calls his project ‘protology,’ the study of what comes first – origins
and first principles – and he sees this as a kind of ontology or metaphysics,
as distinct from an epistemology or psychology.
3 On Gioberti’s use of the term ‘Prime,’ see the beginning of the next selec-
tion, from Gioberti (1840).
4 Among the less familiar names in this list, Nasks are volumes or sections
of the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scripture; Zervan Akarana is the Zoroastrian
Boundless Time; Porphyry mentions Samanaioi as Bactrian priests; the
Emperor Huizong (U Sheng) promoted Taoism.
5 Albert of Saxony and Peter Abelard.
6 The Servite theologian Paolo Sarpi (1552−1623), who wrote a critical
history of the Council of Trent and supported Galileo, was a critic of the
papacy and loyal to his native Venice against papal Rome.
7 For Genovesi, see the Introduction, section 3.
8 For Romagnosi, see the Introduction, section 2.
9 Roveretan: Rosmini was born in Rovereto.
10 Annibale Santorre, the Piedmontese Count of Santarosa (1783−1825), died
supporting Greek revolutionaries in 1825, a few years after the failure of his
own constitutionalist uprising in 1821; Victor Cousin and Ugo Foscolo sup-
ported him in exile. Santarosa’s comrade, Luigi Ornato (1787−1842), was
also a philosopher; he studied Plato under the influence of Malebranche,
Vico, and Jacobi: see Gentile (1917): 143−65.
11 For ‘Prime’ see n2 above; both Theocosm (Godworld) and Cronotopos
(Timeplace) express dualities.
12 For protology, see the first paragraph of Gioberti’s statement.
13 For the Ideal Formula, see section 8 of the Introduction and the following
selection from Gioberti (1840).
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What we call the Ideal Formula is a proposition that expresses the Idea in
a clear, simple, and precise way by means of a judgment. Since a person
cannot think without judging, he cannot think the Idea without mak-
ing a judgment whose meaning is the Ideal Formula. This must consist
of two terms joined together by a third, in keeping with the nature of
every judgment, and it must not go wrong by excess or defect. It would
go wrong by defect if it did not contain all the elements that constitute
the Idea – if, in other words, each notion that occurs in the human mind
could not be reduced synthetically to some one of the elements of that
Formula. It would go wrong by excess if there were something more in
its explicit content than the constituent elements – if, that is to say, one
of the concepts that the Formula expresses were contained in others
signified by it.
In taking up this topic, I do not intend at this time to proceed with
the rigour of method that befits ontology – a pure and strict synthesis
that would be out of place in this introductory work. Since the doctrine
that I am setting forth (though at its roots it is as ancient as the truth)
is completely alien to current practice in philosophy, I thought that I
should smooth the way with the type of presentation that would permit
me to compare the main points of my approach with customary practice
and bring my system as near as possible to today’s science. Now contem-
porary philosophy is by nature psychological. Ontology, even when it is
permitted, is considered only an adjunct to the experimental science of
the human mind. My view is just the opposite, and I hold it firmly: in fact,
in the appropriate place I hope to be able to show, with evidence that will
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because they are relative: the first refers to the qualities or modes that
presuppose it; the other two imply the idea of relation in general by
declaring it absent. A relative concept resulting from two prior concepts
cannot be prime. What remains, then, is the concept of Being, which
constitutes the psychological Prime and therefore the philosophical
Prime, according to the stipulation that we have made.
That Being is the philosophical Prime is a claim dating back to primi-
tive times, as we shall see elsewhere. Among the moderns who professed
it outright, the most illustrious, no doubt, is Nicolas Malebranche,
neglected by his compatriots; they preferred German fantasies or the
frivolities of Descartes to the teachings of the greatest thinker of the
age after Leibniz – or the greatest French philosopher of all time. I am
not speaking about any of the Germans who have revived that opinion,
though only in appearance, altering and bringing it into disrepute with
the nonsense of pantheism. In our day, the illustrious Antonio Rosmini,
in his New Essay on the Origin of Ideas, partly renewed the ancient opinion
and brought it into the debate that gives the main theme of his book a
depth and sharpness of insight uncommon today.
As psychological analysis, Rosmini’s work is more complete than that
of his predecessors, and without doubt it has led science forward. No
one before him has made as full and thoughtful an investigation of what
I call the psychological Prime – insofar as reflection can deal with it. But for
theoretical science this is not enough, not enough for that same analytic
understanding of the mind that cannot avoid errors and attain its goal,
even within merely experiential limits, unless it is based on the principles
and conclusions of a higher discipline.
This, in my view, Rosmini has not done. Following the practices of psy-
chologism, he sought new results for science as an analytic observer, but
as an ontologist he may have cut his gains short, not taking science back
to that height where the best of the ancients had put it. This takes noth-
ing at all away from the just praise due him, since in this case the loss
must be attributed to method and the gain to genius, the one being the
fault of the time, the other the merit of the philosopher. But if anyone
should ask me why the eminent Author followed a defective method,
I would answer that it is not given to the best minds to rise completely
above the problems of their times. I will describe the reasons that cause
me to speak in this way, realizing that I am dealing with one of those
people who are not offended when, for love of truth, someone disagrees
with their views and explains the grounds for disagreement. I assume
that the reader is familiar with the work of the illustrious writer; other-
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1. All ideas have originated from the idea of being. I accept this first statement
with the qualifications that I will mention shortly but could not express
here without making other points first.
2. The primitive idea of being represents only possible being. If this claim were
true, it would follow that the idea of the possible precedes that of the
real, which in the first place is contrary to the practice of psychology.
Given that the abstract follows the concrete and arises from it according
to the natural process of the mind, concrete cognition of the real must
precede abstract cognition of the possible. But if one asserts that a dif-
ferent practice holds for the first act of the mind and that the beginning
of intellectual activity takes place in a particular way, I note that this way,
whatever it may be, must conform to the practice of logic. But accord-
ing to the practice of logic, the possible presupposes the real because
something possible could not be conceived without something real. If
nothing is in reality, nothing can be. A potency that consisted in a mere
potentiality without a prior act would be nothing, not a true potency.
This is why God is called pure act and why his power is included in his
actuality. Nor can one claim that recognizing this truth is a result of argu-
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possible triangle because the concept that I have of that triangle applies
to an infinite number of real triangles. In short, the concept of the real
becomes a concept of the possible by losing its concreteness and becom-
ing abstract, which occurs by means of reflection.
With regard to the mind that possesses it, the idea of Being needs to be
considered in two different moments: in the first act and in the second
act. The first act is a work of intuition, the second is a work of reflection. In
the first act, Being is represented as pure reality, completely simple, abso-
lute, necessary, and perfect; in the second act it is represented as possible.
But possibility presupposes reality just as reflection presupposes intuition,
neither more nor less. The proportion and correspondence that hold
between the two psychological acts and the two ontological states is abso-
lutely precise. The notion of possibility implies an intellectual elaboration,
an abstraction, that cannot occur in intuition, a completely simple faculty
that consists merely of contemplating the object as it is, without adding
anything to it or taking anything away. The possible can no more be intu-
ited with the eyes of the mind than seen with those of the body.
And truly, if the object of intuition were the possible, it would be cor-
rect to assume either that the possible is real, which takes us back to the
earlier argument, or that an object can subsist solely in the state of the
possible, which is absurd. Indeed, one can ask if the objective referent
of the idea of Being is in the mind or outside the mind. Anyone who
says that it is in the mind would incur all the sceptical consequences of
psychologism, and the objective truth of things would be destroyed. But
Rosmini expressly embraces the contrary view and states that the idea of
Being is a true entity distinct from the mind, that it is numerically one for
all people, immense, eternal, immutable, and absolute.9
If it is outside the mind, then, how could it ever subsist and be shown
to the human mind if it were merely possible? How could it commu-
nicate to the mind that intellectual light of which Rosmini speaks and
without which intuition could not take place? And what would this pure
possible be, then? The idea of possible being, perhaps, inasmuch as it
is found in the divine mind? But in that case we will have the intuition
of the possible being in the real Being – in God, that is – following the
teaching of St Augustine, St Bonaventura, and Malebranche, which Ros-
mini explicitly denies.10
I confess that I cannot really understand what the concept is that the
illustrious Author makes for himself of the objective character of ideal
being. In some places he seems to treat it as some sort of mean between
God and the human mind – a mean that logic cannot permit, however.
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is not a concept, the comparison and the judgment cannot take place.
The first case begs the question again; the second assumes a judgment
formed with only one concept – a judgment that is not a judgment, in
other words.
Furthermore, with this judgment the illustrious Author wishes to
explain the concept of existence, which he calls the subsistence of things.
But how can this idea arise from the judgment in question, always assum-
ing that the judgment is possible? On one side, we have just a pure sense
impression; on the other, the concept of possible being. If the two terms
are joined together, what must result from them? The idea of a possible
impression, and nothing more. The two terms cannot give what they
do not have in them. Between existence and the possibility of existence
lies an infinite gap that only creative omnipotence can cross. From what
does the concept of existence come, then? From the possible? Surely
not. From the impression? But the impression contains nothing intel-
ligible, is not a concept, and cannot produce any unless one grants the
rejected and repugnant hypothesis of the sensists, to which Rosmini is
most averse. From jumbling the possible together with the sensible? But
if each of them separately cannot give what it does not have, neither will
they be able to do so if they are put together.
In some passages Rosmini hints that the idea of subsistence, as an
idea, is the pure concept of possible being, and that inasmuch as it is
distinguished from the concept, it is not an idea but a judgment. But
he is clear that the term subsistence, or existence, expresses a judgment
only inasmuch as it signifies a concept. Hence, one needs to explain the
origin of the concept. A judgment can be called a concept inasmuch as
it is a composite idea that contains the notions expressed separately by
the terms of the proposition. Now what are the terms of Rosmini’s judg-
ment? They are the sensible and the possible, and nothing more. But
since we have just now seen that putting these two terms together cannot
generate the idea of existence, this cannot be a judgment either.
One must also guard against confusing the idea of subsistence with the
actual subsistence of something. It seems to me that Rosmini may allow
this mistake by making the following claim: that when one conceives of
the subsistence of something, the only intelligible element is the idea of
possible being. If that were true, it would follow that the concept proper,
expressed by the term subsistence, would be the subsistence itself of the
object. Yet everyone sees that the terms possible being and subsistence are
not synonyms. So they have meanings that differ at least in part.
What is the difference? The idea of the real expressed by the second
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term, not by the first. Therefore, if the concept of the real does not make
up part of the intelligible element but of the thing, it follows that the real
and the concept of the real are the same, which is hard to take serious-
ly. And yet it is this confusion on which the argument of the illustrious
Author is based, so it seems to me. The reason is this: by saying that belief
in the subsistence of bodies is the effect of a judgment born solely from
the idea of possible being and from the sense impression, he assumes
that subsistence and the idea of subsistence are one and the same. But
since we understand what this term subsistence means, it is clear that the
concept, as a concept, and the thing signified are different from one
another. But how can they be different if the only intelligible element
involved in this transaction is the concept of possible being?
This discussion raises a question of the greatest weight and difficulty,
though modern philosophy has forgotten even the motive for it. This is
the question: The concept of the concreteness and individuality of things
arises from what and consists of what? If, as Rosmini believes, every con-
cept is generic, how will one ever be able to conceive of the concrete and
the individual? To avoid this difficulty, the illustrious Author was forced
to deny that the idea of concreteness and individuality is an idea, and to
assert that it is a mere judgment. But this solution cannot be accepted,
which is obvious from what has been said.
A person has a true concept of individual reality – of existence. But
how can it be acquired? By sensation or feeling? These faculties reveal to
us only subjective modifications. By the perception of the Scots? By itself
this perception is not enough because it does not reveal the forces – the
created substances and causes – of which existences truly consist. By the
idea of the possible? The possible cannot give the real. By abstractions of
some other kind? Abstractions follow and do not precede the notion of
the concrete; they presuppose the concrete and cannot create it. There-
fore, one must assume that the concrete and the individual are known by
means of a special and direct intuition, analogous to the perception of
the Scots, from which it differs, however, in that it shows us not only the
surface but the substance of things.
Here I am to content to mention the solution to the problem that I
will shortly clarify; from the argument up to this point, I want no one
to infer that by rejecting Rosmini’s teaching, which explains the idea of
subsistence by that of possible being, I wish to explain it by the idea of
real Being, having substituted one for the other as a direct object of intu-
ition. This explanation would be false, as we will see shortly, and it would
lead straight to pantheism. True, we may see all our sense impressions
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in the real Being, present to our mind, but this is not the direct concept
from which we deduce the real existence of things. And here is the rea-
son: since the Being intuited is not only real but necessary and absolute,
if we asserted the real existence of things in virtue of this simple concept,
we should have to infer that all things are modifications of God that exist
necessarily, and so we would be pantheists. Therefore, it is not by apply-
ing the idea of real Being to things that we know of their existence.
4. The concept of the reality of Being, of God, is not had directly and by intuition
but only in an indirect way and by demonstration. This proposition follows
necessarily from the two that precede it. Rosmini observes that treating
God as a direct object of intuitive cognition is a view held by St Bonaven-
tura, and he expressly rejects it.12 And surely it cannot be accepted if
intuition apprehends only possible Being. In that case, the only effective
way to achieve cognition of the Supreme Being is demonstration. But
for demonstration to be valid, it must be based upon a prior synthesis,
seeing that deduction is an intellectual artifice by which what was already
known by primitive apprehension is reproduced by the mind in its own
mode: this is clarifying the known rather than discovering the unknown.
Rational synthesis as well as analysis, deduction as well as induction, must
necessarily be based upon a prior and basic cognition, identical in sub-
stance to what follows it but different in form.
The main difference rests on two issues. First, deductive and inductive
reasoning happens in time and sequentially, while what I call primitive
synthesis is instantaneous, has no chronological development, and con-
sists of simple intuition. Second, in reasoning and analysis the mind gives
truth a subjective form, taking it apart, putting it back together, handling
it according to its own procedures, yet without altering its substance,
whereas in primitive synthesis the mind blends in nothing of its own but
simple intuition; it is the simple spectator of the object before it and sees
it as it is in itself, without adding anything or taking anything away.
Far from opposing the assumption that God is known in a demonstra-
tive mode, then, my view is actually supportive because there can be no
demonstration that does not take its strength from a prior intuition. The
proofs of God’s existence are a posteriori or a priori. But since both
kinds are based upon a syllogism whose minor premise includes a simple
contingent fact, external or internal to the mind, neither could have
absolute and apodictic force if the process of demonstration that bases
truth on fact were not preceded by an intuition in which fact is based on
truth, as will shortly be clear.
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tion of the perception, the process of thought turning back upon itself.
The terminus of intuition or immediate apprehension is the object in
itself – the object, finite or infinite, but always real, concrete, positive,
and individual. The terminus of reflection is the intuition and with it the
idea of the object, not as in itself but abstract, generalized, stripped of all
individuality, and reduced to the state of the merely possible. Thus one
sees that the direct idea or perception converges with the reflective idea,
either because both are one act of thinking or because of the substance
of their object. But they differ in the way they apprehend that object,
since one takes it as it is in itself, in its concreteness, and as real, while the
other apprehends it as it is in the mind, in its abstractness, and as think-
able or possible, inasmuch as the possibility of the thing is its thinkability.
Now my opinion is that Rosmini, in the first place, confuses the reflec-
tive idea with perception and gives the latter the character of the former,
treating it as the mere concept of possible being, abstract and generic.
But from what has been said, it seems that this concept is merely reflec-
tive and presupposes immediate intuition of the object – of Being in its
concrete and individual reality. In the second place, he also confuses the
perception of sensibles with sensation and with feeling, and from sense
he derives the concept that one has of the individuality of things. The
outcome is inevitable if every idea or perception is abstract and generic
since the abstract and generic cannot supply the concrete and individu-
al, which is their chief contrary, but fails if a person perceives sensibles
by an immediate and direct intuition like that by which he perceives real
Being.
This immediate cognition of sensibles is the perception of the Scottish
philosophers, which I believe to be a fact beyond doubt and well attested
by careful observation. True, the perception of the Scots is not enough
by itself to give us a complete notion of sensible, spiritual, and material
things because it shows us only sensible properties without the intelligi-
ble element whereby we conceive of them as substances or causes. The
perception of the School of Edinburgh is not enough, then, for a full
account of the concept of the existence of bodies, and one must resort
to another principle of which we shall soon speak.
Reid’s perception is in substance what Rosmini calls bodily sensory per-
ception. He acutely observes that by itself it does not produce cognition
of bodies and that we still need an intelligible element, which, according
to him, is the idea of possible being. But possible, abstract, generic being
– can this produce the concept of individuality? Surely not. Therefore,
concludes Rosmini, we get individuality certainly not as the effect of an
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the concept of real Being made abstract through reflection by the men-
tal separation of objective reality from the cognition of that being. The
majority of modern philosophers also treat the notion of pure being
or real Being as abstract, it is true: hence the statement repeated in a
hundred books that the idea of being is a mere abstraction. Of possible
being, this is entirely true. But if real being is what they mean, it is as true
as saying that infinite space is round since Being in itself is the beginning
of everything, the source of concreteness no less than of abstraction.
Modern logic has a great fear of turning abstract things concrete, and
rightly so, but does not worry about converting the concrete into the
abstract, a different vice and more serious than the first, which it usually
precedes. Because primitive truth, though concrete in itself, still con-
tains the seeds of abstractions with regard to the mind, a person must
turn the concrete into the abstract in order to be able to convert the
abstract into the concrete. Hence, when the second conversion comes
after the first, the work already done is undone, and the genuine Middle
Ages, with their humanness, treeness, and so on, reconstituted the reality of
the being destroyed by the abstractions of the Peripatetics. Transforming
the concrete into the abstract is an evil that does no good, then, since it
negates the primitive truth, whereas the contrary process is an evil that
can become a good, if, at least in part, it restores the truth destroyed a
little while before.
Human speech is a continuous alternation of synthesis and antithesis,
and the labour of reflection is to abstract and concretize continuously.
The execution, distribution, and relating of these operations, for better
or worse, gives rise to the virtues and vices of the scientific method. Two
types of abstraction and composition, one lawful and natural, the other
corrupt and contrary to nature, can be distinguished. Corrupt abstrac-
tion consists of dissociating elements that are in accord and destroying
the natural synthesis of things. Next in line comes the corrupt composi-
tion that jumbles elements which are not in accord, forming a mental
synthesis contrary to real synthesis and producing an actual illusion of
the imagination, like the maya of the Indian schools.
Helpful abstraction takes apart illusory and apparent synthesis, discon-
necting the discrepant elements united by that synthesis. Finally, helpful
composition reunites elements that are in accord and remakes – or, to
put it better, re-cognizes – real synthesis. But abstraction that separates
Being and the One from existences and the manifold by destroying the
imaginative phantasm that completely identifies them, and composition
that restores the intelligible to the rule of Being and the sensible to the
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rule of the intelligible – both of these are helpful and legitimate since in
this case the abstract falsity is turned into a concrete truth by converting
the concrete falsity into an abstract truth.
The idea of Being, as we have stated it, contains a judgment. It is
impossible for the mind to have the primitive intuition of Being without
recognizing that Being is: in the contrary case, to be would be nothing
and real Being would not be real, which is contradictory. Nor does the
reality of Being present itself to the mind as something contingent and
relative, so that possibly it might not-be, but as necessary and absolute, so
that the contrary is not thinkable.
A person cannot think nothing, in fact. And this incapacity is not
merely subjective or dependent on the contradiction involved in think-
ing without thinking something; it is also objective in that the mind
knows that nothing is not only unthinkable for us but also impossible in
itself. Hence, the judgment in question can be expressed in these words,
‘Being is necessarily,’ provided one notes that the concept expressed by
the last word serves only to clarify a property inherent in Being itself, as
Being. But if it seems right to express this latter point by a separate word,
saying ‘necessary being,’ it is because the first of these words, as we shall
soon see, is abused in ordinary language.
The judgment – ‘Being is necessarily’ – contained in the primitive intu-
ition is not rendered by the mind in a free and spontaneous act, like oth-
er judgments. The mind is not the judge in this case, but a mere witness
and auditor of a verdict that it does not issue. In fact, if the mind were
the definer and not simply a spectator, the prime judgment – basis of all
certainty and of every other judgment – would be subjective, and scepti-
cism would be inevitable. It is Being itself that pronounces the primitive
judgment and causes the mind to hear it in a direct act of intuition.
Being posits itself in the presence of our mind and says, ‘I am neces-
sarily.’ In this objective utterance lies the basis of all evidence and all
certainty. The vehicle by which it comes to the mind is the Intelligible
– Being itself. In fact, Being reveals itself and declares its own reality to
a person by means of its own intelligibility, without which the very act
of thought could not occur for the person. By means of the Intelligible,
in virtue of which intuition occurs, intuition takes notice of Being. And
since Being is the Intelligible itself, it follows that Being is understood by
us inasmuch as it is posited, and that it is posited inasmuch as it is under-
stood. The two become one and the same.
When intuition views Being as its object, it sees the autonomy that
belongs to Being but does not assert it in a determinate and volition-
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In the judgment under discussion we have the basis of the Ideal For-
mula. But it was just now noted that this Formula consists of a judgment
made from three different concepts. In the aforesaid judgment there is
only one concept, however, and the three terms result from its replica-
tion. So we must search for another judgment that gives us the three
concepts when joined to the first judgment. This inquiry is based on a
postulate that the solution itself will show to be reasonable.
The new judgment that we are tracking down must be blended with
the first to make a single judgment. Otherwise, the Ideal Formula would
be composed of two separate judgments, giving us two formulas instead
of one. The Ideal Formula is organic, and all its parts must be linked
together logically to form a single body. Therefore, we must begin our
search with some concept that, on the one hand, differs substantially
from the concept of Being and, on the other, has an intrinsic connect-
edness with it. Language furnishes us with a term whose meaning has a
close kinship with the concept of Being, and this is also apparent from its
etymology. The term is existence, common to all modern languages that
derive from Latin. Taking this as our hypothesis, let us see if we can use
it to construct the Formula that we are searching for.
The Latin word exsistere means to appear, come out of, emerge, and be
shown. It is used to mean the manifestation or rather the unfolding of
something previously hidden, wrapped, or folded within something else
and then coming out of it and making itself visible externally.16 This is
its proper and etymological sense, the source of the metaphorical sense
which in our tongue has come to belong to the word existence. However,
even though the relation of the Italian expression to the Latin is meta-
phorical because it expresses for the metaphysical order what the Latin
says of the physical order, on a different level the correspondence is still
precise since in both concepts there is a reference to the passage from
potency to act.17 The Latin exsistere announces the activity by which some-
thing that used to be potentially begins to become actual. And existence
in our Italian language also expresses an analogous concept, as we shall
soon see.
The only discrepancy is that in the ancient word the actualization of
potency is expressed by way of unfolding, whereas in the modern word
the reference is to producing, so that in this respect we make a meta-
phor of the term used by the Latins. Granted, ordinary people – even
philosophers, quite often – use the word exist synonymously with be,
and vice-versa, and so they say that God exists and that the world is. But
these locutions, though very common, have by no means eliminated the
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original meaning. And sensitive ears will certainly pick it up. Vico, for
example, that very diligent and knowledgeable student of philosophi-
cal precision in words, faulted Descartes for having said I think, therefore
I am.18 Descartes, not terribly sharp in such matters, uses the two words
promiscuously all the time, showing not the least sign of recognizing
the difference between them. The guilelessness of the writer proves the
naiveté of the philosopher.
Besides the relation of potency and act, the word exsistere expresses, or
at least suggests, another intellectual element of no small importance,
and we should mention it. As anyone can see, the word is composed of
the particle ex- and the verb sistere. This verb and its cognates or deriva-
tives express, more or less directly, the metaphysical concept that mod-
erns call substance, from the Latin word substantia. Its pedigree is short,
though Seneca and Quintilian used it, and its absence from Cicero’s
philosophical works is often palpable; substratum, beloved by some mod-
erns, therefore also emerged.19 The word exsistere, indicating substance
by its verb and derivation by its particle, includes the concept of one sub-
stance, found potentially in another, which thereby passes to an actual
state and begins to stand on its own. The etymology of exsistere is enough
to suggest this mental synthesis in the originating concept that corre-
sponds to that word.
Note also that the particle ex- indicates, in the direct and material
sense, a movement from inside to out, as the particle in- expresses a
contrary movement – or rather the rest or repose that results from an
effort working from outside to in. This becomes clear if the word exsistere
is compared to insistere. Metaphorically, then, the particle ex- gives the
direction of the action by which cause produces effect. Thus, in the origi-
nally metaphorical meaning which for us has become direct, the word
exist makes the axiom of causality present to the mind, just as the Latin
words subsistere and substare and our word subsist represent the axiom of
substance.
Gathering together all these concepts indicated by the word existence
and expressed by its more direct applications, we can say that existence
is the reality proper to an actual substance, produced from a distinct
substance that contains it potentially. From this it follows that the idea of
existence cannot stand on its own and refers necessarily to another, hav-
ing the same relation to it that the effect has to its cause. But this Mother
Idea can only be that of Being. Treating existence as an effect, the mind
is compelled to seek a cause. But if this cause is another existence, and if
what exists is an effect, the mind is forced to move up to another, higher
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cause until it finds one that is a pure cause without being an effect, an
absolute cause necessary by its nature. Proceeding to infinity is not possi-
ble because there would be only an infinite succession of effects without
any cause – effects, in other words, that would not be effects since they
have no cause, nor, since they are effects, would they be causes. Pure,
absolute, necessary Being is the only truly first cause because it is the
only thing that is by its own nature and depends on no other. The idea of
existence is therefore inseparable from that of Being and is represented
to us as an effect whose cause is Being.
In what way is existence produced by Being? Proceeding a posteriori,
ascending from effect to cause, one concludes of necessity that the effect
is folded up in the cause, the existent in Being, and that producing is sim-
ply unfolding. Then one will be obliged to reject creation and embrace
the teaching of the pantheists and emanationists. Indeed, proceeding
a posteriori, how could one reach any other conclusion? Whoever goes
this route moves from effect up to cause and concludes that the cause
must contain the effect in potency because the effect is an act that pre-
supposes potency. But the cause can contain the effect potentially in two
ways: either by including in itself the substance of that effect and having
only the ability to change its form by unfolding and externalizing it; or
else by deriving not only the form but also the substance of the effect
from nothing. By advancing a posteriori, one cannot come to know the
creative potentiality because to reach this goal it would be necessary to
eliminate the effect before having found the potency that produces it.
But if the effect is eliminated mentally, its cause can no longer be recov-
ered because the basis on which the argument rests is missing.
In fact, we can represent the a posteriori process as a line B ––––––– A,
where point B indicates the idea of existence, point A the idea of Being,
and the extent of the line the mind’s discursive process. Now if the mind
wishes to conceive Being as creator, its thinking must eliminate point
B, which expresses existence, before reaching point A, since what exists
cannot be created, inasmuch as it already exists. In the first place, how-
ever, eliminating the concept on which the whole argument turns is logi-
cally absurd. In the second place, if one eliminates B before getting to A,
how can the goal ever be reached? Nor, even if B is eliminated mentally,
can one say that a preconceived notion of A allows reasoning to con-
tinue. If there is a preconceived notion of A, it shows that the reasoning is
a priori, not a posteriori. In fact, the usual argument by which philoso-
phers and theologians prove creation is a posteriori only in appearance,
and, like all arguments of this type, rests upon an a priori synthesis. But
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that all ancient philosophers were ignorant of it and that many mod-
erns oppose it. Moreover, if creation were obvious to reason, pantheism
would not have tempted the deepest intellects of every era. Nor would it
keep coming up again and again in the schools of philosophy, since one
of the main reasons why so many find pantheism plausible is its promise
to explain the fact of universal existence without recourse to creation.
I reply that the concept of creation is no more clear and no more
obscure than the other concepts involved in the Ideal Formula. Every
ideal concept has two sides, one intelligible, the other superintelligible.
One can compare it to a point of light gleaming in darkness, giving us
not what can be called a view but a presentiment of the two, forcing us
to accept them. The clear assumes the obscure, as in turn the obscure
is not apprehended without the clear. The obscure side of the Idea is
the superintelligible, reproduced in every part of the ideal world and
found both in the concept of Being and in that of the creative act. Just
as the concept of Being is the root and origin of other ideal notions, so
the impenetrability of Being is the root and origin of other obscurities,
which is why we use the word essence to express the unthinkable.
Creation taken as the link between the absolute cause and its effect is
entirely clear – clear because it is the cause, since cause cannot be other
than creative if it is not limited, if, in other words, it is cause simply and
absolutely. But the cause is being in relation to the effect, being as active
and causal. Hence, since the act of the being comes from the essence,
it follows that if the essence is impenetrable in itself, the essence of the
cause must also be obscure, and therefore the essence of the causal act
– of creation – must be obscure as well. The superintelligible of creation
is recast as that of Being and reproduces its obscurity. Since we cannot
conceive how to make something from nothing, we cannot comprehend
the essence of Being or the internal mode of its activity.
But what is incomprehensible from one point of view is quite clear
from another, since the beginning of existence is what constitutes the
effect and its relation to the cause. Without having at least a confused
notion of the creative act, this makes it completely impossible to under-
stand the meaning of the term effect (which comes up so often in ordi-
nary human speech) and of all words that express action. What is the
essence of this creative act, then? In what way does Being activate and
initiate what previously did not exist? In short, what is the inner nature of
creation? The human mind cannot answer these questions even though
its inability does not derive from a special obscurity of the creative act as
such, but from its relation to the essence of the creative cause.
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So evident is this that one encounters the same obscurity just in appre-
hending the efficient causes of forms, since making forms is also a true
creation. If pantheists and emanationists accept this creation, while
understanding it no better than the other one, this happens for two rea-
sons. One is that they are constrained by the axiom of causality, which
would never happen if the creating of forms – like that of substance –
were declared impossible. The other is that human beings have within
them, in their free will, as well as outside, the example and proof of this
effective causing of forms, which is then accepted as a fact of experience
even though it is not understood. But people do not experience the effi-
cient causing of substances, knowing it by the activity of reason alone as
a privilege of uncreated Being.
Pagan philosophers overlooked the doctrine of creation, and many
moderns have opposed it. To avoid the reef of mystery, they wreck on
an absurdity: pantheism. What does this show if not the prideful laziness
of the human mind? And yet this truth had no worse luck than other
ideal doctrines. There were sensists and sceptics as well as pantheists.
The obscurity of creation arises from that of Being. Hence, if panthe-
ists deny creation because it is partly obscure, the more logical sceptics
deny Being because it is not entirely clear. True, by denying Being they
commit an enormous number of paralogisms, but it makes no differ-
ence. Subverting the basis of all logic on behalf of logic itself, reaching
an absurd goal by direct reasoning, is precisely the greatest achievement
of scepticism.
All the false systems of philosophy and religion have in common the
error of denying what is clear while loathing what is obscure, whereas
correct philosophy obliges us to accept what is obscure in gratitude for
what is clear, from which the obscure is inseparable. Idealists and fatal-
ists also deny the reality of bodies and free will because of their arcane
nature.
Moreover, there is a special reason why philosophers, especially the
ancients, have neglected the doctrine of creation along with other parts
of the Ideal Formula: because creation is simply a relation, a link, a
bond between two other terms, whereas these terms express a substan-
tive truth. Being and existences, permanent substances directly present
to the mind – one the root of all knowledge, the others subject to the
senses – could not so easily vanish from sight, whereas the creative act,
immanent and not something substantial but modal, might readily be
perceived as indistinct and therefore altered and excluded by reflection.
What else? The very idea of Being was more or less altered by all ancient
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ment, in Being, but in its last element, in the existent, it is relative and
contingent. The link between these two elements is creation, an action
that is real and positive but free. Being – the Substance and first Cause –
thereby creates substances and second causes. It regulates and includes
them in itself, conserving them in time by the immanence of the causal
action, which, in regard to the time taken to complete it, is a continuous
creation. In the aforementioned Formula, then, we have three realities
independent of the mind: a Substance and first Cause; an organic mani-
fold of substances and second causes; and a real and free act of the first
causal Substance, by means of which act the one Being is connected with
the manifold of existences.
Such is the ontological process expressed by the Formula that we have
assumed. Now let us add to it the intuition that we have removed by
abstraction and then consider the Formula in its objective character.
When the intuition that perceives the Formula is restored to it, the onto-
logical process becomes psychological, and each objective element of
the truth becomes a concept with regard to our cognition of it. But in
this transformation there is no actual change for either of the two parts.
With regard to the object, the three elements of the Formula – Being,
existence, and creative action – are still realities there as before. With
regard to the knowing subject, there is nothing in it but an intuition
apprehending those same three realities in itself, without taking into
itself alteration or division of any kind.
Here one must not imagine, like the champions of psychologism, that
the cognitive act makes some unknown appearance, image, or form of
external reality enter into us, and that this mental entity is the termi-
nus of our thinking, so that, for our part, the truth is seen not in itself
but in ourselves. Thomas Reid has thoroughly exposed the falsity of this
notion with regard to knowledge of bodies, and here we only extend his
doctrine to the whole intuitive truth, standing on the same basis as the
Scottish philosopher – on direct and objective evidence, in other words.
Nor should one assume, like the same psychologists, that when the
mind apprehends the different elements of the objective truth, it chang-
es their order, starting with the existent and ascending to Being, while in
the cycle of reality Being descends to the existent, and not the reverse.
Assuming the primitive psychological order to be the reverse of the onto-
logical order is not only a strange and gratuitous view, it is also plainly
contrary to the objective evidence that we have of the identity of the two
orders when it implies that our intuition alters the representation of real
things. Granted, a person in a state of reflection can and does change,
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more or less, the real order of things mentally; in part, this is what sci-
ence is about. But this cannot happen in intuition and has nothing to
do with the first science. Therefore, since the idea is nothing but the
object itself as perceived by our mind, it follows that the ideas of Being,
the existent, and creation are three realities, precisely as proposed by the
Formula. It also follows that the process in which we see them is equally
real, given the sole addition of the mind’s intuition.
The conclusion of these findings is that the Formula proposed by us is
true. Our intuitive cognition must perceive its three terms in the order
of their real occurrence and must therefore apprehend creation as a
fact that the mind witnesses as it descends from Being to existences and
apprehends them in the creative act that produces them. But to convert
this hypothesis into a completely certain statement, it suffices to have in
view the synthetic process that we shall mention shortly. From each part
of this process it will seem obvious that one must either call into ques-
tion the clearest concepts and least doubtful judgments of the human
mind or else acknowledge that the process of ideation takes place as we
have described it. Anyone who understands the nature and value of the
synthesis will ask for no other proof. Before beginning this discussion,
however, we can check the truth of our Formula by a faster method.
That creation is the only way to explain the origin of existents, and that
every other hypothesis leads to obvious absurdities, is too well known to
need proving here. The dogma of creation, then, is a scientifically cer-
tain fact, proved indirectly when reason reflects and argues away from
the absurd alternatives. But if creation really is a fact, how might we ever
get knowledge of it in primitive intuition? This is the question that we
have posed.
The ready answer is that we count it as a fact insofar as we perceive it.
Now to perceive a fact is to see, with the mind, the action – the move-
ment, almost – of which the fact consists, and to see the origin from
which the act moves, to see it as active along with the effect that results
from it. But surely, in our case, the intuiting mind that perceives Being in
its concreteness sees it not in its abstract character, secluded within itself,
but sees it as it really is – causing, producing existents, and externaliz-
ing itself by its actions. Hence, the mind perceives existents as results of
Being’s activity. A person therefore acquires the concept of existence by
having a mental view of the continuing production of that same activity.
Since the psychological process of intuition is identical to the ontologi-
cal, the content of our cognition is not differentiated from the real order
of things. Just as the three real terms – Being, creative action, and exist-
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ences – follow one another logically in the objective synthesis, so also the
three ideal terms that correspond to them have the same order in the
human mind. The mind then sees existences produced in the Being that
produces them, and at every instant of its intellectual life it is a direct and
immediate spectator of creation.
The result may seem odd, but it is rigorous and irrefutable. It cannot
be called into doubt without doing one of three things: either eliminate
existences and fall into absolute idealism; or accept existences as uncre-
ated and embrace the absurd hypotheses of naturalism, pantheism, and
emanationism; or admit the fact of creation but deny that the psycho-
logical process of intuition, by which we know the fact, is identical to the
ontological process of the same thing. But whoever wants to deny the
sameness of the two processes must establish that the idea is a subjec-
tive unknown, which certainly would not arise from an absolutely simple
intuition but from a mental effort that changes the real order of things.
After the direction given to psychology by the Scottish school, how-
ever, this claim is impossible to maintain. If many today still insist on the
contrary view, it happens because the works of the Scots – and Reid’s
especially – are more cited than studied or understood. Because the idea
is just the object as intuited, the bond that runs between ideas cannot
be different from the nexus that links the objects. Now, in the sphere of
objectivity, Being produces existences by way of creation. Then, in the
subjective sphere, we acquire the concept of the existent because we per-
ceive it, and we perceive it because we actually see it produced, before
the mind’s eye. The scheme of the human mind’s synthetic labour, which
we will explain in due course, will clear up every obscurity and remove all
doubt about our proposition.
We noted above that in the immediate intuition of Being a judgment
is contained that affirms the reality of that Being, and that this judg-
ment, the basis of all clarity, is objective and divine. Now we can add that
Being, considered no longer just as Being but as causal Being, gives us
the perception of a fact that is equally objective and divine – the fact of
creation. Therefore, we become aware by intuiting a divine judgment
and a divine fact.
Through the first, Being says ‘I exist.’ Through the second, it pro-
claims ‘I create’ – for to think of things as real, is, for God, actually to
create them. Both are objective, but one is necessary, the other free and
contingent. One is only within Being, the other is reflected towards an
external object. One is a pure judgment by which Being affirms itself.
The other is a practical judgment, a judgment made actual externally,
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by which Being posits universal existence. Both derive from the Intel-
ligible because the Intelligible is Being. But the first derives from the
Intelligible because it freely understands itself, while the second derives
from the Intelligible because it freely understands and wills an external
fact. The divine judgment is the basis of knowledge; the divine fact is the
basis of nature.
Hence, in virtue of this supreme judgment, philosophy is something
divine, as psychology and physics are divine in virtue of its operation.
The judgment provides the scope and content of the speculative scienc-
es, as the fact provides for the natural sciences. And the whole human
encyclopedia has its basis in a divine encyclopedia – a primitive Formula,
Ideal or Real, that comes to us given by God, a true revelation. In the
philosophical sciences, the fundamental Formula is governed by the
divine judgment, which is a product of the ideas. In physics, it is gov-
erned by the grand and divine experiment of creation, which is a revela-
tion of things. The first Formula gives us the Intelligible, the second the
sensible. One represents to us Being taken simply, the other depicts it for
us as a creative cause.
The mathematical sciences, as we shall see farther on, have a place
between these two Formulas. Finally, it is important to note that the
divine judgment and fact, the foundation of the real and the knowable,
argue for the personhood of Being. I only mention this as a truth of great
significance to which I will return and explain in the appropriate place.
The true Ideal Formula that we have been pursuing, the ultimate basis
of all the knowable, can therefore be declared in the following terms:
‘Being creates existences.’ In this Formula the Idea is expressed by the
concept of a creating Being, and since this concept cannot be had with-
out that of existence and creation, the latter two notions belong indi-
rectly to the Idea and to the component elements of the Formula that
expresses it. The idea of Being is thus the foundation and organic centre
of the Formula. The idea of creation is its organic state. And the three
concepts joined together form the ideal organism. Without the idea
of creation, the bond between the two other concepts would be miss-
ing. The extreme terms of the Formula would be confused, as happens
among pagan peoples and philosophers; once this most important con-
cept gets lost, they shake the whole organism loose of its rational truths.
Just as the subject (‘Being’) of the Ideal Formula implicitly contains
the judgment ‘Being is,’ likewise the predicate (‘creating existences’)
contains another judgment, ‘existences are in Being.’ However, just as
the predicate explicitly affirms that existences come from Being as from
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NOTES
1 The text followed here is the first edition, Gioberti (1840); see the Intro-
duction, sections 7 and 8.
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2 [a] H.T. Colebrooke, Essais sur la philosophie des Hindous, trans. G. Pauthier
(Paris: 1834): 9, 17, 34, 35.
3 Samkyha, traditionally the work of a sage named Kapila, is one of the six
main lines of ancient Indian thought. It is the metaphysical theory that
corresponds to the practice of Yoga, and its earliest text survives from the
third century CE. Its cosmology is fundamentally materialist, deriving the
world and the souls in it from a primordial substance called praktri, meaning
‘nature.’
4 The ‘illustrious writer’ here is Rosmini, called the ‘illustrious author’ else-
where.
5 [a] Rosmini, New Essay on the Origin of Ideas (Milan: 1837), II, section 5.
6 [a] Ibid., II, part 1, chapters 2, 5; part 2, chapter 5; part. 6, chapter 2.
7 [a] Ibid., II, section 5, part 2, chapter 4; parts 4−5; III, section 6, part 3.
8 [a] Ibid., II, section 5, part 2, chapter 5; section 4, part 6, chapter 2; III, sec-
tion 6, part 5, chapter 5; section 7.
9 [a] Rosmini, Il Rinnovamento della filosofia del Mamiani esaminato, chapters 35,
39 ff; New Essay, section 5, part 2, chapters 5 or 4, vol. II, p. 135.
10 [a] Rosmini, Il Rinnovamento della filosofia del Mamiani esaminato, pp. 492−3,
nn503−5, 613−21; New Essay, vol. II, pp. 477−80 passim.
11 [a] The illustrious Author confesses that he himself has travelled this road.
Speaking of ancient Catholic doctrine, he expresses himself as follows:
‘Everyone sees that I have come to the same results, but by a different route.
The theological school started, as I said, from thinking about God; I started
simply by thinking about man and found myself nonetheless arriving at
the same conclusions. This reaching the same goal by two opposite paths,
it seems to me, is a confirmation, a demonstration of the truth. Moreover,
doctrine may have received a new illustration and better evidence in this
way, if I am not mistaken, and perhaps language itself also gained more
precision and reason a firmer and more secure way of proceeding’ (Ros-
mini, Rinnovamento, pp. 408−9). The conclusions are not the same since
psychologically Rosmini has been able only to get at possible being, which
on its own cannot have ontological value, cannot serve as the basis of the
knowable, cannot give scientific and objective value to psychology itself. The
whole problem arises from the difference of the method followed. Ros-
mini’s is sound and admirable, yet it is neither primary nor unique in that it
completes ontologism without wanting to take its place. This is the only way
that the new and profound analysis of our Author will be able to purge itself
of its defects, establish a firm basis for itself, and enrich science.
12 [a] See n2 of this volume; [e] Gioberti (1840), I, 711−76.
13 [a] I Cor. 13:12.
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14 [a] See the passages from Gerson cited in n3 of this volume; [e] Gioberti
(1840), I, 776−83, citing Jean Gerson (1363−1429) as an admirer of Bon-
aventura, especially his account of three kinds of seeing (visio) as face-to-
face or intuitive, mirroring or abstract, and cloudy or obscure.
15 Gioberti uses riflesso and riflessivo throughout, usually to mean ‘reflection’
and ‘reflective,’ but sometimes ‘reflex’ and ‘reflexive.’
16 [a] Forcellini (Lexicon [Padua: 1805], II, 250) makes it synonymous with
prodire, apparere, and exire, expressed by the Italian words to leave, appear, and
go out of. He observes that it is ‘often used for esse, but in such a way that it
connotes some movement of what is leaving or appearing, being present or
absent.
17 [a] The Crusca (Dizionario della lingua italiana, ( [Padua: 1828], III, 519)
calls existence being in act and the existent that which is in act.
18 [a] Vico, Opera latina (Milan: 1835), I, 106−7, 135; cf. 54.
19 [a] Forcellini, Lexicon, IV, 255, defines it as ‘essence, nature, that by which
a thing is’; the definition by the Crusca – Dizionario della lingua italiana
(Padua), VI, 1144 – is somewhat better, distinguishes it as having properly
to do with essence.
20 ‘The very word existence (from that which subsists through itself and by itself) –
from being as it were.’
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Count Terenzio Mamiani della Rovere
Part I: Method
ence and completely dogmatic. Its duty is to provide all the other scienc-
es whatever measure of certainty and rationality they have in themselves.
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4. However, as we reached the conclusions that arose in this way from the
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Mamiani, Renewal
1. To form an idea of the value of a task, one must carefully examine the
obstacles barring its completion. Those that the Italians encountered
in the reconstruction of knowledge were the greatest ever recorded by
history. Some impediments were external and had physical causes, while
others were internal causes that damaged the exercise of the mental
faculties. Causes of both types converged in the false teaching of scho-
lasticism, which corrupted thinkers who submitted to it, while afflict-
ing those who were unsubmissive with prison, torture, and the stake.
Petrarch is the first person we meet who had the courage to laugh at the
false philosophy of the schools and use his keen mind to reveal its defects
and foolishness, but the basis of his judgment was a noble and refined
sensibility rather than deep critical inquiry.2 From then on, new access to
sources of Greek wisdom kindled the will to combat scholasticism every-
where, in two ways: by contrasting Aristotle’s plain speech with the spuri-
ous and mystifying talk of the commentators; and by using the charms of
Cicero and Xenophon to wean thinkers away from the barbaric linguistic
habits of the dialecticians.
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He attaches great importance to the study of signs, and even though his
treatment of the subject is too grammatical, he also eliminates several
mistakes of the schools. He invites the youth to look at the greatest writ-
ers of prose and poetry for the correct understanding of language. With
this wise counsel, in fact, he grasped one of the most effective ways to
recover the principles of natural method and put them into practice.
Finally, we should not fail to mention that his subtle mind devised for
his time a reduction of Aristotle’s predicaments and categories resem-
bling the reduction of Kant’s forms and categories that some have made
today. According to Valla’s proposal and declaration, in fact, only three
predicaments are distinct, essential, and more comprehensive than all
the others: thing (both as substance and as cause), quality, and action, so
that quality belongs to thing as substance, while action belongs to thing
as cause.4 This is exactly what the modern spiritualists of France have
thought and written.5
In this way, the disgrace and destruction of scholasticism was complet-
ed in the second half of the fifteenth century. A few foreigners cooper-
ated, to be sure, but they came later. And it was on the peninsula that
a great many of them – Rudolf Agricola, Jacques Lefèvre, Sepulveda,
Scioppius, and others, for example – had acquired their learning and
their skill as writers.6
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doctrines and adding new ones. Pomponazzi himself did this, along with
Zabarella, Cesalpino, and Cremonini, for example. Second, Aristotle’s
views were opposed – sometimes by arguing against them, at other times
by restoring the diverse teachings of various ancient sects to a place of
honour and using them against Aristotle. Finally, opposition to Aristo-
tle came from inventing original and impressive systems, like those of
Cardano, Vanini, Bruno, and Patrizi.7
In the fight against Aristotle and his commentators, Patrizi then dis-
played an eagerness, a knowledge, and an immense erudition that was
altogether uncommon. Nearly half a century later, as Gassendi was plan-
ning to continue his Paradoxical Exercises Against Aristotle, he saw that the
Italians had been there before him and left him no fruit worth harvest-
ing.8 What turned out to be most effective in stirring people to think,
however, were refutations aimed at the works on cosmology and physics,
which were convicted of error rather often by sense experience. Telesio
entered this debate and caused a great outcry. Others, less famous than
him, took a better route to reach better results, but they did not attack
Aristotle because it was not their concern.9
5. After that, one might have guessed that the Italians had finally liberat-
ed their genius from any external constraint, retaining only the internal
authority of their own conviction. They were still incapable, nonetheless,
of exercising their faculties of knowledge freely and effectively because
for a long time those faculties had been damaged by bad habits and
had completely forgotten nature’s precepts. Two philosophical practices
became incredibly harmful. The first was to investigate the relations and
consequences of what was already known rather than the obscure and
hidden parts of what was unknown. The second, at the start of any kind
of inquiry, was to begin with various generalities, usually not debated or
demonstrated and often leading to specious results that were abstrac-
tions and purely vacuous.
From those two practices came others equally harmful. They trans-
formed every type of inquiry into reasoning about ideas; the aptitude
for real analysis was lost, and also the trail of discovery. Detailed observa-
tion of psychological phenomena, as opposed to speculative problems,
therefore fell into disdain when it was supposed that observation could
not be a basis for teaching and when the maxim held that particulars
do not constitute knowledge. It was also usual to attribute little value to
bare experimental physics, a science whose metaphysical part was inves-
tigated, to be sure, but not the rest. Overthrowing a good many of Aristo-
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2. Much praise, then, to the ancient Italians for having discovered the
need for a broad and comprehensive doctrine of method, though the
most ancient of them did not feel this need at all. They undertook a
reform of all knowledge, but this discovery alone made it bear fruit.
Granted that the physical sciences, once they found their true path,
prospered and grew without limit from that time on; our task now is to
prove that the speculative sciences cannot in the least be outmatched
by the physical in their certainty, and, so to speak, infinite progress, as
long as speculative philosophers apply to their subject a single, common
method – the natural method – suitably adapted to the very special con-
ditions of first philosophy.
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applying a form of critical method, searched for the basis of his teach-
ings in the facts of consciousness …
1. Telesio had followers, and it added much to his honour to count Tom-
maso Campanella, a Dominican friar, among those who learned from
him. From the age of fifteen, Campanella began to doubt the Peripatetic
fairy tales that the friars taught him. As he read and compared those
who wrote glosses on Aristotle, his doubts grew. Then he looked at the
text of Aristotle himself, along with Plato, Galen, Pliny, the works of the
Stoics and the Telesians, and – in his words – he ‘compared them with
the great book of nature, where it was revealed how much the copies
resembled the original.’ While still very young, he became aware of the
appalling practices and methods introduced into philosophy, which is
why he wrote his book on investigation, to criticize the methods of the
schools …
2. He claimed that there are two methods, or, better, two applications
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who wrote in this period often came to agreement; some of them I have
mentioned above, and others will enter my discussion elsewhere.
1. Reviewing what has been shown up to this point about the views of our
Italian ancestors on method, one notes that they were quite well aware of
the need to move closer to the precepts of nature even though these had
not all been recognized and were never practised with good judgment.
They thought about the process of induction, but they did not know how
to follow it clearly. A common failing, in fact, was to make inductions
hastily from a few particulars, and often with only a few weak analogies.
Not only did they spoil inductive observation in this way, they also lost
the fruit of any future experience, inasmuch as they bent and adapted
it by force to general principles wrongly held. Universally established,
nonetheless, was the maxim that facts must provide the basis of every
investigation. Peripatetic abstractions were also overthrown, but this did
not keep thinkers free from the tangles of a new ontology, not much bet-
ter than the old one. The custom of completing and extending theories
with syllogisms did not stop, and they went on rehearsing their debates
instead of experimenting. But the old conceit of knowing and explain-
ing everything no longer ruled. On the contrary, philosophers willingly
agreed to admit their ignorance and the weak powers of reason …
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discoveries therefore lay lifeless, mixed with the most outrageous mis-
takes, like flecks of gold in mud. Such was the case with Giambattista
Porta, for example, and with Agrippa and Cardano. Cesalpino in botany
and Fracastoro in some areas of physics turned out to be acute, care-
ful, and admirable observers. Maurolico and Tartaglia became eminent
in mathematics, Eustachio and Fallopio in anatomy.25 But their achieve-
ment was in the special sciences, which sometimes had to involve either
geometrical proof or empirical observation of phenomena, and it came
long after Leonardo’s.
In any case, he alone had a complete grasp of the gradations and rules
of the art of discovery and used them all … No one in the world observed
more than this Leonardo, and he came across no object without contem-
plating it at length. With exquisite care and in good order, he thought
as much about tiny things as about the large … and this precise analysis
never obscured his view of great syntheses as he applied empirical pro-
cedures. On the contrary, he used induction and generalized as much as
any other philosopher who used demonstrative methods. Starting with
the invention of a thousand practical machines and amazing devices for
use in war or for other public needs, he gradually moved on to investi-
gate the higher laws of hydraulics and mechanics. Broad conceptions of
the most important truths of optics, geology, and theoretical and experi-
mental physics abound in his manuscripts, which thus anticipate many
discoveries of Halley, Kepler, Copernicus, and others of like genius.
1. The great Galileo eventually followed the path that Leonardo opened,
and it was his destiny to bring Italy’s restoration to glorious fulfillment.
People would have deceived themselves had they thought that Galileo
did this by a fortunate instinct of nature and not by enlightenment
gained from philosophy – by long and deliberate inquiry into the nature
of human minds. We would prefer to answer them with Galileo’s own
works, where in a hundred passages one finds evidence of his long
meditations on method. This is why he wanted to be called not only
a mathematician but also a philosopher, making a special point of it,
when he unfortunately agreed to return to Tuscany in the service of the
Medici …26 In the Assayer, he lets us know how he discovered that the
secondary qualities of bodies reside only in the sensing subject, and that
with regard to the external object they are nothing but mere names.27
Once the animal faculty has been removed, all these qualities are taken
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2. But his great idea was a complete reform of method, without which
he thought no field of knowledge could prosper …28 Up to now we have
been able to count four or five errors of method which in Galileo’s time
continued to trouble the learned and their studies, such as a certain ten-
dency to trust authority… [To this] he angrily objected … and against
another habit – discussing and debating the known while inquiring no
further into the unknown – his rejoinder was just as angry: namely, that
pride as much as laziness made people in his day incapable of seeking
new and accurate results and unable to derive new proofs from them,
and that it was easier for them to search for books and compare pas-
sages.29 Perceiving, on the other hand, that the teachings of Aconcio,
Valla, Nizolio, Telesio, and Campanella were not enough to detach
people’s minds from their bad and outworn habits, he was convinced
that the same thing would have happened to him had he limited his
work to promulgating and discussing his views on the good and true
method, without extending them by new examples. That he was very
wise to do so was shown a little later by Descartes, who, contesting many
recent teachings of the rationalist philosophers, published new proofs a
priori, abstractions taken for reality, hypotheses treated as theories and
returned to use.
3. Galileo also saw that there can be no certain science of method until
a science of the intellect has been established, and that in the meantime
people have no effective recourse but to return tamely to the dogmas of
common sense. His aim, therefore, was to restore the love of the natural
method and its practices, drawing clear attention to its rules, and, in
the end, making it the people’s heritage once again, perpetuating its
rule with the resolute assistance of the many … He not only wrote in
the vernacular but did so with elegance and eloquence, using his writ-
ing to lead young people to a natural and perfect sense of the beautiful
and the true. At that time, no type of research proved more fit than the
natural sciences to correct their thinking and take away their ills since no
sophisms or veiled words could stand against factual evidence … In this
way, Galileo forced his enemies, the Peripatetics themselves, to stoop to
observation and conduct experiments …
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The natural sciences thus provided the occasion and hope of wonder-
ful discoveries capable of wakening human curiosity – ordinary people
included – and this was how it happened: the invention of the telescope,
the new theory of the heavens, and new experiments on motion stirred
many people and made them want to know more. Another advantage
arising from the things described by Galileo was to persuade everyone
that nature’s wonders belong to one and all, and that for those who use
their eyes and hands there is no shortage of things to ponder. That most
pernicious axiom of the philosophers – that small details do not produce
science – was thus made obsolete. Galileo often noted how he had direct-
ed his research towards problems falsely regarded as commonplace and
frivolous, and he added that on this point his enemies were not behaving
like their master Aristotle … From the love of natural sciences that he
laboured to propagate, this benefit inevitably arose: that in these scienc-
es the facts themselves replace our assumptions and become the mind’s
best guide … What he wanted above all was to plant in each person’s
mind the caution, deliberation, and maturity of the art of induction. He
called doubt the father of discoveries and the highway of truth …
While his contemporaries looked in physics for metaphysics, he
refrained altogether from attempts at explanation in areas where the
senses are incompetent and reasoning is insufficient. In discussions of
the infinite, the continuous, the indivisible, the one or other such fea-
tures of metaphysical being, he actually found express proof that we
deceive ourselves in thinking that we can understand them. And yet
he did not, on that account, call it foolhardy to derive quite plausible
conjectures from the general concept of the system of the heavens that
he had established. The result was that modern science, despite having
made enormous progress, has never caught him in a mistake, except
perhaps on one or two purely conjectural points.
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5. Under these rules Galileo set forth the natural method, whose foun-
dations he believed to be no longer in dispute … He taught an applica-
tion of the rules of method that was already so complete that no one in
any period has ever used a better one. And in the art of coordinating
observation, experience, and reason, what his school showed it could
do – whether in analytic insight and accuracy or in breadth and depth
of synthetic outlook – we find unequalled by any modern researcher …
Galileo thought it a piece of wisdom required by his times not to go
beyond the physical phenomena, seeing that intellectual conditions
were not yet favourable enough to risk the thickets of debate on rational-
ist teachings. He had long discussions about this with Hobbes, however,
who came to Florence specifically to hear what the venerable old sage
had to say.33 And although he advised Hobbes on the method that he
should follow in order to bring speculative theory close to geometric
proof, Hobbes then mixed hypotheses with inductions and made inquir-
ies into the natural history of the mind that were too simple.
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2. Once Bacon got down to dealing with a universal method, it was prop-
er for him to follow the trail of psychological experience. On the other
hand, how could he believe that a first philosophy was not necessary
once he set out to collect and organize human knowledge and to inves-
tigate the highest unity? In fact, the doctrine that he mentions in the
third book of De augmentis, and wants to call a first science, has nothing
to do with the highest universals nor with the common basis of all cogni-
tions …37 Hence, Bacon is to be judged either as a practical person or as
a theorist. If he is practical, who could rank him ahead of Galileo or even
as his equal? If he is theoretical, we would say that he understood neither
the nature nor the importance of certain principles that must have been
known to Italian philosophers before him and subordinated to the laws
of natural method.
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5. In England and France, Descartes and Bacon initiated new and pro-
found theoretical inquiries that were dying out in Italy during the same
period. Bruno, Ruggeri, and Vanini died at the stake; Pomponazzi barely
escaped the executioner; Campanella spent twenty-seven years in prison
and was tortured seven times; others were persecuted and scattered. Thus
the noble course of Italian philosophy fell into decline, first the rational,
then the natural, since very few of Galileo’s disciples escaped the poverty,
worry, and mistreatment to which their master was subjected.
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which had hardly seemed to emerge when it was blocked by the mass of
persecutions and then contradicted again by the bad habits of Cartesian
philosophy.
When we think carefully about these events and make frequent com-
parisons with modern times, we reach the following conclusion: namely,
that the good to be done in every domain of theoretical inquiry would
be quick, extensive, and admirable if a new Italian school could be estab-
lished and if its central task were to pick up the thread of the old abstract
teachings, along with those whose main intent and primary work was to
establish the best philosophical method by carefully adapting the natural
method to the conditions proper to the nature of those teachings – max-
ims for the concerns of first philosophy. For such an enterprise, given
what we have already written, this seems the sole and unique propaedeu-
tic capable of easing the endless discord among systems and bringing
philosophy into any definite and positive state as a science.
We would say that a school must be created, because, in our view, only
the collective activity of many thinkers can work to maintain the author-
ity of secure principles and practices, even when their value can be meas-
ured quickly and confidently from the abundance and variety of their
results. The Italians also believed this when they set the first example and
taught how to unite the strengths of individual minds and multiply them
by mutual influence and by setting definite goals and definite common
standards. Thus arose Telesio’s academy and the one that Porta founded
in Naples; Leonardo’s in Milan and the Platonic group at the Medici
court; also Pomponazzi’s, larger but more secretive; and then the Lincei
in Rome and the Cimento in Florence – and everyone knows what the
civilized world owes these last two for having reconstructed experimental
research.
In this framework, therefore, let us eagerly desire and appeal for a
renewal of the ancestral Italian philosophy, not because we believe there
is no philosophy in our fair land today or that it never follows the foot-
steps of our ancestors. Indeed, it greatly delights our hearts to see it
flourish again – noble, chaste, judicious, and very careful – especially in
the hands of the distinguished Pasquale Galluppi, who deserves to inher-
it all the fame of the thinkers of Cosenza and to propagate the wisdom of
Vico and Genovesi. But what would make us think it impossible today to
renew all the glory of the ancestral Italian school and retake the leader-
ship in theoretical inquiry that we held throughout the whole sixteenth
century, without contest and beyond dispute – even in the judgment of
foreigners? If from one perspective we see a long era of misfortune and
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1. If what we said in opening this book was true, that all the mistakes
of modern philosophy come mainly from errors of method, we should,
after examining the systems most celebrated in our day, find them more
or less out of line with the rules described above. And this seems to be
the case. In keeping with our customary brevity, we shall confirm this
finding with a few selected examples …
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The Lockeans, for example, once they have found nothing in a sequence
of phenomena to show an apodictic causal connection among them,
immediately announce – in keeping with pre-established dogma – that
the causal principle is the child of habit and of the constant association
of particular ideas. The rationalists, on the contrary, having barely noted
the same fact, rush straight to their favourite rule, their belief that the
highest principles of reason are all transcendent and innate.
Because of a related concern, neither sect bothers much about care-
fully distinguishing the positive part of their work from the conjectural
part, which asks about the hidden origins of thought and the mental
history of the newborn. Lockeans start with the assumption of the tabula
rasa. Kant’s only starting point is pre-existing formative powers, but they
are also semi-hypothetical. So nothing proves that there are not notions
and concepts accompanying the formative powers, even in advance of all
experience. And even if this seems improbable, it is certainly not impos-
sible. True, the philosophers make up for their patchy analysis with a cer-
tain subtlety of argument and elevate their theoretical machinery into
absolutes and universals. We have always noted that Kant’s arguments
are incapable of proving the necessity of his categories. Locke’s argu-
ments are just as defective: they work magnificently against Descartes but
not against any assumption of ideas and judgments a priori.
3. Reid’s way is better. Like Locke and the old Italian school, he held
that the history of the mind – when it is deep, careful, and complete – is
the sum and substance of all speculative philosophy, which must nei-
ther begin with dogmas nor pursue them. Consequently, given his astute
sense of method, Reid thought it useful to cast doubt on many opinions
that were thought to be unassailable and to add substantially to the sum
of psychological facts. But he was less successful at sticking to experimen-
tal research on the mind and not making premature synthetic assump-
tions. He erred by proposing that the basis of every demonstration is
human consensus – good, solid evidence in itself as long as it depends
on other, prior evidence, but meaningless when it becomes the begin-
ning and end of every proof, since it is the very thing that requires proof.
Reid thus mistook the means for the end: common sense is a wonderful
tool for philosophy and an excellent place to start, but philosophy’s goal
is to produce an account, whenever there might be one, of the reasons
behind the axioms of common sense.
Other less patient spirits think they can begin philosophy on a
moment’s notice, leaving aside the natural history of the mind and cling-
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ing to some ontological axiom. The result being what it is, impoverished
and unproductive, they keep padding it with broad and rash hypoth-
eses. And then there are others who have recognized the poverty of the
rationalist and sensist systems. But instead of indicting those systems for
their feeble analyses and returning to more exact research on the history
of the thought process, they have put the blame on the poverty of the
human faculties and have gone on to cultivate scepticism in some cases,
mysticism in others.
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5. This has been the subject of our thinking and writing from the day
when we began to look for the shameful reason why the field of phi-
losophy should be so savagely contested by opposing systems, while,
for more than three centuries, the populous family of physical and
natural scientists of every stripe lives happily with its harmonious prin-
ciples and thrives by seeking the truth as its vigour increases. Not many
years ago, that noble thinker, Victor Cousin, was proclaiming in France
that method is a topic of great urgency in the theoretical sciences, and
that he had noticed, corresponding to every basic transformation that
occurred in the sciences, a simultaneous change in method as well.
With this statement we emphatically agree, and we regard it as per-
haps the most useful and productive to have come out of France since
Condillac.
We have no hesitation in wanting this statement to get the attention
that it deserves and to be discussed by a great many different people,
which was the reason for writing and dedicating the first part of this
book. We believe, in fact, that we have shown modern philosophy to
be so remarkably contentious for two reasons: first, not being able to
supply all knowledge with a first philosophy which is open and clear
in its rules and arguments; second, and contrary to the example of all
current fields of human learning, not being able to stop producing
opposed and contradictory positions, so that scepticism wins again and
the fruit of long theoretical study is lost. Now as far as first philosophy
is concerned, this persistent inability to build on bases contested by no
one could have its cause in the weakness of the cognitive faculties. As
for the ever-recurring division of opinions, however, this is purely and
simply the result of a discrepancy in methods – inasmuch as we proved
this at the start. For this reason, then, the doctrine of method not only
has great weight in issues of theory, but also, in a sense, is their form
and essence.
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NOTES
1 Mamiani (1834) is the first edition; we have used Mamiani (1836); for Ros-
mini’s reply, see Rosmini (1836); also section 10 of the Introduction.
2 [a] De vera sapientia; [e] cf. Petrarca (1496).
3 Lorenzo Valla (1407−57), Ermolao Barbaro (1454−93), and Angelo
Poliziano (1454−94) were all humanists, but Pietro Pomponazzi
(1462−1525) was a philosopher (and an Aristotelian), like most of the
figures from this period named by Mamiani: see Copenhaver and Schmitt
(1992).
4 [a] De dialectica contra Aristotelem (Venice: 1499), book 3; [e] cf. Valla (c.
1497).
5 Mamiani may be thinking of the followers of Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
(1743−1803).
6 For Rudolf Agricola (1443−85), Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (1460−1536),
Juan Ginés de Sepulveda (1490−1573), see Copenhaver and Schmitt
(1992); Caspar Schoppe (1576−1649: Scioppius) was a convert to Catholi-
cism and an anti-Protestant (also anti-Jesuit) controversialist who wrote a
widely read Philosophical Grammar.
7 For Girolamo Cardano (1501−76), Andrea Cesalpino (1519−1603), Cesare
Cremonini (1550−1631), Francesco Patrizi (1529−97), Giulio Cesare
Vanini (1586−1619), and Jacopo Zabarella (1533−89), see Copenhaver and
Schmitt (1992).
8 Pierre Gassendi (1592−1655) turned to his lifelong project of recovering
ancient atomism when he decided that he had been preempted by Patrizi in
refuting Aristotle: Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992).
9 For Bernardino Telesio (1509−88), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992).
10 On Mario Nizolio (1488−1567), see Copenhaver and Schmitt (1992); Nizo-
lio (1674) is the edition by Leibniz mentioned just below.
11 Jacopo Aconcio (1492−1567) was a religious controversialist who also wrote
influentially on method in Aconcio (1558).
12 [e] Aconzio (1558): 13.
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33 [a] Targioni, Notizie degli aggrandimenti delle scienze fisiche, in vol. 2; [e]
Targioni-Tozzetti (1780).
34 [a] Nova de universis philosophia in qua Aristotelica methodo, etc. (Ferrara:
1591); [e] Patrizi (1593).
35 [a] Cousin, Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie, in vol. 2; [e] Cousin (1829).
36 Bacon (1620), (1624).
37 Bacon (1624).
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Bertrando Spaventa
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pose is to understand the highest level to which theory has risen in Italy.
Only at this level do we see all our past in its true light, and all our future
as if in its seed. In my judgment, such is that lively, vast, and deep intui-
tion of the universe which – with all the contradictions that are more
apparent than real, perhaps, or, if they are real, are necessary and not
accidental – even Gioberti’s opponents admire so much in all his works.
Thus, all that I shall say of the other systems you should consider only a
general introduction to my account of this last one.
A common belief is that Gioberti is only Rosmini’s antithesis and thus
that the only undertaking worthy of our philosophical activity is to rec-
oncile them, to find a third system that accepts what truth there is in
both and rejects what is false – close to what has long been said about
Plato and Aristotle. This view is in some sense correct. However, taken
as a general criterion of the character of the two Italian systems and as
a rule for the future of our philosophy, it is no less false than the view
that treats Platonic idealism and ontologism (so-called) and Aristotelian
empiricism and psychologism as two equally imperfect and opposed
developments of the great Socratic tradition.
Just as the Aristotelian idea – since by now it is obvious to everyone
that Aristotle, like Plato, Rosmini, and Gioberti, also has his idea – is
the development and necessary completion of the Platonic (the latter
immobile and transcendent substantiality, the former absolute activity
immanent in things), so Gioberti’s intuition and idea contains in itself,
as its first moment, Rosmini’s intuition and idea. By this comparison,
however, note that I do not mean to affirm that our two thinkers relate to
one another in Italian philosophy as Plato and Aristotle relate in Greek
philosophy: that Rosmini is our Plato and Gioberti our Aristotle. Com-
parisons like this, often taken literally, explain nothing; on the contrary,
they frequently breed confusion. Others might say with equal justice that
Plato is the Greek Rosmini and Aristotle the Gioberti, and still one would
not really know anything about any of the four as they really were.
What I want to say is this: just as Aristotle is the more complete Socratic
and thus includes Socrates and Plato in himself, so the reconciliation
of Rosmini and Gioberti is not something that remains to be done but
was already done or at least undertaken by Gioberti himself; it is simply
a question of understanding this reconciliation well and making it bear
fruit. I do not deny that there is a side of Gioberti that appears to be
exactly the opposite of Rosmini; understood in this way, abstractly and
apart from his other features, this side of him for many represents all
of Gioberti. And then they say: ‘Rosmini’s principle is possible Being;
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ency of the real, is found only in that whose Being is its self-knowing and
whose self-knowing is the root and foundation of all being.
Thus what Gioberti in his early works calls his ontologism is basically
nothing more than the true spiritualism. What he says to be present to
human intuition is not being simply as an object or as pure existence or
as unconscious totality of the universal determinations of existence; it is
God himself as absolute personality in the fullness of his power, intelli-
gence, and love, as Creator in the true sense of the term, as creative and
re-creative activity, in other words. He is not external, then, but within
us, and this inwardness is our true inwardness with ourselves precisely
because he is a self-aware personality. Without such inwardness, we, as
personality and awareness of ourselves, would not apprehend him as per-
sonality but only as existence.
It has been said that the ancient world, the Greek world, was beautiful
but lacked love. The cause of this defect is in the very essence of love,
which is two consciousnesses or personalities in one, without the one
cancelling the other but with the one preserved and nourished in the
other. The ancient world did not know love because it did not know
how to conceive of this presence of two in one, and, I would say, their
near identification without eliminating difference. This is possible only
by means of the Spirit and in the inwardness of the Spirit. Antiquity did
not know love because it did not know the Spirit.
Gioberti’s merit is to have included and summed up in his own sys-
tem not only Rosmini, and therefore Galluppi, but also Vico, likewise
Campanella and even Bruno. My bringing all these names together will
seem strange to you, especially when I say that our philosophy begins
with Bruno and ends with Gioberti. What connection can there possibly
be between these two philosophers? I have no wish to stir up old hatreds
here. You all know about Bruno’s unhappy death. In that other era I do
not know what might have been the fate of the author of the Protology, the
Philosophy of Revelation, and the Catholic Reform of the Church.2 But, whether
it is true or false that there may be a certain resemblance between the
two philosophers in some aspect of life, between their teachings there
appears to be no analogy.
Bruno was judged a godless and irreligious man and was burned alive
as such at Rome. Gioberti is celebrated in the public mind, if not by the
Index, as the most forceful defender in modern times of the free alliance
between faith and reason. And so he is, beyond doubt. Granted all that, I
openly affirm that what is great and immortal in the philosopher of Nola
– the concept of God’s real infinity and of divine revelation as nature –
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lives again and becomes real only in Gioberti.3 To put this another way,
the usual verdict on Bruno needs to be reviewed and corrected. Luck-
ily we can now reconsider this judgment by freely studying the works
of our philosophers, all the more in that there is no question here of
inventing theories but only of making history speak. And the history of
human thought lies more in the writings of victims than in the verdicts
of persecutors.
To disclose my full intention to you, I must make known, as if by antici-
pation, the conclusion of my lectures by telling you about the notion that
I have formed for myself of the character and the development of our
philosophy.
Gentlemen, modern European civilization was born in great part from
that obscure and confused unity of different nations that bears the name
of the Middle Ages. This unity was the very idea of humanity, unknown
to the ancients and revealed by Christianity, even though at the time it
was not realized in its true form. The essence of this idea was the free
community of interests, opinions, feelings, and purposes of all peoples, a
community not possible in Greek and Latin culture because the basis of
that culture was the purely national state and so excluded any different
civilization. And this distinct culture, even though it aspired to embrace
the whole world of nations, could not really achieve unity except by
negating and absorbing every particular nationality in the abstract for-
malism of the Roman city. Humanity for the Greeks was nothing but
Hellenic nationality, and for the Romans only the universality of justice
and law. Rome may have been right, since the national cultures that it
rejected had in them nothing truly human – or Christian, we should say
– but were only natural. Without the Christian idea true humanity is not
possible.
The system of the Middle Ages was a different matter: justice, dignity,
human and social existence were not based on a given nationality as in
Greece nor on the universal city as in Rome. Their basis was the very
nature of man as man, the infinite value of his immortal soul, his inward
affinity and communion with God, in whose image and likeness he was
created and then re-created by redemption. Man’s law was God’s law
applied to the human race. But this unity was still abstract, confused, and
rather chaotic; only time and the perennial action of the Spirit could
cause the moral cosmos of nations to be born of it. It was the idea of
Christianity only in its crude, spontaneous, and primitive form, and it
had no foundation in concrete and living interests. The reason, gentle-
men, is that, like the complete community of a single people, the true
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to be understood that man and nature in general are not sin and noth-
ing more, an existence entirely abandoned by God, who can be reached
only in special and extraordinary ways. God exists not only in external
nature but in human consciousness itself, and man has the power to
raise himself to God and realize the divine ideal not only by represent-
ing it and through the vagaries of external worship but also by religious
feeling, by aesthetic understanding, by the practice of social life, and by
knowledge.
This faith in human ability and in nature’s living and divine reality
was the inner motive for the theories of all our philosophers: Telesio,
Pomponazzi, Cesalpino, your great townsman Achillini, Cremonini, Zab-
arella. But in this glorious phalanx of free thought the two greatest are
Bruno and Campanella, who surely mark two special directions in the
development of our thought from that time onward. Defining these dif-
ferent directions is the key to the history of our thought.
In Campanella it is as if there are two persons: the medieval man, the
Dominican, the disciple of St Thomas; and the new man with new aims
and instincts, who always hesitates to contradict the other person, mean-
ing only to reconcile this opposition between the new science – espe-
cially the understanding of nature – and the beliefs of the Church. As a
young man, then, he defended Telesio’s physics against the Aristotelians
of the day. But on the other hand, drawing on the religious piety that he
drank in with his mother’s milk, he seeks to inquire more accurately into
the relation between natural life and the supernatural.
He wants to reform philosophy and social conditions as well, but by
preserving – always promoting, in fact – respect for the Catholic Church
and religion. For peoples he allows progress, but this progress must be
aimed at a universal monarchy with the Pope at its head, at the extirpa-
tion of heresy, at the community of goods and women. He attributes
some importance to worldly affairs and to the State especially, and he
does not treat them as a mere nullity. On the other hand, the world
and the State for him contain nothing authentically divine and absolute,
and they have no real value except insofar as they serve the purposes
of the Church. The divine for Campanella is always the religious ele-
ment alone, and the true state is a church-lay State. He acknowledges
the value of sense and experience; indeed, he bases all of human and
natural science on the latter. As the foundation of all understanding he
posits consciousness of the self and the spontaneous activity of the mind,
so that we must admire him as the precursor of modern empiricism and
rationalism both, of Bacon and Locke and of Descartes. Despite all that,
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natural science for him is not something divine and is based mainly on
the material soul more than on the immortal, whose sole object is the
religious idea and the world beyond. From this comes the dualism that
divides the natural from the supernatural throughout Campanella’s sys-
tem, and he does not know how to reconcile them.
He also maintains that nature needs to be studied because it is the
great book or volume of God, and he actually says that philosophy con-
sists of this reflection. This puts him in open opposition to the Middle
Ages that sought God outside of nature and outside human conscious-
ness itself. But at the same time he adds that creatures are no more than
images and vestiges of God; the world in general is a sort of statue of
God and nothing more; it is not an aspect of God’s life, and God in his
truth is absolutely outside of the world and exists without it. Therefore,
what makes us know the true God is religion alone and definitely not
philosophy, which for this reason is queen only of the natural sciences
and always the handmaid of theology.
But if philosophy, and, in general, all sciences based on the contem-
plation of nature and man do not make us know the truth that is God
himself, of what use are they? How can we justify the need for their exist-
ence, and, in general, why must we pass through this mutable and mate-
rial life on earth? Campanella replies that he knows nothing about it;
on the contrary, he says, on this topic even guesswork is risky. Thus, in
general, Campanella does not understand the necessity of the finite; he
does not know how to grasp the humanity, and, if I may say so, the world-
liness of God. The finite for him is a pure fact that cannot be explained.
From this, one sees that Campanella’s philosophy has both a theological
and a sceptical character. His scepticism lies in the belief that human
knowledge is not enough for everything because it is always limited and
incomplete. His theologism comes from the need for extraordinary
measures to come to the aid of reason. This second trait also belongs to
the scholastics of the Middle Ages, but the difference between them and
Campanella is precisely his scepticism because scholasticism was dog-
matic and theological without first having been sceptical. In the latter,
theologism is a beginning; in the former, a result.
This scepticism, which must be distinguished from the ancient kind,
is the new element in philosophy. Joined with the study of nature – pro-
duced by it, in fact – it takes various forms in various philosophies and
leads to various results. Thus in Cusanus it had already taken the name
of learned ignorance and served to prove the need for God’s word and
for faith. In Pomponazzi it comes out as opposition between sense and
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intellect, experience and reason, the one limited but certain, the other
limited and uncertain, so that one must believe more in the former than
in the latter. The same opposition exists between natural knowledge and
supernatural: as philosophers we must follow the first, even when it con-
tradicts the second; as believers and children of the Church we must
stand on supernatural knowledge. Thus, the same sceptical tendency
that results in theological dogmatism for Campanella, for Pomponazzi
produces a separation, if not an opposition, between philosophy and
theology and the division of the human person into two, the thinker and
the believer. This separation becomes deeper in Telesio and others who
came later.
Anyone who thinks about modern philosophy recognizes this scepti-
cal element in all its systems, more or less. Even in absolute idealism,
which claims to know all truth, it manifests itself as consciousness of the
inability of finite understanding to grasp the essence of things, which is
then granted not to simple faith but to human thinking itself as reason
or dialectical and theoretical intellect.
Campanella’s significance in the history of our philosophy is as follows,
then. He is a free philosopher who trusts the senses, experience, and self-
consciousness, but he does not have the philosophical independence
even of Pomponazzi, Achillini, Cesalpino, and the philosophers of the
Paduan school – not to speak of Bruno. He is the least free of our free
philosophers. He is not a scholastic, and he is greater than Bruno insofar
as he seeks to base philosophy on the principle of self-consciousness, as
his master Telesio had based knowledge of nature on the senses. But in
his conclusions he agrees, more than one would think, with the content
of the hierarchical doctrines of the Middle Ages. He removes the shack-
les from science only to let it make new ones of its own and submit itself
freely to faith. In short, he is the philosopher of the Catholic restora-
tion after the Reformation. His goal was to reconcile the old world with
the new, scholasticism with free thought – an impossible exploit, at least
then. Gioberti undertakes the same feat two centuries later, but with a
much different attitude.
Bruno was a different person: a different spirit, a different mind. Cam-
panella, buried alive in the cause of liberty for twenty-seven years in those
pits they call prisons in Naples, bears up heroically to cruel torment
many times, writes the greater part of his many and voluminous works
threatened by torture, and at last by a pope’s favour sees the light of day
again to die old and at ease in Paris. Bruno, also a Dominican, leaves
the cloister as a young man; throws away his monk’s habit; goes wander-
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ing through Europe; visits France, England, and Germany, preaching his
free ideas at every stop, seeking peace everywhere but never finding it,
always unhappy with everything and everyone except one thing alone –
the truth. He cries out: ‘The university I dislike, the mob I despise, many
things leave me dissatisfied, and only one inspires my love; to that one I
freely subject myself, happy to suffer, rich in need, and living in death’;
‘My toil, torment, and agony is for love of this one alone.’5 Driven by fate,
he returns at last to Italy to be imprisoned by the Inquisition of Venice;
turned over to the Roman Office; interrogated, tortured, and burned.
They often say that truth is the greatest suffering in philosophy as well
as its greatest consolation. If this is so, I believe there is no one for whom
truth produced more suffering or more consolation than poor Bruno.
Was this the source of his enormous enthusiasm and that restless spirit
that seemed calm and quiet only when facing death? ‘In Bruno,’ writes
an historian of philosophy, ‘there is the elation of a great soul that senses
in itself the immanence of the Spirit and knows that the whole life of
thought consists in the unity of its being and of all beings. In the depth
of this awareness there is something resembling the sacred frenzy of a
bacchante, something that overflows itself in becoming its own object
and expressing so much richness.’6 And here is the whole difference
between Bruno and Campanella. For Campanella the universe is certain-
ly not a dead thing. All things live; they sense, in fact; and the universal
soul moves and nourishes them. But this life is only a shadow of the true
life; the source of all life is beyond it. One does not reach this source with
the intellect, which is always condemned to feed on water and mud. We
taste only some semblance of it by means of faith.
Bruno also allows this incomprehensible source to exist, or at least he
does not absolutely deny it. But in confirming it he reduces it to the tini-
est little point that causes no torment for the human mind because in
nature, in the universe and in the world – in other words, as Bruno puts
it, in that heavenly Amphitrite who is infinite begetting, a perfect image,
and likeness of the divine begetter – the mind, living, real and unfolded,
contemplates all the treasures that the point can conceal.7 Thus, the uni-
verse for Bruno is not only the statue of God but his infinite revelation;
not the tomb of dead divinity but the throne of living divinity; it is the
true and only life of God, in fact, because to live is to be revealed, and
one who begets, contemplates, and mirrors himself in his begetting is
revealed. Without the universe, God would be abstract infinity, not real
infinity. Bruno concedes the first to the affairs of the theologians. The
second he assigns to philosophers as their only and true God.
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Here is the point where one sees what truth there is in Bruno and what
is false. The scepticism that we usually see crucified as the enemy of eve-
rything good, is, when one reckons it up, often one of the most powerful
allies of faith and religion. The reason is that unless there were some-
thing to show us the limits and weaknesses of human understanding, we
would have no need to believe: everything would be as clear as the light
of day. Now scepticism, which begins after the Middle Ages with Cusanus
and continues with all philosophers after him, reduces to a mere appear-
ance in Bruno. Like Spinoza after him, whose true predecessor he was,
Bruno does not believe because he is not sceptical enough.
He is satisfied with the God in nature. Indeed, for him nature is God
himself in things, as their substance or identity and as absolute lack of
distinction between thought and extension, ideal and real, form and mat-
ter. The supersubstantial and incomprehensible God of the theologians
does not so much set a limit on understanding as show no regard for it.
Thus, if there is a defect or imperfection here, it lies more with God him-
self, as absolute and otherworldly principle, than with the understand-
ing, which cannot know God because as completely simple – as pure
unity without begetting, or, as Bruno also says, without making one thing
different from another – he is in no way knowable, not even for himself.8
The truth in Bruno’s teaching, therefore, is to have confirmed that
God cannot be known unless within him there is real distinction– unless
he manifests himself, in other words – and that nature is God’s revela-
tion. The false part is to have taken nature as a unique revelation, judg-
ing knowledge of God as nature to be the final and most complete level
of knowledge. Since Bruno did not doubt the truth of this knowledge
and did not use scepticism to see the flaw in it, he fell into the following
contradiction. God (the Substance) does not know himself, and inas-
much as man (the mode of the Substance) knows God, man is superior
to God, the mode to the substance, because the knower is superior to
the known that does not know itself. To resolve this contradiction, one
would need to say either that knowledge has no importance and hence
that conscience, freedom, and personality are mere appearance, or that,
if knowledge has value, God is not simply substance and nature.
God as manifest is surely more real than God as a closed unity. But is
there no other? Is there not a God that knows himself, whose essence, in
fact, is self-knowing, and, just because he is known to himself, man knows
him, knows himself, and knows the world? Briefly, what Bruno lacks is
understanding of real divine revelation, of God as Spirit, in other words.
Because of this he has no faith, nor indeed any religion, since where the
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been abandoned by God. God had made the world, but God was not at
all visible in the world. And in truth they had reduced God – when they
did not say that he was the same as matter – to what they could do with-
out. The world looked to itself and went on its way like a watch wound
up for eternity. Plainly, to escape from such degradation it was obviously
necessary to deny both the abstract monotheism that opposed a mate-
rialism no less abstract, as well as the naturalism of Bruno and Spinoza,
and to take from this a theoretical concept of God that would be neither
pure Being nor merely Nature. This could not be done without denying
empiricism and intellectualism at the same time, and making philoso-
phy’s problem not unconscious reality – the pure object, Being, whether
God, soul, or nature – but conscious reality, conscious knowledge, the
Spirit. This problem is the real meaning of all German philosophy –
psychological in appearance, metaphysical at its core, as in fact it shows
itself to be in its most recent phase.
In the first half of the last century, when the damage was not so serious,
the only God that everyone was looking for in the universe and in mankind
was still just nature, since man himself was considered a natural being.
Then, as if foreseeing where things were headed, one person turned up to
claim that he had discovered a New Science. Was it empty boasting, or rather
an insight anticipating what we in our current century know to be the real
problem of philosophy? ‘Philosophers until now,’ he said,
have contemplated God only in the order of natural affairs. Rising higher, I
contemplate in God the world of human minds, which is the metaphysical
world, in order to demonstrate Providence in the world of human souls,
which is the civil world or the world of nations. Contemplating God only
through the natural order – inasmuch as he has given existence naturally to
things and people, in other words, and naturally preserves it – philosophers
have demonstrated only one part or attribute of his providence. Through
the part that most belongs to human beings, whose nature has this primary
property of being social, I shall contemplate God as provident in moral
political affairs or in the civil customs by which nations have come into the
world and are preserved.
And this new and higher contemplation is possible because this civil
world has certainly been made by humans; hence its principles can and
must be rediscovered within the modifications of our very own human
mind. It must amaze us that all philosophers strive to pursue the science
of this natural world, whose science, because the Deity made it, he alone
knows. But they neglect to think about this world of nations, whose science,
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because humans have made it, humans can pursue. This oddity has resulted
from the weakness of the human mind, which, remaining immersed and
entombed in the body, is inclined naturally to sense bodily things, while to
understand itself too much strength and effort is needed.
And yet inasmuch as man becomes almost like God, and this science is
of a kind truly divine, to that extent man himself has made the world that
he wants to contemplate with this science, since in God knowing and mak-
ing are one and the same, and man alone participates in this divine nature.
The difference between man and God is that originally man has made this
world of his without knowing what he has made – believing, in fact, that he
has done just the opposite.
And, in a way, this is a kindly cunning on the part of Providence, which,
without force of laws, but by making use of man’s own customs – whose
practices are as free of all force as man is to celebrate their nature – as a
mind different from and at times contrary and always superior to the par-
ticular and limited ends that humans have proposed for themselves, makes
them the means to serve larger ends and uses them always to preserve the
human race. Thus, men want to act on their animal lust and abandon their
offspring, and from this they produce the chaste state of matrimony from
which families arise; the Fathers want to exercise unrestrained paternal
power over their clients, and cities arise; the nobles want to abuse lordly
liberty over the common people, and they become servants of the laws that
make popular liberty, and so on.
What did all this was Mind, however, because people did it with intel-
ligence; it was not Fate, because they did it by choice; not Chance, because
the same results come perpetually from the same actions. This Mind or
Providence is the unity of the Spirit that informs and gives life to this world
of nations.12
With these words, which I have collected faithfully from the whole of
the New Science, Vico posed a new problem, a new view of man, the world,
and God. Until that time, man had been viewed as a natural being, as a
pure individual, studied only in those abstract, common, and general
qualities that he had brought with him from birth. Nature was viewed
as a whole unto itself and as having its real meaning only in itself; some
made it derive from God, but no one recognized it as a means to a higher
end. God was viewed only as the author of nature. The human world
appeared either as part of the natural world or as the pure product of
man’s will.
Vico wants to find a new metaphysics, a metaphysics of the human
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whole is the poet who sees and does everything in a practical way: it is the
age of myths and false religions. Understanding comes when people are
reflective enough that every people knows what it is and what it wants.
And philosophy is the highest level of this reflection or the most com-
plete consciousness of the being of a people. This movement from sense
to intellect is a real movement, an internal development, and certainly
not merely adding one thing to another. The intellect exists already in
the sense, but only implicitly, and yet what moves the sense and gives it
life and consciousness is the intellect itself, because in the activity of the
sense the intellect makes itself available as its own material.
Vico’s real merit, then, is to have grasped this concept of the Spirit as
free development of itself and to have applied it to explain the human
world. Just as the intellect appears to produce itself from sense, while
really it is the intellect that has posited sense – or, to put it better, has
presupposed sense for itself – by positing itself as true and real intel-
lect, so also in the human world, in the true life of the Spirit, in history,
the universal intellect prepares its own materials in the spontaneous and
animal life of the various peoples, causing the common end to emerge
from particular ends, public life from private interests, marriage and the
family from lust, the city from the excesses of the Fathers, the laws from
abuse of lordly authority, and so on. This intellect is not an external
mover, and man is not a machine that realizes an end that is not its own.
But the universal end that man fulfills by satisfying his particular ends is
his own proper end, and he fulfills it freely because in doing so he cel-
ebrates, as Vico solemnly says, his own proper nature.13
The result of this new view of man and the human world is a new view
of the natural world and God himself. Just as sense has no meaning by
itself, but only as the material and infolding of the intellect, so nature
is nothing more than the cradle of the Spirit. It is a world upon which
another world must arise and develop. Likewise, God’s real infinity – his
Providence – consists not merely of his revelation as a natural system
of things but mainly of his revelation as a human world. In the former,
things are simply posited; in the latter, man on his own makes himself
what he truly is. The former corresponds to God as Being, the latter
to God as Spirit. Of the former, God is the only author; of the latter,
God and man are the authors, God as creator and man as co-creator, as
Gioberti would say, so that this highest creative activity of God as human
Providence is in itself divine and human at once, and for that reason it
is love. Thus, God’s infinity, purely natural in Bruno, became spiritual
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infinity in Vico. One was the negation, the other the affirmation of the
personhood of God and man.
After Vico, what should our philosophers have done? What they
should have done, in my view, was not to stop studying the human psy-
che, which was really the right path. But they should have studied it not
just by understanding its abstract existence with the specific purpose of
confirming the old metaphysics of Being, but by discovering the meta-
physics that Vico described as belonging to the human mind, and by
grasping human ideas instead of ideas merely thought by man. The
problem was to find a new metaphysics to serve as the foundation of the
new science – of the science of the Spirit, that is. This problem formed
the deepest motive of German philosophy: to grasp the Spirit not simply
as the soul but in the full reality of its manifestation – this is the meaning
of that philosophy.
Thus Kant studies the psyche as cognition and destroys the whole edi-
fice of the old metaphysics, which treated the soul, the world, and God as
mere objects. Fichte studies the psyche as pure consciousness of oneself,
and clearly he remakes the natural and human universe as an infinite
production of the I. Schelling studies the psyche as substantial reason
and as equivalent in its two equal and parallel manifestations of the ideal
and the real, reproducing and transfiguring the pantheism of Bruno and
Spinoza. Hegel studies the psyche as absolute Spirit, which, inasmuch
as it is infinite mediation or relation of itself to itself, is presupposed to
itself as pure ideal, as pure real, through its being posited as actual unity
of the ideal and the real. Hence Hegel’s claim to have put a new meta-
physics in place of the one that Kant destroyed, a metaphysics identical
to logic, whose first principle is not Being but thinking as absolute – the
human Idea, in other words, as Vico calls it, in its greatest abstraction
and as its own absolute beginning.14
Our philosophers, by contrast, saw nothing in the new philosophy but
a problem of psychology, not only the minor figures but also Galluppi,
Mamiani, and even Rosmini. Rather than using their psychological stud-
ies to move on to the new metaphysics, they employed them either to
prop up the old one or negate it entirely without putting anything else
in its place. On the whole they did not see that the new psychological
research was not only incompatible with the old metaphysics but that this
research led necessarily to a new metaphysics, and they tore down only to
build anew. Therefore they fought the critical philosophy because they
thought it was the absolute negation of all metaphysics, when it was only
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the negation of the metaphysics that had run its course and planted the
seed of a new one.
Galluppi knows nothing of God but his existence and declares that
the claim to understand him is unworthy of his infinite essence. Rosmini
allows us only negative cognition of God, for which faith then makes up
the loss, so that the God of his philosophy does not much differ from the
Supreme Being of the previous century, which is recognizable neither in
nature nor in the mind. In all this where is the great idea that Vico had
brought to the world and left as a national heritage to Italian philoso-
phers? The services that Galluppi and Rosmini rendered to philosophy
are great, and I am not the last to acknowledge them. As psychologists
they have few equals, but this is their whole value. The negative is that
they grasp only the bare bones of what there is: man, the world, and God.
Of man they say only that he has one faculty or another, from which
comes one idea or another; of the world that it has one determination or
another of the most general kind, which is contingent, temporal, finite,
and so on; of God that he is, is Supreme Being, the most real being; they
cannot even say that he has created the world since their philosophy
comprehends being but not creating. This is all they say about anything.
But as for the life of man, the world, and God, as for their history – since
not only man but also nature and God have a history, and history in gen-
eral is just the divine thinking of creation – they have nothing to say, nor
can they say anything.
So this explains why neither Rosmini nor Galluppi has a philosophy of
the real, a philosophy of nature and the Spirit. They have logics, theories
of ideas, and psychologies. Rosmini also has a philosophy of law, but law
and psychology, as parts of the philosophy of Spirit, are a minor affair if
they are without a philosophy of art, language, history, and religion as
well. These parts are not found in their systems not because they lacked
the time to devise them but because there could be no place for them.
Where the principle is pure being, there can scarcely be an experimen-
tal psychology; were it otherwise, the inconsistency would be egregious.
In our philosophy, then, Galluppi, Mamiani, and Rosmini somehow
continue and complete that sceptical religious approach that we saw in
Campanella. For them, in order to establish the need for another source
of cognition, the chief aim of philosophy is to prove that reason cannot
know everything.
Gioberti’s merit is to have understood the complete vacuity of this
situation. When he utters the word nullism, it is not an expression of his
angry and emotional heart but of his shrewd and thoughtful mind, of
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the deep feeling that he had for the reality of things. Nullism is the abso-
lute unknowability of God. What corresponds to the absolute unknow-
ability of God is excluding any philosophy of the whole real life of the
world and man, of the whole positive dimension of nature and history,
and generally the whole life of creation. What remains is only pure idea
without fact, pure being without manifestation, pure essence without
activity. Everything positive is left to those who are not philosophers, to
their observation and experience. And since these people do not find
the idea at the bottom of their stills or in their microscopes, there is rea-
son to conclude that the living God, the God of nature and the human
race, is the God of faith, not of science.
Even in Gioberti there is a sceptical element. Although the Idea mani-
fests itself to the Spirit in full and absolute reality – as Creator, that is
– there is still a side of it that intuition cannot apprehend, the superintel-
ligible. Nonetheless, when it is seen that this side is reduced to something
quite small, as in Bruno, this real essence of the Idea, which is distinct
from the rational, is certainly not a totality of determinations different
from those that reason knows, but only the unity and nexus of those very
determinations. And if reason could recognize this nexus? If it could see
how one determination produces another? This is what other philoso-
phers claim, and Gioberti certainly has not shown that this is impossible.
Thus he reduces the mystery to its least expression, to a single point that
for some is perfectly clear. On the other hand, the superintelligible that
appears as a fixed and unbreachable limit in the first form of Gioberti’s
system shows itself to be something that keeps fading away as the system
develops. Intuition is no longer a limited potency, capable of knowing
only one side of the idea, but is an infinite potency to know, and in itself
all that is knowable, except that the act is always in time and in continu-
ous progress. Thus the difference between divine and human knowing is
only that between act and potency, but the content of the knowing is the
same. God is just the Idea of the world in its absolute state, and the world
is the Idea divided and multiplied.
Gioberti thus reproduces Bruno’s realism, but by completing and
resolving it in a higher principle, and on the other hand he establishes
the new metaphysics that Vico asked for. At the same time, he meets the
religious needs of Campanella, Galluppi, and Rosmini, not by separating
faith and knowledge but by reconciling them in the unity of the ideal sci-
ence. This science is based on the principle of creation – on the infinite
Idea as development of itself or as absolute relation to itself.
The Idea as pure Being posits the existent, and as existent it returns
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than this inclination to transcend the real and to be persuaded that theo-
retical insight into the universe can be had only by bare concepts. To
study the real and all the real, to know all the manifestations of nature
and history: this is the absolute state of every true philosophy.
Gentlemen, such is the concept that I have formed for myself of the
character and development of our philosophy. Let me summarize my
thoughts.
The character of our philosophy is just the same as that of all modern
philosophy, essentially different from the character of ancient philoso-
phy: it is the search for the first principle of everything not in absolute
objectivity, material or ideal, but in absolute mind. Its development is the
unfolding, the opposing, and ultimately the uniting of the two moments
of the absolute mind, objectivity and infinite subjectivity, the living real-
ity of nature, and the autonomy of human consciousness.
Informed by this deepest motive, our philosophy overcame that
abstract and unmediated unity of the Christian spirit, which, separated
from its two real moments of nature and humanity, appeared in the Mid-
dle Ages as empty and transcendent Being. From one side, then, came
Bruno’s naturalism, from the other Campanella’s psychologism; from
one side, in other words, immediate intuition of God as simple substance
and cause, from the other, consciousness as direct perception only of
the finite I and finite things. And given the conviction that knowing is
imperfect, given that sceptical approach by which truth – God himself
– was known by way of reasoning and only superficially, the true objects
of knowledge were only the world as mechanical aggregate of entities
and man either as pure will or as himself a mechanical entity. The final
consequence of this approach was, on the one hand, the absolute thing;
on the other, absolute matter as God.
Vico was the first to reconcile the necessity of nature with the free-
dom of the Spirit, but it was only prophecy, not science. He conceived of
God not just as natural order but as the moral order of the world, and
definitely not as two parallel and equally unmediated systems, so that
the moral order was nothing but the same natural order in a different
form (as in Spinozism). Instead, he conceived of God as the intellect
that disposes the natural order as matter and means for the moral order.
Thus, the absolute Prime was no longer substance but subject, not Being
but Mind. Along with this concept, Vico needed a new metaphysics that
would move on to human ideas, and therefore it would be based on the
study of human thinking. Hence the need for psychological research, or,
to put it better, for treating humans as knowing. But this treatment could
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not be philosophy’s final goal nor a means of propping up the old meta-
physics; the only course for this approach was to build a new metaphysics
on the ruins of the old.
This task of destruction explains the sceptical character of the new
philosophy. Galluppi, Rosmini, and Mamiani represent this direction in
our philosophy after Vico: they are philosophers of knowledge. Superb
psychologists, they study the act of knowing in all its aspects. To this
achievement Mamiani adds the noble enterprise of recovering the philo-
sophical tradition of our ancestors in the Renovation and the Dialogues.15
Wanting real results from his research, he strives to reconcile his philo-
sophical notions with the dictates of ordinary common sense. But the
defect of these thinkers is having failed to see that the whole meaning of
psychology lay in the need for a new metaphysics, to replace the meta-
physics of Being with that of the Spirit.
Gioberti alone realized that psychology was a means, not an end; a
means of putting a new principle in place, certainly not reinforcing the
old one. This new principle he expresses in the Ideal Formula, which
is nothing other than a new concept of the spirit.16 From now on, the
Spirit’s essence is no longer the contemplation of Being but the knowl-
edge of the Spirit that creates the Spirit. Its privilege is to be able to
know its own creation. Thus the Spirit alone is no longer a natural Being,
because, as intuition of the creative act, it assists, as I shall put it, in its
own origin. Its being is the very act from which it sees itself being pro-
duced. This is the meaning of Gioberti’s insight: certainly not that the
newborn person knows God the Creator, but that the human intellect is
in itself the potency of this cognition – infinite potency that embraces
everything knowable and must be actualized infinitely.
To know itself absolutely: this is the goal of the Spirit; this knowing is
its absolute freedom. And this must also be the goal of our philosophy,
the problem for our future. So that this knowledge does not decay into
pure abstraction, however, it must presuppose the whole of reality, not
only the natural but the human as well, all the domains in which the
Spirit’s activity is manifest. If the Spirit is the final end and true mean-
ing of everything, one can say that the Spirit is in everything, and hence
the Spirit alone knows itself absolutely and is free when it knows every-
thing and knows itself in everything. This is the knowledge of the crea-
tive act, of the Spirit as immanent and at the same time transcendent in
all things.
In my judgment, then, gentlemen, the highest level of our thinking is
the philosophy of Gioberti. It alone corresponds to the spirit of the age.
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It alone sums up and digests in itself all the most glorious moments of
Italian philosophy. It alone brings our philosophy back into the commu-
nal life of European philosophy. It alone can restore to Italian thought
that freedom and that glory that does justice to it as it becomes a nation-
al philosophy. Italy abounds in genius for theorizing; what is missing is
agreement of theory with experience.17 The first principle of this agree-
ment is in the system that will be the subject of these lectures.
You, young scholars, now have excellent support for succeeding in this
enterprise. In this University, risen to a new day, you can now freely learn
all those disciplines that are the basis of philosophy, not only the natu-
ral disciplines but history in all its branches, scholarship, and philology.
‘Freely,’ I said: and you must apply the first act of freedom to this same
system. There is no question of accepting it blindly in all its forms and
propositions, but of understanding, developing, and bringing to frui-
tion all the good that it contains. This system is more a beginning than a
system. You must shape the beginning into a new and complete system.
The beginning is divine creative activity – freedom, or the absolute law of
the Spirit. This freedom and this law you must grasp in its essence so that
with full consciousness you can make it effective in life as human beings,
as citizens, and as Italians.
NOTES
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is divinity proceeds this monad which is nature, the universe, the world’:
Bruno (1958), II, 1125.
8 Bruno (1958), I, 319−22.
9 Bruno (1958), I, 304−5, 332−3.
10 Campanella (1638a), 2.6.8.1, p. 59.
11 Christian Wolff (1679−1754) was a follower of Leibniz who influenced
Kant.
12 Spaventa takes this précis of Vico’s theory more or less verbatim from
several different sections of the New Science, as he says below: Vico (1977):
86−9, 96−7, 232, 244−5, 272, 592, 705−6.
13 Vico (1977): 87.
14 Vico (1977): 243−5, a key passage for Spaventa’s interpretation of Vico:
‘Setting out to find the nature of human affairs, this Science proceeds by
a rigorous analysis of human thoughts about the human necessities or
utilities of social life, which are the two enduring sources of the natural law
of the tribes … Hence … this Science is a history of human ideas, which
seems to be the basis on which the metaphysics of the human mind must
proceed. This queen of the sciences, following the rule that ‘sciences must
start where their material starts,’ began from the point when the first people
began to think as humans, certainly not when philosophers began to reflect
on human ideas … This Science … comes to describe an ideal eternal
history by which the histories of all nations run their course as they rise,
progress, stabilize, decline, and fall … In fact, we go on to claim that anyone
who meditates on this Science gives himself the narrative of this ideal eter-
nal history inasmuch as he makes it for himself, following the maxim ‘It had
to be, has to be, will have to be,’ since this world of nations was definitely
made by humans (which is the first indubitable principle posited above in
this work), and hence one must search for its mode within the modifica-
tions of our own human mind.’
15 Mamiani (1834), (1846).
16 See section 8 of the Introduction.
17 See section 1 of the Introduction for Bobbio’s restatement of this theme
nearly a century later.
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7
Pasquale Villari
Today there is much talk about the positive philosophy and its applica-
tions to the natural, moral, and historical sciences. If you take a look at
periodicals that discuss new books or new scientific topics, you will find
the issue constantly debated. There are philosophers who attack and phi-
losophers who support the new doctrine, and it is noteworthy that the
most eminent authors have been joining the argument for some time.
In England it is Mr J.S. Mill who supports the discussion, along with
many others. In France, where the positive philosophy had its origin in
this century, those who have entered the fray as advocates are not only
students of the moral sciences, like Littré, Renan, Taine, Vacherot, and
others, but also some of the most illustrious students of the natural sci-
ences, such as Berthelot and the great physiologist Bernard.2 If we look
to Germany, on the other hand, the positive philosophy has found many
barriers to break because in some sense it was foreign merchandise that
came from France, and Germany greatly distrusts the French philosoph-
ical mind. Today those barriers have been surmounted, however, and
German positive philosophy, while it still has no leader, has countless dis-
tinguished followers. The works of Comte and Mill have been translated,
explained, attacked, and defended. The debate is at its most passionate,
and the positive philosophy has won great victories. I will mention no
names because the young writers are many; a few years ago, Büchner
wrote a book titled Science and Nature in which he listed the most impor-
tant of them.3
How did this philosophy come to be? What is its aim? I do not intend
to give its history because the subject would require too much effort. I
wish instead to define its nature and character. I will say only that the
first origins of this philosophy can be found in many great writers of
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the past, both Italian and foreign, but that the first to give it a name,
describing it clearly in many publications and creating what amounts
to a body of doctrine, was Comte in France. And yet he often let him-
self go on with strange and excessive claims that spoiled the success he
had otherwise attained. After Comte came Mill: with his incomparable
insight he distinguished Comte’s mistakes from the true claims, and by
lending the authority of his name to the positive philosophy he gave it
enormous standing in England, where it became widespread earlier than
in France. In truth, however, this was not the work of a single person but
a product of the times, and so it seemed to spring up everywhere at the
same moment. For this reason, I intend to discuss not the opinions of
any individual philosopher but the general direction taken by the posi-
tive philosophy.
How and why did it come to be? And what is its aim?
What happens in the history of the human race often seems to be
what happens in the lives of individual people as well. When we have
been busy for a long time with abstract issues, an intense and passionate
need for poetry and art arises in us. And if we come upon a new poem
or novel, we almost devour the book while reading it. But when we have
grown weary from reading many poems, we want to turn to the philoso-
phers instead. This action and reaction is constant, observed throughout
history as well. After the materialism of the eighteenth century came
the German pantheism that ruled Europe in the first years of this cen-
tury. But when the human spirit had passed through an unending series
of systems, each succeeding and destroying the other in turn, the spirit
became weary and posed a question that could not go unanswered with-
out the gravest consequences.
All the sciences – so it came to be said – after wandering aimlessly for
a long time, finally found a method by which they could make consist-
ent progress, more or less quickly, but also confidently. Each time that
physics or chemistry came upon a new fact or found a new law, science
kept being enriched by these new findings. And once these truths were
accepted and approved by science, they ceased being disputed. Anyone
who tried to resist them would not be listened to – would be ridiculed
instead. All this is exactly the reverse of what happens in philosophy.
From the time of Socrates up to our own day, it has really always been
the same show that philosophy puts on for us. We see a kind of spon-
taneous generation and sustained destruction of systems, a continuing
mass sacrifice going on from century to century, with no way of know-
ing which divinity it is to whom the perennial offering has been given.
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And notice: now is not the first time that these charges have been made
against philosophy – and positive philosophers are not alone in making
them. Immanuel Kant was surely the first great innovator in modern
philosophy, having founded the eminent German school that reached
its final form with Hegel but derived entirely from the Critique of Pure
Reason. But Kant began his reform with precisely this same observation:
metaphysics is not a science, he clearly stated; it has been capable of no
real progress, presenting us with so wretched a spectacle that if it cannot
change course, it must resign itself to being struck from the roster of the
sciences. Metaphysics seems to be an arena where all we do is display skill
in a combat that has no goal, a field where no fighter ever manages to
gain an inch of ground, or at least no victory crowned by lasting success.
Kant created a new system that other philosophers attacked in turn;
he thus proceeded to reconfirm in his own case the truth of his origi-
nal observation. Not that there are not many truths and ideas of the
utmost importance in Kant, to be sure, as in all great philosophers, nor
that reading them does not elevate and ennoble the human spirit. But
metaphysics, as positive philosophers say, is an essentially systematic sci-
ence, and it wants to comprehend the Absolute, to explain the universe
with definite formulas of its own, with definite principles that it always
thinks discoverable yet never does discover. The goal of all its efforts – its
essence, almost – is a general system, and it always ends in ruins.
In this way, a science keeps being destroyed without ever managing to
put a single one of its great truths beyond doubt – not one of those first
principles for which it searches across so many centuries. Some accept
and some reject the existence of a personal God. Some affirm and some
deny that the human soul is immortal. Some tell us that everything in
the world is mind, others that everything is matter. If Kant’s system is
true, Condillac’s whole philosophy is a heap of absurdities. If Rosmini’s
system is true, Hegel’s is absurd, and vice versa. You notice, in fact, that
philosophers of the different schools are not fighting about which truths
to add next. They deny the very name of ‘philosopher’ to one another
because their disagreement is about the very nature and essence of their
most basic and general doctrines.
Surely this is a rather deplorable outcome. Perhaps we might resign
ourselves to it if only one of the many subjects that occupy the human
mind were involved. But philosophy is so closely linked with every one
of the moral sciences that it makes them all subject to its own fate.
When sensism ruled in France, we had Rousseau’s social contract and
Bentham’s legal doctrines. Condillac then wrote a general curriculum
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minds of those who still led a nomadic life or lived in lake-dwellings, who
created the first manufactures and made attempts at the first sciences,
were certainly not in the same state where we find ourselves after so many
centuries and so many generations. Even in our individual lives there
are different stages at which not only the body but also the spirit exists
in various states. The hold that imagination has on us in early youth is
surely not what can happen at maturity when passions and imagination
give way to reflection instead.
Many philosophers have observed that the seasons of our lives are
closely related to the ages of mankind. Our Vico showed that in the world
of nations, as he used to put it, there is also an infancy, a childhood, and
an adulthood. If all that is true, we ought to find the same thing in the
history of sciences as well. Since they are the result of the various opera-
tions and different faculties of the human mind, the sequence of events
ought to be the same. It is at this point that the new positive philosophers
enter the conversation with an observation that belongs to Comte, and
it has a very great deal of truth in it. All sciences generally pass through
three stages, they say, taking three different forms corresponding to the
three states in which the human spirit exists in those periods.
When man acquires the use of reason, he no sooner observes a phe-
nomenon than he seeks its cause inductively. At this primitive stage,
the human race has no method, no scientific discipline, and it is full of
superstitions, and so for every phenomenon it has recourse to an imagi-
nary god. Apollo brings light, Jupiter commands the thunderbolt, and
so on. In this state of affairs, the sciences do not yet actually exist; this is
the time when mythologies are created instead. But priests are the only
scientists or philosophers at this point, and thus the sciences are still in
their first state or stage, which is theological.
Little by little things change, the human spirit evolves, and man is
no longer content to find the explanation of every phenomenon in a
divinity made in his own image. Needing something less sensible and
material, he has recourse for every phenomenon to an abstraction, and
then he seeks a single cause to explain the universe. The Eleatic, Ionian,
Pythagorean, and other schools show us the primitive stages of this new
state of the sciences. One person observes that a living animal generates
heat, that a dead one grows cold, and that two pieces of wood rubbed
together produce heat. And instead of imagining a divinity of heat, light,
or fire, this person then imagines a hot spirit and a cold spirit, asserting
that heat is the vital principle of the animal and the essence of the wood.
He makes still another move and announces that he has finally discov-
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ered that heat is the first principle of the world, and then he completes
his system with an explanation of the universe. But right away someone
else objects, claiming that the first principle of the world is different:
light, air, numerical harmony, unity, substance, the Idea, the Absolute,
and on and on. Once the word has been found, the system has been
found, and the human spirit has free rein in this new arena. Shackled
neither by facts nor by experience, it assembles and disassembles the
universe at will, demonstrating all its cleverness, all its subtlety, skill, and
flexibility. This second stage that the sciences pass through – the age of
systems – was called metaphysical by Comte, but other positivists called it
scholastic instead because its golden age was in the medieval period, just
when scholasticism was dominant.
At that time philosophy and the natural sciences were in the same
state, somehow forming a single science. As the debate went on in
one domain among Nominalists, Realists, and Conceptualists, seeking
to learn whether beings are pure names or real things or something
of both, what effect did this actually have in the natural sciences, the
part of that philosophy that gave it integrity? They were looking for the
inner nature of things, imagining a third essence in the stars, in water,
in earth, in plants, and so on. Quiet or raging, sad or smiling, these
spirits or essences were the cause of natural phenomena. These meta-
physical abstractions were endowed with all the human passions, as the
more ancient divinities had already been endowed with them. And an
essence of all essences was the vital principle of the world. In this way,
systems were multiplied to infinity, and when the natural sciences were
not inseparable parts of philosophy, they were occult sciences like astrol-
ogy, alchemy, and the rest, forming an appendage that could not be cut
off from philosophy.
So what show did the natural sciences put on for us at that time? The
same one that philosophy puts on for us today. A series of systems that
destroyed one another by turns, with no possibility at all of true and
authentic progress. Now, however, we are used to seeing few years pass
by without physics, chemistry, and all the natural sciences announcing
some great discovery to us, some new conquest. What are the conquests
of the Middle Ages in what was then called natural philosophy, the product
of so much study, so many exhausted minds, many of them even of the
highest level? We cannot give any answer because at that time the natural
sciences were, more than anything else, an elegant gymnasium where the
human mind went for exercise – as it goes to philosophy today – without
ever securing any result. It has been said a thousand times that the Mid-
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It is very important to see how and in what ways this transition was
made in order to decide next if an equal transformation is possible in
the moral sciences. What did Galileo add to the procedure, then, to the
method followed by the ancients? Certainly what Galileo added brought
about reform so vast and radical that it is hard to comprehend how the
man dared so much and succeeded in it. And yet the thing is so simple
that it turns out to be more difficult to explain why the thought came
so late. The truth is that Galileo’s scientific courage was incomparable
because he said this for the first time: I treat inquiry about essences as
an enterprise that is all but impossible. When you tell me that the cloud
is steam, that the steam is water, that the water is substance or force or
matter, you always come to an unknown that you cannot explain, and
at the end of your account the essence remains as obscure as before.
Therefore, we need to abandon research about essences and prefer just
one small and certain truth to a thousand large truths that are uncertain
and hypothetical. Since Galileo had the courage to renounce the inquir-
ies that for so many centuries had occupied the whole human race and
all the greatest intellects, he ended the Middle Ages for ever with these
simple words and began an era of research and facts.
This was the negative part of his reform, however. The essence of the
world and of things may still remain unknown to us, but if we are to con-
tent ourselves with just a few sure truths, how are we to find and verify
them? Aristotle’s authority had collapsed, as I have said, and observation
and induction had already begun. But as soon as the observer proceed-
ing by induction ascended in this way from the particular to the general
and grasped the first idea, with the help of logic he went right on from
one idea to the next, moving farther and farther from the real world
by his own power and his own imagination. But Galileo said to observe
the phenomena, determine what they are, and then make an induction
carefully, by seeking not the essence of the phenomena but their cause
or law. And when you believe you have found it, stop right there. Before
taking another step and moving on to another law, check what you have
found against nature: test and test again – in a word, experiment.
You see the lamp swinging, and by induction do you not suppose that
the swings are isochronous, all happening in the same space of time?
Even so, do not derive any conclusion from that. Instead, check with
nature and question her, because, if you know how to ask questions, she
will answer. Not only can you make your observation again every time
you see another lamp swinging, you can also build a pendulum in a thou-
sand different shapes and make it swing in a thousand directions with a
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force that is always different. If the law that you have found is correct, the
swings will always be isochronous, and only then will you be able to say
that you have discovered a truth because your idea did not stay in your
mind; instead, you checked it in the external world and asked nature to
confirm it. The law has been verified, and no one will ever be able to call
it in question because you can always check it and ask nature to speak
on your behalf again. I took the pendulum by the end of the cord, says
Galileo, and I held it in the middle, making it move in a thousand direc-
tions, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, and the swings were always equal.
And now also draw the consequences that derive logically from your law.
Having made your induction, also deduce if you like. But when the first
deduction is done, check again. Do not assume that you have found a
second truth unless nature has replied again.
You make a ball roll on an inclined plain, you find that velocity keeps
increasing, and you induce that it increases in direct proportion to the
squares of the distances. Then you experiment, measuring the velocity
and changing the angle of the plane’s inclination over and over. The
law always turns out to be correct, and therefore it has been verified.
But look, your mind takes another step and says that if the ball rolls
down the inclined plain by this law, then heavy bodies ought to fall by
the same law. Once a scholastic was in possession of the first law, he
would have drawn not only this conclusion but a thousand and a hun-
dred thousand others, and he might also have formulated a new sys-
tem of the universe. What did Galileo do when the second idea came
to him, namely, that heavy bodies fall by the same law? He took anoth-
er step, not by going on to another idea but by ascending the Leaning
Tower of Pisa instead. From there, holding a clock, he dropped heavy
objects and measured their velocity, and nature replied to him again
that the law was verified.
We know that there was more, and that we ended up learning that
all bodies are attracted in the direct proportion of their masses and the
inverse proportion of the squares of the distances. This was the law of
universal attraction discovered by Newton. With this law we have been
able to measure the orbits in which the planets move, and we can pre-
dict, many years in advance, the day, the hour, and the minute when a
star or a comet will pass through our meridian. When the day comes, the
astronomer sets up his telescope and looks at his chronometer, and as
soon as it marks the first minute and second of the hour, he goes up to
the eyepiece and sees the star passing by. The star that passes tells him
again that the law has been verified and is correct.
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ing from system to system, they have gone from conquest to conquest,
extracting a new secret from nature every day.
But the most important thing of all to notice is that when any of the
natural sciences has persisted in following the ancient way of systems, it
has never been able to find a way out of disputes, and it has never been
able to make any sure and stable progress until convincing itself – like
the other sciences – to follow the experimental method and renounce
inquiries that are not possible. It was not long ago that physiology still
persisted in research into the vital principle. But what came of it? The
powers of the finest minds were spent in vain on this mysterious some-
thing. One person would say, ‘The essence of life is force.’ Another
would say, ‘It is a certain vital principle.’ And someone could be found
to say, ‘The essence of life is the Idea.’
And so we had dynamism, vitalism, and pantheism, but still no physiol-
ogy. Or to put it differently, science still stayed in its scholastic state, una-
ware of the positive path and unable to enter it. Today, physiology has
taken a big step: its final transformation, though not complete, may have
begun before our eyes. How is all this being done? I shall permit myself
to mention the celebrated Professor Bernard, very much one of those
who have contributed and are contributing to this progress in physiol-
ogy. This is roughly how he puts it. Today, the issue is not knowing what
life is. This we do not know, and perhaps we shall never be able to know
it. Of all the definitions of life, the only one we can accept without protest
is this: life is the opposite of death. Everything that science can attempt
reduces to understanding the conditions that determine vital activity.
But understanding the vital principle, as belonging to the inner nature
of all things in general, seems likely to remain unknown to us forever.
When the scholastic saw venom act immediately to snuff out the life of
an animal, he wanted to know how the venomous spirit ate up the vital
spirit, and he came to no conclusion. We want to know instead how the
venom acts on the blood, the blood on the nerves, and so on, and learn
what can serve as an anti-venom. For the Middle Ages, the generation of
the disease was the development of a febrile idea. Opium caused drowsi-
ness because it had a dormitive virtue. All that has vanished, and physiol-
ogy has renounced knowledge of the why of things, looking instead for
the how. We know that a given amount of hydrogen, combined with a
given amount of oxygen, produces water, and thus we can produce water
when we wish. But what hydrogen or oxygen is, why we need that par-
ticular amount to produce water, and thus what water is – that we do not
know. In truth, as Bernard concludes, absolute knowledge of the simplest
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matical method and the experimental – but metaphysics can use neither
of them. It cannot use the mathematical method based on absolute clar-
ity because metaphysical truths are subject to constant dispute. Everyone
agrees that two and two make four, that a straight line is shorter than
a curved one, and that the whole is greater than the part, but they all
disagree about being and the existent, about the Idea and the Absolute.
And how would you like to apply the experimental method? How and
where would you like to check whether your definition of the Absolute,
God, the Infinite, and so on is true or false? What experiment will you
do when called into question about this by systems opposed to your own?
Saying that there are truths accepted by all systems does no good: the
reason is that the primary and least expendable value of a system lies in
its having an organic unity, and disagreements among philosophers go
precisely to the fundamental truths on which all other truths depend.
It seems, then, that only two ways are left to us. One way is to say that
philosophy, by its nature, will never be able to escape from systems, and
so it will never produce scientific verification for the truths that it claims
to have found. But philosophy must in that case resign itself to being
seen as abandoned by the positive and scientific spirit of our times and to
run the risk of being put with old and useless contrivances like astrology
and alchemy. The other way is to attempt a revolution like the one that
Galileo made in the natural sciences and to see if it is possible to find a
method that indisputably verifies at least some, if not all, philosophical
truths.
Positivism has attempted this revolution, which it did not so much cre-
ate as spread, improve, and apply, inasmuch as it could be shown that the
seeds of the reform are very ancient. However that may be, all modern
philosophers always agree just on the issue of the new direction and new
method of philosophizing that they have adopted. They have seen the
new method as having been followed all at once, by many people, in dif-
ferent sciences, at the same time, and always with equal success. There-
fore, we should not be busying ourselves now with the works of Comte
or Mill, nor with those of Taine or Littré or others. We should instead
be studying the road that science has generally taken, more by pursuing
its natural development than by heeding the impulse of any particular
author. Let me therefore describe this method to see what results it has
produced or is capable of producing.
The goal of philosophy, above any other, is knowledge of man. In us
philosophy finds various faculties, various ideas, and a reason that obeys
certain laws, and out of all this it makes a field of study. Consequently,
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because philosophy is used to searching for the essence and the first and
eternal cause of everything, it has a great tendency to locate humanity
somehow beyond space and time. What we see in the world is societies,
peoples, and individuals in transformation, changing every day. But phi-
losophy thought it would be more successful in understanding human-
ity by skipping the study of the contingent and mutable. And this was a
huge mistake. How would you propose to understand the nature of this
entity that changes constantly if you have no knowledge of the laws that
regulate its inevitable changes? You wish to have absolute knowledge and
find the essence of man, but you do not think to study him first in the
only situation in which you can observe him.
But let’s go further. In man you find an idea of the good, the beautiful,
and the true, and you want to know their nature, essence, origin, and
value. This dooms you to a subjective labour, and you derive your claims
about the nature of the good and the beautiful only from your reason.
But reason can be fooled, all the more when your opponents deny you
even the name ‘philosopher.’ In that case, what will you do to test the
nature of the good, the beautiful, and the true? What will you do to test
what thought, reason, and the human soul are? In a word, how will you
tell whether everything that you find in your consciousness and in your
reason has a real objective value outside you, that in the end it is not an
illusion of your mind? This is philosophy’s fatal flaw, the place of ship-
wreck for all systems.
Who has examined our reason better than Kant? And what was the
conclusion of his system? He frankly declared that reason is powerless
to prove the objective value of its own ideas. Reason can certainly be
said to have an idea of time, space, beauty, and so on, but do these have
value outside us? That, according to Kant, is the question that can have
no answer. Yes, if only we had that absolute knowledge of first truths that
the metaphysicians strangely claim, all other knowledge should follow
from them by logical inference. But the attempt to get to this point has
been made again and again, too many times and without success. What
is the use of starting over from the beginning now that the world is weary
of this and has lost all confidence in it, now that even the fecundity that
creates different systems seems to be extinct?
So the question comes down to this: can we find a way to get from the
I to what is outside the I by checking and testing the ideas that we find
in ourselves, along with what we have thought about those ideas and
what we would like to make convincing to others? If this is impossible,
philosophy again resigns itself to being abandoned by the scientific spirit
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of our times. So then, these ideas that people find in themselves – this
thought, this reason, this consciousness that philosophy studies – are
they static abstractions or are they something concrete, real, and living
in the world? It is worth giving an example to explain this more clearly.
Let me imagine that you are working on the idea of the good. You read
the interminable volumes written about this by philosophers, and their
contradictions terrify you. You start to think for yourself, and you find
no secure method for knowing whether your novel thoughts are true
or false. Can you get it right when Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Hegel
have not been able to come to agreement? Before abandoning the enter-
prise as hopeless, however, you make an observation: this idea that you
find in yourself is generally found in almost all other people.
So then, take a people or a society: in the abstract imagine a moment
when there is absolutely no idea of the beautiful among these people
except when you have the capability or power of instilling it in them.
What would happen then? As soon as they can contemplate the idea of
the beautiful, the imagination of this people immediately goes to work.
This is the start of architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry;
in a word, what some call the world of art emerges and springs forth. And
this is a real, sensible world that you can observe, study, examine, and
classify as you do with all of nature’s productions. What are these works
of art? They emerge precisely from the idea of the beautiful, which,
putting the faculties of our mind into motion, clothes itself in a sensible
form. And then we get the statue, the painting, the poem, and so on.
Suppose further that this idea actually becomes faded or dim but later
lights up again before the mind of this people. Well then, art will follow
its own path because in the end it is just the sensible manifestation of this
idea of the beautiful, about whose essence you have laboured uselessly
for so long.
You go into the Vatican and find yourself in the middle of a city, as
it were, populated by Greek statues. Are they not something that you
can see, touch, and feel? You can arrange them and distribute them by
period, by order of excellence, by artist, and so on. In the final analysis,
just as universal attraction, heat, and light produce natural phenomena,
the idea of the beautiful likewise produces social phenomena, and you
can study them in the same way. And if it has been possible to establish
a science of forces, light, and heat without knowing what they are – and
actually only from the moment when you have renounced knowledge of
their essence – will it not be possible to establish a science of the beauti-
ful by renouncing knowledge of its essence for the present?
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Perhaps this science will not be able to quench all of your noble desire
for the truth all at once. But it can make you learn what the conditions
are in which art flourishes or decays, what are the means of advancing
it, what conditions and qualities are required of the artist, what conse-
quences follow from the flourishing of art for the human spirit and soci-
ety, and so on. True, these are less ambitious items of knowledge than all
that you might desire on the nature of the idea of the good, just as what
has been learned and discovered by optics is less ambitious than what
scholasticism wanted to find out by looking for the essence of light. In
every case, however, the former items are possible and demonstrable by
facts because you always have the history of art as a check and as a sort
of test of your theories. But the latter items always remain uncertain, if
not impossible.
Take another example, the idea of the just. One person tells you that
the just is the useful correctly understood, and another adds that it is
an eternal idea, independent of the useful and often contradicting it, a
manifestation of the Absolute, and so on. And philosophers have never
been able to establish clear agreement on this point. Yet we have this
idea of the just, and all people have it. Therefore we accept it as a fact
and study it, as the forces of nature are studied. If a people lacked this
idea, what would follow? A society without law and without rule, subject
to unconstrained will. Do you think it possible, then, all at once, for
the idea to penetrate the heart and mind of this people? Suddenly you
would have laws, statutes, institutions, codes, a norm and rule for human
actions, and so on. These are the social phenomena that derive from
this new agent called the just, and from this emerges law, just as optical
phenomena derive from light. Can you not observe, study, and classify
various pieces of legislation in their eras and in their rise and fall, and,
by so doing, learn better to understand the nature of right, its laws and
its various forms? Today, in fact, a science of right already exists, without
any ability on the part of philosophers to reach agreement on giving a
definition of right. With this science there has come to be a good pos-
sibility of improving the law-making of all civilized peoples, something
that the scholastics – with all their discussions about the eternal idea of
the just and its relations with the idea of God – did not do and never
could have done.
Let me go on to another example, since we can repeat the same obser-
vation in all the social sciences. Read ancient authorities on politics, and
what is it that interests them? They end up inquiring about the best gov-
ernment – meaning an impossible government that has never existed
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nor can ever exist. The best government assumes a populace of the best
people, but they do not exist nor probably will ever exist on earth. Eve-
rywhere we see ambitions, jealousies, and interests battling the nobler
passions, and it is for such people, who change and become different
in every period and place, that we need to find a government. What
good would it do, then, to search for the best government, that abstract,
immutable, and metaphysical government that cannot be applied to any
people? Modern politics, without simply denying society a path towards
ideal perfection – which is easier to foresee than to define – abandons
inquiry into the best government, asking instead which government is
better for a given society.
If there is one problem that I long to solve, it is certainly this: for a
particular society to find the institutions that are the better aids to its
progress. If this new direction has turned less theoretical, it has still been
rather more useful for mankind and has been able to prevent much
unhappiness and many disasters. Where now, in fact, is that string of
impossible plots that took place in the Middle Ages, when every noble-
man thought that a government dreamed up in an hour’s exalted imagi-
nation could be put into practice? Now we know that the greatest person
described in our histories wanted to restore the ancient Roman Empire,
and to call up armies and armed men for this purpose against Florence,
his native land. Ordinary people today would never let themselves be
deluded by dreams like those that for so long ruled Dante Alighieri’s
mind in this way.7 We are all convinced that society’s laws are as inviolable
as those of nature, and that instead of capriciously opposing them, we
should understand them in order to manage and make use of them, just
as we make use of natural laws and agents. Only in this way can new laws
and new institutions be productive.
To add many examples is useless because one could multiply them
infinitely. Examining the whole human being, not as an abstraction but
as what really stands before us, with his faculties, passions, and transfor-
mations from era to era and year to year, we will find that his life has
a constant counterpart in the life of society and in the history of the
human race. Every new idea, every faculty that we observe in the human
person, inevitably gives rise to a new series of social facts. Christianity is a
religious reform that takes place in the individual conscience; well then,
might it not have altered society and modern history? The philosophy of
the eighteenth century is a new doctrine; well then, do you not find it
immediately at work in the American Constitution, and do you not find
it among the primary causes of the French Revolution?
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In the same way, we can extend this inquiry into infinity. Take the most
abstract ideas, the most metaphysical, or the most concrete, as suits you
best – the idea of God, for example. We are not speaking here of what
faith or revelation can tell us. Faith can believe what reason still does not
understand, but now we are dealing only with reason. The fact is that
the most ardent desire of metaphysics has been to prove the existence
of God indisputably and to get knowledge of God’s nature out of this.
Well then, without being accused of impiety, we can say that metaphysics
has not reached its goal. When I say that the three angles of a triangle
are equal to two right angles, I have a sure way of silencing anyone who
might want to contradict me. But St Thomas, Leibniz, Bossuet, and many
others have spoken without ever managing to silence the sceptics or the
materialists, and even today the battle among pantheists, materialists,
and spiritualists rages livelier than ever. So it is useless to delude oneself.
Metaphysics does not have the power to reach its goal scientifically; it is
not and never will be able to put an end to disputes about questions that
are the most important and vital for its existence.
What does a philosopher do when he wants to write a treatise on
the nature and existence of God? He withdraws within himself, seeks
a cause for the world, seeks in his ecstasy to contemplate the Absolute,
and looks at how this idea arises in him, how it grows bright and grows
dim in his consciousness. But in this state is he sure that his precon-
ceived ideas do not change the meaning of his observations? Can he test
the absolute objective truth of what goes on in his mind? Well then, if
faith makes us believe in a God, and if reason is powerless to explain its
nature, we should not uselessly persist in overstepping the natural lim-
its of our intellect. If this idea is really in us, it must carry its inevitable
consequences into society; it must produce visible facts as real as natural
phenomena. Such facts exist, and they are called religions; throughout
history, the number and various forms of such religions are infinite. You
can study them and understand them, observing the monuments, ritu-
als, commandments, and infinite number of cults that religions produce.
What do you learn by such a study? You will not get absolute and full
knowledge of God, something you have renounced for the present. But
you can experiment and use history to test how the idea of God emerged
– not in yourself, to be sure, but in humanity – how the idea grows bright
and dim, and what consequences this constant alternation has for civi-
lized populations. From the savage’s cruder rituals, you advance to the
gleaming images and timeless serenity of the Greek gods, whom later
you see vanish, destroyed on their altars by a new feeling that emerges
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from Christian consciousness, and this new feeling changes society, his-
tory, literature, and the sciences.
Might all that not be a practical study – positive, testable, and tested –
of how the idea of God and religious feeling emerge and develop in the
human race? Well then, the science of religions, or rather comparative
mythology, already exists, and it has been an endless source of light for
the history of civilization and for understanding mankind. Only when
we have been able to comprehend and explain Greek mythology, in fact,
and understand the divinities to whom Homer and Plato sacrificed, only
then shall we have grasped the history and humanity of Greece, when it
has appeared to us in a new light. Even the superstitions of the savage
reveal to us the secrets of his consciousness, and thus we learn to under-
stand more about him than he could know about himself. Might this not
be a practical, positive, but also progressive knowledge of the human
heart? This visible study of the ideal world that becomes real, does it not
make our faith more alive and more solid?
I cite a final example. Anyone who has read books about philosophy
knows that one of the questions with which philosophers have struggled
most is the origin of language – human or divine. This thinker supported
one view, that thinker another, and volumes were written without being
able to come to any sure conclusion. Some lost their way in research
about primitive language; having no other device, they thought they
might suggest an experimental method, proposing to keep a baby in a
room and feed it without ever letting it hear the human voice in order
to see what language it would naturally speak. They decided to subject
the infant to conditions that were entirely contrary to nature, in other
words, in order to learn what would happen naturally. Nonetheless, such
problems are very important because the origin and development of lan-
guage is quite closely linked to the history of the human spirit and the
origin of our ideas. Each new word is the sensible image of a new emo-
tion, a new thought. Each new language is the mirror in which a new
civilization is reflected. Accordingly, philosophers gave much effort to
this, but they laboured in vain.
This is a strange thing to say! Languages live all around us: they are
born, they grow, they age, and they die, almost under our eyes, I might
say, just like living things. It is as clear as the light of day that if we want
to understand the history and nature of languages, we should do as we
do when we use botany or zoology to understand the history of plants
and animals. In other words, for the present we give up as pointless any
talk about the inner essence of the plant, the animal, and the language.
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We study, organize, and classify them, researching the laws of their modi-
fications in various regions and at various times. So then, a science of
language has emerged today, and in effect its method comes so close to
the experimental method that the distinguished philologist Max Müller
has found many reasons to claim that this method should also put the
science of language among the natural sciences.8 We are not obliged to
accept his view. Indeed, we can hold, as we do hold, that since language
is a manifestation of the human spirit – as Müller himself confirms –
then, for that reason alone, the science that deals with it must go with
those that study man’s moral and intellectual nature.
The view of that learned philologist and the reasons he adduces clear-
ly prove what method that science has adopted. Today, in fact, philol-
ogy and linguistics have studied, classified, and organized languages by
period, by family, and by genus and species, so to speak, as they do with
plants or animals. The laws of their birth, growth, change, decline, and
death are understood. But when the philologist has an idea of his own
or devises a new theory, science does not accept it unless he has first
demonstrated and tested it by checking and experimenting with lan-
guages. The savage’s crudest and most inarticulate sounds and the least
respected dialects have thus become a precious archive for the philolo-
gist’s constant toil as he seeks to find the links in the chain of the vari-
ous families of languages. And if today, with some confidence, we can
define the direction and development of the languages of the first Aryan
peoples, tracking them step-by-step up to our time; if we can understand
how dialects rise to the level of educated speech and how they decline
or decay again; if we can stand beside the Kaffir or the American Indian
as he tries to express ideas that are still clouded by his barbarity; have
we not (in little more than half a century) come close to solving the
problem of the origin of language – far closer than philosophers had
come from Socrates down to Hegel? Have we not made progress in our
knowledge of man?
Add up everything I have said, and one conclusion clearly follows:
namely, that if we set aside all the particular forms that positivism takes
and focus on its general character, it comes down to applying the histori-
cal method to the moral sciences and giving that method the same stand-
ing that the experimental method has in the natural sciences. Hence,
positivism is a new method, definitely not a new system. For me, it would
be easy to show that its very first seeds are found in Vico’s New Science and
in other Italian authors, but this is not the place for such a discussion.
It suffices to note that this method, explained rather clearly by Comte,
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believed to be laws of the human spirit. Up to this point, you have only
looked in history for facts, and from the human mind you have been able
to get only speculations, never checking them against the facts: from one
you get pure empiricism, and from the other scholastic philosophy. But
after what Vico found – that the laws of the world of nations are the same
as the laws of the human spirit that created this social world: from the
one you can get the science of history and from the other the science
of man, tested and demonstrated. For if history somehow gives you the
external world on which to experiment and verify the inductions of your
psychology, the psychology then becomes a torch that illuminates his-
tory. The laws of the one, if they are true, must be checked against the
other, and vice versa.
What is the reason why you are so eager to read history? Because, as I
have already noted, there is an important relation between the seasons
of our lives and the stages of the human race, and all of universal history
is none too large to include mankind. For what reason, when you were
eighteen, were you an ardent reader of the history of knights and cru-
saders? You could feel yourself, an unknown youth, akin to Godfrey and
Peter the Hermit, finding your own passions depicted in those exotic
adventures. What can the historian’s genius ever do except make past
generations live in front us and stir our passions powerfully by telling
us about the Greeks and Romans? Is this not perhaps the ability to dis-
cover and appreciate the secret relation between us and the history of a
past whose children we are? In our spirit the historian finds the explana-
tion of humanity’s great revolutions, which for us is the source of much
delight because we discover boundless riches hidden inside ourselves,
being made aware of them for the first time. We journey through all of
universal history, finding something that belongs to us in every era, every
society, every great person, something that is like a property of our spirit,
like ourselves. Thus we become aware that there is a kind of synthesis
in us, an epitome of mankind in a determinate form. It is not possible
for you to understand yourself, in fact, unless you also understand the
civilization of your country, where you were born, and where your spirit
took shape.
And how would you propose to understand Italy without also under-
standing the culture of the peoples that surround her – Europe’s cul-
ture? Can you understand Europe without the story of her past? Think
for a minute: if there had been no Empire and no Roman law for you to
learn as a youth, is it likely you would have the same political and legal
ideas that you have today? And if there had been no Greek society, if
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force, light and heat are. The modern physicist has created mechanics,
optics, and the science of heat by renouncing knowledge of what those
natural entities are. If the positive philosopher finds the science of the
human being and its ideas without knowing its nature, he surely will have
brought off an equivalent revolution in the moral sciences. Is it possible
that metaphysics and scholasticism have had such success in solving the
problems that positivism abandons?
But there is still more. As you meditate eternally on the essence of
force, you have not taken a single step, while mechanics, which makes
progress every day, discovers the laws of force. And if the day for discov-
ering all those laws had come, would this not be rather close to know-
ing that essence? What else could that essence be but the synthesis of
all those laws? And what else could absolute knowledge of thought be
except what unifies the knowledge of all its laws? But to unify them, they
must first be found. From one side, then, we get a method that persists
in reaching for an impossible goal all at once and cannot move a single
step forward, while from the other side comes a method that renounces
reaching that goal and still gets closer to it every day. But this does not
make the metaphysicians surrender. Indeed, full of indignation, they
give this reply: you deny first ideas, then, you deny the science that Aris-
totle and Plato worked on, and for you there are only facts and laws. So
you are materialists or sceptics consumed by doubt.
Not at all, reply the positivists. We belong to the people who have
renounced the impossible, and we recognize the limits of reason, which
is the only way for it to make progress. And really, what good does it do
to raise those ancient accusations that have been used in vain against
every progressive step that science has taken? They have become dull
and rusty weapons that wound only those who use them. The pyre did
not extinguish Giordano Bruno’s teaching, and the Inquisition did not
silence Galileo: those fearsome phrases have been used too often for
them to have any more value.
Positivism is a method that wants to lead us to study facts and find the
relations between our spirit and human society. It makes us see how our
ideas are the life and reality of historical facts. Can positivism maintain,
in good faith, that it is just the same thing as materialism? True, there
are positivists who are used to denying the existence of ideas, as there are
also others who want to explain their essence. But then those positivists
overstep the bounds of the science that limits itself to saying that we do
not know, for now, the inner nature of ideas, and so, by another route,
they fall back into the metaphysics that they wish to combat. Still, a final
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word needs to be said on this grave question. The historical method does
not presume to shed light on all problems of metaphysics, much less to
do so all at once, just as the experimental method did not and does not
claim to answer all of scholasticism’s questions. And yet the human spirit
keeps asking itself those questions. There are scientists today who write
clever books about the system of the universe, the plurality of worlds, and
so on. Such books will never stop, and they are not useless: hypotheses
too have great importance, serving temporarily to unify the facts already
known, if nothing else. But real science stops where those hypotheses
start.
And so it is not to be hoped, even after the progress made by pos-
itivism, that people would stop asking themselves what space is, what
the infinite is, what God its, whether my soul is immortal, and what will
become of me in the other life. Science cannot answer these questions,
but they still torment our spirit. Beyond reality, or, if you like, above it,
there is an ideal that flickers confusedly before us and never leaves us,
that keeps tempting and pushing us to ask new questions; in a way, it
is the life of our life, and it keeps making us hope to step beyond our
nature’s limits. Since only vulgar minds do not find this ideal in their
consciousness, we should not deny or doubt it. But it cannot really be
part of the science that verifies by testing, and it keeps going on without
ever stopping. Poetry, music, metaphysics, and faith follow behind this
ideal, from which they cannot, should not, and do not wish to remove
themselves, even though they are destined to stay behind it and never
reach it, feeling it rather than understanding it. This is why it has often
been said in our day that metaphysics is another type of art.
But for now, metaphysics must resign itself to having been abandoned
for some time, and, I would almost say, abased. No one, in fact, wants to
hear it any longer. No metaphysical system prevails in Europe, and were
a new system to appear, it would be greeted with suspicion, and, I would
almost say, with disgust. It seems to have been struck by a sudden steril-
ity, while bearing the burden of the universal suspicion that surrounds
it. We lack the time to chase after new speculations in order to build
new systems. The philosophical spirit is busy, and it is needed for new
and manifold inquiries made possible all at once in so many sciences,
where the laurels gathered are more secure and more useful. To create
comparative philology and mythology, no smaller speculative talent is
required than was needed to build the systems of Hegel and Schelling.
Accordingly, we are far from wishing to discredit the philosophical
and speculative spirit, which is really indispensable for all the inquiries
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not be alarmed at the great progress made by the historical method and
the positive philosophy. Metaphysics will not be destroyed, but it certain-
ly will be chased back to its natural borders. Therefore, instead of going
astray to hurl useless accusations of materialism or scepticism, philoso-
phers should recognize in Machiavelli, Vico, and many other Italians the
first seeds of this new and inevitable progress that brings us to the truth
and not to materialism or doubt. They should remember that it has nev-
er been possible, even once, for torture and the stake to stop progress
towards truth, and that today vague threats do not halt progress. They
should remember that every honest search for the truth is equally useful
for all sciences and fulfills mankind’s most sacred duty.
NOTES
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Germany, when the context was theological in the wake of David Strauss’s
Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, is more commonly
characterized as ‘materialism’ than as ‘positivism.’ Almost exactly contem-
porary with Villari’s speech was Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism –
Lange (1866) – a plea to return to Kant for a more cautious resistance to
metaphysics than what was provided in Germany by the current versions of
materialism.
6 For some of these philosophical slogans and bywords, see sections 6, 8, 9,
and 10 of the Introduction, on Rosmini, Gioberti, Mamiani, and Spaventa.
7 Dante argues in De monarchia that the secular authority of the Emperor is
autonomous, not subject to the Pope. He was exiled from Florence in 1302
when the part of the Guelf party that was strictly pro-papal took control of
the city.
8 Friedrich Max Müller (1823−1920) was a philologist whose studies of South
Asian languages, religions, and myths were both formative and controversial
for the fields of comparative religion and mythology.
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Francesco De Sanctis
to his topic. He is austere in his writing, all order and precision, averse
to phrase-making, formulas, and sophisticated fog, free of all sentiment
and fancy. And because there is much talk here in Italy of Realism in art
and science – though it is usually vague and confused – I think it worth-
while to explain the ideas of a writer who has devoted a great deal of his
intellectual life to this problem.
Realism is not to be confused with empiricism and sensism, these being
crude starts on Realism. And it is not the same as materialism, which has
grown up from a rather superficial application of thought to the prob-
lem of matter. Hegel himself condemns empiricism. But he could not
condemn Realism in its present form because Realism puts thinking in
as lofty a position as the Idealists do. Here is the difference. Idealism
treats thinking as the unique and direct source of being because what is
highest and first in being can be learned only from thinking. But accord-
ing to the Realists, existence can be known only by perceiving, and the
only purpose of thinking is to elaborate the content of perception, purg-
ing it of false appearances and deriving the general from it in the form
of concepts and laws.
The instruments of knowledge, therefore, are perceiving and think-
ing. And our author, before giving us the principle of knowledge accord-
ing to Realism, analyses these two instruments. Perception comes from
the senses and also comes from consciousness – from internal sense, or,
as the author says, internal perception. The organs of the first (percep-
tion) are the senses. The second has no organs. At its foundation lie the
various states of one’s own soul as they exist in desire or in feeling pleas-
ure and pain. This could be called apperception (Selbstwarnehmung). But
because this gives you information only about your own soul, knowledge
of the states of souls belonging to other people is missing. By physiog-
nomy, gesture, and attitude you can evaluate this through reasoning and
thus through thinking, but you cannot see any farther into it than your
own experience takes you. The consequence is that Know thyself is also
the basis of all these mental states.
Experience gives you the object as outside you – something out there
– and gives it to you directly and immediately, as the principle of causal-
ity, with no use of categories, without anything discursive, without action
and reaction. And it gives it to you necessarily. Even the most fanatical
Idealist surrenders to this necessity and must locate the object outside
himself, as existing. Without perception the concept of existence would
be absent from thinking. The existent has a content and a form. As con-
tent, the existent comes into the soul by way of perception in the form of
knowledge – something cognized. But it does not get to us in the same
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way as form, as just being alone. The resistance presented by this form
through its duration and limitation reveals its presence so that being in
its positive nature eludes knowing, and its concept for us is only negative
– the unknowable in things. When Schelling and Hegel said that being
and knowing are at once the same and different, they spoke the truth,
since they are identical in content, though in form they are eternally
different.
How things work when the content of being enters the mind by way
of perception is a problem of philosophy and physiology, as unsolved
today as in the time of the Greeks, despite so much progress. Science
has only transmuted being into knowledge (Idealism) or knowledge into
being (Materialism). Materialism forgets that all our observations have
managed to establish the reciprocal activity of the brain and states of
the soul – but not their identity. There is no instrument perfect enough
to fix the ultimate boundaries of the bodily, the smallest parts of the
brain and their vibrations. The connection between the end of the bod-
ily and the beginning of the mental is still unknown. Movements of small
parts of the body are and always will be bodily – different from knowing.
All the systems of monism are just a game – that of Plotinus and those
of Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This unity that is immediately
divided again into being and knowing is an empty word. Depending on
how good the magician is, we can get anything we want from this unity,
but it has nothing to do with what can be conceived of.
But there is a second instrument of knowledge – thinking – and if
we carefully observe what it does, we see that it gives us some clues: in
memory, it repeats; in synthesis and analysis, it unites or divides; and it
compares, contrasts, relates, and expresses different types of cognition,
attention, certainty, and necessity. These are its activities or powers. When
it remembers, it no longer needs an object; representation is enough.
When it divides the object into parts, properties, elements, and concepts,
it assists language and cognition; and from concepts it ascends to the laws
that are the aim of science. Joining objects with parts of objects, as the
poet does, it produces new images or representations, without being able
to pass beyond the forms of what exists. Formal unities other than those
that exist cannot be represented; they are empty words, like many such
philosophical notions. To summarize: humans can know the content of
everything that exists – body and mind – only by perception. In its two
forms, perception alone provides the bridge that leads from being to
knowing, and perception alone confirms the identity of the content as
being and as knowing – its truth, in other words. The simplest form of this
principle of knowledge can be expressed in these two propositions:
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the soul that does not provide any content of being but surrounds it with
an infinity of relations. Forms thereby emerge whose origin is in the soul
and are closely linked with being. A natural illusion will make these also
– these especially – seem to be true being. The forms of relation repre-
sent no being, however, and in their purity they are empty of any con-
tent that exists. But because they can be applied to any content and are
closely connected with it, these relations are confused with the concept
of being, both in the ordinary appearance and in the scientific illusion.
Because they include objects of the most contrary kinds, and because
they mark the same object with the most contrary features, contradiction
arises. Kant’s antinomies and Hegel’s contradictions arise just from this
confusion between relations and the concept of being.
The forms of relation do not arise from one another; they are suggest-
ed by experience as they gradually manifest themselves in the language
of educated people in the form of adverbs, prepositions, and conjunc-
tions – such as not, and, and or; equality, number, and whole; whole and
part; cause and effect; substance and accident; essence and non-essence,
form and content, external and internal. Application of these forms
requires more than one object – at least two. Thus, they are not repre-
sentations of any one object. An object that can take one of these forms
can take the opposite form; in various relations it can be near or far,
young or old, and still remain always that object in its being. The relation
therefore does not acquire being, and it is a mistake to confuse the two.
The same object can be sometimes whole, sometimes part, sometimes
cause and sometimes effect. A part can turn into a whole, an effect can
turn into a cause, accident into substance, and so on to infinity: when
Spinoza plays this game the human becomes a mode or accident of God.
These infinite series that play so large a part in philosophy today thus
belong to relations that express the alternating succession of their oppo-
sitions, but the infinite chain of causes and effects does not lead to an
infinite cause-and-effect series in being as well. This confusion is the
basis of Kant’s antinomies. In the thesis the object is treated as existent
and thus as finite. In the antithesis it is treated as a relation and comes
under an infinite series. To resolve these antinomies it suffices to under-
stand the nature of relations. But since Kant did not understand this, he
was forced to reduce the existent to a mere appearance. There is a simi-
lar confusion in Hegel that produces its own contradictions. He finds a
contradiction in the concept of limit because it establishes the reality of
existence but is also its negation, given that in the limit lies the ending of
one object along with the beginning of another. It is clear that the limit
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into our brains. Relations and various modes of knowing – such as those
that do not derive from being yet have the kind of connection with it that
enables them to appear to be its categories – confirmed philosophy in
taking this direction. These categories of pure knowledge thus became
the categories of primal being, and the Absolute was discovered. Kant’s
categories – with the exception of the Real – are also of this kind. How-
ever much he recognizes that they are only forms of knowing and do not
originate from being, he still gives them the meaning of being when he
claims that experience is possible only through them.
The principle of knowledge according to Realism cannot be proved
in the form of a geometrical deduction or syllogism. But a few observa-
tions can support it. Above all, the objective value of perception and the
principle of contradiction are facts accepted by everyone and used by
everyone, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from childhood
on, even though the child does not recognize them. They are proposi-
tions born into the soul. They are not empty formulas. They indicate
powers of the soul that work according to the aforesaid principle and fill
knowledge with content. Therefore, within human knowledge they mark
out the laws of an irresistible force and a fact. They work by necessity, and
all are subject to them.
Since the principle of Realism is common to all people, since it is that
by which they acquire their cognitions and determine the truth of those
cognitions, it is possible for this philosophy to have a clear and precise
language free of contradictions and accessible to the most ignorant and
simple people, who find in this philosophy the same laws and forces that
operate in daily life and have shaped much of their way of thinking and
speaking. Not only in philosophy but in all other fields of knowledge –
morality, law, the fine arts – Realism provides a solid foundation from
which observation and induction can lead to truth, just as in the natu-
ral sciences. Ethics especially is impossible if time and space are unreal,
as the Idealists claim; if true reality is without space and time, human
actions turn into mere appearance, devoid of moral value. To create an
ethics, Kant, Fichte, and Schopenhauer had to abandon their Idealism;
in an artificial way, they had to give a kind of reality to a world that had
been reduced to a phenomenon.
Beyond this, Realism needs none of the assumptions required for
the functioning of other systems – no categories, no dialectical devel-
opments or genetic sequences. Realism gets directly to its object. To
acquire knowledge a person needs only the senses, assisted by the powers
and activities of thinking to correct illusions, eliminate contradictions,
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about which all people agree, and this cuts off the disputes. It is easy to
correct experience, tracing its illusions back to laws, cleansing it of the
falsity introduced by imagination and sentiment, testing and retesting its
results with new and more accurate research. And when a new discovery
is made, the whole structure does not collapse, as it does with Idealism.
The new settles down upon the old, and when the new is such that it
destroys the whole structure, there is still plenty of material left to con-
struct the new.
Realism not only rejects other systems, it also provides an excellent cri-
terion for discovering what is false in them by showing where they stray
from nature and fall into errors and contradictions. With this criterion,
Kirchmann refutes Kant and Hegel, lingering long over the explanation
and refutation of the system that has recently become so famous: the
philosophy of the unconscious. Hartmann owes his success to a method
that is essentially experimental and inductive, making it possible for eve-
ryone to follow him in his more abstruse and subtle conceptions. But if
the method is based on Realism, the author substantially contradicts it
with his hypothesis of the unconscious. This is a first being outside space
and time and having two attributes, an unconscious ideal and an uncon-
scious will, in the end deriving an Idealism from Schelling that can be
resisted at many points.5
In philosophy, of course, just as in the sciences, we use hypotheses
to explain various problems, and, sometimes – especially in talented
intellectuals – various conceptions suddenly emerge and lead to a new
truth. But Realism, while continuing to admire the intellectualism, is not
satisfied with the obscure and contradictory notions that entangle the
new concept. Wishing to see the concept clear and well-defined, free of
contradictions, and compatible with the findings of experience, Realism
applies to these methods and these products of genius the same philo-
sophical test that applies to all the special sciences. It keeps whatever
passes this test. Anything else will be a nice game but not the truth nor
even a start on it.
Such hypotheses are common to almost all great philosophers: Plato
has his ideas; Aristotle his doctrine of divinity in metaphysics; Stoics the
identity of virtue and pleasure; sceptics the impossibility of finding the
truth; scholastics the harmony between mysteries of the Christian reli-
gion and philosophy; Descartes universal doubt; Spinoza the unity of
thought and extension; Leibniz the pre-established harmony between
knowing and being; Kant the phenomenal character of the object; Fich-
te the subject/object; Schelling the intellectual intuition; and Hegel has
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But many are discouraged and talk about the end of metaphysics, as
we used to talk about the end of poetry. Metaphysics and poetry are eter-
nal, however. They have their sunsets, but they also dawn again on the
horizon. We already see how much metaphysics multiplies in the midst
of Realism. And what are natural selection, the principle of heredity and
evolution, the unconscious, and the internal states of atoms but attempts
at metaphysics? What ought to worry us instead is this excessive haste
in metaphysics, perhaps more as a residue of old habit then as a true
awakening, the result of new and sufficient preparation. It is noteworthy,
however, that all these concepts do not come from constructs of pure
speculation, as they used to do. They have come as results of long and
patient observation of things, broadened and elevated into laws through
a process of bold and ingenious induction. They are tools of Realism that
construct new kinds of metaphysics. Constructs of pure thinking have
no more credit and no following. Metaphysics can go nowhere without
Realism as its passport – at least in appearance.
Kirchmann can be happy, then, and declare himself generally satis-
fied. We are deep in Realism. The new generation runs after us with the
same passion that made others of us in illis temporibus run after Hegel.6
Whether it’s Realism or Idealism, however, the important thing for the
young is to study and to study enough. Study is the best system of all. And
serious study is the only source of a people’s greatness. A people that
studies is always free and creative. Today there is progress. But we are still
neither free nor creative.
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Francesco De Sanctis
The Ideal1
its enemies as well. Let me not conceal from you that in thinking about
giving this funeral oration, I have secretly wished, as we accompany it to
the grave, that we shall realize that it is still alive – immortal, in fact.
The Ideal is dead. The Ideal is alive.
Therefore, as one should when someone has died, I ask myself: ‘How
was it born; when was it born; how did it live; and when did it die, if it did
die? Above all, when the Ideal is born, how is it born?’
We look at an animal. What is it? It is a being with no purpose but
life, no purpose but preserving its life and preserving it in a state of
well-being. Can this purpose be called the Ideal? Certainly not. Let us
move on to the human and think about it first of all in infancy, when it is
almost an animal. The baby is anxious for the breast, driven there by the
instinct for life: is this an Ideal act? No. Now think about the savage when
all he does is hunt and fish, when he has no rule of morality other than
self-preservation, sacrificing even his own kind to it. Is there anything
Ideal in the savage? Again, no. Hence, the Ideal is born when the feel-
ing of being human is born in a human being, when thinking develops,
when a person conceives an idea of what was a feeling for him the day
before. A human comes to generalize human qualities, conceptualizing
glory and the fatherland, for example: at that point, ideas are born. But
we still do not have the Ideal.
When does one of these ideas become the Ideal? This happens only
when that creative human faculty called imagination takes hold of ideas,
and, by working upon them, produces feeling and informs all human
action with it in such a way that the idea becomes like the pillar of fire
that guides the human race. The Ideal then wholly occupies the human,
taking different forms in art, religion, philosophy, and history.
If it is true that the Ideal is born together with the feeling of human
consciousness, how is it born? The Ideal is not something floating in
the air. The Ideal is produced, like everything else. From what is it pro-
duced? From the Real, by that reality which you take to be its enemy.
Here is the reason: as reality evolves, it must reach a point where it is
capable of creating its own Ideal from itself. If the Ideal is the child of the
Real, any historical reality must have its corresponding Ideal. The history
of the Ideal is the history of the human spirit. Since no one has yet writ-
ten this history, it would be absurd for me to pretend to do it in a few
words. Nonetheless, in order to give you some sense of the principle that
it sets forth, I shall mention a few of its large features by way of example.
Suppose the human has reached the point in the development of con-
sciousness where he can think about his animal nature. Suppose he is
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Indeed, facing this Realism, what is the Ideal? What gives the Ideal
its logical, typical, and emotional perfection is an illusion of the human
mind. It is a mere extension of the mind that has nothing to do with real-
ity. Thus, as thinking becomes an effect of chemical compositions and
morality a question of bodily temperament, we find ourselves fully in the
animal kingdom. As art follows this impulse, we find that all the qualities
that are really human appear to be bestialized: idea turns into instinct;
imagination is a manifestation of the machinery; passion is appetite. So
it looks to me as if man is walking backwards and reverting to his bestial
side. And yet, as I watch the human race embeasted, what gives me com-
fort is certainly not explaining such a thing but seeing the Ideal peeping
through even from beneath this momentary depravity.
Modern civilization is quite different from the civilization that shaped
the age when Messalina and Agrippina went to the circus to applaud
the gladiator who died elegantly.4 Today people protest. And what form
does this protest take? It is above all the laughter, denied to the ani-
mal and granted to the human, that produces a benign irony about this
dominance by the animal side. There is a great lesson in that laughter
to which we surrender ourselves in carnival. Weary of being human, we
are happy to be animal for a few days. And then, gentlemen, when that
animal nature asserts itself and is asserted as a negation of humanity – of
the homo sum – the human protests, and this protest is called disdain or
indignation. Humanity appears in us and reacts against this degradation.
Another protest erupts when humanity sees the Real immensely distant
from the Ideal and cannot hold back a cry of pain. Look at Schiller and
Leopardi.5
But we ask, ‘Do you not realize that this cry is the swan’s last song,
the funeral bell announcing the end of the Ideal life?’ No, gentlemen.
It is a painful cry full of desire and foreboding, and as long as there is
pain and indignation, the Ideal is present. While believing this, it also
comforts me to discern an enduring fact at the heart of this phenom-
enon: namely, that science prospers and flourishes, that the struggle with
nature snatches new secrets from it, looks in it for laws, and directs its
forces. This forms a richer reality that is more secure in its methods and
criteria than the one that preceded it, and the new Reality is also bound
to succeed in forming its own Ideality.
This has been called an age of transition, an enfantement, an age of
birthing. Indeed, what is this second half of the century but a laboratory
for preparing the reality that will have to produce its own ideality? In the
consciousness of the age, in the phenomena that accompany this animal
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417
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Marianna Bacinetti Florenzi Waddington
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tion that exists among various things. This enables us to see how the
inner facts of understanding and consciousness proceed in parallel with
physical and moral facts. It is true, then, that in the progressive course of
history and in the analysis of the visible universe – just as in the course of
each of our own lives – we can find the link that unifies all human knowl-
edge under a single point of view. But it is also undeniable that the high-
est metaphysical truths are those that really constitute pure knowledge
and cannot reach our minds by way of analysis and experience, coming
only from a primordial synthetic vision that the mind has and which we
get from the mind. Analysis and experience follow later, affirming our
intuition of what is positive and higher. And in those true and purest
essentials shines a light so bright that it gives them an undeniable clarity
needing no proof; it emerges from their objectivity and has none of the
subjectivity that might produce error in them.
And if this were not so, how could we have the idea of Absolute Being?
But the radiant light of that universal Idea illuminates all the other ideas,
and it is this precious ontological Idea to which we must turn for the
stability and veracity of knowledge – a deep, pure, and uncreated Idea
that resides in our soul and that humans cannot acquire on their own,
neither through reasoning nor through any conclusion. In the best and
highest sense, it is this Idea that stirs us to search for the origin of things.
With its truth and sublimity, it does not leave us content to search fee-
bly and ineffectively, wishing us instead to rise, with settled confidence,
towards what it wishes not to be unknown to us.
As I read your learned letter again, I am delighted to see your fondness
for our Bruno, a great talent and a free one deprived too soon and too
cruelly of life. I have been writing on matter now, treating it at first meta-
physically and then physically, focusing especially on the Idea of Bruno
that makes matter divine. I have also written about the disorder of indi-
vidual existences and the eternal order. And I have brought up another
topic, the infinite striving of the human mind and the constraints on it. I
am still thinking about related matters as well, while waiting for happier
times to do philosophy, and then I shall see if these things can be pub-
lished. But since I have taken none of my inspiration from the living and
little from the dead, just as I have always done, I have no expectation of
doing anything whose merits deserve praise or print.4
Whatever comes of it, I follow the impulse of my spirit and take delight
in dealing with philosophical topics, rising in desire to the high places
of wisdom that we mortals can still reach only fleetingly. The answer to
so many large questions rests only with the One that comprehends all, is
all, and knows all. We are happiest, meanwhile, when the Idea of ideas
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2 May 1860
NOTES
1 This text, a private letter written in 1860 and not published by Florenzi
Waddington, may be found in Florenzi Waddington (1978): 25−35, with
notes by the editor.
2 Baron Karl von Bunsen (1791−1860), a Prussian diplomat in Rome, Bern,
and London, studied theology at Göttingen and published in a number of
fields; he was the Marchesa’s cousin by marriage and corresponded with her
about translating Schelling. For the letter from Bunsen to which this letter
replies, see Florenzi Waddington (1978): 30−2.
3 Acts 17:28.
4 For the Marchesa’s published views on pantheism, see Florenzi Waddington
(1863).
5 For Schelling, Maximilian, and the Marchesa’s translation of Schelling’s
Bruno, see section 13 of the Introduction; her translation of the manuscript
is Florenzi Waddington (1864b).
6 ‘Charles and Mary’ may be Charles Waddington-Kastus (1891−1914) and
his wife; Florenzi Waddington (1856) is a translation of Waddington-Kastus
(1848), whose author taught philosophy in Paris: see section 13 of the
Introduction.
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God is the Ideal, the infinite Ideal, the infinite Thought from which eve-
rything develops in immensity, eternity, and variety. Being infinite, God
cannot create the finite because the finite of itself cannot be perceived
by an infinite mind since that would be to create something contrary to
its being. Also, by having to create from nothing – which seems to me
absurd – God would not be able to create something that was not in con-
formity with his infinite being because that would be to create something
not worthy of his eternal power. To create the finite, it would be neces-
sary for God to have created a substance different from himself. Because
he contains everything, God creates nothing. Everything unfolds from
him, and thus there can be no existence different from him because
two different substances imply a contradiction. Either there would be
two equal Gods, which cannot be, or two unequal Gods, which again
is impossible. By accepting a lower God and a higher God, or rather a
God of good and a God of evil, we will get the doctrine of the Persians,
and with that we accept two Gods, one opposed to the other.2 Spinoza
says that a substance conceived per se cannot include the concept of
anything else. It is being in itself, the cause of itself, whose nature entails
existence. And since its attributes are its essence, it is therefore all exist-
ence, the essence in itself of uncreated nature, the cause of the existence
and essence of everything. If the substance had been produced, it would
need to have an antecedent cause, and then it would no longer be a sub-
stance because substance has the principle of existence in itself.3
For this reason, the finite must be indistinguishable with respect to
the infinite and identical with it. And every individuality is just a finite
appearance, a phenomenon, which, from our point of view, can be called
a relative substance at whose base there is always infinite potency. The
Florenzi Waddington, Pantheism II
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neither the beautiful nor the good. God is neither beautiful nor good
but the perfect infinite Idea of each thing. Since God is itself all beau-
ty and all goodness, how can infinite absolute beauty see beauties and
goodnesses apart from itself? How can it judge and create one object
that emerges from it as more beautiful and more good than another?
More and less, small and large, least and greatest are all human things,
and by going that way we do not make ourselves like God; we make God
like us instead. God cannot will to choose because he is neither will nor
intelligence nor freedom – nothing in particular. God is the whole uni-
versally and contains it all. God’s understanding is infinite and does not
understand one thing better than another. God is without number, with-
out quality, and without quantity. God is each thing identical in the One,
the identical in itself. In God the ideal blends with the real, number with
unity, and the finite with the infinite, and in everything that appears in
the finite is the incarnation of the Infinite, where infinite potency always
shines forth.
There is an All that is all, then. There is nothing but God, and God
exists, as Spinoza shows, because existing is a potency and not existing is
an impotency, and there can be nothing but God because there is noth-
ing but God. There cannot be any other substance of a different nature,
and the divine nature cannot be affected by the action of any other sub-
stance. All things are in God, and everything that happens, happens only
through the laws of God’s infinite nature.
If I distance myself from the idea of pantheism, everything confronts
me as determinate. Everything becomes barren and dry. I no longer see
that infinite production of things – magnificent, eternal, and unceas-
ing. I no longer see that infinite and mighty Being into which my soul
needs to leap, in which it takes nourishment, comfort, and hope, break-
ing those too confining bounds of individuality. To say that the idea of
infinite space and time comes to us from cognizing finite space and time
will be useless. No: this finite notion does not take us towards the eter-
nal and infinite. That idea, that certainty, that inexplicable cognition
comes to us from direct intellectual intuition. Our mind sees, feels, and
contemplates truths whose proof is inward and invisible, just as undeni-
able as truth itself. But this view that we have comes from the view of the
soul’s essence, which is eternal in God (to be proved).6 Therefore, by the
same mark of necessity, truth, and eternity that they have in God, we see,
feel, and cognize all those eternal, necessary, and true things. We realize,
then, that true knowledge comes from divine knowledge, which in God
is a complete whole. We get it through a vision in God, so to speak.
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being – of possibility and becoming, but not the existence that God gets
from man or from human reason and consciousness. It is therefore in us
that divine activity attains consciousness of itself. At first this activity of
the divine Spirit was the activity itself, the Spirit that stirred unconscious-
ly in its spontaneous development. Now it is no longer unconscious; it is
the absolute Reason that is identical with human reason.
On that assumption, it seems to me that the great philosopher gives a
kind of superiority to man, in whom and through whom God becomes
God and develops in his absolute fullness. If we accept this, might God
not instead be called ‘negated’ and subjugated to man, so to speak?
Granted, God is realized in his highest freedom as essence because in
that uncreated essence, existing from eternity, is the seed of each thing,
and before it there was nothing at all. But during the same time, God
turned out to be wanting because of blind action and by an involuntary
law, lacking consciousness. In short, God showed himself unfolding as
pure necessity striving for expansion and externality.
This God of Schelling is not the one that I know because I think that
God has always been immense – equally infinite, eternal, and uncreated.
Therefore, God is without beginning and without end, and everything
that arises and develops from God has in its foundation the mark of the
divine nature. In every finite thing is the infinite potency, and by the
law of cause and effect, things cannot be of a nature utterly unlike what
produces them. I maintain, however, that human reason derives from
the divine, not the divine from the human, as one might conclude if God
really attained self-consciousness in human consciousness. In the end,
without the human from which God gets life and absolute reality, God
could not be God, according to Schelling. It is therefore evident that
man actually becomes a divinity before God.
But I think that human reason comes from the divine instead, from
absolute Reason, and is part of infinite Thought. From that aspiration,
that anxiety that we have to seek the divine and the infinite, it is clear
that human reason gets part of the divine. And our reason seeks to grasp
the holy Knowledge from which it emerged by seeking to understand
itself and to understand and contemplate God – eternal primordial
Activity, absolute Substance, the universal Essence that has produced
everything eternally in its own eternal immensity, necessity, and com-
plete freedom. I understand this necessary development of divinity as
always immense and equal, not reaching its fullness by different degrees
yet revealing itself in different degrees. Rather than accept the principle
proposed by the illustrious philosopher for the production of things, I
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NOTES
428
12
Francesco Fiorentino
LETTER 1
In our frequent talks together about the enormous value of The New Sci-
ence, you have pointed out to me various statements that clearly fore-
shadow German philosophy, and you have asked why people have tried
so hard to conceal these similarities and twist the teaching of the greatest
Neapolitan philosopher into such strange shapes. I have answered with
a few words about this, but since the question is a serious one and needs
more clarification, I have decided to write about it, in confidence that
this will please someone who finds philosophical debate (a rare thing in
our day) neither tiresome nor annoying.
Now that Vico’s name has escaped the oblivion that gripped it for so
long in the previous century, Italians and foreigners alike invoke it today,
making it the object of praise as excessive as the scorn heaped upon it in
other periods. The way of the world, as we almost always discover, is Gol-
gatha yesterday, Tabor today, the Bastille then, and now the Pantheon.2
After Vico published The New Science, he avoided crowded places so that
he would not run into anyone whom he had mentioned, probably fear-
ing their rebukes and sneers. Were he alive today, he would have quite a
different reason to hide. Rightly or wrongly, everyone wants to be seen
as Vico’s follower. For every statement he made, there are a thousand
interpretations, and his words are cited and distorted to the point where
none of their meaning is left. In the academies, among philosophers and
jurists, there is a real struggle to be or to appear to be Viconian – at any
cost. In my opinion, however, going overboard with praise is as harmful
as the ceaseless denigration used to be. And I have always felt that one
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Fiorentino, Vico and Kant
length about his studies and the thinking that produced his books.3 But
this far-seeing effort was not much help because any truly creative genius
has something inside that remains unclear to the person himself. Some-
thing flashes through his mind unawares, which he cannot escape and
cannot hold still enough to see it squarely from every side. In science as
in poetry there is inspiration, and this sudden flash, whence the mind
catches an unexpected glimpse of an unknown world, evades the search-
ing thoughts of anyone who finds himself struck by it.
The task of real criticism, then, is to investigate what not even the
author himself understood, to uncover the hidden struggles of his gen-
ius and shed light on the shadowy workings of the remotest reaches of
his mind. In every great genius, the old person confronts the new, and
they fight so fiercely that the battle stays long undecided while the mind
wavers in doubt. Then, as if by instinct, it takes shelter in the past, and
the old person prevails. But final victory always goes to the new person,
whom the struggle makes stronger while the other weakens, and, in the
long run, gives up. The creator of a new system can be called a battle-
ground that no one sees. Hence, it is not a wise plan to make one of the
parties to this conflict disappear by suppressing it or by describing great
people as if they were formed in an instant. History done in this way by
lopping off the process of coming-to-be is a falsification of science.
Not departing from our plan, we are presented with two lines to notice
in Vico, as there were two before him in Descartes, and two after him in
Kant. Vico lays out of one of these lines; he traces its origin to Plato, and
he is on the right track. But the other line, not understood by him, is
based on the new principle of Descartes – the Descartes whom Vico fol-
lowed and made productive while believing that he was attacking him.
In his learned work on Vico’s thought, Ferrari is not interested in these
various details that the modest Neapolitan investigated in the history
of his great predecessors.4 For him The New Science is a solitary monu-
ment with no basis in past advances, rising as if by enchantment like the
palaces described by Ariosto. In his view, neither Plato nor Tacitus nor
Bacon nor Grotius – the four authors from whom Vico took inspiration –
had enough power to cause the new science to be born.5 Ferrari is right,
in one sense, because no haphazard erudition does any good without
a mind to develop it. Books create opportunities, but they are useless
without intellectual energy. Just as the apple that fell in front of Newton
cannot be called the discoverer of universal attraction, neither could
the lamp in Pisa’s cathedral, swinging there in plain sight for Galileo,
disclose the laws of the pendulum to him.
But besides external events and the talent that belongs to the indi-
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Fiorentino, Vico and Kant
LETTER 2
I’m not sure what it amounts to, this bit of babble that I’ve started to put
together for you, nor if it seems mostly a waste of time. Since it’s no both-
er for you, anyhow, I intend to go on with it to the finish. Who knows?
By continuing, we might get to an issue that more reluctant minds and
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those more remote from theoretical subjects might find worth thinking
about. I cannot conceal from you that I have become hopeful about this,
convinced as I am that in Vico’s new science we find not only discus-
sions of a philosophical problem but also material with implications for
problems of origin – the origins of history, art, religion, and law, topics
continually discussed but never finally resolved.
In the meantime, we cannot do without these things, and anyone who
tries not to deal with them often turns back to them despite himself – an
indisputable sign that all these issues are living in human consciousness.
But in getting back to origins, as it gets darker and darker, the thing
that you’re looking for gets smaller and smaller, and, for one reason
or another, dismay overcomes you and you’re tempted to abandon the
task. Proof of having great talent – and a privilege that comes with it – is
not letting oneself be defeated by difficulties, redoubling one’s effort at
every obstacle. For a good twenty-five years Vico laboured over his book
and gave it a title that he himself calls invidious, The New Science.9 Over
so long a period he had to overcome many serious obstacles even within
himself, not counting external impediments, for it is in the nature of
the human spirit to turn on itself if there is nothing outside to attack it.
The Neapolitan philosopher therefore had plenty of problems, and they
came to him from the very teachings that had helped him in his early
efforts.
The last time I wrote you, I mentioned how Plato first suggested to
Vico the design for thinking about the new science, and this theory,
which was effective when he first started his project, began to be only
half-useful to him quite soon. Plato, being too fond of ideas and their
immobility, was happy to squeeze everything inside this cage, as he did
with the history of humanity in his Republic. From his own experience,
Vico perceived – and would have occasion to say – that the ideal nature
of Plato’s conception cannot be identified with history without doing
grave harm to it. He therefore hastened to extract history from this ideal
and base it on a different principle. Vico thus arrived at the cardinal dis-
tinction between the true and the certain: where the philosophy of history
was a science of the true for Plato, for Vico it becomes a science of the
certain. And we can describe the certain as the living truth and human
fact, which gradually escapes the confines of particularity that encumber
it and keeps reaching for universality and convertibility with the true. In
this exchange, as the true acquires awareness, the certain, for its part,
gets the benefit of universality, with the following result: although the
true lies beyond the mind that contemplates it, according to Plato, and
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and that reason must add the vowels.12 It seems to me that this is exactly
how Vico looked at knowledge as a whole, dividing it into two domains,
one covered by reason, the other by authority. And then he showed that
philosophy contained the vowels of history, while philology contains
only its consonants. Vico gave philology a very large role, describing it as
‘the theory of everything that depends on human will.’13 Yet his solitary
researches may lack the evidence and support from oriental languages
that assist modern philologists. Being too shut up in the world of Rome,
neglecting the rest and evaluating what little he knew of it by the Roman
standard, may have done him harm. Despite all these failings, we still
cannot deny that he is immeasurably far ahead of those who travelled the
same road after him. He made philology important, raising it from the
detailed study of words to the lofty position of a scientific system. And he
studied the lives of peoples in all the most important phenomena that
usually characterize them, never content with collecting witty anecdotes
and popular stories as many do today – to what end, I am not sure.
When Vico came on the scene, there was no shortage of erudition.
Every book published carried an unbearable load of it, or else it would
have had no value, giving the swarm of learned experts no reason to
applaud. The only thing lacking was to use erudition moderately and
know how to direct it to some reasonable purpose. In order to do so,
erudition had to be subjected to regular laws, distinguishing what was
real and solid from the worthless and spurious, tracing the provenance
of scholarship, and using such connections to link it with thought.
No longer trusting that this could be done, Descartes took himself
out of it and disowned the attempt: rather than untie the knot, he cut
it. The Discourse on the Method marks a cross on the back of every such
inquiry, revealing its uselessness and showing that a mind encumbered
with so many little bits of information would then be ill-equipped for
the richer and very important task of knowing oneself. Descartes may
not have been entirely wrong about the academies and scholars of his
day, but he had not seen that while a person or an academy might look
for childish amusement, the human mind produces nothing without
meaning. His plan went too far, then, for there was an alternative not
opposed to the Cartesian principle, I believe, but derived from the very
same method – a plan to redo those learned inquiries from a different
point of view, inasmuch as they uncover the hidden nature of the spirit
that becomes concrete in its products. And had Descartes reinstated the
thinking that was banished for so long, he would not have needed to
leave it naked and impoverished in order to complete its restoration;
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these works was printed and published in 1710, and please do me the
favour of noting the dates, whose importance for our purposes we shall
see later. Its intent is to track down in a few Latin words the remains
of the remotest Italian philosophy, which, so it seemed to Vico, had to
be found hidden beneath that covering. There our Vico sees truth con-
verted into what is made in a mind located above our minds, as the eye
of reason catches its solitary existence in a distant glance. And while that
sovereign mind makes all and knows all, ours rests content with a science
of smaller scope, as it keeps harvesting the elements of things scattered
hither and yon. The only making suited to us is the mathematical, whose
deep structure we therefore see, whereas in physics we see no farther
than external appearance since physical things are copies and simulacra
of divine ideas.
But who does not portray the old metaphysics – the Plato of the Repub-
lic and Timaeus – along these lines? In this first work, then, Vico is still
Platonic, just as Descartes is a Platonist when he sets aside his I think,
therefore I am and takes a big leap into the most perfect Being and St
Anselm’s famous argument. No wonder, then, that some have thought
that this is where Vico and Descartes agreed – as Bouillier, among others,
did in his history of Cartesianism.17 But they did not realize that on this
point Vico and Descartes are not so much alike as both modelling them-
selves on ancient metaphysics. Both Vico’s sovereign Mind and the most
perfect Being of Descartes bear the imprint of the Good from Plato’s
Republic. It is still a resemblance, but copied over, not an original resem-
blance. From this we see why Vico, at a more mature stage – actually,
a year after publishing the New Science – scolds Descartes for this same
failing, of which he too had been guilty in The Most Ancient Wisdom of the
Italians. Indeed, writing to Esperti he says that ‘Descartes establishes as
a rule of truth that the idea has come to us from God, but without ever
defining it.’18 And the Cartesian idea lacks definition because defining
implies connecting and linking by genus and difference, so that an idea
is interwoven with the most universal items by way of the genus and with
the most concrete by way of the difference. But if Vico’s observation
is correct, it could then be a rebuttal against the infinite mind that he
himself proposed, since it too is without definition and isolated from the
rest of the system.
After a while, Vico figured out the difficulty involved in accepting a
mind of that kind, and in The New Science he turned to a living psyche that
is both defined and capable of development in a logically and histori-
cally organized system. And in this transformation he was truly Cartesian,
making no use of any other mechanisms than those that thinking sup-
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plied. Therein lies Vico’s novelty, and therein lies the real resemblance
to Descartes – not the old one copied over from Plato, which is the only
one noticed by the French critic.19
Next you will ask me the reason why he changed paths, at what point
he changed, and whether he changed all at once or slowly? These are
the questions that I think I hear you asking, and I shall answer them at
another time. Now I only mention to you that ten years after The Most
Ancient Wisdom of the Italians came the Universal Right, and fifteen years
later The New Science.20 In addition to the actual content of the books,
which we shall discuss when we have a chance, that sequence of publica-
tion clarifies for us how Vico finally came to rest in The New Science, from
which he expected more glory than from any of his other works before
or after it. Hence, when Solla wrote to tell him that he thought more of
his oration for the death of Angiola Cimini than of any of his other works
– including The New Science – the kindly Vico, seeing what a stupid thing
his friend had said, quietly replied that his own opinion was certainly just
the opposite.21
What a hard life that unfortunate genius lived, so that regret had to
come to him even from the praise of close friends, along with the cer-
tainty of having wasted his labour, at least as far as contemporaries were
concerned! If it were me, I would have been much more contemptuous
of Solla’s praise than of the miserly refusal from Cardinal Corsini or the
painful neglect of the three generations who allowed that astonishing
talent to be a teacher of rhetoric.22 Thus I cannot forgive him for having
desired and requested approval and favour from vulgar minds and from
hearts hard in the way of the courtier when there would have been more
glory for him in not seeking this at all. Perhaps his name would have
been much more famous – as a person, anyhow – if in his mature years
and as a professor in Naples he had been able to preserve that youthful
audacity, which, in the solitude of Cilento, pushed him almost to boast
of his misfortune, scornful of all comfort.23
What do you say about this, distinguished lady? I can see you smiling
at these words of mine and perhaps reproving me gently for having left
The New Science in order to be annoyed with its most excellent author. But
what do you expect if I cannot stick to my target, even when very great
persons are involved? I ask Vico’s forgiveness, and yours, and in letters to
follow we shall discuss the rest of his works. Keep me in your friendship
then, which honours me greatly, and consider me yours.
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LETTER 3
The last time I wrote you, I ended with various questions that I promised
to answer, one by one, and now, to keep my promise, I begin by making
another question out of them. Have you never found yourself faced with
something so difficult that it has made you change your mind, forcing
you to reach the same goal by a different route? I think so, since this is
what normally happens to everyone who wants to find the truth without
being too careful. And if less educated people are taken to be change-
able at every shift in the winds of theory, the learned commend them for
it, and science pays them back.
In my view, then, Vico found himself in that same place, more or less,
where all distinguished thinkers end. Having accepted a philosophy that
I call Platonic (more to accommodate popular opinion than to express
my own views), Vico sought to make it fit the primordial era of Italian
philosophizing. There he did his best to investigate various words that
he believed to contain a hidden wisdom perfectly suited to that type of
philosophy. A clever strategy – had it been more successful – since his
aim was to give an air of venerable antiquity to new concepts, most of
which he had proposed for the first time. With great courtesy and pre-
cision, the Giornale dei letterati published at that time in Italy made him
realize that various interpretations were inexact, that the conclusions of
the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians led to contradictions, and finally
that the basis on which his whole system was built was dubious.24 Vico
replied once and replied again, countering with new clarifications when
objections were restated and defending himself as best he could. But he
went no farther with the second and third parts that made up his original
design – an absolutely sure sign that the difficulties had defeated him.
Thus, the controversy had a double outcome, which is not very common:
first, it ended politely; second, it led such a person as Vico to think things
over again for himself.
I will not go into all the details of this controversy, nor will it be
necessary to do so, since everyone knows them. My only point is this:
how could so subtle and perfect a philosophy be found in the Lat-
in language, seeing that the Romans began to philosophize only at a
rather late date, and even then, lacking knowledge of their own, they
borrowed all their inquiries of this kind from the Greeks? This obser-
vation was so much on the mark that when Vico could not make the
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rough and warlike Romans the actual authors of such enormous wis-
dom, he turned back to the Etruscans, concluding that the Romans
could have spoken their language as philosophers without their hav-
ing been philosophers themselves. A quick way out, to be sure, but
no longer enough to sustain the intrinsic and hidden power of Latin
words – words whose learned interpretation was supposed to be a rem-
edy grafted on at a later date and lacking the native and spontaneous
value of the words themselves. If so, what did the Etruscans do to get it?
On Vico’s new hypothesis, the problem would have been displaced but
certainly not solved: if there were primitive words, and if these words
could have a deep and arcane wisdom within them, it still remained to
decipher it.
It was suggested to Vico that he apply himself instead to Rome’s most
ancient laws, where an original manifestation of that people was surely to
be found, and where indisputably there was a collection of practical wis-
dom, at least, if not theoretical wisdom. At first he seemed not at all com-
pliant with this advice: repaying his advisors with problems that they had
first brought forward, he claimed that uncertainty and scarcity might
be no less an issue in those legal documents than in what produced the
labile language of metaphysics. Either because self-regard yielded to con-
cern for science or because the choice seemed not so hopeless to him,
he gave the question more deliberate consideration than he had before
and turned from the wisdom of Socrates to that of Romulus, from the
school to the assembly, a direction apparent most obviously in the Sole
Origin and End of Law.25 This work of Vico’s makes the transition from
inner speculative wisdom to the common and spontaneous kind; it is his
progressive step towards the true sources of science and history. Since
law-making stands between the particular interests of life and the abso-
lutely universal ideas of the mind, it is the natural mediator between
theory and practice, between remote abstractions and what is alive and
concrete. Professor Giani, in the learned interpretation of this work that
he provides – the first one produced in Italy – astutely recognizes its
special, characteristic feature, its treatment of the conciliation between
philosophy and philology.26 Hence, one realization after another made
it impossible for Vico not to notice that the Twelve Tables, with all their
marks of coarse rigour, had something reflective in them and a kind of
generality that did not belong to a truly primitive people. And he went
back even farther, to the cave-dwellers, to the earth’s virgin forests and
their thunder-struck sons, to the crude, savage rites that inaugurated the
birth of the first civilization.
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Fiorentino, Vico and Kant
Science, we notice that humans no longer make just the mathematical sci-
ences but also the others that Vico calls ‘practical matters’ – history, reli-
gion, art, law, and science.27 Thus he violated the prohibition that had
been established, extending the limits within which he had imprudently
confined the human mind: a venturesome violation, whose fruit was The
New Science – as a pedant would surely be aware.
It is not enough to register the violation, however, unless we emphasize
the cause from which it came, and to me it seems to lie in this, that when
Vico rejected the Cartesian principle and criterion, his rejection did not
produce the unshakeable contradiction that others have surmised. That
this is the case is not a claim of mine based on guesswork or imagination;
I find Vico himself saying so in his first reply to the Giornale dei letterati.
This revelation is precious indeed because it puts us inside the thinking
of this great genius and also because it provides new confirmation of an
ever-enduring fact, which is that people who exaggerate corrupt what is
taught instead of defending and clarifying it. Thus, Vico says that he does
not confirm the Cartesian principle, ‘but that the cogito is an undoubted
sign of my existence, and yet since it is not a cause of my existence it
does not produce knowledge of existence for me.’28 Here his distinction
reveals itself clearly: while the direct consciousness of Descartes could
give him the certainty that he existed, it was still not enough to show that
thinking produces existence.
In other words, this is what Vico wanted to say: If you make me see
how I think is a cause of my existence, then I too will surely be Cartesian;
but as long as the I think is only a direct certainty of this existence, I shall
never regard it as a scientific principle. Now this was bringing Cartesian
consciousness to completion, not weakening it, much less denying it. It
was an elevation of thinking from the level of subjective certainty, where
Descartes had confined it, to that of a universal and creative principle.
Immanuel Kant also went beyond Cartesian consciousness and moved
up to the transcendental consciousness where he found the primitive
unity of the categories, and he did not profess to have contradicted
Descartes in this. On the contrary, he considered himself the new and
improved Descartes. Moreover, I will say that Kant completes Descartes
by putting Vico’s presentiment into effect, the reason being that the Ger-
man philosopher was the first to try to make us see how the I think that
contains the categories or specific functions of thinking is the universal
and necessary condition of the human mind.
My claim, then, is that Vico does not contradict the progress of phi-
losophy that developed between Descartes and Kant but that he actually
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reconnects them both and that he is the successor of the French philoso-
pher just as much as he is the precursor of the German. But since Kant
had thought in a mature way about the course of Locke’s philosophy
and about Hume’s serious objections to it, he could consciously state the
problem that Vico had only divined. The Neapolitan philosopher did
not have confidence that he could untie the knot that he surely loosened
up a bit in The New Science, the knot that Kant sets out to untangle with
his fearless and self-aware critique. Vico teaches how the human being
makes history, Kant how the mind makes knowledge, and in this they
both reveal that thinking is the supreme maker, thus fulfilling the prom-
ise that knowing should depend on making – the one unconsciously, the
other fully aware – and both observing the rule made by the Descartes
who wanted the new science to be based on thinking.
Now you will tell me that it is my duty to prove that Vico’s new science
was really based on thinking, as understood by Descartes and Kant, and
not on divine thinking, as Providence is still called – which is what some
believe. I know that I have taken on this duty, and I will try to do the best
that I can.
Please accept my feelings of esteem and friendship, then, and con-
sider me always yours.
NOTES
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Fiorentino, Vico and Kant
had set before himself’ when he read On the Law of War and Peace by Hugo
Grotius (1583−1645), a towering figure of the day who made fundamental
contributions to the notion of natural law in political and legal theory.
6 Dante, Inferno, 1.42: ‘quella fiera a la gaetta pelle.’
7 Vico (1975): 121−2.
8 Vico (1975): 122.
9 Vico (1977): 696 explains that he could not avoid the ‘invidious’ title
because he had, in fact, invented a new science that reveals ‘the ideal history
of the eternal laws on whose basis the deeds of all nations operate in their
rise, progress, stability, decline, and fall,’ this being ‘a universal topic in that
it deals with the nature common to nations by that property possessed by
every science that is complete in its idea.’
10 Vico (1975): 154.
11 By ‘the two schools’ Fiorentino may mean the Italic and Greek traditions
from which later Greek philosophy emerged, the former represented here
by Pythagoras, the latter by Plato; although Vico saw Pythagoras as a better
route than Plato to native Italian wisdom, he took Plato’s Cratylus as his
model in Vico (2005), and a great deal of his evidence in The New Science is
also etymological, and often far-fetched, even by the standards of the day;
see Vico (1975): 148−50.
12 Hamann (1730−88) was an early reader of Vico in Germany: Berlin (2000):
243−358. He made the remark about the Hebrew alphabet in a letter to
Kant: Hamann (1955−75), I, 450.
13 Vico (1977): 91.
14 For Bossuet see the notes to our translation of Villari’s prolusione.
15 Vico lived as a young man, from 1686 to 1695, in the castle of Vatolla in
Campania, with the support of the owners, the Rocca family, for whom he
worked as a tutor; Vico (1975): 119−23
16 De antiquissima italorum sapientia, the first part of a larger work that was
never completed, appeared in 1710, followed by two critical reviews in the
Giornale de’ Letterati; Vico replied at length to both reviews in 1711 and
1712. De uno universi iuris principio et fine uno, inspired by his reading of Gro-
tius, appeared in 1720, as the first of three volumes of a work on universal
right. In 1723 Vico began what was to become The New Science, publishing a
first version in 1725, a much different second version in 1730, then adding
corrections and additions through 1733; the final version overseen by Vico
appeared posthumously in 1744, the year of his death. See Vico (1722),
(1977), (2002), (2005).
17 The famous ontological argument developed by Anselm of Aosta and
Canterbury (1033−1109) aims to prove God’s existence from a definition
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of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought. Descartes first
used a version of the ontological argument in the Discourse of 1637. See also
Bouillier (1868): 521−45.
18 Fiorentino read Vico’s letter of 1726 to Giuseppe Luigi Esperti, a cleric who
was part of Vico’s complex network, in Vico (1835−7), VI, 5.
19 The French critic is Bouillier, in Bouillier (1868).
20 See n16 above, on the chronology.
21 Nicola Solla was a student of Vico who wrote an early biography of his
teacher; Vico discusses the learned Angiola Cimini (or Angela Cimmino) in
Vico (1975): 180−1; for Vico’s answer to Solla, see Vico (1835−7), VI, 6−10.
22 When Vico dedicated the first version of The New Science to Cardinal
Lorenzo Corsini in 1725, the implication was that financial support would
follow, but the Cardinal, who became Pope Clement XII in 1730, reneged;
Vico (1975): 11−17, 173. While waiting in vain to be called to a chair in law,
Vico taught rhetoric, a less prestigious subject and less rewarding financially.
23 Cilento is the part of Campania where Vico lived as a young man in the
castle of Vatolla.
24 Although Vico himself says that the dispute with the Giornale de’ Letterati was
polite, it was also long and intense; Vico (1975): 152−3.
25 Vico (1722), begun in 1720.
26 The legal scholar Costanzo Giani (1826−69) was the editor of Vico (1855).
27 Vico (1977): 185, 323, 600.
28 Vico (1711): on the Giornale de’ Letterati, see nn16, 24 above.
446
13
Francesco Fiorentino
No one used to thinking about the course of human events can help
noticing the variable success enjoyed by various fields of study, no less
than by any other institution or practice. It will be easy for any such
person to see that some fields that were once sought after and fashion-
able were soon completely forgotten or taken up without enthusiasm.
Usually, in fact, the eventual oblivion has been in proportion to the ante-
cedent ardour: the greater the expectations engendered, the more dis-
tressing the consequent disillusionment. Nowadays – and it could not be
otherwise – philosophy has met a similar fate, sometimes praised to the
skies, sometimes trampled in the dust, depending on which intellects
are in charge, whether they are the haughty young or else older people
given to circumspect doubts. So goes the world! History has its own ups
and downs, just like people: sometimes the human race sails on, as fast as
desire; sometimes it runs aground in dismay and disillusionment.
Reversals of this kind do not lack causes, however. Every era is made of
an aggregate of traditions, principles, and doctrines with which it stays
content until it occurs to someone to suspect that they are unstable.
Until that moment, there is no hint of suspicion, which for most people
is not an issue. But then – as with a building whose walls tumble down all
at once, and no stone is left upon a stone – not one principle or doctrine
in this whole mental world any longer has any value or authority at all.
It must be completely rebuilt, completely redone from the start, and
reconstruction begins with a preconceived dislike for anything from the
past. But this dislike too is unreasonable. And history takes on the dif-
ficult task of keeping what must be kept, leaving in the rubble the useless
weight of countless frameworks worn out by time.
Nowadays we are in the habit of getting upset with any speculation at
Part II: Translations
all – indeed, any idea of any kind. And since we still need something to
do, what has become fashionable is careful research about facts. Positiv-
ism is the name given to the philosophy that takes this path, and Idealism
is the name that we usually give to its opposite. Two philosophies, Positiv-
ism and Idealism, have been set up facing one another, and two catego-
ries have been walled off, the category of facts and the category of ideas.
This sharp opposition does not mean the end of all philosophy, how-
ever, only that one philosophy takes the place of another. The founder
of the positive philosophy, Auguste Comte, in the famous Course that he
published from 1830 to 1842, proposes to find the most general rela-
tions of objects belonging to the different sciences, and because rela-
tions of quantity are simpler, he puts them first.2 Accordingly, he puts
mathematics at the base of the whole encyclopedia, and mathematics is
supposed to be the key to explaining chemistry. Chemistry is the key to
biology and biology the key to sociology. Starting with quantitative rela-
tions, Comte gradually moved up to more complex linkages and finally
reached the most complicated connections of social life. That was his
plan, but it did not last. As soon as he started to think about life, he real-
ized that he could go no farther with mechanical laws alone. He sensed
the need for final causes and admitted it – those same final causes that
he had proposed to banish in the first sections of his Course of Positive
Philosophy. Then he formulated a principle that departed from his earlier
view: namely, that higher forms cannot be explained by lower forms.3
Through George Lewes, Positivism travelled across the Channel to a
soil where it could take root more easily. Here were the traditions of
Berkeley, Hume, and Bentham. Here, as Stuart Mill wrote to the same
Auguste Comte on 4 March 1842, the nation had more positivity.4 Any-
one who knows the history of English philosophy understands that theo-
rizing was gradually restricted there to the phenomena alone. Locke had
banished every idea of substance. Berkeley had banished every cause.
Hume had reduced every nexus of causality to a mere association of
ideas. Accordingly, a philosophy based on the phenomena alone, which
excluded everything absolute and all necessity, could not help being
favourably received in England. Bentham emphasized utility. And if,
as Macaulay said, the glory of modern philosophy lies in seeking the
useful and shunning ideas, then, from Bacon until now, no nation has
done more to make this maxim effective.5 But the fact is that a question
remains: Is this really the glory of modern philosophy? Will we be wiser when
we have extinguished the light of every idea and when we have pursued
every means of multiplying the comforts of life? And the most brilliant of
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Part II: Translations
formities. Call it what you will, natural conformity or natural law, it still
remains true, in any event, that one thing connects with another in the
sequence of natural facts. In moral actions, however, there is an inde-
pendent activity that posits and determines itself by breaking loose from
the adamantine chain of the causal series. That said, I do not intend to
settle this question, simply to mention it.
Claiming that we must use the method of the natural sciences in the
world of ethics and human history appears to assume an answer to the
prior question – specifically, it assumes that there is no activity that does
not come into the sequence of cause and effect and is not determined
by another action preceding it, which, in turn, determines the action
subsequent to it. Now this verdict has not actually been rendered, and
we still have no arguments on one side or the other that are unobjection-
able. On the one hand, some people say this: I know only facts, and facts,
inasmuch as they enter into consciousness, exist in a nexus of causality
and occupy a moment of time with a before and after. This is the argu-
ment made by Kant, adjusted later in various ways. On the other hand,
some people make an objection: there is something in our thinking that
experience does not supply but that all experience assumes. There is
something primitive, irrational, and a priori, which, in the domain of
practice, is freedom. If experience is powerless to grasp it, reason can
only accept it. This is another thesis proposed by the same Kant, and
when it is opposed to the first it constitutes one of his famous antinomies.
So then, with all this show of judgments straightforwardly rendered,
we have still not wriggled free from the fatal grip that held Immanuel
Kant, that giant of intellect. It’s no use, then: we apply the method of the
physical sciences to the natural sciences, but first we must decide wheth-
er the forces that we have in mind are all equivalent to physical forces.
Clinging to the doctrine that the whole fabric of nature and that of mind
as well reduce to a single law of causality does not mean that all debate
has been cut off and that this single law has necessarily been proved.
Herbert Spencer made great efforts to close the distance between
natural causality and freedom, finding clever ways to bridge the gap by
bringing memory as close as possible to instinct and instinct as close as
possible to intelligence. He thinks that the theory of the average person,
upon which statistics is based, has confirmed as much stability in human
phenomena as can be found in natural phenomena. Considering the
movement of the whole human race in the aggregate, he thinks that
exceptions conflicting with this stability can be seen to grow sparse grad-
ually and finally vanish. All this we may not understand. We may indeed
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452
Fiorentino, Positivism
453
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But can nature and mind be studied in the same way, by the same
method, and with the same results? This is another controversial ques-
tion about which it is easy to get confused.
Ever since the great Galileo rejected all authority and all the problems
of the schools to turn to experience and to induction, nature has revealed
itself in new ways. The laws that Galileo discovered, even though they did
not reach beyond facts of sensation, had the great virtue of producing
a need to see the world of Spirit transformed in the same way. What he
did for external facts, Descartes attempted for subjective consciousness,
and Kant achieved this in his immortal critique. The problem was that
it was hard to apply the powerful inductive method to the individual
and solitary mind because mind lacks that indispensable point of control
and connection that facts provide, and that becomes clear and concrete
only in the collective psyche. Giambattista Vico, inventing a science that
was both a philosophy and a history of the human race – and trading
the truth of science for the certainty of history, as he himself used to
say – completed Galileo’s project and made the inductive method of the
experimental sciences available to the science of the mind.10 I am cer-
tainly not claiming that historical induction left Vico’s hands in as com-
plete a state as experimental induction had left the hands of the scientist
from Pisa. In fact, after criticizing Descartes for being shut up inside a
single consciousness and neglecting philology, what did Vico himself do
but apply to the psychology of peoples the same hierarchy and the same
faculties contained in the individual psyche: sense, imagination, and rea-
son? But anyone who wants to take into account the greater difficulty of
the philosophy of Spirit, as compared with natural philosophy, cannot go
too hard on the philosopher from Naples.
And here it is not beside the point to sketch the difference between
natural induction and history in order to reply to those who are too
quick to preach and teach that the moral sciences should adopt the same
method if they want to do things reliably.
The basis of natural induction is solid, whereas the basis of histori-
cal induction is mobile and always changeable. Natural facts are always
present to us either as stable or as readily reproduced, and most of the
time, from our point of view, they are exactly identical as long as circum-
stances are the same. Therefore, the observer can grasp them in their
native integrity and honesty as he assembles them, disassembles them,
and tests them in countless ways. With mental facts it is not the same.
When such facts pass us by, they leave no trace, or else whatever trace
they leave cannot reach us unaltered by time – or without the actual
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imprint of the person who has transmitted them to us. It is not within the
power of humans to reproduce such facts entirely. What creates them is
already different; the environment in which they move is different; and
the sequence to which they belong is different. Induction cannot get
started in a reliable way, then; it is forced to proceed by guesswork that is
rarely correct and often misleading.
Calm, stable, and serene, nature does not alter the measure of its prod-
ucts in order to change what it produces. Under the crust of earth that
we walk on, the planet has stored away for us the buried and ineradica-
ble proofs of its distant transformations. But the ephemeral commences
with life and reaches its peak with mind – this fickle, gabbling Proteus
that has no constant face. Like a raging blast of wind, mind goes so fast
that there is no time for any one of its actions to get a grip on another.
When one act begins, the other is already gone forever. Nor is memory
so very prompt or so fixed on taking everything in, or, having done so,
on preserving them all. Thus, in individual consciousness, as in the his-
tory that mirrors the collective life of peoples, the activity that creates is
never the activity that reflects. If the point is to re-weave the course of
history, then, how can we re-enact a process that is so long, so fast, and
so laborious? How can we return to the infancy of our race? How can we
revive that unthinking childhood when languages, myths, customs, and
religious rites were created without yet giving birth to science, without
reflection to inspect or regulate creative activity, without the forethought
of a riper age to see to the preservation of the evidence?
Littré, in the wonderful preface to his Dictionary of the French lan-
guage, claims that the history of words can be treated as equivalent to
natural facts since what he calls the ‘drawplate’ of words – the sequence
of all the words roughed out before reaching final and finished form
– should be treated like the methodical process by which the experi-
menter moves from the sequence of observed facts to the result of induc-
tion. But what is his point? What Littré says is all well and good, but
how can we have access to all the rough forms of which his drawplate is
constructed? Would we not need to fall back on guesswork most of the
time when a link turns out to be missing from the chain?11 If this hap-
pens with a language formed so recently, how great will the problem be
for very old and primitive languages? The equivalent of natural facts will
never have the same value, the same persistence, the same undeniable
reality as the natural fact accessible to observation. The same argument
holds for all other products of the mind, not all of whose intermediate
forms can possibly persist.
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This is why all those who attempt these researches into origins slip
unconsciously into guesswork, more like philosophizing than telling
a story. The result is that philosophy, having been banished in name
from the class of positive sciences, comes back into all the philologi-
cal disciplines, unsummoned and unwanted. Indeed, who else but the
philosophical soothsayer is there to reconstruct the first enthusiasms of
the mythopoeic imagination? Who else repopulates the first temples,
descries there the first artless acts of worship, and restores the first crude
rituals? Who divines the first anxieties of moral awareness and the shame
that coloured the cheeks of the person who first felt guilt? Who goes
down into the hollowed caves, approaching the household fire to recon-
struct the first ties that bound primitive families together?
How little evidence remains of the kind called positive today! And how
much, by contrast, does the reason of the philologist, the moralist, the
jurist, and the historian perceive as unavoidably primitive? Cut away
inductions by reason, and how large a piece of positivity will you have
chopped off along with them? Reduce induction to the poor sterility to
which Stuart Mill has condemned it, and very little of the positive will be
left in these researches.
But this is not the end of differences between natural and historical
induction. Natural forces remain always the same while changing their
forms. But the primal forms, those that make up the skeleton of the
world, as it were, neither increase nor decrease. In the domain of Spirit,
however, increase is undeniable. The moral and intellectual environ-
ment not only changes but also expands as the number of ideas devel-
ops and enlarges. And as it expands, it weighs more on individuals,
substantially altering their activity. In fact, what happens in the world
of nature also occurs in the world of Spirit: the mind is surrounded by
an environment of customs, beliefs, languages, traditions, and ideas no
less than the body is surrounded by the atmosphere. The mind lives,
breathes, and moves in that environment without being aware of it and
without feeling the immense weight pressing on it from all sides. Unlike
the quantity of gases that surround the body, however, the moral and
intellectual environment is not always given. It grows in the course of
history. And it is both producer and product of that history, both origin
and result. This constant variation in one of the most important agents
of history – indeed, the most important agent of all – makes it rather dif-
ficult, not to say impossible, to check on human actions. The changed
environment teaches and guides the people living within it in different
ways. The dispositions that develop there propagate, and each genera-
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Fiorentino, Positivism
tion thus becomes astonishingly unlike the next. But, always assuming
that these generations are not transformed physically and do not inherit
good or bad habits from their ancestors, could anyone say that they act
under the influence of the same mental causes if, beyond any doubt,
these are perpetually mutable?
That is how it is with history, then: those are the difficulties of recon-
structing it and basing it on valid inductions. More than the rushing
waters of a river into which no one plunges twice (to put words in the
mouth of the Greek sophist), the torrent of human affairs permits no
halt or respite.
Given all these difficulties, then, all we can do is philosophize. We
practise philosophy as we practise religious faith or art. Show that such
things are useless, and the human mind will answer with the words that
Madame de Staël gives to her Corinne: ‘How I love this uselessness!’12
But it is not only the heroine of a novel who will say this: Stuart Mill him-
self, that most austere spokesman for the English mind and positivism,
will also tell us so. ‘It would be a serious mistake,’ he says, ‘to believe that
thinking – intellectual activity and the search for truth – is to be counted
among the most powerful inclinations of human nature or that it holds
the highest place in human life except in entirely exceptional individu-
als. And yet, despite the relative scarcity of this element in comparison to
other social forces, its influence is the chief cause that determines social
progress.’13 In other words, while few are made for hard thinking, and
though the human race cannot stick close to these few bold and restless
spirits, it will still always travel behind them. So where will that proud
irritation with ideas lead? Where will that vaunted preference for the
useful lead?
Galileo, who among us can be called the founder of the positive meth-
od, knew almost by heart the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, the creator of
those vivid fantasies, so remote from the real world, that Leopardi cor-
rectly called ‘empty pleasantries.’14 For us, awareness of the real and of
life has never destroyed or diminished the splendours of imagination
and the deep speculations of intellect. And if the hasty and hazardous
syntheses of Idealism have shown Positivism to be right, this does not
suffice to deny the human mind any conception at all of system and any
synthesis. Cut away the branches growing wild and fruitless, but do not
rip every seedling out by its roots and stock.
For the rash claims of the one group and the disheartening denials of
the other there is always a constraint that is healthy for both. This is to
use ideas, but not arrogantly, and to study facts, but not narrowly, and
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then to weave facts and ideas into a broad system where the one does not
conflict with the other and where all have a place and a reason. Idealism
can be empty and Positivism can be blind if one is detached from the
other, following the judgment that Kant reached about the pure concept
and bare intuition. An idea that is not verified and not checked by facts
is not an idea but a daydream. A fact that does not hinge on an idea, that
does not express a reason and give evidence of law, serves absolutely no
purpose. Given the strictest dictates of Positivism, such a fact must be
condemned as useless.
What lights up the fact is the idea shining inside it, raising it from the
sphere of mere accident to that of lasting reality. How many lamps were
there swinging in the world before the one in your cathedral caught
young Galileo’s attention? Who noticed them? Who remembered them?
Who made use of them? And what good did this swinging do until your
great townsman extracted the laws of the pendulum from it? The pre-
tentious contempt for ideas, the even more pretentious curiosity about
disconnected facts bundled together in great heaps without the light
of the idea and without that secret control which is the ingenious and
divinatory role of the inductive method – this will cause amazement in
fools but will surely not satisfy the minds of intelligent people.
Meanwhile, indefatigable compilers of catalogs have now replaced
indefatigable builders of systems. It used to be deductions from an
assumption of some kind that suffocated us. Now it is the recorders of
varieties and anecdotes who bore us to death. Here it is the claw of a
monkey or there the tail of a fish or the shape of a prehistoric tool that
takes the place of the risible quibbling that Cremonini employed to fight
Galileo and prove Aristotle right.15 In me they all awaken the same sense
of disgust – those who believe they can explain everything with the mar-
velous fecundity of the Idea, and the others who think they hold the key
to unlock every secret chamber of nature and mind just because they
have gathered up and recorded all the curiosities and anecdotes.
Needless to say, I have no particular person in mind; I regard every
discipline as necessary and useful; and it really delights me to see anyone
enthusiastic about his own studies. But I believe that philosophy has the
special task of correcting these exaggerations that are so much opposed
to one another. Even in the judgment of a famous Positivist it is phi-
losophy’s duty to coordinate all the sciences and find a way to unify all
human learning. Experience, says Herbert Spencer, ‘is knowledge of the
most humble kind, and it is not unified knowledge; science is knowledge
partly unified; philosophy is knowledge wholly unified.’16
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sequence – like the golden chain that the Homeric Jupiter trusted he
could use to tie up all the gods.
So if facts cannot enter into what we can know, we will take care not
to let them do us violence because they force themselves on us. And if
the connections and conjunctions by which I try to link them up are my
conjectures, or mere need rather than undeniable proof, I shall not hesi-
tate to say so explicitly, thinking it much more helpful to admit difficul-
ties than to beguile your minds with false and fanciful demonstrations.
In short, I shall see to it that the study of philosophy in this flourishing
University works with the same seriousness – though not in the same way
– that leads to success for philology, mathematics, law, and natural sci-
ence. Here the tradition of wisdom is ancient. And the rebirth of science,
though it began elsewhere, found its final expression here with the great
Galileo, whom your Fabroni was not wrong to call almost a god among
philosophers.18 So while Galileo did not set out to do philosophy in the
strict sense, he nonetheless paved the way by perfecting the inductive
method, an indispensable precursor of the historical method.
Here, where the government set up a normal school many years ago
and assigned it to educate new generations for the difficult task of teach-
ing, here it is also necessary to strengthen the minds of these students
even more by training them in the strict discipline of argument, care-
ful inquiry into the facts, precise definition of ideas, and that sense of
measure in all things which is the source of lucid mental clarity and firm
integrity of character. As our new institutions are attacked on all sides,
sometimes by troubles so stale that they stink, sometimes by rash and
half-baked novelties, all apparently turned loose and whipped up by
winds blowing in opposite directions; in this circumstance it is the duty
of science to make our minds stronger by bringing under control the
excesses that claim the pretentious title of principles and beliefs and by sub-
mitting the unruly person of talent to the conquering force of reason.
From ideas well defined and well organized come firm convictions;
from convictions well rooted come steady personalities; and from them
both States get exuberant life and truly lasting glory.
NOTES
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462
14
Antonio Labriola
It perplexes us that the word ‘history’ has been used to express two dif-
ferent levels of ideas: the totality of things that have happened, and the
totality of literary devices used to attempt an account of them.
The Greek word actually corresponds to the second level of ideas
and expresses the subjective attitude of inquiring. The literary sense of
the word, then, starts with the father of history: ‘This is the account of
the inquiry made by Herodotus.’ Around the middle of the nineteenth
century, when the need for an organized discipline of historical inquiry
began to emerge, Gervinus devised the term Historik, by analogy with
Grammatik and Logik.2 The German word Geschichte, however, which
comes from geschehen, ‘to happen,’ represents the first level of ideas, or
rather it represents the series of events that have happened. This, seem-
ingly a matter of no consequence, becomes a major issue for the concept
of a philosophy of history. I site as examples the many blunders made
recently in Italy in discussions of historical materialism. In these debates,
many people, even those with intelligence, have not understood that this
doctrine has to do with the notion of a fact or an event, not with a phi-
losophy of inquiry or a narrative art.
Hence, when some people ask if history can become a science, two
approaches are required, depending on whether the word is applied in
the first sense or the second. In the second case, it is especially important
to remember that until the nineteenth century there were no scientific
procedures for historical research. Even when some clever person made
tacit use of critical method in writing a literary account of a particular
period, it was never the case that this criticism took the form of a princi-
pled statement of rules and standards. Hence, as people felt the need to
deal critically with history, particular doctrines of exposition and inter-
Part II: Translations
pretation took shape and solidified, so that today one can talk about
being trained philologically to be an Italian medievalist, for example.3
It is not history in the narrative sense that has become a science, then,
because narration will always end up in the sphere of intuition. If our
means of achieving the reconstruction of the past have become exact or
scientific, we classify this as linguistics, epigraphy, and so on. If writers
who discuss these issues carelessly wanted to pose the problem correctly,
they would have to put it this way: How much technical education is
needed to master the evidence required for an examination thorough
enough to recover the form of the commune of Florence at the begin-
ning of the fourteenth century?
If instead we apply the dilemma of science or art not to these techniques
of ours but to the totality of things that have happened, we immediately
realize that the dilemma does not apply. In all likelihood, no one will ask
a physiologist if digestion is an art or a science, even though one can say
that physiology is an art – or rather an experimental technique – and, at
the same time, a science in its conclusions. And when we say that history,
insofar as it is the sum of events, is not subject to the art/science dilem-
ma, we have in mind something very basic that is not merely an obvi-
ous observation. If, as noted above, we need many scientific means and
methods to recover the truth about facts that we then wish to recount in
a narrative or expository art, it is because history in the objective sense
no longer appears to us as an accidental product of a set of random acts
– nor as the promulgation of a higher plan, which would be the theologi-
cal explanation – but as something spontaneously self-moving that rep-
resents the sum of human actions in the development of humanity itself,
from the animal level up to its current state. And after we have acquired
the notion of this multiform process that is history in the objective sense,
it is absurd to be asked if it is art or science since it is really the basis of
all art and all science.
The arts and sciences are moments, aspects, and so on of this same
human development. When we establish criteria in aesthetics for epic
poetry, for example, or establish principles of law and economics in the
practical fields, we are doing nothing but extracting from history some
of its conspicuous forms, some of its decisive elements – not because
these forms stand above it as its rule or model but because they are his-
tory itself in action. And, finally, given this way of seeing history as an
objective sum of events, it is understood that from the new scientific
conception comes a change in the direction of research for anyone who
studies history as a discipline that must start with exposition and narra-
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fied facts but had not decided between the theory of race and the theory
of the natural environment; did not know whether religion is the cause
or the effect of social conditions; had not made up his mind about the
customary or the authoritarian origin of law; had not mastered the psy-
chology needed to judge whether the force of individual personality is
indifferent to chance or providence, to predestination or mechanical
causality? Since Villari has stubbornly maintained in so many polemics
that history is not a science, I would ask – with his kind permission – how
he, of all people, could attempt in his various studies to explain the ori-
gin of the commune of Florence?7
Now we can see what the art/science dilemma comes down to. Main-
taining the double sense of the word ‘history,’ we have shown, in the first
place, that research about facts has become and continues to become
always more scientific, which does not exclude narration as the final goal
of research. Secondly, we have seen that understanding the confirmed
fact depends on the implicit or explicit philosophy on which the histo-
rian bases his interpretation. Now it would be out of keeping with the
current state of the social sciences and the current state of scientific phi-
losophy if the majority of historical researchers, like so many new avatars
of Thucydides, Tacitus, or Machiavelli, wished to abandon their distinc-
tive bent when they interpret. And they will do well instead to acquire
whatever complement of philosophy they may need from the science of
others.
Twenty or thirty years ago, when all Europe was in a state of philo-
sophical decay, all this would be seen as heresy. Now, however, Bernheim
concludes his treatise on historical method by discussing the philosophy
of history – that comprehensive interpretation without which facts have
no meaning.8 The result is clear in itself, that the philosophy of history
deals with history only as objective – with the event, in other words – and
does not deal with history as subjective and therefore not with research
about the event. Every time we talk about the philosophy of history, we
mean to refer to principles that we take to be directive for the sequence
of events, and, when they are known to us, they help us understand the
events themselves.
Let me propose, then, that progress, in the broad sense of the term,
is history’s directive principle. It is important to note that this concept
was unknown to the ancients, just as it was unknown through the Middle
Ages; it is an idea that gained depth and precision only in the eighteenth
century. This concept, once it was grasped, became the standard meas-
ure for classifying historical facts no longer in terms of perspective but as
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And thus, little by little, we have arrived at one of the other themes
mentioned at the start, when I said ‘history’ and ‘sociology.’10 Just now,
in fact, while identifying the object of the philosophy of history, I hap-
pened to mention in passing that this object consists of differences,
oppositions, and sequences of social forms. I will not stop here to deal
with the origin, development, and criticism of the concept of sociology
from Comte onward, nor do I feel obliged to examine exactly what the
positivists have meant by using that term. When I say sociology here, I
mean to refer to everything that can be an object of our thinking when
society exists. In this sense, sociology existed in fragments before Comte
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– and long before, I would claim, since there was a generalized juris-
prudence called Natural Law as well as research on the production and
distribution of wealth that forms the content of economics. These two
disciplines have belonged to the modern world since after the Renais-
sance.11 Going back to antiquity, however, many problems of sociology
(so-called) entered into what Aristotle called politics, for example. And
the very historians who were interested only in narrative, even without
saying so, were forced in various ways to use as evidence what we would
now call the social context or environment.
With these observations, I do not intend to cast doubt on the more
specific features of scientific autonomy that the positivists have under-
stood to belong to sociology because its task is to study all social phenom-
ena globally, going beyond the particulars of law, economics, history in
the strict sense of the word, and so on. On this assumption, we see for
ourselves that sociology – which really still needs to be established and to
develop – would occupy the whole field of the philosophy of history. This
was the view of Paul Barth, extraordinary professor at the University of
Leipzig, who wrote a book titled Philosophy of History as Sociology last year.
The second volume has never appeared. Paul Barth has been busy with
many other things, and I hope that he leaves the first volume without a
successor.12
Therefore, standing on our assumption and avoiding all questions of
terminology, competence, and disciplinary boundaries, I mean – and I
mean to say – that every time we propose to study the directive principles
of history’s movement, our first obligation is to get completely beyond
the external narrative in order to represent the character and constitu-
tion of the specific society that we call the people of Israel before the
Assyrian conquest, for example, or the Roman people as one of the Ital-
ian societies. And then we may begin to ask ourselves: are we dealing
with a large grouping or a small one; is the grouping solid or unstable;
does the grouping have a fixed location (and is therefore agricultural),
or is it still inclined to nomadism? Then we can ask other questions: is it
a grouping by blood, where race and society coincide, or is it a coalition
of various groups related by blood? At what level is its social differentia-
tion; are all the people free, or are they free, less free, slaves, clients, and
dependents? In this way, classes are gradually defined by the economic
situation and by the functions that they fulfill; and as we immerse our-
selves deeper and deeper in this social analysis, we begin to see what the
history really is – to see, in other words, how that state of coexistence is
produced. The manner of that production is the object of research.
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I will not say that we are at the point of being able to group all histori-
cal facts under distinct sociological forms so that an art of recounting
them would be the equivalent of a scientific representation of events.
If that were the case, the problem – or rather, problems – of the phi-
losophy of history would already be solved and there would no longer
be any discrepancy between history and philosophy of history. In some
cases, even those sociological forms that are easier to characterize are
always presented in the concrete and with great detail and specificity,
because, in fact, while in the abstract we can make the agricultural phase
something precisely distinct from the industrial phase, no people has
ever really existed that was exclusively one or the other. Thus, because
of the difference between industry in Rome and industry elsewhere – at
a time when industry was never absent, even where conditions of living
were mainly agricultural – Rome’s situation in a certain period took on
a particular character as compared to that of another Aryan land that
came close, more or less, to its situation.13 The same can be said of trade,
which can indeed become the predominant and best defined mark of a
whole population, as was the case with the ancient Phoenicians. But in a
more or less elementary form, it is never absent, if only as the adjunct of
that basic economic life that will be a hallmark even of primitive peoples.
With these brief remarks, I have wanted to say that the historian must
be on guard against classifications forced on us by a schematic sociology
that would like to claim that the way of life of a particular human group
could be indicated in a few rather short strokes. And the reason lies in
the fact that history begins to have society as its object after society has
already been differentiated and become complicated. Yes, the prehis-
toric horde can present homogeneous features of people related purely
by blood, people who choose to keep themselves spatially separate from
other tribes and vaguely express the form of law, morality, and religion in
simple custom. But when we find a particular arrangement in which the
specialty of the priests has already emerged, for example, even though
they are just magicians or sorcerers; or else the class of warriors has taken
shape and the distinction of lordship has arisen from their privilege,
along with its consequences of slavery, and so on; and this gives rise to
the need for a leader and then to the origin of dynasties; at this point, we
are far from the primitive and homogeneous, and we are moving step-
by-step towards those internal and external struggles that constitute the
main fabric of history.
If you stop and give careful attention to these ideas that bring with
them the novelty of rigorous criticism, you will find there not only a com-
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plement to those first remarks that posed the art/science dilemma but a
good answer to this new issue: sociology or philosophy of history?
And now we wish to give a brief summary of what this answer is:
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progress and a reason to have faith. And, if one eliminates this concep-
tion, the study of history no longer has a rationale and is once again
confined to the useless multiplication of particulars.
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the theory got its name.16 Although one can ask whether the project of
historical materialism was a success or not, one can certainly not pretend
that the doctrine is true but the name is false.
I shall clarify this with an example.
The general schematic psychology that I have outlined in my other
course is based mainly on the assumption that psychic phenomena start
and stop with the life of the individual.17 But we know that the sensists
were inclined to claim on the basis of the materialist hypothesis that all
complex psychic phenomena must be explained by the primitive data
of sensation. However, our individual consciousness contains many ele-
ments that cannot be explained without the existence of society and his-
tory. You use language not as individuals but as social subjects. And thus
one may say of law, religion, and moral ideas that they exist in us only
through the medium of history and society. But biological materialism
does not tell me how the dogmas of Christianity emerged, nor how the
grammatical forms of neo-Latin emerged, nor, in general, how social
structures exist.
The task of historical materialism has been to find the material condi-
tions of the historical social world. This task is parallel to – not derived
from – what the pure positivists have called sociology. Let me note here,
by the way, that when I mention the word ‘positivism,’ I always do so with
great hesitation, because positivism, as it developed from Saint Simon to
Littré, was essentially historicism, the urge to explain history. All those
who call themselves positivists in Italy, however – with the single excep-
tion of Angiulli, who really came from the Hegelian school – have lapsed
into materialism as it was before Feuerbach.18 They always start with the
individual and always end with the individual, and so they do not under-
stand the morphology of history. Our positivists generally fall short of
Comte, who was so much a historicist that he denied the possibility of an
individual psychology.
Having claimed that the name is neither accidental nor irrelevant,
that it actually reveals the origin of the doctrine and its stance towards
those contemporary or somewhat later views that struggled to overcome
the limits of idealism and ideology, and before going on to discuss the
content of the doctrine itself, to the extent that it reflects my own views
about the philosophy of history, I must define the general concept of
the social phenomenon. A social phenomenon occurs only when relations
of action, cohabitation, and cooperation exist between people. To ask
how far the form of cohabitation reaches makes little difference here.
It can happen in a small, simple tribe geographically isolated from the
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rest of the human race. But this will not happen – namely, that there is
a small tribe – without phenomena of correlation that are not directly
explained just by the bio-psychological state of each of the individuals
and that arise only from the fact that the individuals depend on one
another. For continuing cohabitation to go on in such a tribe requires
a particular form of speech that must arise from the successive adapta-
tion of different individuals not only to specific and stable associations
of sensations, memories, and so on, but also to sounds and grammatical
forms. The origin, stabilization, and development of language are the
most general and direct signs and symptoms of social states of mind. It
was precisely the effort to provide reliable canons of interpretation for
the science of language, in fact, that gave rise to the notion of social psy-
chology in one of the successors of Herbart’s school. The proper content
of language recurs in forms of custom that precede law or take its place.
And it recurs again, especially in elementary forms of the acquisition of
material goods, or in what is distinguished later by the name of economics.
All those who deal with psychology, staying with the pure schema of
individual psychology, can only stick to pure abstractions. Anyone who
sets out to study the forms of the will, for example, pursuing the project
that I proposed in my course on theoretical philosophy (and I no longer
know how far I will be able to take this), must almost entirely avoid the
true and proper content of the forms of volition since this content is
always social.19 The will that takes shape is not the will that wills itself;
it is the will by which one learns to make shoes or play the piano, to
recite verses like Pastonchi or read badly like Formíggini.20 Those few
generalities that I have just mentioned about features of the social fact
do not claim to be anything like an introduction to sociology, much less
a chapter from the concrete logic used by Wundt and company.21 Speak-
ing to students and not to members of an academy, I have tried to intro-
duce the most basic distinguishing conditions of the social fact, as it then
becomes the real basis and subject of history, as I once said in dealing
with the question of sociology or philosophy of history.
And, by briefly showing where the true difficulty of understanding the
social fact begins, and by showing this right after defending the terminol-
ogy of historical materialism, I have certainly not meant to attribute the
discovery of the social phenomenon to the inventors of that doctrine. I
do not belong in the illustrious company of those Darwinists who only
just miss attributing the discovery of nature to Darwin. To justify the term
historical materialism, I have looked at it from the point of view of that
internal crisis that Marx suffered when he broke with Hegelian idealism.
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reflective education knows no more than the ancient Greeks, who tell us
that Solon makes the law, that Herodotus writes history, and that Alcaeus
composes his haughty personal poetry. To us it seems almost inconceiv-
able that millions and millions of humans from various races have lived
for untold thousands of years – or centuries – with their individuality
absorbed in custom and the I wrapped in the we.
If we stand back a bit from the prosaic discussion in the preceding
pages, we may fall again into what Marucci, along with other enraged
positivists, calls metaphysics, for lack of another terminology that would
be more exact.24 The trouble, however, is that making such a metaphys-
ics out of sociology is just what the positivists have done, for we read that
they have filled the world with an endless number of symbols for the
social organism, the collective spirit, and so on.
Our prosaic statements, if I may review and compare, come down to
this: Nature produces male and female individuals of a particular race.
But when these persons come into the world, they do not develop as iso-
lated subjects face to face with nature and living only in nature. Instead,
they develop within a social group that gives homogeneous features to
each of them, and these are just the product of that social relationship
– a certain way of speaking, a certain emotional rhythm, certain shared
fantasies and, above all, the imitation of practical functions. As internal
apprehension of their own conscious existence emerges – what we call
the I – the function naturally divides into I and we. Yet the individual can
be mistaken in referring some particular content of experience to the
subject I rather than the subject we. All those scientists – idiots, more
or less – who used to deduce language, law, justice, and the state from
choice, inventiveness, and individual will, knew nothing at all about
these two major issues: that at first individuals were born in the horde;
and that individual consciousness based on the I arises little by little in
the heart of the we.
That is all I have to say by way clarification. If what I have said up to this
point is insufficient, anything else would only make it obscure.
NB: As in previous lectures I have explained the concept of historical
materialism, and along the way I have alluded to socialism. I believe it
useful to note that many now think they can account for their socialist
aspirations by forming a collectivist mental representation of the society
in which the we would again reabsorb the I – a lovely way to return to
primitive conditions. Not because it affects the explanation of socialism,
but because it is important for the subject of my course, it helps here to
recall that everything supports the claim that the gains made by indi-
viduality will never again be lost, and, in fact, that recent progress in
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the civilized world will empower the personal more and more. By giving
a theoretical account of a society that is communist in the economic
sense of the word, we mean only to say that the means and instruments
of production could no longer be private property but would belong to
the collective through the exercise of labour needed for the production
of material goods. This means that a great many individuals, now subject
to a hierarchy of bosses, would gain greater freedom because, since the
labour of the one (who are many) could not produce wealth for others
(who are few), each person would be allowed the most favourable condi-
tions for intellectual and moral development.
All of you now present are masters at claiming that such things are
purely utopian. But I, dealing here with social consciousness and with
individual consciousness, must make you understand that this so-called
utopia is not meant to be a return to mankind’s primitive state – in keep-
ing with the old Egyptian image of the serpent that bites its tail, and
other such old saws of the decadent rhetoric that the illustrious Profes-
sor Loria finds so delightful.25 Ancient Egyptians have no right to have
their images and symbols recognized as meaningful for modern science
because those ancient Egyptians, in fact, never created Greek science,
nor the Latin city, nor Roman law, nor those other things on which our
civilization is based.
Following my digression on the reduction of social consciousness to
the we and my prosaic explanation of it, and focusing on everything that
I have already said to put the concept of history into helpful terms, we
can now offer a brief review of the essence of that historical materialism
whose definition we have been seeking.
At first sight, it might seem needless to say that every society depends
on the material conditions of its existence since this amounts to translat-
ing an observation of common sense into a technical formulation. For-
get those people who look after the happy concerns of science and art;
forget those often superfluous categories of the professors and priests;
forget – in other words – all those who live at third or fourth hand on the
products of another’s labour. The basic framework of society depends
on relations that hold among those who produce material goods directly
by their labour and with its instruments. This is what Marx called the
form of production. That the basic structure of society, or rather its eco-
nomic framework, has varied from prehistory until our time is beyond
all doubt, and that these variations must have their rhythm and must in
themselves show signs of process is more than likely, if we recall all that
we have said before about making history something like a science. His-
tory is, above all, variation in the basic frameworks.
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Labriola, Materialism
NOTES
1 We have used the text edited by Franco Sbarberi, Labriola (1976a), where
the editor describes it as ‘notes for a course on the philosophy of history
given by Labriola at the University of Rome in the academic year 1902−3.’
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2 The books written by Herodotus in the fifth century BCE came to be called
‘Histories’ from the word historia used in the first sentence of his work,
where it means ‘inquiries.’ Georg Gervinus (1805−71), an historian whose
liberal hopes were shattered after 1848, was known first for his history of
German poetry and later for a progressive history of Germany in the nine-
teenth century, which led to a charge of treason and the end of his career;
Labriola is thinking of his Principles of History (Historik) of 1837: see Gervi-
nus (1835−42), (1837), (1854−60).
3 The target of one of the polemics that runs throughout Labriola’s notes
is Villari (see the Introduction, section 11), who discusses medieval Italy,
among many other things, in ‘Is History a Science?’ (1891); his study of
medieval Florence is Villari (1893−4).
4 Theodor Mommsen (1817−1903) was the leading ancient historian of his
age, best known for his History of Rome.
5 Bernheim (1899); see also our notes to Croce, ‘History Brought Under Art.’
6 When Mommsen won the Nobel Prize for Literature around the time when
Labriola was writing this essay, the speech conferring the award stressed his
powers of imagination. See Mommsen (1886): 6.
7 See n3 above on Villari.
8 See n5 above on Bernheim.
9 Luigi Ceci (1859−1927) pioneered the study of historical linguistics and
taught it in Rome when Labriola was there; he was also active in educational
reform and administration. The Bibel-Babel controversy erupted in 1902
when Friedrich Delitzsch, an Assyriologist, claimed that Mesopotamian
myths were the basis of what most people believed to be the biblical record
of mankind’s origins: see Ceci (1882).
10 Both words occur in the title of this piece.
11 Unlike many earlier Italian authors, Labriola uses ‘Rinascenza,’ perhaps
because by 1902 ‘Risorgimento’ had more pressing uses.
12 Paul Barth (1858−1922), a critic of Hegel’s philosophy of history, taught at
Leipzig; the title of the work that Labriola mentions is reversed, Die Philoso-
phie der Geschichte als Sociologie: see Barth (1890), (1897).
13 Greece would seem to be the other ‘Aryan land.’
14 Alfonso Asturaro (1854−1917) taught sociology in Geneva: see Asturaro
(1897), (1903).
15 The Order of the Red Eagle was a Prussian military award, and that of Saints
Maurice and Lazarus was bestowed by the Kingdom of Savoy.
16 Max Stirner (1806−56), whose name at birth was Johann Schmidt, was
a theorist of anarchism and a critic of Feuerbach who influenced Marx,
Engels, and many other nineteenth-century thinkers, often negatively; he is
a prominent target of The German Ideology: see Stirner (1844−5).
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483
15
Benedetto Croce
Is history a science or an art? This question has been asked many times,
but the usual judgment of the educated world is that the question is
trivial, one of those usually raised only out of common confusion and
then badly answered. Those who have asked and are still asking it, in fact,
either fail to give it a precise definition, or, if forced to offer one, limit
themselves to indicating merely this question: whether history, besides
being verified exactly, should be represented in a lively way and be well
written in the artistic sense. And the vague sense of the question tallies
with that of the answers, the most common being that history is science
and art all at once.
A different answer, that looks much sterner, however, has taken shape
among the most learned authorities on history, notably in Germany,
where experts on history have a mental habit widespread there and often
feel the need to philosophize about their discipline.2 Given the growing
sense that their work is important, serious, and difficult, a certain natu-
ral pride has emerged among historians and has contributed to their
response. Indeed, everyone recognizes the amazing progress, starting a
century ago, made by historical studies both in methods of research and
criticism and in methods of interpretation and understanding. Whole
histories of civilization utterly unknown before have been discovered,
and histories already known have been understood in an entirely new
way. Experts on history have therefore discarded the old chain of roses
that used to link their discipline to the belles lettres and have proclaimed
its strictly scientific character.
No one has stated this with more clarity, perhaps, than Johann Gus-
tav Droysen, distinguished author of the History of Prussian Politics, in an
important and intriguing little book on the Elements of History (Grundriß
Croce, The Concept of Art
der Historik). History for Droysen is science and certainly not art; science
and art go in opposite directions and are irreconcilable; artistic concerns
are harmful to history; the so-called artistic histories, especially abundant
in English and French literature, are nothing more than works of rheto-
ric – rethorische Kunst.3
Such ideas have prevailed among experts on history, from high to low,
and we find them explained in great detail in the extensive and excellent
Manual of Historical Method (Lehrbuch der historischen Methode) published
some years ago by Professor Ernst Bernheim of the University of Greif-
swald, which in effect collects the views of the discipline that are wide-
spread among German historians. We can see them in their fullest form
in this book by Bernheim, thus sparing us from multiplying footnotes,
which would be easy to do but also redundant.4 In his conclusion, Bern-
heim claims: (1) that history is a science and definitely not an art because
its aim is to provide not an aesthetic pleasure but knowledge (Erkennt-
nis); (2) that the results of historical science, since they are reported in
prose, obviously fall within the domain of art, in one sense – because
prose is a type of art – but this says nothing special about history as com-
pared to any other scientific account; (3) that it may sometimes turn out
that a work of history can be a work of art as well, but for Bernheim this
is a very rare event, and, in any case, purely coincidental.5
Obvious answers, are they not – quite clear and crisp? You would
give exactly the same answers to anyone who asked you if chemis-
try and physics are sciences or arts. The question would seem to be
closed. Attempting to reopen it would be the only reason to find one’s
thoughts faced with that charge of Begriffswirrung – conceptual confu-
sion – which Bernheim describes as reaching its peak whenever some-
one claims that history is art, or science and art at the same time.6 Yet
when two words are frequently brought together, there is almost always
some real reason for the juxtaposition. When a question arises persist-
ently, however confused it may be or badly put, one must be wary of
easy answers that seem to cut the knot. At the bottom of the poorly
framed question must be some problem to discover, which is its real,
though unconscious, motive. Now if people ask and keep asking if
history is science or art, there is one answer that settles nothing and
almost begs the question: that history, being a science, has the same
relations with art that all other sciences have with art. If the question
has come up for history but not for other sciences, it would mean, on
the one hand, that history seems not to be a science like the others,
and, on the other hand, that its connection with art appears greater
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and different than that of other sciences with that very same art. We
need to stay with these two points and clear them up.
Actually, after the incisive claims about history’s scientific character
that I cited above, it is intriguing to see Droysen himself letting this sen-
tence slip from his pen: ‘And it would not be without interest to seek the
reason internal to history that makes it, alone of all the sciences, enjoy
the equivocal fate of having to be an art as well, a fate shared not even
by philosophy, despite Plato’s dialogues.’7 He does not realize that the
problem starts just at the point where he thinks he has finished with it.
To seek the internal reason for the connection that some detect between
history and art, and then to determine what this connection or relation
really is, we must go back and clearly establish the content of the three
concepts that come into such a discussion: science, art, and history. An
odd, but not uncommon, fact arises for these three concepts: we believe
that there is an agreement about their content that does not really exist,
and this gives rise to endless ambiguity, making some see the problem as
entirely without substance, while preventing others from saying exactly
what the problem is.
Experts on history, for example, usually start with too narrow a con-
cept of art and too broad a concept of science. Popular opinion goes
wrong, however, by using all three concepts in an imprecise and contra-
dictory way. As it happens, nonetheless, we shall find our inquiry lead-
ing us closer to this popular opinion – that history shares the nature
of art – than to the view of those who locate it definitively among the
sciences. And no wonder. However vaguely it may be expressed, a true
feeling for the real nature of science, art, and history operates in ordi-
nary consciousness, although it has been completely lost in the course
of learned polemics – as often happens. Let us begin, then, by establish-
ing these basic concepts. And I hope that readers will not be scared off,
having been assured that we are not attacking the question at too great a
distance, but bringing it back to its own territory instead, the only place
where it can be quickly and easily settled.8
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Croce, The Concept of Art
aimed at producing the Beautiful. But trouble starts with the meaning of
the word ‘Beautiful.’
May heaven save me from getting into the endless and subtle disquisi-
tions that form the object of aesthetic science! That science was born,
grew, and bore wonderful fruit in Germany, though in other countries it
has never been much cultivated nor well – particularly in Italy, where it
is now completely neglected. I forbear lamenting this neglect and move
on.9 For my purposes, it suffices to mention the essential features of the
view of the Beautiful and of art that I find acceptable.
What is the Beautiful? Up to now, as far as I know, four main answers
to this question can be or have been given. First is the answer of Sensu-
alism, which reduces the Beautiful to a type of pleasure. The second is
that of Rationalism, which identifies it with the True and the Good. The
third is the answer of Formalism, which makes it consist of uncondition-
ally pleasurable formal relations. The fourth belongs to what a recent
historian of aesthetics calls Concrete Idealism, which arose mainly from
the deep insights of Hegelian aesthetics and sees the Beautiful as the
representation or sensible manifestation of the Idea.10
Now as for the first two, they are still tending wounds inflicted on them
by the mighty Kantian critique. Never again will it enter anyone’s mind
to confuse the Beautiful with the pleasant, save perhaps some French or
English pseudo-philosopher, one of those who call their chattering ‘phi-
losophy’ for the same reason the good people of Florence used to call
Dante’s beloved ‘Beatrice’ – because they knew not what to call her.11 Like-
wise, no one will any longer locate the Beautiful in the world of theory or
the world of ethics, however deep that view may be in other ways, since
an invincible impulse of our mind pushes us to seek out the relations
that must exist among the highest idealities of the human spirit – among
the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.12
More than anything else, the formalist theory of aesthetics is an anom-
alous episode in the history of philosophy, and I shall say something
about it mainly because it has remained totally unknown to us. Herbart,
wishing to detach aesthetics from approaches full of fantasy and from
vague intuitions and reduce it to an exact science – having already done
so quite successfully with ethics, psychology, education, and other disci-
plines on which he made a still indelible impression – correctly asked
that one begin by analysing individual instances of beauty.13 By analys-
ing the simplest aesthetic facts about music and observing that a simple
tone is never either beautiful or ugly, that the judgment of beautiful
and ugly always emerges from a relation between at least two tones, that
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two tones coming in one order are pleasant, but unpleasant in another
order – by these and similar observations he was forced to the hypothesis
that the Beautiful consists solely of formal relations of pleasure, and that
every aesthetic pleasure therefore arises from form, independent of con-
tent. Having no chance to develop a complete theory of aesthetics, Her-
bart left only a few remarks on the topic that the reader finds scattered
through his works. Disagreement about the teacher’s thoughts arose
among his students, some supposing that he did not mean to exclude
the expression of content from the Beautiful.14
But Robert Zimmermann, advocating the strictly formalist interpreta-
tion and following the partial efforts of others whom we need not name
here, tried to construct a complete system of aesthetics based on Her-
bart’s views. First he brought out a major critical history of the discipline,
followed in 1865 by the publication of his Aesthetics as a Science of Form, in
which all the phenomena of the Beautiful are explained as purely formal
relations of pleasure.15 In a work of poetry, for example, what is ordi-
narily called poetic content gives pleasure – according to Zimmermann
– through particular formal relations of character, of feeling, and so on
among the persons in the piece. What is called expression gives pleasure
through the formal relation of correspondence between content and
form. And the so-called externals of form (verses, stanzas, and so on) do
the same through formal relations of pleasure. All these various rela-
tions, of which the work of art would be the sum, Zimmermann classifies
and reduces to a few first principles – five aesthetic ideas meant to tally
with the five practical ideas of Herbart’s ethics. But after Zimmermann,
who remained the only preacher of formalist aesthetics, no one contin-
ued with it.16 And we agree entirely with Hartmann in judging it ‘the
contrived construct of a perfectly fruitless insight.’17
The last of the theories that I mentioned, which has given rise to a very
rich aesthetic literature, remains robust. And it is this one that prevails
among the well-informed, if I may speak in broad terms. This theory
locates the Beautiful in the expression of some thing, called the ‘sensible
manifestation of the ideal’ in Hegelian terminology. I cannot establish
this claim, which at first glance seems strange and yet is the only one
that explains all the aesthetic facts. I am forced to refer to the works of
specialists, of which the last to be published, and the most noteworthy in
many ways, is Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Beautiful.18 Nor can I describe
how the process of expression works, which is actually one of the most
successful parts of Hartmann’s study, titled ‘Theory of Levels of Con-
creteness in the Beautiful’ (‘Die Koncretionstufen des Schönen’).19
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not the physiological stimulus but the meaning that makes it full, the
idea of which it is the bearer.22
So also, if we go to the opposite extreme and consider mathematical
propositions or philosophical concepts – the most rarefied products of
the mind, of thinking at its most abstract – we see that these become
objects of aesthetic discernment only when they are embodied externally
in speech and other means of expression. And they are beautiful insofar
as their expression, in every respect, is adequate and effective. Aesthetic
form is not, as some believe, something that has aesthetic value in itself –
applicable to some contents, supposedly, but not to others – like a coat of
many colours or a diadem of sparkling jewels. It is a projection, we might
say, of the content. When the topic requires it, even technical language is
aesthetic, and in the event that it is required, it is actually more aesthetic
than any other language.23
Starting with that concept of the Beautiful – understanding the Beauti-
ful as the expression of a given content, in other words – we easily explain
the judgments of approval or disapproval that the aesthetic sense cus-
tomarily gives of its various objects of nature and art. We also explain
the relativity of judgment according to which an object is seen from one
point of view or another, as the saying goes: actually, the object is treated
as the expression of one content or another. A specimen of an animal
species will be ugly, for example, if viewed as an expression of what is
animal in general, because, in the given specimen (the form), animal
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life (the content) may not be fully reflected, though it could be beauti-
ful if viewed as a typical expression of a given species of animal, since in
that case it is treated as an expression or form of a different content.24 In
short, an object is beautiful or ugly according to the category by which
we apperceive it.25
Now one specific category of apperception, in fact, is art. And in art,
all natural and human reality – beautiful or ugly from various perspec-
tives – becomes beautiful because it has been apperceived as reality in
general, which we want to see fully expressed. When they enter the world
of art, all characters, all actions, all objects lose (artistically speaking)
the features that they usually have for various purposes of real life, and
they are judged uniquely by the greater or lesser perfection with which
art depicts them. In reality Caliban is a monster, but he is no longer a
monster as a figure of art. One sees from this how wrong it is to believe
that the proposition, ‘art represents the Beautiful,’ entails that art has as
its content those objects that seem beautiful from various natural points
of view. ‘The Beautiful!’ De Sanctis once wrote: then tell me ‘whether
there is anything as beautiful as Iago, a form that has emerged from the
utmost depths of real life, so full, so concrete, so finished in all its parts,
in all its gradations, one of the most beautiful creatures in the world of
poetry.’26 And he was right. Without doubt, the concept of the Beautiful
is the same in art as in nature, but in art the ideal that we keep present –
the content that we want to see represented – is simply reality in general,
whereas in nature the idealities are particular forms of reality. From here
comes the distinction which, though not at all abstruse, is not easy to
express clearly and often gives rise to confusions.
If we restrict ourselves to this concept of art and view it as a represen-
tation of reality, then clearly most of the reasons that scandalize many
people, making them deny that history is a product of art, disappear.27
Such scandal is entirely justified when it starts from one of the three
theories about the Beautiful or art that we have rejected: namely, when
it is thought that art’s purpose is either (1) to develop the pleasure of
the senses and imagination, or (2) to represent the True and the Good,
or (3) to create a summary of formal relations of pleasure. The goals
of doing history are incompatible with these three aims, or compatible
only in unusual and accidental circumstances. But outrage seems not to
be equally justified when we accept the definition given above: that art
is the representation of reality. May history not also be a representation
of reality?
Yet those who oppose identifying art with history say this: ‘You are
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mistaken. History does not represent reality, as art does, but studies this
reality scientifically, which is a far different matter. Therefore, there can
be only one artistic feature of historical writing, the same that belongs to
any type of communication that must be turned into good prose. History
is a science.’
So let us see what science is.
On the concept of science there are certainly not the disagreements that
we have described about the concept of art. Yet one should not believe
that there is agreement. Some – many, I would have to say – confuse
science with knowledge or with learning in general. Any proposition
expressing a truth, then, is a scientific proposition according to them.
But when I say ‘I took a walk today,’ their procedure does not give me the
right to conclude that I am making a scientific statement. Such a concept
is so broad that it really lacks all the distinctive features of science. And
anyone who wants to give precise meaning to the function of science will
agree with those who distinguish it from knowledge in general, pointing
out that science always seeks the general and works by concepts. Where
no concepts are formed, there is no science. According to Herbart’s
excellent definition, philosophy itself, highest of the sciences (if there is
a hierarchy also among the sciences), is just the working out of concepts
left confused and in mutual contradiction by the special sciences.
Now if we start from this concept of science – which is the only precise
one – we can justly ask: ‘Of what is history a science? What concepts does
it develop?’ Bernheim (I continue to cite his book for the reason men-
tioned above) immediately supplies an answer to our question. ‘History,’
he says, ‘is the science of the development of humans in their activity as
social beings.’28 And so we would have learned what history is a science of.
But reflecting a bit on this string of words suffices for us to discover that
the definition of history given here is merely apparent. History is not the
science of development; it does not tell us what development consists of;
history sets forth or rather recounts the facts of development. Defining
the concept of development is a job for philosophy, actually for meta-
physics, and it would occur to no one to shelve a book that dealt with the
concept of development alongside books about history. If the book dealt
with historical development in the proper sense, the most one would do
is to put it with books on the philosophy of history.
In a few well-known pages of his great work, Arthur Schopenhauer
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became the first to give serious reasons for denying that history has any
scientific character. ‘History lacks the basic feature of science, subordina-
tion of the things that come into consciousness, and it knows only how
to present a mere coordination of the facts that it has registered. This is
why there is no system in history, as there is in the other sciences … As
systems of what is known, sciences always speak of kinds; history, how-
ever, always speaks of individuals. History would then be a science of
individuals, which entails a contradiction.’29
An excellent study by the philosopher Lazarus expresses that distinc-
tion between science and history even more rigorously.30 History deals
with individual and concrete facts; history obviously relates particulars to
the whole but does not thereby acquire a scientific character; the whole
is different from the general, the proper object of science. ‘What inter-
ests science is not the single fact but the law that recurs in each fact; for
history, the goal of research is each single fact or the ensemble of such
facts. History does not deal with facts, events, actions, or persons as such,
but always with this fact, this person, and so on. For science, this determi-
nation is entirely without interest because science looks for the general
– what exists in all the individual objects, in other words. Summarizing
briefly, on one side we have logical abstractions, on the other simple
processes of psychological condensation; on one side, general concepts,
on the other, condensed concrete representations, even if they are not
quite individual; here the singular as abstract specimen, there the singu-
lar as concrete individuality; here the goal of research is the general law,
there it is the individual process.’31
I agree entirely with those observations. History has only one aim: to
narrate the facts, and saying narrate the facts also means that the facts
must be collected carefully and shown as they really happened – traced
back to their causes, that is, and not just set forth as they appear superfi-
cially to the untrained eye. This has always been the ideal of good histori-
cal writing in all periods. And even now, while methods of research have
made progress, while the interpretation of the data of historical tradition
has made progress, the ideal of doing history has not changed because it
cannot change. History narrates.32
A writer who deals with historical topics, not knowing how to evade the
arguments presented above, has said this: ‘History is not a science like
the others, but it is a science, not an explanatory but a descriptive sci-
ence, like geography.’33 But I challenge him to tell me what descriptive
science means.34 The character of Don Abbondio exists in rerum natura.35
Is the quite perfect description that Manzoni gives of it science, then?36
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tem on whose basis acts of historical knowing can occur. It also deals
with those particular problems of the theory of knowledge that relate to
the method of doing history. This set of issues, which arise from think-
ing critically about history, is something solid, quite different from that
alleged rhythm of ideas that Hegel meant to depict in his treatment of
these issues.43
To conclude, then, the material of history can certainly give rise to a
science, which is philosophy of history in the sense described above. But
in itself history is not a science. Now if history is not a science – and if at
the same time it is not the futile labour, unworthy of the human spirit,
that Schopenhauer supposed it to be – what is it?
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tory, not its nature; the historian aims to represent his object as fully as
the artist, and if quite often he does not succeed in this, it is the result
of external circumstances (lack of documents, unclarity, and so on) and
not because the effort is impossible in itself. It would be odd to make the
absence of history part of the nature of history! That would be like saying
that error is a component of science because scientists are often in error.
As for Droysen’s other observation, that the artist presents only the final
product of his labours while the historian must put the work that got him
to his results on display, we will have more to say later, noting for now
that history is one thing and historical discussion or argument another.52
More popular is the objection that history deals not just with events
and persons but also to a great extent with ideas, opinions, and the like,
and that the history of mathematics – or Lecky’s book on the Origin of the
Spirit of Rationalism in Europe – is also history.53 In this is seen – I know not
why – opposition to the procedure of art. Perhaps there is some topical
limit on the content of art? Can the exposition of a series of thoughts not
be a content of art? The psychological novel and the philosophical lyric
exist, do they not? Think for a moment about a book treating the history
of philosophical sciences in Italy as a psychological novel, for example,
and the analogy will help remove prejudices that may still remain in your
mind against the artistic nature of any sort of history. Truly, what psycho-
logical novel is more interesting than the history of philosophy?
But if history is art, the question will be what place it has in relation to
other products of art. What relations of similarity and difference hold
between works like Dante’s Comedy and Machiavelli’s History of Florence,
between Faust and Mommsen’s Roman History? Here is my answer to this
entirely legitimate question.
Without addressing the many attempts at classifying the arts – Hegel’s
historical-ideal version is famous, treating the arts as symbolic, classical,
and Romantic54 – let me simply express my view that the only solid cri-
terion for classifying the various arts is one that derives from the means
that each art uses: the means that define a special field of representations
for each one.55 According to this classification, doing history would be
included in the class of arts of language – both those of prose and those
of poetry, since examples of verse histories abound and are not at all
unjustified historically or aesthetically. But neither should one forget –
speaking with the rigour appropriate here – that the telling of history can
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And here we must deal briefly with another large problem – the con-
tent of art. In science the content is everything that exists: the ambition
of science is to leave not a single manifestation of reality behind with-
out bringing it under the category to which it belongs. Everything must
be brought under concepts; this is the domain of science. But does the
domain of art have the same extension? Can art represent everything?
As a general principle, where there is a work of art, there is always
something fully represented – abstractly speaking. But while the goals that
science pursues are universal, art limits or circumscribes its task accord-
ing to the various circumstances in which it develops – in life lived con-
cretely.57 Now what is the principle of this limiting or circumscribing?
This amounts to asking what the content of art is. On this point, theories
endlessly various have been proposed by aestheticians or simply by con-
noisseurs. But most of them quickly collapse because they are tightly tied
to those aesthetic doctrines that we have already mentioned and discard-
ed as false. Thus, sensualist aesthetics must necessarily locate the content
of art in objects that give pleasure.58 And rationalist aesthetics locates it
in the moral ideal or in the representation of a type. We have seen that
Schopenhauer, just as a result of this view, makes the idea the object of
art, and Schiller had already said that it is the universal. But then no
content of art exists for formalist aesthetics, since on this view the object
of art is always a formal relation of pleasure.59 Those connoisseurs and
popular critics who keep insisting that some one content is aesthetic,
and another one non-aesthetic, are also harnessed (without realizing it)
to these various views. From time to time, therefore, those problems that
have no beginning or end come up in the domain of art, continuing for
a while and then ceasing not because they have been resolved in any way
but simply because it is annoying to air them without effect – like the one
that plagued us in Italy for two or three years after the publication of Car-
ducci’s Odi barbare (still lively and fresh) and Stecchetti’s Postuma (long
dead and desiccated) – the so-called problem of idealism and verism.60
What should the content of art be? That question can be posed only by
the aesthetics of concrete idealism, the aesthetics represented mainly by
Hegel. The admirable criticism of De Sanctis, wholly inspired by idealist
principles, is the best proof of that doctrine’s fertile truth. He once wrote
that ‘the science (of art) was born on the day when content was not
set aside and declared irrelevant … but assigned its place, treated as an
antecedent or a given of the problem of art. Every science has its assump-
tions and antecedents. The assumption of aesthetics is abstract content
(among others). And science begins when content lives and stirs in the
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The result of what has been said is that history may be defined as the type
of artistic production that takes what has really happened as the object
of its representation. From this definition it follows that historical accu-
racy is an absolute and indispensable duty of the author of history. Just
as an artist may not lapse into the false, so the historian may not lapse
into the imaginary. To achieve honesty and avoid falsity, the artist usually
completes a series of preparatory works, generally summed up in what is
called the spirit of observation, which often does its work unconsciously.73
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NOTES
1 Croce read this paper in the 5 March 1893 session of the Accademia Ponta-
niana; the text followed here is the first edition, Croce (1893).
2 [a] Germany possesses a very rich literature on historiography, like no other
502
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country. The book by the English historian, E.A. Freeman (1886), The
Methods of Historical Study (London: Macmillan), is mediocre in every way,
though it has been rather fashionable in recent years. [e] Influenced by
Ranke, Edward Freeman (1823−92) was an ideologically liberal medievalist
who looked for the Germanic roots of English liberty.
3 [a] Johann Gustav Droysen (1882), Grundriß der Historik (3d ed. Leipzig):
81 ff; [e] Droysen (1808−84) wrote history with a political point, aiming his
enormous History of Prussian Politics at the unification of Germany; his influ-
ential Grundriß first appeared in 1858 and grew through many editions –
see Droysen (1977) – criticizing the prevailing orthodoxy, which was based
on Ranke’s views, as philosophically naïve, and dismissing the fashionable
positivism of Henry Buckle (see below) as morally bankrupt.
4 [a] We note that Bernheim depends especially on a work by Heinrich
Ullmann, ‘Über die wissenschaftliche Geschichtsdarstellung,’ in Von Sybel’s
Historische Zeitschrift, 4 (1885): 42−54; [e] Despite challenges from Droysen
and later from Karl Lamprecht, Ranke’s views – cautious respect, not with-
out theological commitments, for documentary evidence – became dogma
for many German historians; in 1889 Ernst Bernheim restated the consen-
sus in his Lehrbuch, which became the standard work.
5 [a] Ernst Bernheim (1889), Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (Leipzig:
Duncker und Humblot): 81−90 (‘Das Verhältnis der Geschichte zur
Kunst’).
6 [a] Ibid.: 82: ‘That people often call history an art marks the peak of the
conceptual confusion that dominates our subject.’
7 [a] Droysen, Grundriß (1882): 85; [e] Droysen (1977): 483.
8 [a] I have not managed to see the work by Bruno Gebhardt (1885),
Geschichtswerk und Kunstwerk: Eine Frage aus der Historik (Breslau: Preuss &
Jünger), which Villari mentions briefly in his study, ‘La storia è una scienza?’
published in the Nuova Antologia, 1Feb., 16 April, 16 July (1891). Nor have I
been able to make much use of this work of Villari’s (however much its title
and opening words might seem to coincide with mine), because, among
the various questions of historical method and philosophy of history that it
deals with, there is barely a passing mention, here and there, of our prob-
lem – not to speak of purposeful discussion of it.
9 [a] In Italy, Antonio Tari (d. 1884) dealt with aesthetics and was well
acquainted with German academic ideas, and Vittorio Imbriani (d. 1885)
produced some good writing, particularly a sharp, witty, and energetic cri-
tique of the aesthetics of the Abbate Fornari. A Hegelian aesthetician in Ita-
ly is Nicolò Gallo, author of two works on Idealism and Literature and on The
Fine Arts, among others. I need not mention De Sanctis, enormously fertile
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in aesthetic observation but not systematic, and, in any case, inspired as well
by Hegelian aesthetics. Among professional philosophers, we owe to Masci a
very laudable study on the Psychology of the Comic. Save for some insignificant
omissions, this is what the recent literature on aesthetics (the part that can
be taken seriously) boils down to in Italy. But anyone who wants a quick idea
of the development of this science in Germany should look at the histories
of aesthetics by Zimmermann, Lotze, Schasler, Neudecker, and Hartmann,
along with the one just published by the Englishman Bernard Bosanquet.
[e] Antonio Tari (1809−84), a friend of De Sanctis and the Spaventa broth-
ers, wrote about philosophy, literature, and music. Father Vito Fornari
(1821−1900), a highly placed Neapolitan academic, was active in politics
and promoted national unity by way of linguistic unity. The prolific and
tempestuous Vittorio Imbriani (1840−86) studied with De Sanctis; although
reading Hegel converted him to a politics that put him to the right of the
Destra storica, he founded an important journal with Spaventa and Fioren-
tino. Of the opposite political persuasion was Nicolò Gallo (1849−1907),
who taught aesthetics in Rome and held high ministerial and elective posts.
The Neo-Kantian Filippo Masci succeeded Fiorentino in Naples: see Fornari
(1866), Gallo (1880), Imbriani (1872), (1907), Masci (1889), Tari (1863).
For the histories of aesthetics mentioned by Croce, see also Bosanquet
(1892), Hartmann (1886), Lotze (1864), Neudecker (1878), Schasler
(1872), Zimmermann (1858); and for Hartmann see section 17 of the
Introduction.
10 [a] Eduard von Hartmann, Ausgewählte Werke, III: Aesthetik, 1: Die deutsche
Aesthetik seit Kant (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1886): 107.
11 [a] Spencer, who will perhaps stand as the symbol of the philosophical
mediocrity of our time, has downright childish theories and views about
aesthetics. To show how thin his literary and philosophical education is,
it suffices to say that he bases the explanation of aesthetic phenomena in
great part on the concept of play, which he says that he saw attributed to
some German author, ‘whose name I do not recall.’ The author is Friedrich
Schiller! Writing a book about aesthetics, how does one manage not to
know how much the concept of play (Spiel) occupied the thought of Ger-
man philosophers at the beginning of the century? For an essay on positivist
aesthetics, see Les Problèmes de l’ésthétique contemporaine (Paris: Alcan, 1891)
by Guyau. [e] Dante, Vita Nuova, 2: ‘la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, la
quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice li quali non sapeano che si chiamare’;
‘the glorious lady of my mind, called Beatrice by many who knew not what
they called her’: ‘Beatrice’ means ‘she who blesses.’ See Schiller (1967) for
the concept of play in The Aesthetic Education of Man.
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Croce, The Concept of Art
12 [a] A triad that has become a bit ridiculous, to tell the truth, ever since it
provided Italian titles for several works by the splendid Conti; nonetheless,
I take heart and mention it because I cannot resign myself to the fact that
windy philosophers need to discredit even the True, Good, and Beautiful.
[e] Augusto Conti (1822−1905), not to be confused with Auguste Comte,
wrote on philosophy and education, locating the beautiful between the true
and the good: see Conti (1872), (1876).
13 [e] For Herbart see the Introduction, section 14.
14 [a] One can get a good look at the controversy, particularly between Nahl-
owsky and Zimmermann, in the Zeitschrift für exacte Philosophie, 2 (1862):
309−58; 3 (1863): 384−440; 4 (1863): 26−63, 199−206, 300−12. [e] Robert
Zimmermann (1825−1904), an Austrian, taught Herbartian philosophy at
Prague and Vienna. Josef Nahlowsky (1812−85) was also a Herbartian: see
Nahlowsky (1863), Zimmermann (1862−3).
15 [a] Zimmermann (1865), Allgemeine Aesthetik als Formwissenschaft (Vienna:
Braumüller); [e] Zimmermann (1858).
16 [a] Attempts at conciliation between formalism and idealist aesthetics are
those of Köstlin and Siebeck; [e] see Köstlin (1869), Siebeck (1875).
17 [a] Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik, p. 304: ‘Das verkünstelte Gebaüde eines
völlig unfruchtbaren Scharfsinns’; also quite apropos are the observations
(pp. 282−3) by which Hartmann means to put the public on guard against
the growing ambiguity of the word ‘formalism,’ as if, by opposing idealism,
formalism were defending the rights of aesthetic form against abstract con-
tent, or else the freedom of art against preconceptions about the value of
content, whereas really it is just the reverse. While idealist aesthetics in Italy
has produced the criticism of De Sanctis – the most effective declaration of
the freedom of art known to me – the practical results of formalism would
lead to a petty and academic art criticism.
18 [a] Hartmann, Philosophie des Schönen.
19 [a] Ibid.: 72−208.
20 [e] Leibniz to Christian Goldbach, 17 April 1712, ‘Musica est exercitium
arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi’: Leibniz (1734), I, 241.
21 [a] On this, see Hartmann’s acute discussion in the Philosophie des Schönen,
pp. 82−6, and elsewhere.
22 [a] Leopardi, Aspasia; [e] Aspasia, a poetic name for Fanny Targioni Tozzet-
ti, is a cycle of five poems written by Leopardi in the early 1830s to express
his unrequited love.
23 [a] It helps to remember the poet’s lines:
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Croce, The Concept of Art
33 [a] I read this in a review, published four or five years ago in Von Sybel’s
Historische Zeitschrift, of Labriola’s work; [e] see n32 above.
34 [a] Wilhelm Wundt, ‘Über Ziele und Wege der Völkerpsychologie,’ Philoso-
phische Studien 4 (1888): 4−5, has this to say about so-called natural descrip-
tive sciences: ‘No scientific researcher today will any longer accept as correct
the distinction between a merely descriptive treatment of a given fact and
an explanatory account of the same thing. Zoology, botany, and mineralogy,
no less than physics, chemistry, and physiology, want to explain the objects
of their investigations, and, as much as possible, understand them in their
causal relations. The difference lies much more in the fact that the former
deal with knowledge of individual natural objects in their mutual depend-
ency, and the latter with knowledge of universal processes of nature.’
35 [e] in rerum natura: in nature.
36 [e] Don Abbondio, a village priest, is a leading character in I Promessi sposi
(1825−42), the novel by Alessandro Manzoni (1785−1873) that established
the Tuscan dialect as literary Italian, thus providing a linguistic basis for
Italy’s eventual political unification. Manzoni became a major force in Italy’s
cultural, religious, and political development. Don Abbondio, who naively
and fearfully tolerates wrongdoing and thereby sets the novel on its course,
is one of his most memorable characters.
37 [a] Melchiorre Delfico, Pensieri sulla storia e su la incertezza ed inutilità della
medesima (3d ed.; Naples: Agnello Nobile, 1814); [e] Delfico (1744−1835),
like Croce a southerner, lived long enough to see Italian philosophy move
away from the sensism of Condillac and other thinkers of the French
Enlightenment, but Delfico himself continued on the path towards mate-
rialism. His views on history, which included hostility to Roman law and
civilization, were also uncompromising: he believed history to be useless
and pernicious.
38 [a] Note the curious resemblance between the first pages of Henry Buckle’s
History of Civilization in England and Delfico’s little work. [e] At the other
extreme from Delfico, Buckle (1821−62), inspired by Comte, believed that
history could derive scientific laws by observing the basic forces of nature
and that the scope of such laws extends beyond politics to all aspects of the
human condition: see Buckle (1857), I, 1−35.
39 [a] Cf. Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (Leipzig: 1892),
chap. 2, ‘Von den historischen Gesetzen,’ especially pp. 36−8, where he
discusses the impossibility of establishing laws of complex events (‘Unmögli-
chkeit von Gesetzen über Gesammtzustände’); [e] The philosopher and
sociologist Georg Simmel (1858−1918) wrote about social groups, modern
city life, and money.
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40 [a] The same sense of scorn comes up in the recent book by Ludwig
Gumplovicz, professor at the University of Prague, La Lutte des races: Recher-
ches sociologiques, French trans. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1893): 165−7, 363−78;
[e] Gumplovicz (1838−1909), a Polish Jew who taught at Graz in Austria,
studied conflict between ethnic groups: see Gumplovicz (1883): 169−72,
366−76.
41 [a] Here it is useful to cite the words found in the introduction to one of
the notable recent attempts at historical science, Hermann Paul, Principien
der Sprachgeschichte (2d ed.; Halle: Niemeyer, 1886): p.1, saying that he wants
to avoid the expression, philosophy of language, because ‘our unphilosophical
age detects in it a mild case of metaphysical speculation … But in truth what
we have in mind is no less philosophy than physics or psychology.’ Hegel
identifies the two terms; see his Philosophie der Geschichte (Berlin, 1848),
‘Introduction,’ section C, pp. 11ff; [e] In later editions, Croce added this
note on Buckle’s four laws: ‘What Buckle’s four famous laws were will be
recalled: (1) the progress of the human race is the successive extension of
the knowledge of the laws of facts; (2) every stage of progress is preceded by
the spirit of scepticism; (3) scientific discoveries increase the effectiveness of
intellectual powers and correspondingly diminish that of moral powers; (4)
the chief enemy of the movement of progress is the defensive spirit. Laws
like these (Droysen was right) are found by the dozen every day, and better
than any other is this splendid example: ‘the measure of a people’s civiliza-
tion is its consumption of soap.’’ [e] Hermann Paul (1846−1921) taught
historical linguistics, grammar, and lexicography at Freiburg and Munich.
42 [a] See the valuable work by Labriola, I problemi della filosofia della storia,
which is perhaps the only thing written in Italy on this topic in the sense
stated above. Here I might mention a few previous Italian attempts at a sci-
ence of history, like those by our Cataldo Jannelli, that refer again to Vico’s
fertile views, but I plan to deal with them elsewhere when I have the oppor-
tunity. [e] Cataldo Jannelli was a classicist and Egyptologist who defended
the usefulness of history in 1817 in a book that invoked Vico’s authority;
Jannelli (1832) is a later edition published by Gian Domenico Romagnosi.
43 [e] In later editions, Croce replaced this paragraph, as follows: ‘Having first
emerged as inquiry into the laws and meaning of history (Vico, Herder),
it confined its speculations about idealist philosophy almost exclusively to
the latter of these two problems, and it gets confused with the philosophi-
cal presentation of universal history. The classic work in the genre, and
the mother of many others like it, is Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Fallen
into disrepute and considered ‘quite dead,’ it has come to be restored in
recent years as a treatment that covers a series of problems suggested by the
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of all this? What is the purpose of working so hard to summon from the
grave persons and peoples who no longer exist?’ (At this point I would say
with De Sanctis that anyone who asks this question is like those who want
to know what good poetry is and what we learn from it.) Villari concludes
with a question: ‘How can history, whose means are so different than those
of poetry, ever produce effects on us that are so much alike?’ [e] In later
editions, Croce adds the following: ‘Simmel, Geschichtsphilosophie, pp. 82−3,
n 1, using a better method, continually makes use of comparisons with art;
see also Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundle-
gung für das Studium der Gesellschaft under der Geschichte (Leipzig: Dunker and
Humblot, 1883), I, 49−50, 114.’
49 [a] Schopenhauer, Welt, p. 503.
50 [a] In fact, Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik, pp. 44−61, puts him in the sec-
tion of his history of aesthetics that deals with abstract idealism.
51 [a] If this claim means, for example, that the artist, presented with the raw
material of his observations, completes a process of idealization, then the
historian also completes this process.
52 [a] Droysen, Grundriß (1882): 85; [e] Droysen (1977): 483−5.
53 [a] William E.H. Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Ration-
alism in Europe (London: Longman, 1865), often reprinted; [e] Lecky
(1838−1903) was among the few who tried to emulate Buckle, first in his
evolutionary intellectual histories of rationalism and morality, then in a
more specialized but very extensive study of the eighteenth century, espe-
cially valuable for its treatment of Ireland.
54 [a] Formalist aesthetics also preserves the partition of the classical and the
romantic.
55 [a] Chiefly on this point, Lessing’s Laokoon is a remarkably suggestive work;
[e] Lessing (1766) argues that painting and poetry can be distinguished by
their different objects, which are bodies for painting and actions for poetry;
see also Croce (1956): 449−54.
56 [e] This sentence is omitted in later editions.
57 [e] The following sentence is added in later editions: ‘It is important for us
to know the laws of reality, though it is not important – it is actually against
our interests – to know all the facts, whatever they may be, of reality.
58 [a] Here is a sample of this aesthetics: ‘These laws (the laws of art) direct
it to please, to charm, to enchant, and in order to produce these happy
effects, it is obliged to respect what people respect, to exalt fine sentiments,
and condemn the base, as everyone does,’ and so on. I take this verbiage
from a text on ‘La Moralité dans l’art’ in Constant Martha, La Délicatesse
dans l’art (Paris: Hachette, 1884): 201; [e] see Martha (1897): 201.
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Croce, The Concept of Art
59 [a] This is the position of Formaesthetik (aesthetics of form) as against all the
other aesthetic doctrines included under the term Gehaltsaesthetik (aesthetics
of content).
60 [e] The poet and scholar Giosuè Carducci (1835−1907), who first pub-
lished his Odi Barbare in 1877, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1906.
Orlindo Guerrini (1845−1916), whose Postuma also appeared in 1877
under the name of Lorenzo Stecchetti, was a follower of Carducci. These
champions of realism or naturalism (verismo) in art opposed Manzoni’s
influence, described as idealist. A major point of contention was Manzoni’s
success in prescribing a single literary language for Italy, which supporters
of verismo feared would obliterate regional (especially southern) dialects,
the ‘real’ languages of the people: see Carducci (1877), Stecchetti (1877).
61 [a] De Sanctis, ‘L. Settembrini e i suoi critici,’ in Nuovi saggi critici (Naples:
1872): 241−3, in the note; one notes that the sense in which De Sanctis uses
the word ‘form’ is significant, differing from ordinary usage and debatable
in its appropriateness; cf. Hartmann’s correct observations in Die deutsche
Aesthetik, pp. 311−12, and in Philosophie des Schönen, pp. 29−33.
62 [a] Karl Köstlin, Aesthetik (Tübingen, 1869), 1.2.2, pp. 53−62.
63 [a] I say aesthetic as well because it is very frequently the case that art is
inspired by spectacles of natural beauty, and then the work of art is a beauti-
ful object reproduced in a beautiful way. But the artistic process stands
entirely on this second use of the adjective ‘beautiful.’ Art as art gains
nothing from the content that is beautiful for reasons extraneous to art. For
a different view, see Zumbini’s essay on Settembrini’s Storia letteraria in his
Saggi critici (Naples: 1876): 300−20.
64 [a] In the ‘Preface’ to L’Enfant prodigue; [e] Voltaire (1738), sig. Aivr.
65 [e] Later editions add ‘and seeks total domination of reality.’
66 [e] La Dame aux camélias, first an autobiographical novel (1848) and then a
play (1852) by the younger Alexandre Dumas (1824−95), inspired Verdi’s
La Traviata as well as much subsequent criticism; Rabagas (1872), a play by
Victorien Sardou (1831−1908), has been less successful with posterity.
67 [a] His sonnet ‘A Dante.’; [e] Carducci (1871): 212.
68 [e] Later editions add ‘roughly distinguished and designated.’
69 [a] On historical interest, see Labriola, I Problemi della filosofia della storia, pp.
8−9, and Dell’insegnamento della storia (Rome: Loescher, 1876).
70 [a] On differences between the historian’s procedure and the poet’s, see
also Lazarus, Ideen, pp. 12−15. The poet and the historian, he says, both
take the elements of their creations from what is given empirically. But
while the poet is guided only by the principle of aesthetic connection, the
historian is also subject to the principle of real causality. And we note that in
511
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Croce, The Concept of Art
torical facts – ‘minutes of scarcity,’ as poor Vittorio Imbriani used to say; [e]
For Imbriani, see nn9, 25 above. Cornelius Tacitus wrote the most impor-
tant histories of imperial Rome. Communes were forms of civic government
in medieval Italy. Matteo Spinelli was a chronicler of the Kingdom of Naples
in the thirteenth century. Henry Stuart Darnley, Mary Stuart’s husband and
the father of James I, was murdered in 1567 in a plot that involved her next
husband, the Earl of Bothwell.
76 [e] Later editions insert the following sentence: ‘The historian watches with
“a knitted brow,”
certainly not in the full light of the noonday sun, like the artist’; Dante,
Inferno, 15.17−21:
… e ciascuna
ci riguardava come suol da sera
guardare uno altro sotto nuova luna;
e sì ver’ noi aguzzavan le ciglia
come ’l vecchio sartor fa ne la cruna.
Seeing Dante and Vergil, members of a group of souls look at them ‘as one
man watches another at dusk beneath a new moon, knitting their brows at
us like an old tailor threading a needle.’
77 [a] Bernheim (Lehrbuch, pp. 84−7) agrees with the observation of this fact,
but he explains it differently. A shrewd and learned friend of mine (a pro-
fessor of philosophy, as it happens) also used to admit to me that he had yet
to find a single work of history that satisfied him completely, having come to
the conclusion that it is much easier to do philosophy of history than to do
history.
78 [a] Goethe, Faust, I, 2.1.222−3:
[e] Schiller, Don Carlos, 3.10: ‘Dass Menschen nur – nicht Wesen höhrer Art
– die Weltgeschichte schreiben!’
79 [a] On the other hand, artistic creations have their disadvantages when
compared to products of history, and here some observations of Labriola
(Dell’insegnamento della storia, pp. 43−4) on the educational effect of history
are on target: ‘Situations,’ he says, ‘which as history develops are prepared
513
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514
16
Benedetto Croce
Just because they are formations of different kinds, pure concepts and
pseudo-concepts do not constitute divisions of the general concept of
concept.2 Assuming that they do so would be a grave confusion of terms,
not much different from Spinoza’s example of the person who divided
the genus dog into the animal dog and the constellation dog, basing
this on the fact that poets once said that the celestial dog also ‘barks and
bites’ when the implacable sun burns the fields.3
And since we are in the domain of logic, it does no good to make
another division of the concept that enjoyed much fame and authority
in the past: namely, dividing it into obscure, confused, clear, distinct, and
the like – according to different levels of perfection attained by the con-
cept. Such a division can have rough empirical value, and in this sense it
may be hard to reject it completely in ordinary discourse, but it has no
logical and theoretical value. Obviously, the concept that we are talking
about is the complete concept, certainly not the concept interrupted
or gone astray along the way. Nonetheless, the aforementioned division
has had great historical importance ever since people tried to use it to
distinguish the concept, under the name of a clear and distinct thought,
from an intuition, as a clear but confused thought, and then to distin-
guish both from a sensation, impression, or emotion, which was called
obscure cognition. People tried, but they never got there; the problem
was posed, but it was not solved because the solution came only when it
Part II: Translations
was seen that in this case the issue is not three levels of thought, as abso-
lute logicism supposed, but three forms of the Spirit: the forms of think-
ing or distinction; intuition or clarity; and practical activity or obscurity
and naturalness.
Logically, the concept does not give rise to distinctions because there
exists only one form of the concept, not many. In our Logic, this conclu-
sion is the analog of the one that we reached in the Aesthetic with the
theory of the unicity of intuition or expression and the non-existence of
special modes of expression (except in an empirical sense, where we are
always allowed to establish as many modes or classes of whatever kind
we like). When we distinguish forms of the Spirit, after dividing the two
main forms, theoretical and practical, and then subdividing the theoretical
into intuition and concept, we do not get another subdivision of theoreti-
cal forms: intuition and concept are both indivisible forms.
The reason for this indivisibility is made clear only by the full devel-
opment of the Philosophy of the Spirit. Here, by way of suggestion, we
can only say that the division of intuition and concept has at its base
the division of individual and universal. Since there is no medium quid
or ulterius in this, no intermediary, or third or fourth form, and so on,
there is likewise no subdivision:4 from the concept of individuality we
move to each particular individuality, which is not a concept, and from
the concept of the concept we move to the particular act of thinking,
which is no longer the simple definition of logical form, but logical form
itself made effective. Having ruled out any subdivision of the concept as
logical form, we can refer the manifold of concepts only to the variety of
objects that come to be thought in that form. The concept of goodness is
not the concept of beauty, or rather, both concepts are a single act logi-
cally, but the aspect of reality that the first designates directly is not the
aspect designated by the second.
Still, in circumstances where the concept would have to supply the uni-
versal, it may be asked how we ever get so many universals, so many dif-
ferent forms of reality, so many distinct concepts (passion, will, morality,
fantasy, thinking, and so on) by working out reality as universal through
the concept. If this variety were not overcome and could not be over-
come by the concept, we would have to conclude that the real universal
is not attainable by thinking, and we would have to turn to scepticism or
at least to that peculiar form of logical scepticism that makes an act of
real life – a mysticism with no logical translation – out of the conscious-
ness of unity.
The distinction of concepts, deprived of unity, is apartness and atom-
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ism, and surely it would not be worth the trouble to leave the manifold
of representations if we were then to fall back into the manifold of con-
cepts. The one no less than the other would be subject to a progressus in
infinitum.5 Who could ever say that the concepts discovered and listed
were all the concepts? If there are ten of them, why could there not be
twenty, a hundred, or a hundred thousand, if we took a closer look?
For that matter, why will there not be as many concepts as representa-
tions – an infinity of them? With perfect coherence, Spinoza counted
two attributes of substance – thinking and extension – without any inter-
mediary between them, while acknowledging that the attributes of sub-
stance must be considered infinite in number, even though those are the
two known to us.6
The concept needs and demands that this manifold be negated,
then, and in return we affirm that the real is one because the concept
by which we know it is one; the content of thinking is one because its
form is one. But here is what happens when we meet this demand: we
fall into another error because we throw away distinctions, and the unity
obtained thereby is an empty unity, without organic character, a whole
without parts, something simple beyond representations and therefore
ineffable, and so we return to mysticism by another route. A whole is a
whole only because, and insofar as, it has parts – indeed, it is parts. An
organism is what it is because it has, and is, organs and functions. A unity
is thinkable only insofar as it has distinctions in it and is the unity of the
distinctions. Unity without distinctions is just as repugnant to thinking
as distinction without unity. It follows from this that both are necessary
and that the concept’s distinctions entail neither negating the concept
nor that something falls outside the concept; rather, distinctions are the
concept itself understood in its truth, the one-as-distinct, which is one
only because it is distinct and distinct only because it is one. Unity and
distinction are correlative and therefore inseparable.
But distinct concepts, constituting unity by their distinction, cannot
be infinite in number because otherwise they would be equated to rep-
resentations, nor can they be numerically finite and yet located on the
same plane and capable of being arranged in one grouping or anoth-
er without altering their being. In other words, by way of example, the
Beautiful, True, Useful, and Good do not constitute the first steps in a
numerical series, nor may they be distributed arbitrarily by putting the
Beautiful after the True, for instance, or the Good before the Useful,
or the Useful before the True, and so on. Their arrangement is neces-
sary because they imply one another reciprocally, meaning that we defi-
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that has three angles and of a figure that has three sides are identical
concepts, both referring to the triangle; the concept of 3 x 4 and that
of 6 x 2 are identical, both being definitions of the number 12; the con-
cept of a domestic feline animal and that of a domestic animal that eats
mice are identical, both being definitions of the cat. This also explains
how and why that doctrine will talk about primary and derived, simple
and composite concepts. By shaping certain concepts and using them
to shape others, judgment comes to posit the first as simple and primi-
tive with regard to the second, which are then considered composite or
secondary.
We have already shown that the arbitrary concept, as distinct from
the pure concept, necessarily duplicates itself into the arbitrary doublet
of the empirical and the vacuous, giving rise to formations of two dif-
ferent types, empirical concepts and abstract concepts. Empirical con-
cepts have this feature, that in them unity is outside of distinction and
distinction outside of unity. If this were not so, and the two determina-
tions interpenetrated, those concepts would certainly be not arbitrary
but necessary and true, as already shown. When the distinction has been
located outside of unity, any division posited for it is arbitrary, just like
concepts of the same kind. And any enumeration is arbitrary because
such concepts can be multiplied to infinity. In place of distinctions of
pure concepts, which are rationally determined and completely unified,
pseudo-concepts present manifold groupings, formed arbitrarily, and
sometimes also unified in a single group that embraces the knowable as
a whole, but in a way that does not exclude other infinite modes.
In these groupings, empirical concepts simulate the organization of
pure concepts by reducing the particular to the universal – locating a
certain number of concepts under another one. But we can by no means
think of these subordinate concepts as actualizations of the basic con-
cept, developing out of one another and returning into themselves.
Thus we are forced to leave them juxtaposed to one another in simple
coordination. The schema of subordination and coordination with its
associated spatial symbol (the symbol of classification) – a straight line
intersected in the centre and from above by another straight line per-
pendicular to it, with other perpendiculars descending from it and thus
in parallel – provides, by contrasting with the circle, the clearest and
most visual demonstration of the deep difference between the two ways
of proceeding. It will always be impossible to arrange a nexus of pure
concepts in that classificatory schema without falsifying them. And by
analogy, it will always be impossible to transform empirical concepts into
a series of levels without destroying them.
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what I have said above, and if I have removed the doubts about the unity
that the concept affirms – not in spite of distinction but by way of it –
then a new difficulty arises when we consider that set of concepts called
opposites or contraries.
That opposites are not distincts or simply reducible to them is clearly
seen as soon as we recall examples of both. In the system of the Spirit,
practical activity will be distinct in relation to the theoretical, and utilitar-
ian as well as ethical activities will be sub-distinctions of practical activity.
But the contrary of practical life is practical inactivity, the contrary of
utility is harm, and the contrary of morality is immorality. Beauty, truth,
utility, and the morally good will be distinct concepts, but we quickly real-
ize that ugliness, falsity, uselessness, and wickedness cannot be added or
inserted among them. And that is not all. Looking still more closely, we
perceive that the reason why the second series cannot be added to the
first, or mixed in with it, is that each contrary term already inheres in
its own contrary and accompanies it, as darkness goes along with light.
Beauty is what it is because it negates ugliness, good because it negates
evil, and so on. The opposite is not positive but negative, and, as such, it
goes along with the positive.
This different nature of opposites in relation to distincts is also
reflected in the logic of the empirical, in the theory of pseudo-concepts,
because this logic, even though it reduces distinct concepts to species,
nonetheless refuses to treat opposites in the same way. Hence, this log-
ic will never say that the genus dog divides into species of living dogs
and dead dogs, nor that the genus moral person is divided into species of
moral and immoral persons. When divisions of this sort occur, a mistake
has been made, and it is an error even within the compass of this logic
because the species can never be a negation of the genus. Therefore,
even empirical logic seems to confirm, in its own way, that opposite con-
cepts are different from distinct concepts. Yet it is equally clear that we
cannot be content to list opposite concepts alongside distinct concepts,
since in this way we would be applying unphilosophical procedures in
the field of philosophy, and we would fall into bad logic or empiricism
in the philosophical theory of our Logic. If the unity of the concept
is simultaneously its own self-distinction, how can that same unity ever
have another type of division or self-distinction – which is self-opposition
– parallel to it? If it is not conceivable to merge one into the other and
make opposite concepts distinct or distinct concepts opposite, it is no
less inconceivable to leave the distinct and the opposite concepts, unme-
diated and unjustified, within the unity of the concept.
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To solve this problem, it helps to start by digging deeper into the dif-
ference between the two orders of concepts. Distinct concepts are dis-
tinguishable in unity: reality is their unity and likewise their distinction.
The human person is thinking and action, indivisible but distinguishable
forms, such that insofar as we think, action is negated, and insofar as we
act, thinking is negated. But opposites are not distinguishable in this way.
The person who commits an evil action, if he really is doing something,
surely does not commit an evil action but performs an action useful to
him. The person who thinks a false thought, if he is accomplishing any-
thing real, does not think the false thought – indeed, does not think at
all – but rather goes on living and looking after his own convenience, or
generally some benefit that he cares about at that instant. Thus we see
that opposites, when taken as distinct moments, are no longer opposed
but now distinct. And in that case they keep their negative labels only met-
aphorically, whereas strictly they deserve to be called positive. Because
the inattentive eye does not see the treatment of opposition turning into
the treatment of distinction, we must not mistake opposition for a dis-
tinction at the heart of the concept; in other words, we must resist any
distinguishing of the opposition, declaring it merely abstract.
So true is this that once opposite terms are taken as distinct, the one
becomes the other and both evaporate into nothing. In that regard, dis-
putes brought about by the opposition between being and non-being,
and the unity of them both in becoming, are celebrated.11 It is known
that being, thought of as pure being, has been recognized to be the
same as non-being or nothing; and then that nothing, thought of as
pure nothing, is the same as pure being. Accordingly, the truth has been
found in neither of them but in the becoming where both exist – but
as opposites and therefore indistinguishable. Becoming is being itself,
which has non-being within itself and thus is also non-being. We cannot
think of being in relation to non-being as we think about the form of the
Spirit or of reality in relation to another form. In the latter case, there
is unity in the distinction, in the former a restored or rectified unity, re-
asserted against emptiness – against the empty unity of mere being and
mere non-being, or against the mere sum of being and non-being.
The two moments must certainly be synthesized when our polemic
turns against the abstract thinking that divides them. Taken in them-
selves, however, they are not two moments joined in a third, but only
one moment, the third (and even in this case the number is a symbol),
which is the indistinguishability of the moments. Thus it happens (let
me say in passing) that Hegel, to whom we owe the polemic against emp-
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ty being, was not satisfied in this encounter either with the words, ‘unity’
and ‘identity,’ nor with ‘synthesis’ nor the other term, ‘triad,’ and he
was happier to indicate opposition in unity as the objective ‘dialectic’ of
the real.12 Still, no matter what word we prefer to use, the thing is what
we have called it: the opposite is not the distinct of its opposite but is an
abstraction from true reality.
If this is how it is, the duality and parallelism of distinct concepts and
opposite concepts no longer survive. Opposites are the concept itself –
and thus the distincts themselves – each of them in itself insofar as it is
a determination of the concept and insofar as it is conceived in its true
reality. The reality whose concept is worked out by logical thinking is
not immobile being or pure being but opposition; the forms of reality
that the concept thinks in order to think reality in its full measure are
in themselves opposed. Otherwise, they would not be forms of reality
or would not exist at all. ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair’: beauty is what it is
because it has ugliness in it, the true because it has the false in it, and the
good it because it has evil in it: the way forward (as Jean Paul used to say)
is a ‘continual decline.’13 If we take the negative term away, as is custom-
ary when proceeding abstractly, the positive also vanishes, but this is just
because we have removed the positive itself along with the negative.
When we talk about negative terms, or about non-values and therefore
non-beings, as entities, in reality we are talking about entities by adding
to the assertion of a fact the expression of a desire – namely, the desire
for another existence to arise beyond that existence. ‘You are dishon-
est,’ meaning to say, ‘you are a person who sees to his pleasure’ (a theo-
retical judgment) ‘but you need to be (no longer a judgment, but the
expression of desire) something more and bend yourself to the universal
ends of reality.’ Consider this example, ‘You have written an ugly verse,’
as meaning that ‘you have seen to doing this quickly and taking a rest,
meaning that you have performed an economical action’ (theoretical
judgment), ‘but you also need to perform an aesthetic act’ (judgment
no longer, but expression of desire). And so on with other examples. But
each person has evil in him because he has good in him. Satan is not a
creature extraneous to God, nor is Satan even God’s minister, but rather
God himself. If God did not have Satan in him, he would be food with-
out salt, an abstract ideal, a mere ought-to-be that is not, hence impo-
tent and useless. It was not without profound meaning that the Italian
poet who sang of Satan as ‘rebellion’ and ‘the avenging force of reason’
ended by exalting God as ‘the highest vision to which people ascend in
the strength of their youth,’ and as ‘the sun of lofty minds and passionate
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ing from one to the other. But this is a confusion between concept and
fact, between ideal moments – eternal moments of the real, therefore –
and existential manifestations of reality. Existentially, the poet does not
become a philosopher except when something contradicting his poetry
takes shape in his spirit, specifically when he feels dissatisfied with the
particular and with the particular intuition. But he does not pass over
into philosophy at that moment; he is already a philosopher because
the passing, the actual being, and the coming-to-be are synonyms. In the
same way, the poet does not pass from one intuition to another, from one
work of art to another, unless a contradiction takes shape inside him,
making the earlier work no longer satisfying for him. Then he passes on,
or becomes a different poet and really is a different one. This passing-
over is the law of all life, and therefore it exists in all the existential and
contingent determinations of each of life’s forms. From one verse of a
poem we pass on to another because the first verse is both satisfying and
not satisfying. Ideal moments, by contrast, do not pass into one another
because they are in one another eternally, each one distinct and united
with the other.
On the other hand, the violent extension of the dialectic to the dis-
tincts and the unlawful perversion of them into opposites, motivated by
a lofty but misguided yearning for unity, has been punished at the scene
of the crime because the desired unity has not been attained. The nexus
of the distincts is circular, and thus it is true unity. Extending the oppo-
sites to the forms of the Spirit and reality, however, would not produce
the circle that is true infinity, but the progressus in infinitum that is false
or bad infinity.16 In fact, if opposition determines the passage from one
ideal level to another, from one form to another, if this is the sole char-
acter and supreme law of the real, by what right may we set down an ulti-
mate form where that passage would no longer take place? The Spirit,
to choose an example, moves from an impression or emotion and passes
on dialectically to intuition, and, by a new dialectical passage, to logical
thinking: by what right should it find rest in this at last? Why (following
the lead of such philosophies) should the thinking of the Absolute or
the Idea provide the terminus of life? In obedience to the eternal law of
opposition, which is poorly placed among forms of the Spirit, it would
be necessary for the thinking that negates the intuition to be negated
in turn, and for the negation to be negated again, and so on to infin-
ity. Actually, this infinite negating goes on, and it is life itself, viewed in
representation. But precisely for this reason we do not escape from this
bad infinity of representation except by the true infinity that posits the
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eternal at every instant, the first in the last and the last in the first – posit-
ing at every instant the unity that is distinction, in other words.
It must be acknowledged that the false extension of the dialectic has
produced per accidens the excellent result of showing that the manifold of
defectively distinguished concepts is unstable, just as there is profit to be
had from the devastation and disorder that this extension has wrought
on age-old prejudices.17 But that mistaken dialectic has also promoted
the habit of imprecision, negligence, and conceptual clumsiness, some-
times encouraging the fakery of the lightweight minds who have reduced
philosophy to a dance and counter-dance of empty abstractions – even
though this is per accidens in relation to the vigorous initial instinct of the
polemic about dialectic.
The form of the law given to the concept of the concept – an incor-
rect form wholly corrupted by the use made of it by proceeding empiri-
cally – has contributed to producing such a conclusion. When the law
of identity and contradiction is posited, and when the law of opposition
or dialectic is posited alongside it, a duality inevitably appears, since we
do not notice that the two laws are nothing more than one-sided forms
of an expression of the unique nature of the concept. We could see the
real character of the concept expressed instead in a different law or prin-
ciple, in the principle of sufficient reason, which ordinarily used to be
referred to the concept of cause or to pseudo-concepts. However, both
because of its inner tendency and also because of its historical origin, it is
correct to refer it to the concept of an end or a reason. And it asserts that
things cannot be called known by alleging just any cause whatever for
them, that what must be produced instead is exactly that cause which is
also the end and which is therefore the sufficient reason. And yet to seek
out the sufficient reason of things, what else would one mean except to
think them in their truth, conceive them in their universality, and posit
the concept? In this lies logical thinking itself, as distinct from the repre-
sentation or intuition that presents things but not reasons, the individual
but not the universal.
There is no point in dealing with other so-called principles of logic
because either they are already in play implicitly or they are trivial and
of no interest.
NOTES
1 We have used Croce (1920), the fourth edition of the Logic, whose original
form in Croce (1905) was quite different; Croce (1917b), an older English
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also comes from Croce’s reading of Vico, about whom he wrote a formative
book, while compiling and updating a large bibliography; he saw Vico’s New
Science as an avatar of his own Philosophy of the Spirit, of which the Logic is
the second part: Croce (1911a), (1911b).
9 [e] For moment as a term of art in Hegel and in Croce, see sections 1 and 4
of ‘What Is Living.’
10 [e] The ‘five terms’ or quinque voces that Croce lists are the topic of Por-
phyry’s Introduction, which was one of the first texts to be mastered by
students of Aristotelian logic; the Introduction presents a scheme of classifica-
tion whereby two species within the same genus are made distinct from one
another by a difference, so that the difference rational makes humans distinct
from other species within the genus animal.
11 [e] For being and non-being in Hegel, see section 1 of Croce’s ‘What Is Liv-
ing.’
12 [e] Again, on Hegel’s terminology, see especially section 1 of Croce’s ‘What
Is Living.’
13 [e] Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.i.11; Richter (1903), 1.2.11. Johann Paul
Richter (1763−1825), who became famous as Jean Paul, one of the great
romantic novelists, first published Levana, or the Doctrine of Education in
1807; Richter (1814) is the second edition.
14 [e] Carducci, ‘Inno a Satana,’ ll.156, 195−6; (1881): 127−37; (1894): 3.
15 [e] Croce (1920): 271−2: ‘The concept is a logical synthesis a priori, a unity
of subject and predicate, a unity in distinction and a distinction in unity …
Representation without the concept is blind, pure representation, robbed of
the light of logic, and it is not the subject of judgment; without representa-
tion, the concept is empty. In the act that is called error, where propositions
expressing the truth are combined not at all according to their theoretical
nexus but by the arbitrary choice of the person who does the combining,
that unity can be broken up in a practical way. The first thing that happens,
then, is that there is an empty concept: deprived of any internal rule, it fills
up with a content that does not belong to it and can be had only by joining
with the representation, and it gives itself a false subject … Because it abuses
the logical component, we can call this type of error logicism or panlogism or
even philosophism, since abuse of the logical element is identical to abuse of
the philosophical element.’
16 [e] On Hegel’s bad infinity see section 3 of Croce’s ‘What Is Living.’
17 [e] per accidens: accidentally, in the technical sense of ‘accident,’ so ‘not
substantially’ or ‘not essentially.’
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Benedetto Croce
Notice
Naples
6 March 1906
Part II: Translations
Hegel is one of those philosophers who took philosophy itself, not just
unmediated reality, as the object of his thought, thereby contributing
to the establishment of a logic of philosophy. To me, in fact, it seems
that the logic of philosophy (with the many results that come from it for
solving particular problems and for thinking about life) was the mark at
which he aimed his greatest mental effort. In this he found – or brought
to completion and made effective – principles of great importance that
had been unknown to previous philosophers or were scarcely mentioned
by them and can therefore be considered real discoveries of his.
This concept of a logic of philosophy is simple enough and should be
accepted as incontrovertibly evident, yet it encounters a strange resist-
ance – resistance to philosophy’s proceeding by its own method, in other
words, with a theory that must be investigated and formulated. No one
doubts that mathematics has a method of its own, studied in the logic
of mathematics; that the natural sciences have their method, the source
of the logic of observation, experiment, and abstraction; that there is
a method of writing history and thus a logic of historical method; that
for poetry and for art in general there is a logic of poetry and art, or
aesthetics; that there is a method inherent in economic activity which
appears later in reflective form in the science of economics; and, finally,
that moral activity has its own method, presented in reflective form as
ethics (or a logic of will, as it has sometimes been called). But then,
moving on to philosophy, a great many people resist what follows: that
philosophy too, once it exists, must have a method of its own, which must
be defined. On the other hand, very few are surprised when treatises on
logic, which give a great deal of space to discussions of mathematical,
naturalistic, and historical disciplines, usually pay no special attention to
the philosophical disciplines and often move right past them in silence.
It is perfectly natural that anyone who rejects philosophy in gener-
al, whether from thoughtlessness or mental confusion or eccentricity,
should reject a logic of philosophy since one cannot claim to accept the
theory of something whose reality has been disallowed. There exists no
philosophy, so there exists no logic of philosophy, and that’s the end of
it; if this is good enough, enjoy it.
But why have I just been talking about a strange spectacle? The reason
is that philosophers themselves – or philosophizers, perhaps – too often
seem to show themselves lacking any awareness of this ineluctable neces-
sity. One of them asserts that philosophy must follow the abstract-deduc-
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Yet when our thinking investigates what is real, it faces not only dis-
tinct concepts but also opposed concepts that cannot simply be identi-
fied with the former nor treated as special cases of them, as a type of the
distinct.9 The logical category of distinction is one thing, that of opposi-
tion another. Two distinct concepts are connected to one another, as
has been said, even in being distinct, while two opposed concepts seem
to exclude one another: where one appears, the other totally vanishes.
A distinct concept is assumed and lives in the other that follows it in the
order of ideas. An opposed concept is destroyed by its opposite: the say-
ing that applies to it is ‘mors tua, vita mea.’10 Examples of distinct con-
cepts are those of imagination and understanding, already mentioned,
as well as others that could be added – law, morality, and so on. But
examples of opposed concepts come from the many pairs of words that
abound in our language, and they are certainly not happy, loving cou-
ples. They are antitheses of true and false, good and evil, beautiful and
ugly, valued and unvalued, joy and sorrow, activity and passivity, positive
and negative, life and death, being and nothing, and on and on. It is not
possible to confuse the two series, the distinct and the opposite, which
are so strikingly different.
Now if distinction does not exclude the concrete unity of the philo-
sophical concept but actually makes it possible, it seems that we cannot
think the same about opposition. Opposition gives rise to deep cleav-
ages in the core of the philosophical universal and of each of its particu-
lar forms, and to irresolvable dualisms as well. Instead of the concrete
universal – the organic reality that thinking seeks – it seems to come
up against two universals everywhere, one confronting the other, one
threatening the other. This prevents philosophy from achieving its goal,
and when an activity cannot achieve its goal, this shows that the goal set
for it is absurd, and philosophy itself – all philosophy – is threatened with
failure.
This reality of this need has caused the human mind to be always
troubled by the problem of opposites but without always giving a clear
account of its trouble. One solution to which people have constantly
clung over the centuries has been to exclude opposition from the phil-
osophical concept by claiming that the dangerous logical category of
opposites or contraries does not exist. The facts actually showed the
reverse, if truth were told, but facts met with denial, and only one of
the two terms was accepted while the other was declared an illusion – or
else one term was set apart from the other by an insensible and merely
numerical difference, which amounts to the same thing. The logical doc-
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combat, we always long for good sense, for the truth that all of us can
find in ourselves directly, without the exertions, subtleties and exaggera-
tions of professional philosophers. But our longing is sterile. The bat-
tle has been joined, and without victory there is no returning to peace.
Naive thinking (this is its defect) is in no position to justify its own claims.
At every objection, it wavers, falls into confusion, and contradicts itself.
Its truths are not complete truths because they are placed next to one
another but not connected, and the juxtaposition is not systematic. Con-
tradictions, doubts, and a painful awareness of antitheses are welcome.
War is welcome if it is needed to acquire the truth that is complete and
sure of itself. This truth, though its level of elaboration is very different
from what comes out of ordinary naive thinking, cannot really be unlike
it in substance. And when a philosophy stands in contrast to naive con-
sciousness, it is a sure sign of trouble. Indeed, when people see plain
and conclusive statements of philosophical truth resulting from centu-
ries of effort, this is the very reason why we often see them shrugging
their shoulders and remarking that the vaunted discovery is something
quite easy that everybody knows. Exactly the same thing happens with
the most inspired works of art, which develop so simply and naturally
that everyone has the illusion of having made such things or being able
to make them.
If naive thinking gives us hope and a sign of compatibility between
unity and opposition, another fact is right in front of us, offering a rough
model of these benefits. Alongside the philosopher stands the poet. The
poet also seeks the truth; the poet also thirsts for the real. Like the phi-
losopher, he too rejects arbitrary abstractions while reaching for the liv-
ing and concrete. He too abhors the muffled delusions of mystics and
sentimentalists because he says what he feels and makes it ring in our
ears, clear and silvery, in words of beauty. But the poet is not doomed
to failure. He contemplates the reality that is torn apart by oppositions
and makes it vibrant with opposition, yet one and undivided. Can the
philosopher not do the same? Is philosophy not a way of contemplating,
like poetry? Since the philosophical concept is completely analogous to
aesthetic expression, why must it lack the perfection that belongs to the
aesthetic, the power to resolve and represent unity in opposition? Philos-
ophy is contemplating the universal, obviously, and hence it is thinking,
while poetry is contemplating the individual, and hence it is intuition
and imagination. But why can the philosophical universal not be both
different and the same, discord and concord, discrete and continuous,
precise and fluid all at once, like aesthetic expression? When the mind
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makes its leap from contemplating the singular to contemplating the All,
why should reality have to lose its own character? Does the One not live
in us like the singular?
And at this point Hegel shouts his joyous cry, his cry of discovery –
Eureka! – his principle that resolves the problem of opposites, a very
simple principle, seeming so obvious that it deserves to be put with the
others symbolized by the egg of Columbus. Opposites are not an illusion,
and unity is not an illusion. Opposites are opposed to one another, but
they are not opposed to unity because true and concrete unity is just the
unity or synthesis of opposites: it is not immobility, it is movement; it is
not stasis, it is development. The philosophical concept is a concrete uni-
versal, and therefore it is a thinking of reality as both united and divided
at once. Only in this way does philosophical truth correspond to poetic
truth, and the pulse of thinking to the pulse in things.
This is the only possible solution, in fact, and as such it does not reject
the two that came before it, those that I have called monism and dualism
of opposites. Instead, it justifies both by treating them as truths that are
one-sided, fragments of truth that need to be integrated in a third truth,
where the first, the second, and also the third fade away as all three are
fused in the sole truth. And this alone is true: that unity does not con-
front opposition but contains it in itself, that without opposition reality
would not be reality because it would not be development and life. Unity
is positive, opposition negative, but the negative is also positive – positive
in being negative – and, if that were not so, we would not grasp the full-
ness of the positive. If the analogy between poetry and philosophy has
been unsatisfactory, if the concrete concept, corresponding to intuition
as the logical form of development – as its poetic form – has seemed not
clear enough, now that we take our comparisons and metaphors more
freely from the natural sciences, one might say (sacrificing exact analogy
for apt comparison) that the concrete universal, along with its synthesis
of opposites, gets at life and not at life’s cadaver. It offers a physiology of
the real, not an anatomy.
Hegel calls his doctrine of opposites the dialectic, rejecting other formu-
las of unity and coincidence of opposites as likely to cause confusion because
they emphasize unity but not opposition along with it. The two abstract
components, or rather the opposites taken by themselves, in their apart-
ness, he calls moments, taking the image from moments of the lever. The
third term, synthesis, is also sometimes called a moment. He uses the word
‘resolve’ or ‘overcome’ (aufheben) to express the relation of the first two
moments to the third. Hegel notes the implication that the two moments
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are negated insofar as they are taken as separate, while in synthesis they
are preserved. In relation to the first term, the second takes the form of
negation, and in relation to the second, the third is a negation of the nega-
tion, or absolute negativity that then becomes absolute affirmation.
If for the sake of exposition we apply numerical symbols to this logical
relation, the dialectic can be called a triad or trinity because it turns out
to be composed of three terms. But Hegel never stops warning about the
external and arbitrary character of this numerical symbolism, which is
quite unfit to express the theoretical truth. Strictly speaking, in the dia-
lectical triad it is not really three concepts that are thought but only one,
the concrete universal, in its deep structure. Moreover, since we must
first of all posit opposition of terms in order to achieve this synthesis, if
we call the activity that posits opposition understanding, and reason the
activity that provides the synthesis, it is clear that understanding is neces-
sary to reason, that it is a moment of reason and external to it. And this
is actually how Hegel sometimes treats it.
Anyone who does not rise to the way of thinking the opposites that I
have just described can make no philosophical claim that does not con-
tradict itself and change to its contrary, as I noted in reviewing the antith-
eses of monism and dualism. We can see this in the first triad of Hegel’s
Logic – the triad that has all the others in it and which, as we know, is
made up of the terms being, nothing, and becoming. Without nothing, what
is being? What is pure being, indeterminate, unqualified, indistinct,
unutterable, being as universal, and not this or that particular being?
How does it differ from nothing? On the other hand, what is nothing
without being, nothing conceived in itself, with no determination or
qualification, nothing in general, not the non-being of this or that par-
ticular thing? How does it differ from being?
When someone uses one of these two terms by itself, the result is like
using the other by itself, since the one has meaning only in or through the
other. Someone who uses the true without the false, then, makes the true
into something not thought – since thinking is struggling against the false
– and therefore something not true. Likewise, for someone who uses good
without evil, the good becomes something not willed – because willing the
good is rejecting evil – and therefore something not good. Outside of syn-
thesis, the two terms used abstractly become confused with one another as
they trade roles. There is truth only in the third term – for the first triad, in
becoming. This, as Hegel said, is ‘the first concrete concept.’13
And yet this mistake, which comes of using the opposites outside of
synthesis, keeps recurring. We must always respond to it with the objec-
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tion that shows – as we did just now – that the opposites cannot be
thought outside of synthesis. This objection is the dialectic that might
be called subjective or negative. But it must not be confused with the true
and proper content of this theory, with the objective or positive dialectic
that could also be identified as the logical theory of development. In the
negative dialectic, the outcome is not synthesis but the annihilation of
two opposed terms, one as a result of the other. Therefore, like the word
‘dialectic’ itself, the terminology that we described above also acquires
a somewhat different meaning. The sense of understanding is meant
to be derogatory and pejorative, since it is no longer a moment intrin-
sic to reason and inseparable from it but rather an affirmation of sepa-
rate opposites that claims to stand on its own as the final truth. This is
abstract understanding, the eternal enemy of philosophical theorizing
– basically, reason itself failing in its own work. ‘Understanding is not to
blame if we go no farther; it is a subjective powerlessness of reason that
lets that determination stand in that way.’14 The triad itself surrenders
its place to a quartet of terms, two affirmations and two negations. Rea-
son steps in as negative reason and brings confusion into the abode of
understanding. Although it clears the way for the positive theory by this
negation and makes it necessary, it does not produce and posit it.
Confusion between the merely negative side of Hegel’s dialectic and
its positive content has given rise to an objection against the Hegelian
theory of opposites, and this is a warhorse often mounted by Hegel’s
enemies. Goldbridle and Bayard are rather old and worn out, and I fail
to see how anyone can still stay in the saddle.15 They ask: if being and
nothing are identical (as Hegel proves or thinks he proves), how can
they constitute becoming, which (on Hegel’s theory) must be a synthesis
of opposites, certainly not of items that are identical and thus unpro-
ductive of synthesis? A = A remains A and does not become B. And the
answer is: being is identical with nothing only when being and nothing
are badly thought, or, indeed, when they are not thought; only then does
it happen that one is the same as the other, not as A = A but as 0 = 0. In
thinking that thinks being and nothing truly, they are not identical but
decisively opposed, brawling with one another. And this brawl (which is
also a bonding because the two wrestlers have to put their arms around
one another in order to wrestle) is becoming. This is certainly not a con-
cept added to or derived from the two prior ones as if they were apart
from it. It is a unique concept that has two abstractions outside it, two
unreal wraiths – being and nothing as separate and hence as united not
by conflict but by their shared emptiness.
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As Hegel says, this is the principle of identity as ‘the law of the abstract
understanding.’21 The false application occurs because we do not want
to acknowledge that opposition or contradiction is no defect, no blem-
ish, no disease in things that can be removed from them – nor is it our
own subjective error. Rather, it is the true being of things: all things in
themselves are contradictory, and thinking is the thinking of contradic-
tion. This discovery serves to put the principle of identity on a real, solid
basis, triumphing over opposition by thinking it, grasping it in its unity.
Opposition thought is opposition overcome, overcome precisely in virtue
of the principle of identity. Opposition disregarded or unity disregarded
is what seems to be obedience to that principle but is actually its real
contradiction.
The difference between Hegel’s way of thinking and the ordinary kind
is the same that distinguishes a person who confronts and conquers an
enemy from someone who closes his eyes to avoid seeing the enemy: this
person believes he eliminates the enemy, and then he is eliminated by
him. ‘Speculative thinking is thought establishing what thinking does,
opposition, and, in opposition, thinking itself; it is definitely not what
happens in representative thinking, in letting oneself be dominated by
opposition and thereby having one’s own determinations resolved only
in other determinations or in none.’22 Reality is a nexus of opposites,
and it does not come apart and dissipate by reason of opposition; in fact,
reality originates eternally in and from opposition. And thinking, as the
supreme reality, the reality of reality, does not come apart and dissipate
but grasps unity in opposition and synthesizes it logically.
Like all assertions of truth, Hegel’s dialectic does not come to dethrone
the old truths but to enrich and consolidate them. The concrete univer-
sal – unity in distinction and opposition – is the true and complete prin-
ciple of identity. It does not allow the principle of older systems to exist
apart from it, either as ally or as rival, having absorbed that principle and
transformed it into its own life’s blood.
Some historians of philosophy have had the view that the problem of
opposites is the whole problem of philosophy, and so at times the his-
tory of the various attempts to solve it has been taken as the entire his-
tory of philosophy: the former story has been told to tell the latter. But
the dialectic is not even all of logic, much less all philosophy. It is a very
important part of logic, however, and perhaps its crowning achievement.
The reason for the confusion may already be apparent from what I
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have said above: it is the inner bond that lies between the logical prob-
lem of opposites and the great debates between monists and dualists,
materialists and spiritualists. This makes up most of the content of stud-
ies of philosophy and histories of philosophy, even though such debates
do not represent philosophy’s primary and basic task, which is better
expressed by ‘Know thyself.’ But that deceptive appearance will also
vanish when we reflect that it is one thing to think logically, another to
construct the theory of logic logically, one thing to think dialectically,
another to have a logical conception of dialectical thought. If this were
not so, the Hegelian solution would already be perfectly clear in the
many philosophers who have, in fact, thought dialectically about real-
ity, or at least in all cases where they have thought about it in this way.
Every problem of philosophy refers to all the others, no doubt, and all
the others can be found implicit in each one. Solutions true or false for
one contain solutions true or false for all. But if it is impossible to keep
histories of particular philosophical problems completely isolated from
one another, it is still true that these problems are distinct, and we must
not put the different parts of the organism together helter-skelter if we
are not to lose any idea of the organism itself.
Attention to this distinction is needed to set exact limits of inquiry into
the historical development of the dialectical doctrine of opposites, and,
subsequently, into the special value and originality of Hegel’s thought.
This is research that may not yet have been done as it should have been,
within the exact limits set for it. Moreover, since students of philosophy,
on the whole, have not been convinced that the theory is important or
correct, the interest required to construct its history, as well as a guiding
criterion, have been lacking. The best that has been put together on the
subject is found in Hegel’s own books, especially his History of Philoso-
phy.23 It will be useful to offer a quick summary here of these scattered
references, with additions and comments as needed.
Was Hegel the first to formulate the logical principle of the dialec-
tic and of development? Or did he have predecessors, and who were
they? Through what forms and approaches did this principle pass before
reaching its final state in Hegel?
The doctrine of dialectic is a product of mature thinking, a result of
long philosophical incubation. We find the difficulties that arise from
the asserting of opposites first noted in ancient Greece, in Zeno of Elea’s
denial of the reality of movement. Movement is the same thing as devel-
opment but in a form more accessible to reflection. Zeno put great
emphasis on these difficulties and resolved the conflict by denying the
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ed, there we find only the need, or rather the awareness of impotence
and evidence of what is lacking.28 The same in Plotinus, for whom all
predicates fall short of the Absolute because each expresses a determina-
tion. The idea of the trinity or triad, already mentioned by Plato, devel-
ops in Proclus.29 This idea, along with the conception of the Absolute
as Spirit, is the great step forward in philosophy implied by Christianity.
When the modern world began, Cusanus was the heir of Neoplatonic
and mystical traditions and the thinker who most vigorously expressed
the human spirit’s need to get away from dualisms and conflicts by ris-
ing to that simplicity where opposites coincide. Cusanus was the first
to notice that this coincidence of opposites is antithetical to the purely
abstract logic of Aristotle, who conceived of contrariety as complete dif-
ference.30 Aristotle did not accept that in unity there could be contraries,
and in each thing he saw the privation of its opposite. Against this view,
Cusanus maintained that unity comes before duality and that opposites
coincide before they divide. But he thinks of the nexus of opposites as a
simple coincidence that humans cannot grasp either by sense or by rea-
son or by intellect, which are the three forms of the human mind. The
nexus remains a mere limit. Of God, where all oppositions converge,
the only knowledge possible is an incomprehensible comprehension, a
learned ignorance.31
With Giordano Bruno, who declares himself a disciple of the ‘divine
Cusanus,’ that idea seems to acquire a more positive function.32 He too
celebrates the coincidence of opposites as the outstanding principle of
a philosophy that has been forgotten and needs to be revived. He pro-
vides an eloquent account of the unification of contraries, of the greatest
circle and the straight line, the acute angle and the obtuse, of heat and
cold, corruption and generation, love and hate, poison and antidote,
spherical and plane, concave and convex, anger and patience, humil-
ity and pride, greed and generosity. Echoing Cusanus, he writes these
memorable words:
Anyone who wants to know nature’s greatest secrets should look at the mini-
ma and maxima of contraries and opposites and think about them. There
is deep magic in knowing how to draw out the contrary after locating the
point of union. This is where poor Aristotle was heading with his notion of
positing privation, conjoined with a particular disposition, as the ancestor,
parent, and mother of form, but he could not reach his goal. He could
not get there because he planted his foot in the genus of opposition and
stayed stuck there in such a way that he did not move down to the species of
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contrariety and could not succeed or even keep his eyes on the target. He
missed it every time, claiming that contraries could not really come togeth-
er in the same subject.
We delight in colour and especially one that includes all colours, not a sin-
gle colour defined in one way or another. We delight in sound but not in a
single sound, rather the inclusive sound that comes from the harmony of
many sounds. We delight in a sensible but especially the sensible that com-
prehends in itself all sensibles, the knowable that comprehends every know-
able, the apprehensible that embraces all that can be apprehended, the
one being that completes all, and, above all, the One that is itself the All.33
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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
ed?38 In Kant this synthesis does not attain its full meaning, its develop-
ment in the triad of the dialectic. Once made public, however, it could
not be long before synthesis revealed all the riches contained in it. A
priori synthesis causes transcendental logic to emerge alongside the old
logic, at first paralleling the latter but in the end forcing its dissolution.
The form of the threefold is also a major issue for Kant, who still treats it
as something extrinsic yet uses it persistently, as if by some presentiment
of its imminent and better destiny.
What philosophy’s mission had to be after Kant now seems clear to us:
developing the a priori synthesis, creating the new philosophical logic,
and solving the problem of opposites by eliminating the dualisms that
Kant left intact or actually made more powerful. In Fichte there is little
more than there was in Kant, but he certainly makes it all simpler and
more transparent. The thing in itself is rejected, while, at the same time,
Fichte’s I still keeps its subjective sense and does not achieve a true unity
of subject and object, so that Fichte does not succeed in justifying nature
against Spirit, and, like Kant, ends up with faith and moral abstractions.
The idea of a new logic works out better because philosophy is conceived
as a theory of science. The form of the threefold acquires a fundamental
position and is characterized as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Schelling takes another step forward when he becomes convinced
that we can philosophize only by using the principle of the identity of
opposites, and he conceives of the Absolute as that identity of opposites.
But for Schelling the Absolute is something neutral between subject and
object with merely quantitative differences. It is not yet subject and Spir-
it. And his gnoseology lacks a logic because for him aesthetic contempla-
tion is the instrument of philosophy.39 This is the failing that Schelling
could never overcome, and the consequences for him were so serious
that they caused what has been called his second phase, the metaphysics
of the irrational.
As we know, Hegel came before the world of philosophy later than
Schelling, his younger contemporary – and we can call Hegel his disci-
ple. But where Schelling’s journey ended was for Hegel part of the voy-
age, and Schelling’s last period, where the decay began, was a juvenile
phase for Hegel. For some time, even Hegel recognized no other instru-
ment for philosophy than aesthetic contemplation: the only intuition
was intellectual intuition, and the only philosophical system was the work
of art. In the first sketch of his system that survives, he too put religion,
not philosophy, at the apex of spiritual development.40
But Hegel’s deeply logical mind eventually led him to see that phi-
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other person robbed him of, nor even where his opponent had gone
wrong.44 Hegel, on the other hand, continued to honour Schelling as
the ‘father of the new philosophy,’ recognizing that glimmer of the dia-
lectic that he had in him and always lucidly describing his strengths and
weaknesses.45
If a point of view shows itself more advanced by including views that
are less advanced, if evidence of a theory’s truth comes from its abil-
ity to provide both justification for truths discovered by others and an
account of their mistakes, such evidence was also not lacking in Hegel’s
theory. Kant, who did not fully understand himself, fell into the hands of
neo-Kantians who turned away from his transcendental logic to a purely
naturalist logic. Schelling, who did not fully understand himself, ended
up ingloriously as the second Schelling. But through Hegel, in that great
mind of his, both ended up with him as their spiritual son – a nobler end
than providing exercises for schoolchildren or living on alone in their
misunderstanding of themselves.
To think dialectically and to think about the logical theory of the dia-
lectic are therefore two distinct mental acts. Nonetheless, it is evident
that the second thinking reinforces the first, giving it consciousness of
itself and clearing from its path the obstacles that arise from false ideas
about the nature of philosophical truth. This is exactly what happens
in Hegel, who was not only the great theorist of that dialectical form of
thinking but also the most effective dialectical thinker to appear on the
stage of history. Treated dialectically by Hegel, the ordinary conception
of reality is modified in several ways and totally changes its appearance.
All dualities, all splits, all gaps – all those gashes and wounds that make
reality appear to be torn, so to speak, by the activity of the abstract intel-
lect – all these are filled, closed, and healed, and the whole of reality
becomes unified, a compact unity (gediegene Einheit).46 The coherence
of the organism reasserts itself; blood and life circulate again within it.
We must notice the disappearance, first of all, of a series of dualisms
that are not truly of opposites and not even of distincts. They are false
opposites and false distincts – terms that can be thought neither as con-
stituent components of the concept as universal nor as its particular
forms, the simple reason being that they do not exist as thus formulated.
Hegel (who, while criticizing them, still now and then mentions this dif-
ference that separates them from the others) gives an excellent defini-
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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
ther the one nor the other of those terms and is not their sum. The real
is the concrete concept that fills the void of the thing in itself and cancels
the distance that used to separate this thing from the phenomenon. It is
the Absolute, which is no longer a parallelism of attributes or a neutral-
ity towards them but a new prominence and significance given to one of
the terms, which, by dint of this new significance, absorbs the other into
itself and merges with it. Substance thus becomes subject; the Absolute
determines itself as Spirit and Idea; and materialism is overcome. Moreo-
ver, reality is no longer something internal in relation to the external. In
keeping with Goethe’s remark, which Hegel accepts and makes his own,
nature has no kernel or shell; it is all one piece.49 The One is not beyond
the many; it is the many. The Spirit is not beyond body; it is the body.
And supernaturalism is overcome.50
This destruction of the falsely distinct and opposite, all of which can be
summed up and represented by the duality of essence and appearance,
is accompanied by the properly dialectical treatment (positive dialectic)
of true opposites, which can all be represented and summarized in the
duality and antithesis of being and non-being. The dualism is based on
real opposition because it would never enter anyone’s mind to deny the
reality of the evil, the false, the ugly, the irrational, and death, along with
the antithesis between all these terms and the good, the true, the beauti-
ful, the rational, and life. Nor does Hegel deny it. Because of his logi-
cal theory, however, which turns the thinking of opposites into the very
conception of reality as development, he cannot treat the negative term,
the side of not-being, as something that stands confronting the other
and detached from it. If there were no negative term, there would be no
development. Reality, and the positive term along with it, would go away.
The negative is the mainspring of development; opposition is the very
soul of the real. The lack of any contact with error is not thinking and
is not truth but is really the absence of thinking and therefore of truth.
Innocence is a feature not of acting but of not acting. Whoever makes
anything makes mistakes. Whoever does anything comes to grips with
evil. True happiness – human or rather manly happiness – is not bliss
without feeling any pain, the bliss approximated only by stupidity and
foolishness. Conditions for bliss of this kind do not exist in the history
of the world, which (says Hegel) ‘shows us blank pages’ where conflict
is lacking.51
If this is true (as doubtless it is, in keeping with deep and widespread
human opinion expressed in the many aphorisms which at times seem
to be Hegel’s phrases), the connection between the ideal and the real,
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between the rational and the real, cannot be understood as those words
are meant in the philosophy of the schools: namely, as conflict between
a rational that is not real and a real that is not rational. ‘What is real is
rational, and what is rational is real.’52 Idea and fact are the same. In the
domain of scientific thought, for example, what do we call ‘rational’?
Thinking itself. An irrational thought is not thought; as thought, it is
unreal. What do we call rational in the domain of products of art? The
work of art itself. An effect of art, if it is ugly, is not an effect of art. It is
certainly not a reality of art that then acquires the feature of ugliness. It
is artistic unreality. What is called ‘irrational,’ then, is the unreal, and
cannot be considered a species or class of real objects. The unreal also
has its reality, no doubt, but this is the reality of unreality – the reality of
non-being in the dialectical triad, the reality of the nothing that is not
real but is the goad of the real, the mainspring of development.
Standing on the aforesaid teaching that identifies the rational and the
real, those who have spoken of an optimism in Hegel’s conception of
reality and life have grossly misunderstood him. Hegel eliminates nei-
ther the evil nor the ugly nor the false nor the useless. Nothing would
be more alien to his dramatic, and, in a certain sense, tragic conception
of reality. He wants instead to understand the function of evil and error.
And to understand this function is certainly not to deny it as evil and
error but rather to affirm it as such, not closing one’s eyes to the sad
spectacle or distorting it with childish teleological justifications (of exter-
nal finality), as used to be done in the eighteenth century (as Bernardin
de St Pierre used do, for example).53 But the correct point at the bottom
of this claim for Hegel’s supposed optimism is that he cannot be called
pessimistic either, because pessimism is the negation of the positive term
in the dyad of opposites, as optimism is the negation of the negative. And
besides, have there ever been consistent pessimists or optimists, or can
there ever be? No more than there have been consistent monists and
dualists. Every optimist always has a pessimistic side, while every pessimist
proposes a procedure for liberation from evil and error, meaning that he
also has his optimist side.
Good and evil are opposite and correlative terms; asserting one does
not deny the other.54 Hegel, who denies both, preserves both in the dia-
lectical synthesis. He truly stands on high, beyond pessimism and beyond
optimism, on that philosophical Olympus where there is no weeping and
no laughing because laughter and weeping have become objects before
the Spirit, and their agitation is overcome in the serenity of thinking.
The fact – reality – is always rational and ideal, always truth, always wis-
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dom and moral goodness. The proviso is that the fact be truly fact, the
reality truly reality. What is illogical, stupid, ugly, shameful, or fanciful is
not a fact but the absence of the fact, the void, non-being – at most it is
the need to be true, the goad to reality, certainly not reality. Hegel never
dreamt of accepting what is mistaken and distorted and justifying it as
fact. Is this perhaps a justification for treating it, as he treats it, as some-
thing unreal and vacuous? According to the old saying, nature abhors
a vacuum. But surely the one that abhors the vacuum is the human
because the vacuum is the death of his activity, of his being human.
But if the justification of evil is not to be found in Hegel’s philosophy,
which justifies only the function of evil, it is nonetheless true that Hegel
warned against the glibness and superficiality that typically despairs of
what actually was and is as irrational, even though, precisely because of
its actuality, it cannot be considered irrational. Hegel is the great enemy
of life’s discontents, of sensitive souls, perpetual declaimers, and agita-
tors in the name of reason and virtue, and (to be historically specific
and give an example) the enemy of the Faustian attitude that proclaims
theory to be grey and the tree of life green, rebelling against the laws of
custom and existence, scorning truth and science, and, instead of being
possessed by the heavenly Spirit, falling into the power of the earthly.
Hegel is the enemy of the Encyclopedic humanitarianism and Jacobin-
ism that sets its own delicate heart above hard reality, seeing tyrannies
everywhere, and swindles by despots and priests. He is the enemy of Kan-
tian abstraction, of a duty that keeps itself beyond human feeling.
Hegel hates that virtue which is always in conflict with the world’s move-
ment, which digs up stones to collide with, which never knows exactly
what it wants, but, yes, has a big brain – swollen big – and, if it is seriously
involved with anything, it is to admire itself for its own incomparable
and affecting perfection. Hegel hates the Sollen, the Ought-to-be, the
impotence of the ideal that always ought to be and is not, never finding
any reality adequate since all reality is adequate to the ideal instead. The
destiny of this Ought-to-be is to become tedious, as all the finest words
(Justice, Virtue, Morality, Liberty, and so on) become tedious when they
remain mere words, ringing out thunderously and sterile where others
act and do not fear to stain the purity of the Idea by betraying it in the
deed.
In the conflict between this Ought-to-be, this vainglorious virtue, and
the movement of the world, the world’s movement always wins. Here is
the reason.
Either the movement of the world does not change, and the claims
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of virtue are revealed to be arbitrary and absurd, meaning that they are
not really virtuous; they remain, at best, good intentions, excellent inten-
tions, and yet ‘the laurels of good intentions are dry leaves that have
never turned green.’55 Or else virtue attains its end and becomes part
of the world’s movement, in which case it is certainly not the movement
of the world that perishes but virtue – virtue detached from the deed,
unless it might wish to keep on living in order to hold a grudge against
its ideal, because it is guilty of becoming real! The illusion arises from
the conflict, which is certainly real, but certainly not a conflict of the
individual with the world – rather a conflict of the world with itself, the
world that makes itself. ‘Everyone wants to be better than his own world,
and believes himself to be so; but whoever is better only shows that his
own world is better than other worlds.’56
So what is this aversion for fact felt by messengers of the Ideal, felt
by devotees of the universal against individuality? Individuality is noth-
ing but the vehicle of universality, its actualization. Nothing can be real-
ized unless it becomes a human passion: nothing great is done without
passion.57 And passion is human activity directed to particular interests
and purposes. Particular interest is so much the vehicle of the universal
that people realize the universal by pursuing their own purposes. They
make a slave of another person, for example, and in each of them, out
of the conflict between slave and master, arises the true idea of liberty
and humanity. With their activity they overcome their conscious inten-
tions and follow immanent intentions, intentions of reason, which takes
advantage of them: this is the ‘cunning of reason’ (die List der Vernunft).58
We must not understand this in a transcendental way. The ‘cunning of
reason’ is the fanciful phrase that denotes the rationality of everything
that humans actually do (any human act at all), with or without reflec-
tive consciousness. In this way, the artist creates the work of art but gives
no account of the labour completed. Although no account is given, the
artist’s labour is not therefore irrational, obedient as it is to the supreme
rationality of genius.
Thus, the good and naively heroic soul believes that it simply follows the
impulse of its own individual feeling. It has no consciousness of its action,
such as the observer and the historian have, but this makes it no less good
or heroic. Great men make their individual passion into their particular
interest, actually willing reason – what is of substance in the needs of their
time and people. They are the ‘business agents’ of the World Spirit.59 And,
just for this reason, those who judge them superficially end up perceiving
only shabby motives in them. They stop at the individual side of their activ-
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ity, as needful as it is: for the saying is correct, that ‘no one is a hero to his
valet.’ As Hegel observes (and Goethe enjoys repeating the witty phrase),
it works out this way not because the great man is not a great man, but
because the valet is a valet.60 For the same reason, what great men ordinar-
ily get from their contemporaries is not praise and thanks, nor do they
find satisfaction in the public opinion of posterity. What they get is not
praise but immortal glory, by living in the Spirit of the very people who
fight them and yet are completely full of them.
This Hegelian way of looking at life, expressed in terms of current
politics, has been judged to belong to the conservative spirit. It is called
this because, just as Rousseau was the philosopher of the French revolu-
tion, Hegel likewise was the philosopher of the Restoration – in particu-
lar, the Prussian Restoration – the philosopher of the governing Privy
Council and the ruling state bureaucracy.61 Without starting to investi-
gate whether there is more or less factual truth in these claims, however,
it is useful to observe that one must not confuse this Hegel, the historical
individual, who acted in certain given circumstances related to social and
political problems of his time and people – the Hegel who is within the
competence of the biographer and the political historian – with Hegel
the philosopher, who alone is of concern to the historian of philosophy.
If one can extract a political attitude from this and define it historically,
it shows that this is not pure philosophical truth. Philosophy (as Hegel
again observes) should not be mixed with things that do not concern it.
Plato therefore might well spare himself the trouble of giving advice to
nurses on how to hold babies in their arms, and Fichte too might forbear
‘designing’ the model of a police passport so that, according to him, it
ought to be supplied with a picture of the bearer and not just his distin-
guishing features.62
So philosophical was Hegel’s conception of life that conservatism,
revolution, and reaction each finds its justification in it, depending on
events. On this point both Engels the socialist and Treitschke the con-
servative historian are in agreement.63 Both recognize that the formula
identifying the rational with the real could be invoked, at one time or
another, by all political parties and points of view, which thus differ not at
all in the formula that they share but in deciding what is the real rational
and what is irrational and unreal. Every time a political party has readied
itself for war against some institution or social class, it has declared the
enemy irrational, not endowed with real, solid existence, and this has
put the party in line with Hegelian philosophy!
In the revolutions of the nineteenth century, and especially in 1848,
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great works of history that we owe to Hegel’s influence have always been
emphasized and made objects of admiration: histories of religions, of
languages, of literature, of law, of economics, and of philosophy. A too
simple conception of the matter, however, has caused Hegel’s effect on
the study of history to be treated almost as an accident, owing simply to
the personality of the master, who pursued historical knowledge ardently
and was firmly in command of it. Moreover, this effect seemed to be a
strict consequence neither of the greatly contested dialectical principle
that resolved the opposites and false opposites nor of Hegelian logic in
its most characteristic form. While the promotion of historical studies
was accepted as a great benefit, its true cause was rejected: while the
consequence was accepted, its premise was denied – the sole premise on
which it could be and was based.
The sacred character that history acquires is one aspect of the feature
of immanence that belongs to Hegelian thought, one aspect of its denial
of all transcendence. It was a mistake, certainly, to blame or praise it for
naturalism and materialism. If a philosophy, a philosophy of activity, a
philosophy whose principle is the Spirit and the Idea, uncovers the gen-
esis of those illusions, how could it ever be naturalist or materialist? But if
these words of blame or praise were meant to underline an anti-religious
character, there was something correct in the observation. Hegel’s is a
philosophy (the only philosophy, I would say) that is radically irreligious
because it is not content to set itself against religion or set itself to one
side; it absorbs religion within itself and takes its place. Also, and for
the same reason but from a different perspective, Hegel’s can be called
the only supremely religious philosophy because its aim is to satisfy the
need for religion, which is the highest human need, in a rational way.
It leaves nothing outside of reason, nothing left over: ‘The questions to
which philosophy does not respond have their answer in the fact that
they should not be asked.’69
In the logical doctrine of this philosophy, then, and in the actual think-
ing that conforms to it, lies the unbeatable strength, unexhausted fertil-
ity, and perpetual youthfulness of Hegelian philosophy – the strength,
fertility, and youthfulness that spring back all the livelier in our day, with
the new exuberance of neurotic mysticism and insincere religiosity in
which we participate; with the new anti-historical barbarism presented to
us by positivism; and with the new Jacobinism that often results from this.
Whoever is conscious of human dignity, the dignity of thinking, cannot
be satisfied with any solution to these conflicts and dualisms other than
the dialectical solution, achieved by the genius of Hegel.
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In this respect, the philosopher who can be set alongside Hegel better
than any other is Giambattista Vico. I have already mentioned him as a
precursor of the concrete theory of logic, working like Hegel at aesthet-
ics, a pre-Romantic where Hegel was a Romantic, and resembling Hegel
more closely in his actual dialectical thinking.70 Vico’s attitude to reli-
gion is certainly less radical than Hegel’s. Although from a biographical
point of view Hegel was a rather dubious Christian and not very explicit
in clarifying his position towards the Church, Vico, seen through his
biography, was a completely sincere Catholic who had no doubts. All
of Vico’s thinking, however, is not only anti-Catholic but anti-religious.
The reason is his naturalist explanation for the formation of myths and
religions. And if his refusal to use this principle when facing Hebrew
history and religion was subjectively the timidity of a believer, objectively
it acquires the value of unconscious irony, like Machiavelli’s knowing
irony, when he refused to investigate how states so badly governed by the
Pope might be maintained, because (he said) ‘they are ruled by higher
causes, where the human mind cannot reach.’71
Vico shows that the true is convertible with the made, and that only
the person who has made a thing can really understand it. He therefore
credits humans with full understanding of the human world, because it
is their product, and he refers understanding of the remaining natural
world to God because He only is the one who made it and has knowl-
edge of it. The latter is also a limitation that unfortunately creates an
obstacle to the revolutionary principle announced by Vico, which, once
established for the human world, should necessarily extend to the whole
of reality. So deeply irreligious was the whole gnoseology of this devout
Catholic that, immediately after his death, stories were told that he had
to hide part of his thinking in his books because of restrictions received
from churchmen. In Vico rationalists saw their master, while zealous
Catholics criticized him as the first source of the whole anti-religious
movement of the period after his own time.72
But when we set this religious issue aside, the similarities between Vico
and Hegel are much more obvious. Just as Hegel opposed the anti-his-
toricism of Enlightenment encyclopedists and fought against it, so Vico
opposed the anti-historicism of Descartes and his school. He showed that
philosophers and philologists both had missed half the point, the former
because they did not certify their reasons with the authority of philol-
ogists, the latter because they did not take the trouble to verify their
authority with the reasons of philosophers. As Hegel opposed utopians,
preachers of abstraction, and advocates of sentiment and enjoyment, so
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Vico rejected Stoics and Epicureans alike, accepting only those whom he
called ‘political philosophers.’73 Vico scorned those sages who forgot the
struggles and pains of real life and dictated ‘guides for living that were
as impossible or dangerous for the human condition as it was to regulate
the duties of life by the pleasure of the senses,’ people who established
laws and founded republics ‘resting in the shade,’ states that ‘existed
nowhere but in the minds of the learned.’74 He certainly understood that
‘governments must conform to the nature of the people governed,’ and
that ‘native customs, especially those of natural liberty, do not change all
at once but by degree and over a long time.’75
No less than Hegel, Vico had the concept of the cunning of reason,
and he called it Divine Providence, ‘which from the passions of people
entirely concerned with what is useful to them privately, passions that
would cause them to live like wild animals in the wilderness, has made
the civil orders by which they live in human society.’76 What difference
does it make that people are not conscious of their doing this? The fact is
not thereby less rational. ‘Homo non intelligendo fit omnia … because, when
he understands, man explains his intention and understands things, but,
when he does not understand, he makes these things out of himself and
then he becomes what he turns himself into.’77
‘And should we not say,’ Vico exclaims elsewhere,
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Nations wish to destroy themselves, and they make the journeys into the wil-
derness that save them from this, the wilderness from which they rise again,
like the Phoenix. What made all this happen, since it was with intelligence
that people acted as they did, was Mind; since they acted by choice, it was
not Fate; since they acted with constancy, it was not Accident. By acting in
this way, they always get to the same results.78
The concepts – often the same metaphors, images and turns of phrase
– are Hegel’s, which is all the more remarkable in that the German phi-
losopher (it least in the period when he was thinking his philosophy
through and writing The Phenomenology of Spirit) seems not to have known
the other phenomenology that had been thought through a century ear-
lier in Naples under the title of the New Science. It almost seems that the
soul of the Italian Catholic philosopher had migrated into the German
to reappear, more mature and conscious, a century later.
Now how did it ever happen that this philosophical thinking, so deeply
grounded in logic, so rich in irresistible truth, so harmonized and in
sympathy with the concrete, with passion, with imagination and history,
how did it happen that this thinking seemed instead to be, and hence
has been condemned as, abstract, intellectualist, full of caprices and
devices, in contradiction to history, nature, and poetry – in short, actu-
ally the opposite of what it wanted to be?
How can one explain the violent reaction against it – a successful and
decisive reaction, evidently – since explaining all of this only by adven-
titious motives, by ignorance and lack of intelligence, would be not
thoughtful (and not very Hegelian)? And why, on the other hand, was
this philosophical thinking ever invoked to support trends of the most
different kind, precisely those that Hegel had meant to combat and over-
come – materialism and theism? Why is it that I, for example (allow me
a personal recollection that may not involve a merely personal issue), I
who am writing and have just now interpreted Hegel’s doctrine of the
synthesis of opposites and the resulting conception of reality as both one
and various, commenting on this in such a strong spirit of agreement,
why, during several years of my intellectual life, did I feel strong revul-
sion for Hegel’s system, especially as presented in the Encyclopedia, with
its three-part division of logic, philosophy of nature, and philosophy of
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began its journey, the only path suited to the principle from which it
moved, the concrete universal. The theory of levels runs through all his
books, although there is no place where he argues and explains it fully
and explicitly.
In this theory he also had forerunners whom we should investigate.
Here too the philosopher perhaps closest to him is Vico, who never made
distinctions about the Spirit, languages, governments, laws, customs, and
religions except as a sequence of levels. Spirit is ‘sense,’ ‘imagination,’
and ‘mind’; languages are ‘divine mental language,’ ‘heroic’ language,
and the language of ‘articulate speech’; governments are ‘theocratic,’
‘aristocratic,’ and ‘democratic’; laws are ‘divine’ law established by the
gods, ‘heroic’ established by force, and ‘human’ established by fully
developed human reason; and so on. Therefore Vico also conceived of
philosophy not as a series of separate compartments but as ‘ideal eternal
history, whereupon particular histories run their course in time.’85
Though Hegel may not have known Vico, there were other influences
pushing him towards the solution at which he always aimed. Despite the
poverty of its categories and assumptions, even the sensism of the eight-
eenth century, especially Condillac’s doctrine, certainly seemed valuable
to him inasmuch as it included the attempt to make intelligible, by dem-
onstrating their genesis, the variety of activities in the Spirit’s unity.86
He criticizes Kant, who had simply enumerated faculties and categories
by making tables, and follows this with high praise for Fichte, who had
confirmed the need for the ‘deduction’ of the categories. But Hegel’s
real and authentic precedent was Schelling’s system of identity, with its
method of potentializing whereby reality developed as a series of poten-
cies or levels.87 ‘The subject-object,’ – in his retort to Hegel, Schelling
himself recollected his own youthful notion in this way – ‘in virtue of
its nature, objectifies itself, but it returns victorious from all objectivity
and shows itself at a higher power of subjectivity every time until, having
exhausted all its virtuality, it appears as subject, triumphant over all.’88
What does the theory of levels mean? What are its terms? How do they
relate? What is the difference between this theory and that of opposites
in regard to terms and relations? In the theory of levels, every concept –
let it be concept a – is distinct and at the same time united with concept
b at the next higher level. Hence, even though a is posited without b, b
cannot be posited without a.
Choosing for the relation of two concepts an example that I have stud-
ied at length elsewhere, that of art and philosophy (or, as others like to
put it, poetry and prose, language and logic, intuition and concept, and
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so on), one sees how an impenetrable enigma and a headache for empir-
ical and classificatory logic is easily resolved in speculative logic thanks
to the theory of levels.89 It is not possible to posit art and philosophy as
two distinct and coordinate species of one genus – cognitive form, for
example – to which both are subordinate in such a way that the presence
of one excludes the other, as happens with parts of the same order. Proof
of this are the many distinctions that have been given, and continue to
be given, between poetry and prose, all of them completely empty, based
on arbitrary features.
But the knot is untied when the relation is understood as one of dis-
tinction and unity together. Poetry can exist without prose, but does
not exclude it, while prose can never exist without poetry. Art does not
exclude philosophy, but philosophy absolutely includes art. In fact, no
philosophy exists except in the words, images, metaphors, figures of
speech, and symbols that are its artistic side. So real and indispensable
are they that, where they are absent, philosophy itself would be absent
since philosophy unexpressed is not conceivable. A person thinks by
speaking. The same demonstration can be made by taking other dyads
of philosophical concepts: the passage from law to morality, for example,
or the passage from perceptual consciousness to nomothetic conscious-
ness. The real, which is one, divides within itself, grows upon itself, if we
talk like Aristotle, or, if we talk like Vico, reality runs the course of its
ideal history.90 At the final level, which combines all prior levels in itself,
reality joins up with itself, entirely developed or wholly unfolded.
Should we move now from the relation between levels a and b (art and
philosophy in the example chosen) to the relation between opposites
in the synthesis, a, b, and g (being, non-being, and becoming in the
example), we will be able to see the logical difference between the two
relations: a and b are two concepts, the second of which would be arbi-
trary and abstract without the first, although, in its nexus with the first,
the second is as real and concrete as the first; a and b apart from g, by
contrast, are not two concepts but two abstractions: the only concrete
concept is g, becoming.
If we apply arithmetic symbols to each nexus, in the first we have a
dyad, in the second a unity – or, if we prefer, a triad that is a triunity. If
we want to say that the synthesis of opposites and the nexus of levels are
both (objective) dialectic, we must then not lose sight of the fact that one
dialectic works differently than the other. If our wish is to apply Hege-
lian designations of moments and overcoming – abolishing and preserving at
the same time – to one nexus as well as the other, we will need to notice
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of Spirit and is then set forth systematically in the great Science of Logic
(1812−1816) and in the small Logic of the Encyclopedia (1817, 1827,
1830).98 The second result determined the character of Hegel’s aesthet-
ics and gave rise to the two philosophical sciences of history and nature.
What these three sciences are can be seen mainly in the Encyclopedia and
in the posthumously published courses of lectures.
To start with the first point, when opposites and distincts are con-
fused, abstract moments of the concept (a synthesis of opposites, in
its concreteness and truth) are naturally treated as taking on the same
functions that lower distinct concepts have in relation to the higher. In
relation to becoming, for example, being and nothing are two abstrac-
tions, but by analogy they become two levels, like levels in a series of
distincts – intuition, thinking, and practical activity, for example, where
the two concepts of intuition and thinking have this relation to the third
level of practical activity. But when each of those two abstractions, being
and nothing, is taken separately by itself, what are they except two falsi-
ties or mistakes?
According to Hegel, in fact, the first corresponds to the view of the
Eleatics or similar philosophical movements that treat the Absolute sim-
ply as being and God as nothing other than the whole of all reality, the
Most Real. The second abstraction corresponds to the Buddhist view that
treats Nothing as the foundation of things, as the true Absolute. These
are two opposing philosophical mistakes, therefore, and yet they are also
alike since both profess to think of supreme reality as the indeterminate
and abstract. And what are intuition and thinking, on the other hand, if
not two truths? The first term includes all of mankind’s imaginative activ-
ity, and, in its theoretical guise, this gives rise to a particular philosophi-
cal science, to aesthetics. The second stands at the head of all human
scientific activity, and, in its theoretical guise, this gives rise to the science
of science, to logic. These two are not unreal abstractions, then, but two
real and concrete concepts.
On that assumption, the result is clear. By confusing the dialectic of
opposites with the nexus of distincts, by making the opposites, taken
abstractly, fulfill the same functions as distinct concepts, those mistakes
are turned into truths – particular truths, truths of lower levels of the
Spirit, but still functions or categories that are needed. And when these
mistakes have been baptized as truths of a certain type, there is no longer
any impediment to treating all mistakes – error in general – as special
cases of truth. In that way, the phenomenology of error takes on the
appearance of an ideal history of truth. This baptism, this transfigura-
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tion, has appeared, and to many will still appear, as the recognition of a
deep and important truth. Do we not often speak, even in ordinary lan-
guage, of productive mistakes, of mistakes that open the way to truth? Do
we not say that the human race has learned more from various mistakes
than from many truths?
The Eleatics were wrong to conceive of the Absolute simply as being,
but that mistake of theirs also confirms a completely solid, yet partial,
truth: that even the Absolute is being. Descartes and Spinoza were wrong
to claim a parallelism of spirit and body, of thought and extension. But if,
by means of that mistake, the distinction between the two terms had not
been fixed and emphasized, how would it have been possible to conceive
of their concrete unity? Kant was mistaken in presenting the antinomies
as insoluble, but that led him to recognize the need for the antinomies,
the bases of the dialectic. Schelling was mistaken in conceiving of the
Absolute as mere identity, but that mistake of his was the bridge needed
to pass over to a conception of the Absolute as unity in opposition and
distinction. Without the Platonic transcendence of ideas, how would the
merely logical concept of Socrates have changed into the Aristotelian
composite? Without Hume’s sceptical denial, how would Kant’s synthetic
a priori ever have emerged?
Whoever claims that truth is born without error, claims there is a child
without a father. Whoever despises error, despises truth itself, which is
incomprehensible without those previous mistakes, which therefore per-
sist as eternal aspects of truth.
Here too, however, my advice is to analyse the real issue and not let
ourselves be misled by metaphors. If there is something in a mistake that
gives rise to its being designated a productive mistake, a fertile mistake,
and the like, then it is a not a mistake, but a truth. Dealing with some
doctrine globally, we declare it to be mistaken, but when we deal with it
in more detail, it comes apart into a series of assertions of which some
are true and others false. Productivity and fertility lie in the true claims,
surely not in the false, which cannot even be called assertions.
In the Eleatic doctrine, then, the assertion that the Absolute is being is
true, but the assertion that it is only being is false. Even in the supreme
realization of its truth, that ‘the Absolute is the Spirit,’ the Absolute is
being, even though it is no longer mere being.99 Likewise, the distinc-
tion between spirit and body and between thought and extension in the
Cartesian and Spinozan parallelism is correct, at least in a certain sense,
but how this distinction is produced remains to be explained. The false
explanation is the hasty metaphysical theorizing that explains those two
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The problem of Hegel’s Logic (as it follows from the main body of that
book) is to examine the various definitions of the Absolute, to make a
critique of all forms of philosophy in order to demonstrate, by way of
their difficulties and contradictions, the truth of that philosophy which
treats the Absolute as Spirit or Idea. At the same time, this critique shows
that aspects of truth revealed by various philosophies find their justifica-
tion in this position, and that this philosophy is therefore the product of
all the efforts of human thought, just as it was what those efforts aspired
to. In the Logic, then, all these pass before us, indicated sometimes by
name, sometimes by allusions and references: Oriental emanationism,
Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Eleaticism, Heracliteanism, Democritean
atomism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, the doctrines of pantheists, scep-
tics, and Gnostics, of Christianity, St Anselm, and scholasticism, and then
the doctrines of Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume, Kant,
Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Herder, and other philosophical points of view.
In the words of an English writer, who means something rather differ-
ent from what I intend, this is the ‘pathology of thinking.’100 This is the
polemic through which every philosophy, disagreeing to some extent
with other philosophies and hostile to them, asserts and maintains its
life against them.
This polemic, if we have a correct view of it, can proceed in two dif-
ferent ways, one of which assumes the other as its basis. The various
philosophies with their partially mistaken viewpoints can be studied in
their individuality, in the particular form adopted by them in different
thinkers at different times, in chronological order: the result is the his-
tory of philosophy, which, like any real history, is history and critique
at the same time. Or else the objects of study are the general possibili-
ties of philosophical error and the persistent sources of those mistakes
that arise from confusing philosophy with various other activities of the
human spirit.101 In the latter case, the polemic against error is philoso-
phy itself, the whole system, since the reasons behind mistakes become
clear only when the system as a whole has been developed. While for rea-
sons of presentation a polemic against error can be located sometimes at
the beginning, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end of a
philosophical theory, the polemic is logically inseparable from the phi-
losophy itself: as Bacon said, just as the straight line measures both itself
and the curve, so is ‘verum index sui et falsi.’102 Or, as we commonly say,
every assertion is at the same time a negation. This critique, which is the
system as a whole, is then the real basis of the other critique that is the
history of philosophy.
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door, in fact. Take the palace by assault from all sides. Only in that way
will you get inside, penetrating to the sanctuary of the Goddess. And it
may be that by doing so you will see the bright face of the Goddess with
a kindly smile, gazing at the saintly simplicity of her many worshipers.114
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form of the Spirit (except the final and supreme form) is only a pro-
visional and contradictory way of grasping the Absolute; therefore, he
could not find that primal and natural theoretical form which is the lyric
poetry or music of the Spirit, the form in which there is nothing philo-
sophically contradictory because the philosophical problem simply does
not arise there, where only the condition of that problem is present. This
is the territory of intuition, of pure fantasy, of language in its essential
character as picture, music, or song – the true territory of art.
When Hegel starts his meditation on the phases of the Spirit, he finds
himself already at the point where he has left that territory behind with-
out realizing that he has passed beyond it. The Phenomenology takes its
start from the certainty of the senses, the simplest form of all for Hegel,
the form in which, he says, our stance towards reality is direct or recep-
tive, without changing anything in reality and holding off on any employ-
ment of concepts. It is not hard for Hegel to show that contemplation of
this kind, which seems the richest and truest, is actually the poorest and
most abstract. The thing exists now, and a moment later it is no more.
This thing is here, and right away there is something else here. The
only thing left is the abstract this, here, now; the rest disappears. But the
certainty of the senses of which Hegel speaks is not the first theoretical
form. It is not genuine sensible certainty, a‡sqhsij pure and simple.115 It
is not, as Hegel believes, direct cognition. It is already mixed with intel-
lectual reflection. It already contains the question about what is truly
real. The first reflection on sensible cognition has been substituted for
genuine certainty of the senses (which exists in aesthetic contemplation,
where there is no subject/object distinction, no comparing one thing
with another, no placement in the spatio-temporal series), and naturally
this first reflection seems imperfect and must be overcome.
Hegel says many times that ‘the subject without predicate is what is,
in the phenomenon, the thing without property, the thing-in-itself, a
base that is empty and undetermined. It is the concept in itself, which
acquires difference and determination only by way of the predicate.’116
But art is precisely subject-without-predicate, and it is entirely different
from the nullity and emptiness of the thing-in-itself and the thing-with-
out-property. Art is intuition and there are no intellectual referents. It is
the tremor that a poem communicates to us, through which the vision
of a reality opens to us. We can never put it in intellectual terms, and we
possess it only by singing or reciting it.
Since Hegel does not reach the territory of aesthetic activity and does
not get from there to the truly primordial theoretical form, he does not
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the relation that he establishes among those three forms, the distinctive
character that he assigns to art vis-à-vis religion and philosophy. Unlike
others, Hegel could not make aesthetic activity a complement of philo-
sophical activity, something that has its own way of solving problems left
unsolved by philosophy – much less make it an activity higher than phi-
losophy. The logic that he took for granted was bound to lead him to
the usual dialectical solution, applied to distinct concepts: artistic activ-
ity is distinct from philosophy only by being incomplete, only because it
grasps the Absolute in a direct and sensible form, whereas philosophy
grasps it in the pure element of thought. Logically this means that art is
not at all distinct, and that, for Hegel, it is basically reduced to a philo-
sophical mistake, to bad philosophy. Philosophy, by tackling the same
problem addressed by that other effort and handling it in a complete
way, is the true art.
That this is what Hegel really thinks is confirmed by the fact that he
does not repudiate the ultimate consequence of this theory: when phi-
losophy is fully developed, art must disappear because it is superfluous.
Art must die; indeed, it is quite dead already. It may be a mistake, but
the mistake is not necessary and eternal. The story of art as told by Hegel
aims to show the gradual dissolution of the form of art which, in modern
times, is no longer part of our true and paramount interest. It is the past
or a survival of the past. This grandiose paradox sheds light on Hegel’s
aesthetic mistake in all its contours. Better than any other example, per-
haps, it clarifies the mistake in his actual logical assumption. Some have
said in Hegel’s defence that the death of art that he describes is that
eternal dying which is an eternal rebirth, which we see in the human
spirit whenever it passes from poetry to philosophy, rising from intuition
to the universal as the world of intuitions fades before our eyes. Against
this mitigating interpretation, however, stands the fact that Hegel speaks
of a death of art that is definitely not a perpetual renewal but an event
that really happens and has happened – a death of art in the world of his-
tory. Hence, this is entirely in keeping with his treating levels of reality as
if they were a series of opposites, crudely abstracted and set apart. Once
he had applied dialectic in this way, Hegel had no choice: either he had
to suppress art by means of that grandiose paradox or preserve it by a no
less grandiose inconsistency.
This explains why it is not wrong to perceive Hegel’s system (whose
principle of the concrete concept, as well as the dialectic annexed to
it, are plainly aesthetic in their inspiration) as a cold intellectualism,
incompatible with artistic consciousness. And the negation of art makes
itself felt when the system does no good for all those philosophical prob-
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lems where the concept of art comes in as a given that is more strictly
necessary.
Hegel is usually considered an enemy of formal Aristotelian logic. To
be more precise, however, one should say that he was the enemy of clas-
sificatory and naturalist logic, or, better yet, that he limited himself to
revealing that classificatory and naturalist logic is not enough to make
the logic of philosophy work. I have already recognized his achievement
in doing this, which was all that he could have meant by stating polemi-
cally that ‘Aristotle is the author of the intellectual logic [of the abstract
intellect] whose forms deal only with the relation that finite things have
to one another, so that the truth cannot be conceived in these forms.’121
But the method of classifying is not what is truly characteristic of the
logic of Aristotle and the schools. The tendency to classify is also found
in Baconian or inductive logic. The characteristic of Aristotelian logic
is its syllogistic, or rather its verbalism – the confusion between logical
thinking and speech that it comes up against, and the pretense of estab-
lishing logical forms by maintaining verbal forms.
Hegel did not and could not criticize this mistake because he lacked
the very tool of criticism that only a good philosophy of language can
provide. He tries to distinguish between a proposition and a logical
judgment, of course, but he does not manage to produce good reasons
for this distinction. He says that a proposition (‘It’s hot,’ for example)
becomes a judgment only when it responds to the doubt that can arise
about the truth of the claim. The precise distinction was not accessible
to him, the one that consists in recognizing that the simple proposition
is just speech itself, language as a pure aesthetic act, exempt from logic,
even though it is a vehicle that logical thought needs. As a result, he
not only preserves the three-part division of concept, logical judgment,
and syllogism; he also does his best to distinguish and define new cat-
egories of judgments and syllogisms. Traces of old treatises on formalist
logic, including the division between a theory of elementary forms and
a theory of methods, definition, division, demonstration, and proof, are
preserved everywhere in his logic.122
One might say that Hegel’s failure to understand the autonomy of art
also prevented him from understanding the autonomy of history (of his-
toriography).123 But the truth is that Hegel could not do justice to this
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second function for the same reason he could not do so for the first:
namely, because of the aforesaid metamorphosis that he brought about,
turning particular concepts into philosophical mistakes. From a logical
point of view, the two mistakes have the same source. Psychologically, it
is likely that the first smoothed the way for the second, as it is also psy-
chologically likely that Hegel’s notion of religion contributed something
to producing the first mistake. Thinking of religion as an imaginary and
more or less incomplete form of philosophy was bound to lead him to
assign art an analogous position in relation to philosophy.
Unlike art, history assumes philosophical thinking as its condition.
But like art, history has its proper content in the intuitive component.
History therefore is always narrative, never theory and system, although
it has theory and system at its foundation. This is why historians train
themselves, on the one hand, to study documents scrupulously, and,
on the other, to form clear ideas about reality and life, especially those
aspects of life that they want to treat historically. This is why it has seemed
that history can do no less than science and yet always remains a work
of art.124
If all works of history are reduced to their simplest expression, which
is the historical judgment or proposition asserting that ‘something hap-
pened’ (Caesar was killed, for example, or Alaric destroyed Rome, Dante
wrote the Comedy, and so on), one sees by analysing these statements that
each is made up of intuitive components functioning as subjects and
logical components functioning as predicates. The first will be Caesar,
Rome, Dante, the Comedy, and so on, and the second will be the concepts
of killing, destroying, artistic composition, and other such things. The
result of the gnoseology of history that this suggests is that any progress
in philosophical thinking translates into progress in historical knowl-
edge.125 We certainly get a much more precise understanding of the his-
torical facts about Dante’s producing his poem, for example, once we
have a better sense of what poetry and artistic creation are. But another
result is a foolish pretense: wishing to reduce those historical assertions
to philosophical assertions by absorbing the fact, in its wholeness and
integrity, into a mere condition of the fact.126
History can give rise to conceptual science of an empirical kind, as
when we pass from history to a sociology that proceeds by types and
classes. But for this very reason, history is not absorbed into that concep-
tual science, of which it continues to be the basis and presupposition.
Conversely, history can give rise to a philosophy whenever we pass from
the historical treatment of the particular to theoretical issues that lie at
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the base of that treatment. But for this very reason, it is not absorbed
into that philosophy, which is its basis and presupposition. A philosophy
of history, understood not as a return to that pure philosophy but as a
history at the second level – as a history that is philosophy while con-
tinuing to be history, a system while continuing to be an application of
the system, universal and logical while dealing with the individual and
intuitive – is a contradiction in terms.127 What does it mean to posit this
notion of a philosophy of history, this history at the second level? Noth-
ing more nor less than the annihilation of history. This second level, this
putative philosophical treatment of historical narrative, this philosophi-
cal history, would then be the real history in relation to which the history
of historians would be revealed as mistaken because it is constructed by
a method that does not lead to the truth, or – amounting to the same
thing – does not lead to the whole truth. When the second form appears,
the first would dissolve; or rather, it would dissolve just because it would
no longer be a form but something formless.
The notion of a philosophy of history is the denial of autonomy to
historiography for the good of pure philosophy. Every time someone
makes this demand, we seem to hear bells tolling the death knell of the
history of historians. These historians are usually docile when notified of
progress in science or philosophy that might clarify some part of their
narrative work. But they rise up in violence whenever anyone talks to
them about a philosophy of history, some vaguely speculative method of
understanding history, whenever anyone tries to persuade them to turn
over the work to which they have devoted themselves entirely, whose
every line and shadow is dear to them, to put it into the hands of phi-
losophers for revision and completion. And the rebellion is reasonable.
It would be like telling a painter or a musician who had finished a paint-
ing or a partita to turn it over to philosophers in order to raise it to the
second power by inserting philosophical brushstrokes and philosophical
chords.
Hegel had to posit, and he did posit, the notion of a philosophy of
history, and he had to negate, as he did negate, the history of histo-
rians. This was required by his logical presupposition. He divided phi-
losophy into the pure or formal (which should have been logic and was
metaphysics as well) and the applied and concrete. This constituted the
two philosophies of Nature and Spirit, and a philosophy of history reap-
peared in the second of these. The three together made up the Encyclope-
dia of Philosophical Sciences.128 In that way, Hegel took over the traditional
scholastic division of philosophy into rational and real philosophy – and
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the individual small change of the period and its persons into the repre-
sentation of general interests is not only counter to judgment and taste but
counter to the concept of objective truth, whereby only what is substantial
is true for the Spirit – certainly not the emptiness of external existence and
incident. It makes no difference at all whether such insignificant matters
are formally documented or whether, as in the novel, they are invented in
a characteristic way and attributed to one person or another and to one
circumstance or another.138
Anyone who thinks about these words will find there the straightfor-
ward and pernicious distinction between facts and facts – historical facts
and unhistorical facts, essential facts and unessential facts – that we have
often seen reappearing among Hegel’s students. Start with Eduard Gans,
who, in the very act of publishing the lectures by his teacher on the phi-
losophy of history, repeated that this discipline would lose dignity if it
had to busy itself with the micro-study of facts. Hence, it has to show the
need not for all facts but only for the great epochs of history and great
groups of people, leaving the remainder to merely narrative history.139
Move on from Gans to that Italian Hegelian who had to maintain some
years ago, in a well-known polemic, that documents were needed to
identify the prisons in which Tommaso Campanella stayed or how many
days and hours he suffered torture, but not to determine the histori-
cal meaning of his thinking and activity. This second finding would be
deduced a priori from the idea of the Renaissance, the Catholic Church,
the Lutheran Reformation, and the Council of Trent!140
By such distinctions, even when used to save one class of facts as nec-
essary for real history, all the facts, and the very notion of fact, are dis-
carded as useless. For what other reason might facts a, b, c, d, and e be
unessential and superfluous except that they are individual and contin-
gent? And are not facts f, g, h, i, k, and l equally contingent and individu-
al, facts that these people want to declare essential and indispensable? If
it is a contingent fact that Napoleon suffered from stomach cancer, will
not 18 Brumaire and the Battle of Waterloo also be contingent?141 Will
the whole Age of Revolution and Empire not be contingent? Proceeding
in this way (since individuality and contingency extend to all the facts),
the whole history of the world will be contingent. By the same token, if
the French Revolution, 18 Brumaire, and the Battle of Waterloo were
necessary facts, it is not clear how to deny necessity to the Bonaparte
who was an actor in the drama, or to the Bonaparte who actually existed
in reality, with his mental and physical strengths and weaknesses, with
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his youthful resistance to fatigue that enabled him to stay on a horse for
whole days and seated at his desk for whole nights – and with his stomach
disease when he was older.
Since reality has neither kernel nor shell and is of one piece, since
the internal and the external are a single whole (and it is Hegel who
taught us this), thus the mass of facts is a solid mass, not split between an
essential nucleus and a non-essential shell, between inwardly necessary
facts and superfluous externalities.142 When these distinctions are used
in ordinary language, we always take them to refer to particular histori-
cal representations. In relation to their meaning, and only in relation to
that particular meaning, certain masses of facts seem superfluous. The
distinction is so plainly relative that, by changing points of view, we pass
from one meaning to another: what was superfluous before becomes
necessary, and what was necessary before becomes superfluous.
In the passage cited, however, it is also notable that Hegel refers those
facts that seem to him unhistorical (which we say are all the facts) to
the novel – an art form. And since art for him was a mere phenomenon
that philosophy dissolves and displaces, this is another way to reveal the
negation that Hegelian philosophy makes out of history. A strange fate!
That very philosophy which, by the force of one of its logical doctrines,
had so effectively vindicated the value of history, of res gestae, that same
philosophy, as the result of another of its logical teachings, then found it
impossible to recognize the value of historia rerum gestarum and hence of
the same res gestae.143 Starved for history, fed by history, Hegel’s philoso-
phy then produced propaganda for fasting, but gave no good account of
this. And the contradiction was obvious in the light of day, in the sight of
everyone, because from Hegel’s school came a series of great writers of
history, and then from the same school came the most brash and comical
belittlers of history and facts that the world has ever seen.
To understand the real limits, the real character, of the natural and
mathematical sciences was certainly a harder job. From the Renaissance
onward, there had been a continuing enlargement of what has been
called experimental and mathematical science, the exact science of nature that
became more and more dominant in thought and life. Philosophical
theorizing bowed before exact science or felt its imprint in one way or
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same result, is his quite insistent claim that nature, unlike mankind, has
no history. But if all reality is movement and development, how could
we ever conceive of a part of reality that is not in the process of becom-
ing, along with everything else? The truth, however, is that what has no
history is nature in the naturalist sense – namely, nature stiff and mum-
mified in abstract schemata and concepts – another reason that must
lead to regarding those schemata and concepts as not destined to get at
the real reality. An English critic has noted appropriately that – in the
Philosophy of Spirit – the philosophy of history, or the account of universal
political history, corresponds to the section on objective spirit, just as the
histories of art, religion, and philosophy, also given special treatment
by Hegel, correspond to the section on Absolute Spirit, which includes
the three spheres of art, religion, and philosophy. In that philosophy of
Spirit, then, only the section on subjective spirit – on psychology – has no
historical discussion corresponding to it. Man, when treated psychologi-
cally, has no history.157 But why? Just because psychology is a naturalist
science and is afflicted with the same historical sterility recognized in
nature generally.
Despite all these suggestions, however, despite these favourable con-
ditions, despite these partial and more or less conscious confessions,
Hegel did not come to the conclusion that seems right to me. He did not
proclaim the philosophical neutrality of the scientific and mathemati-
cal disciplines and their full autonomy. Instead, he turned to the solu-
tion already adopted by Schelling when he had planned a philosophy of
nature. The reason is clear enough. He was pushed to that conclusion
by his logical presupposition. Since – in his mind – art and history were
cast as philosophical mistakes, one to be corrected by pure philosophy,
the other by the planned philosophy of history, then, by analogy, the
scientific and mathematical disciplines could not remain independent
as practical schematizations of the data of experience. They had to be
treated as attempts at philosophy and partial mistakes, to be corrected
by a philosophy of nature.
‘This antithesis of physics and the philosophy of nature,’ he says,
is surely not between a not-thinking about nature and a thinking about it.
Philosophy of nature simply means a thoughtful contemplation of nature.
Ordinary physics also does this because its determinations of forces, laws,
and so on are thoughts, except that in physics those thoughts are formal
and intellectual.
The only point of the philosophy of nature is to posit, in place of the cat-
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Hegel certainly sees that there are purely artificial classifications in the
natural sciences aimed only at providing clear and simple information
by way of subjective cognition. But he believes that they can be replaced
by ‘natural’ classifications. And a start on such classifications seems to
emerge for him from research on comparative anatomy, on the division
of animals into vertebrates and invertebrates, of plants into mono- and
dicotyledons, and so on.160 He often talks about an ‘instinct of reason,’
supposedly manifest in the theories of physicists and scientists, that
should somehow anticipate the theoretical concept.161 Against Locke’s
naturalist and mathematical nominalism, he uses this to defend the real
existence of natural kinds and mathematical concepts. He also uses it to
preserve an unshaken faith in the ‘eternal laws of nature.’162
One remark suffices to show that this amphibian position is unten-
able. A person who wishes to apply philosophy to historical facts has no
choice but to narrate history, which, in order to be history, must still be
illuminated in some way by philosophy. Then, should desire for a philo-
sophical system seize that person while engaged in history, all he can do
is abandon the history and return to pure philosophy. In the same way,
anyone troubled by the need for philosophy when engaged in natural
science has only two ways to satisfy it, depending on what the need is,
whether for an applied philosophy or for a pure philosophy. In the first
case, he must pass from the scientific and mathematical disciplines, and
from their abstract and arbitrary concepts, to the historical view of things
natural and human. In the second case, he must turn to philosophy,
pure and simple. But a philosophy of nature, a philosophy that should
have the natural sciences as its basis, is another contradiction in terms, as
the philosophy of history is in a different sense. The reason is that a phi-
losophy of nature implies philosophical thinking about those arbitrary
concepts that philosophy itself does not recognize, and, as a result, has
no grip on them, whether to affirm or deny them.
Hegel repeatedly called attention to the difference between his philos-
ophy of nature and Schelling’s, criticizing the latter as based on the anal-
ogy between organic and inorganic, on the comparison of one natural
sphere with another, and as developed by applying a schema established
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In the old philosophy of nature and also in the new, it was an improper
representation to treat progress and the passage from one natural form or
sphere to a higher one as a product supplied by external reality – as a prod-
uct which, however, in order to be made more luminous, has been pushed
into the darkness of the past. The externality by which nature allows differ-
ences to be separate from one another and to appear as neutral states of
affairs belongs precisely to nature. But the dialectical concept that directs
progress through its levels works within them. Representations that are
cloudy, and, in the end, derived from the senses – like plants and animals
emerging from the water and animal organisms better developed from low-
er organisms and so on – must be completely excluded from philosophical
consideration.164
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all – in making these criticisms and even in the violence of his language.
Still, when one evaluates the substance of it, both the part of the polemic
that is just and the part that is unjust and exaggerated, it is clear that it is
simply a logical consequence of Hegel’s philosophical position.
In the philosophy of nature, as in the philosophy of history, Hegel
also never dared commit himself to declaring the empirical and posi-
tive method completely mistaken and fully replaceable by the theoretical
method. For him, when empirical sciences construct their laws and con-
cepts, they come up against (entgegenarbeiten) the labour of the philoso-
pher, offering material that is ready-made and half-developed.169 And
Hegel urged an accord between physics and philosophy, as we have seen.
Declarations of the same sort have been repeated by students of Hegel
– Michelet, Rosenkranz, and Vera. The last of these compares physicists
to day labourers and the philosopher to the architect, saying that ‘la
physique rassemble et prépare les matériaux que la philosophie vient
ensuite marquer de sa forme.’170 These are just phrases aimed at the
physicists, however, – rash and passionate, but devoid of any content.
The choices, in fact, are two. In one case, we suppose that the empiri-
cal method is in a position to posit certain laws, certain types, and certain
concepts – certain truths, in short – and then we can never manage to
understand why other laws, types, truths, and concepts, along with the
whole system of them, should not follow from the same method. For the
same activity that posits the first naturalist concept thereby shows the
capacity to posit the others and the whole, just as the poetic activity that
shapes the first verse is the same one that completes the whole poem.
In the other case, we suppose that the empirical method is incapable of
any truth, however minimal. And in that event the theoretical method
not only has no need of the other but cannot derive any benefit from it.
Paying lip service to physics and the empirical method is not serious,
and rightly this has satisfied no one. By treating the exact sciences as a
semi-philosophy, Hegel completely rejected them and absorbed them
into philosophy, which thus took on all their rights and all their duties.
Having thereby put so big a burden on philosophy’s shoulders, he could
not then legitimately lighten it by trying to turn part of it over again to
the empirical sciences, which for him were eliminated and nonexistent
forevermore. All rights and all duties: from then on it was up to phi-
losophy and not empirical science to prove and justify the existence of
this or that particular fact of nature. It was up to philosophy to discover
stars, physical forces, chemical structures, physiological elements, and
unknown species of animals and plants.
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Now it seems we would have to agree that Krug – the poor devil – was a
simple messenger of common sense when he demanded that Schelling’s
natural philosophy should deduce the moon and its various features,
or a rose, a horse, or a dog, or even just the quill with which he, Krug,
was writing at that moment.171 From his first writings to his last, Hegel
mocked him, presenting him as a figure of fun, and perhaps that is what
he was. But that does not deny that Hegel’s reply to Krug’s objection is,
beneath its seeming nonchalance, clumsy and ambiguous. In one sense,
Hegel seemed to be saying that things of that kind, individual facts (and
all facts are individual), have nothing to do with philosophy. In anoth-
er sense, however, he was saying that the deduction is quite possible,
though science now has tasks far more urgent than the deduction of
Herr Krug’s writing quill.172 Salvatore Tommasi, the famous Neapolitan
physiologist and physician, showed how right Krug was when he replied,
with some annoyance, to De Meis the Hegelian, who kept insisting on
some unknown theory of physiology and pathology. Tommasi said that
he would be ready to pay attention to the method recommended to him
when a medical discovery had been made by using it – an immediate
cure for pneumonia, for example.173
Therefore, the attempt to hang on to the coattails of the empirical
sciences after having turned them loose only means that we have new
proof that Hegel’s thesis is false, as we said above in the case of history
(and the basis of the natural sciences is historical). The point is certainly
not to cleanse the thesis of its falsity and render it true. But the analogy
does not stop there. Because Hegel had no hope of ever being able to
rationalize all of history, as required by his notion of a philosophy of
history, he ended up by arbitrarily excising one part of the historical
facts that he found more perplexing than others and consigning them
to the novel. He did the same for the natural sciences when faced with
so many classes and species of natural facts, with reality’s infinite appear-
ances, with things that are called rare cases, exceptions, extraordinary
entities. What he discovered is delicious – ‘the impotence of nature’ (die
Ohnmacht der Natur): nature is weak, she swoons, she faints away from the
harsh task of actualizing the rationality of the concept.174
However, just as we did not let ourselves be persuaded to throw away
one part of the facts in the field of history, having learned from Hegel
himself that the fact is sacred, so also, having learned from him that
there is reason in the world, it will not behoove us to believe that a part
of reality is in rebellion or inert in the face of reason. What is called here
‘the impotence of nature’ is clearly nothing but the impotence of the
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Hegel might have just proposed the idea of a philosophy of history and a
philosophy of nature, admiring them, promoting them, and defending
them but doing nothing else. A person can announce a project and still
lack the commitment to carry it out. This often happens, especially when
the project is risky. Systems and books that go no farther than introduc-
tions and preliminaries are not hard to find, even in contemporary lit-
erature and among those announced with the greatest fanfare. It would
be almost worth the trouble to make a cautionary catalogue. But Hegel
did not leave the philosophy of history and the philosophy of nature as
ideas in the air. He made a real product of each of them. In the process
of getting it done, he had to force himself to treat individual facts and
empirical concepts as particular philosophical concepts. And since he
had already applied the dialectic to these items, treating individual facts
and empirical concepts dialectically had to be his procedure.
This is the second great abuse of his dialectical discovery that Hegel
committed.175 To get to this point and put ourselves in a position to give
the correct formulation and origin of this second abuse, it was indispen-
sable for us to have gone through the first one and to have run though
its multiple consequences. Some of them – namely, denying autonomy
to history and the positive sciences – lead in turn to the second abuse.
Without following that path through all its twists and turns, we would not
comprehend how Hegel could ever have arrived at so strange a thought.
By following that path, while acquiring full knowledge of the facts, we
also somehow develop a feeling of admiration for the ingenuity that
exists in that tight knot of error – for the method in that madness, as
Polonius would have said.176 The second abuse is the more commonly
known, and it has done more than anything else to give Hegelian philos-
ophy a bad reputation. If the first abuse caused damage to certain parts
of philosophy, the second struck or threatened historical studies and the
positive sciences. Both reacted vigorously in self-defense.
But we must not neglect certain observations about this matter. As
people gained awareness of the error in the method that Hegel champi-
oned and tried to apply, this caused a general condemnation and impli-
cated all his books on the history of civilization and art, on philosophy
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Romantic, which here again would transmute the triad into a tetrad,
unless we want to say that the last phase is art’s cessation in philosophy.188
The history of religions is organized in three phases: natural religion;
the religion of consciousness divided against itself; and the religion of
transition to the religion of liberty. The two last phases are also deter-
mined triadically: the religion of division becomes religions of measure
(Chinese), fantasy (Indian), and internality (Buddhist); the religion of
transition becomes religions of nature, spiritual liberty, and absoluteness
or absolute religion. These are subdivided into new triads: the religion
of nature into those of light (Persian), pain (Syrian), and mystery (Egyp-
tian); the religion of spiritual liberty into those of the sublime (Jewish),
beauty (Greek), and intellect or finality (Roman). The absolute religion
would then be Christianity.
But the three parts of the world give us one of the strangest examples
of the dialectical construction of the individual. As mentioned, Hegel
got rid of the other two parts that did not seem mature to him, either
physically or spiritually. The ‘new world’ shows an incompletely devel-
oped division between a northern and a southern part, in the manner
of a magnet. But in the old world the division into three parts was com-
plete. The first of these, Africa (the region of metal, the lunar element,
hardened by heat, where man is compressed within himself and dull) is
the mute spirit that does not attain knowledge. Asia, the second, is come-
tary Bacchic dissipation, the land of formless and indeterminate breed-
ing that cannot master itself. Europe, the third, represents consciousness
and constitutes the rational part of the earth, with its equilibrium of riv-
ers, valleys, and mountains – and the centre of Europe is Germany!189
Dialectical construction is rampant in the Philosophy of Nature, or rath-
er in the field of empirical concepts. In its positive part, that book is basi-
cally just a compendium of scientific and mathematical subjects, divided
into three sections: (1) geometry and mechanics; (2) astronomy, physics,
and chemistry; (3) mineralogy, botany, zoology, geology, and physiology.
This compendium of varied information is organized as the fundamen-
tal triad of mechanics, physics, and organic physics, and the whole thing
is subdivided into smaller triads. Never mind that in universal history
the point of convergence and the final result is the Germanic spirit, just
as in Hegel’s conception of cosmology Earth is the centre of the uni-
verse (which must then be Germany, at least according to the words cited
above).190 This only shows yet again how a lofty philosophical mind can
succumb here and there to sentiment and prejudice.
Look instead at some examples of the dialectic of the geometer and
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Ethics divides into family, civil society, and state. Finally, the state divides
into internal law, external law, and (by an odd leap) universal history.
Hegelian dialectic has been caricatured many times. But no carica-
ture could equal what the author himself did unconsciously when he
tried to think of Africa, Asia, and Europe, or the hand, nose, and ear,
or family patrimony, paternal power, and testament in the same rhythm
of thought that he used for being, nothing, and becoming. It seems at
times that Hegel was not yet in full possession of his thought, so much
did he need help from mythology – just as Plato (on an apt reading from
Hegel himself), when he was unsuccessful in using thought to master
certain difficult problems which in his day were still not ripe, substituted
an imagined solution for one that was thought out, the myth for the
concept.
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be asserted with the full coherence of truth, the panlogical mistake con-
verts to its contrary, and this is dualism. The locus of this conversion is
the philosophy of nature, where, as has been shown, the old concept of
nature, as provided by the physical and natural sciences, appears to be
completely solid and sustained. This was the concept on which Hegel
conferred philosophical value, by making it the thinking of a reality that
stands facing, or stands behind, the concept of the reality of the Spirit.
The critical point of the conversion – the revelation of the dualism
that emerges at the very moment when we seek to disguise it – is the
famous passage from Idea to Nature on which Hegel expressed himself
so briefly and obscurely, and on which his disciples spent so many words
but shed no light:
The Idea that is for itself, treated in this way as unity with itself, is intuit-
ing. But, as intuition, the Idea is posited in the one-sided determination
of immediacy or negation by means of extrinsic reflection. The absolute
freedom of the Idea, however, is that it does not just pass over into life, nor
allow life to appear in it just as finite cognition, but that, in its own absolute
truth, it resolves to release freely out of itself the moment of its particularity
or its initial determination or being-other – the immediate Idea as its reflec-
tion, as Nature.199
That conversion and that passage are so dangerous that many inter-
pretations of Hegelian thought have been proposed (and others might
be proposed) to avoid the danger, to remove the dualism, and preserve
the system’s original theme, which is absolute idealism, the substance as
subject. But none of those interpretations seems to conform to the phi-
losopher’s genuine thinking.
Thus, it might be convenient to claim that the passage from Idea to
Nature is nothing more for Hegel than the passage from philosophy to
experience, from philosophy to natural science, whose existence and
independence alongside philosophy Hegel would never have thought
to deny. In that way, Hegel’s system would become a philosophy of mind
or Spirit in general, external to experience but not unfriendly to it – not
to observation and research into natural and historical particulars. But
this hermeneutic clashes with the simple realization that Hegel does not
pass from philosophy to the (empirical) science of nature but from logic
or philosophy in general to the philosophy of nature. Hence, he under-
stands nature not as the empirical in relation to the theoretical, but as a
theoretical concept with rights equal to any other.
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‘the Logos in itself is not reality, then, except insofar as it is logic, Spirit as
the thinking of thinking – pure thinking. Nature fixed as nature does not
suffice by itself, and so it not only presupposes the Logos ideally but also
has the Absolute Spirit as its real principle just because it has a real Absolute
as its end.’200
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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
to preserve the living part of the philosophy, meaning the new con-
cept of the concept, the concrete universal, along with the dialectic
of opposites and the theory of levels of reality;
to reject, on the basis of that new concept and its development, all
panlogicism and any speculative construction of the individual and
empirical, of history and nature;
to recognize the autonomy of the various forms of the Spirit, even in
their necessary connection and unity;
and finally, to reduce all philosophy to a pure philosophy of the
Spirit (or a metaphysical logic, if one preferred to give it that name).
It has been necessary to pull Hegelian thought ‘out of the sheath of its
limbs’ – fake limbs clumsily stuck on to it – permitting it to grow limbs of
its own in response to the nature of the primitive seed.207 Hegel’s school
totally failed in this task. As indicated, it was divided into Right and Left
and subdivided into secondary factions on the question of what empha-
sis to give to tendencies in the system towards transcendence or imma-
nence. But the school was completely united in preserving and enlarging
the system’s dialectical muddle, the confusion between a dialectic of
opposites and a dialectic of distincts, a dialectic of the Absolute and a
dialectic of the contingent.
Michelet, for example, as editor of the Philosophy of Nature, played at
correcting some details dialectically – such as the place that belongs to a
fifth of the world in the dialectic of geography mentioned above, suppos-
ing, as he did, that the islands of Oceania represent the ultimate future of
the human race, the final development of democratic ‘self-government.’
And to those whose vision of dialectical modes of reasoning was unclear,
Michelet replied that the dialectical method, like artistic creation, makes
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As far as Hegel’s opponents are concerned, they too never did their
duty. Clearly, if they had done it, they would have been not opponents
but disciples and continuators of his thinking. While his followers kept
the dialectic completely intact to the bitter end, with all its confusions
and false applications, the opponents rejected the whole thing. There-
fore they fell into an opposite, yet similar, error. We may leave the bizarre
Schopenhauer aside; he spewed insults at Hegel but talked hearsay with-
out understanding anything precisely.219 What he spits out never really
goes beyond the generic or anecdotal. Herbart was more balanced and
at least recognized in Hegel ‘one of those rare people born to theorize.’
He concluded that Hegelian philosophy, because of its great emphasis
on the contradictions of which reality shows itself to be full when it is
present to thought, made the best introduction to metaphysics!220 But
whoever reads the refutations of Hegelian dialectic by Trendelenburg in
Germany, Rosmini in Italy, and Janet in France (naming only the most
important) cannot help feeling struck by a sense of distrust.221 For when
we perceive that a critic is doing his job too easily, it emerges from his
own words of scorn and condemnation that there is something much
deeper in the question that the critic could not get at.
Those clever debunkers have brought difficulties to light, no doubt
– sometimes even mistakes. But they do not show the mistakes in their
real origin, as deriving from the exaggeration of a great and novel
truth. ‘Refuting a philosophy,’ to use Hegel’s exact words, ‘only means
overcoming its limits and diminishing its determinate principle until it
becomes an ideal moment.’222
Hegel’s philosophical opponents were soon followed, however, by bar-
barian opponents in the new generations that came of age after 1848.
What they loathed in Hegel was just philosophy itself, which he repre-
sented in all its majestic harshness: philosophy, heartless and without
pity for the weak-minded and careless; philosophy, not appeased by
treats of sentiment and fantasy nor by quick meals of semi-science. For
those people, Hegel was the unavenged ghost of the theoretical need in
the human spirit, and here was a ghost apparently ready to undertake its
own vendettas at any given moment. Hence the fierce hatred of Hegel,
a hatred blended of remorse and fear, and certainly not motivated by
awareness of mistakes in the system.
Hegel had observed that philosophy after Fichte became too refined
and could no longer mean anything to polite society and the educated
public, as it did in the eighteenth century before Kant.223 But positivist
decadence reduced thinkers to so low a level that they no longer distin-
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guished between the concept and sensation, between theory and expe-
rience. Given this loss of the most elementary distinctions, and given
Hegel’s assumption that elementary philosophical problems are identi-
fied and solved, how could anyone ever have discussed him, with his
thought turning on advanced and more subtle problems, living and
breathing on the highest peaks? For his critics to look at Hegel in such
conditions was the same as uncovering the sad consciousness of power-
lessness, with its agitations and irritations, and with fierce condemna-
tions of the joys that they were not allowed to taste.
In our day, fortunately, intellectual attitudes have changed for the
better. Things are now more favourable to philosophy in general, more
favourable to Hegel himself. We are now at the point of possessing a
philosophy of art and language, a theory of history, and a gnoseology of
the mathematical and scientific disciplines that make it impossible for
the mistakes that entangled Hegel to emerge again. In particular, the old
concept of nature, inherited from the science and philosophy of the sev-
enteenth century, is in disarray. Every day it becomes clearer that nature,
in its concept, is a product of human praxis. Only when people forget
how they got here do they find something facing them from outside that
somehow frightens them because it looks like an impenetrable mystery.
On the other hand, a kind of philosophical Romanticism that is being
reborn everywhere is a condition (though nothing more than a condi-
tion) for a clear understanding of Hegel and all the philosophers of his
period. And people are sighing once again for mysticism and direct per-
ception in the manner of Jacobi. Once again they are positing Schelling’s
old ideal of an aesthetic contemplation that gives what (natural) science
cannot give to the Spirit that thirsts for truth and concreteness. Bergson,
one of the writers who belong to this movement, thus advocates an intui-
tive knowledge ‘qui s’installe dans le mouvement et adopte la vie même
des choses’ as a metaphysics of the Absolute.224 Was this not precisely
Hegel’s demand? Was this not his point of departure – finding a mental
form that would be as mobile as movement, that would share in the life of
things, that would feel ‘the pulse of reality’ and mentally reproduce the
rhythm of development without shattering, rigidifying, or falsifying it?225
For Hegel this view was only a point of departure, however, certainly
not a conclusion, as it was for the writer just mentioned and for others
of his inclination. It would have been futile to ask Hegel to renounce
thinking. His supreme achievement, his deathless discovery, is having
demonstrated that the need for concrete knowledge is satisfied in the
form of thinking. Hence the need to study Hegel critically, to isolate the
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living and vital components from the dead. Modern consciousness can
neither wholly accept Hegel nor wholly reject him, as used to be done
fifty years ago. As far as Hegel is concerned, modern thought finds itself
in the position of the Roman poet towards his lady: nec tecum vivere possum
nec sine te.226
It seems that this critical revision of Hegel cannot now be had from
his native Germany. So much has she forgotten her great son that his
works are no longer even reprinted, and judgments of him are frequent-
ly expressed that astonish us in this remote margin of Italy – we who have
never managed to forget him completely and have to some extent made
him one of us, reconnecting him with Bruno of Nola and Vico of Naples
as our brother. Rather more important for Hegel studies than German
efforts are those that have been going on for more than thirty years in
England, where Stirling’s work has proved fertile and where Hegel is
clearly explained, truthfully interpreted and criticized with respect and
intellectual freedom. In return, the mighty spirit of George Hegel has
awakened English thinkers to the life of theory for the first time – they
who have been the world’s suppliers of empirical philosophy for centu-
ries, seemingly unable even in the nineteenth century to produce any
philosophers better than Stuart Mill and Spencer.227
If anyone were to ask me now, after all that I have said, whether one
ought to be ‘Hegelian’ or not, whether I am ‘Hegelian,’ I might excuse
myself from answering. However, I wish to add the desired response here,
as a kind of corollary. I am, and I believe one ought to be, Hegelian, but
in the same sense whereby anyone in our day who has a philosophical
mind and education also is – and feels – Eleatic, Heraclitean, Socratic,
Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Sceptic, Neoplatonic, Christian, Buddhist,
Cartesian, Spinozist, Leibnizian, Viconian, Kantian, and so on. This is
the sense in which no thinker and no historical movement of thought
can have passed by without bearing fruit, without providing some com-
ponent of truth that becomes part, consciously or not, of living modern
thought.
No prudent person will want to be Hegelian if it means being a slav-
ishly literal disciple who professes to accept the master’s every word, or
else a religious cultist who thinks it sinful to disagree – nor will I. In
short, Hegel too found his piece of the truth, and one must recognize
and validate this piece. And that’s all. If this does not happen now, never
mind. ‘The Idea is in no hurry,’ as Hegel used to say.228 We will have to
arrive at the same truth, at one time or another, by a different route. And
without having help directly from Hegel, but looking back on the history
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NOTES
1 We have used the first edition, Croce (1907), but see also Croce (2006),
the new Edizio nazionale by Alessandro Savorelli and Claudio Cesa, based on
the 1948 edition but with variants from the 1907, 1913, and 1927 versions;
another recent edition by Giuseppe Gembillo in Croce (1995) also reflects
the many stylistic and some substantive changes that Croce made after
1907. The bibliography that Croce mentions is omitted here.
2 The prolific Kuno Fischer (1824−1907), who taught philosophy and its
history at Heidelberg, Berlin, and Jena, was still a major figure when Croce
was writing this essay. Fischer (1849) addressed Croce’s special interest of
aesthetics, but he was best known for his history of modern philosophy and
his interpretations of Kant and Hegel. For Hegel, see Fischer (1901), and
for logic and metaphysics, Fischer (1852) and its second edition (1865).
3 Hegel (1986a), 3.20; (1977):7−8; Croce used Hegel (1832−45); see his
‘Saggio di una bibliografia hegeliana,’ in Croce (1907): 215−20. Although
his habits were too mandarin to bother with references for quotations from
Hegel or other sources, we will identify them when we can – along with
some other passages without quotation-marks. Our references will usually be
keyed to an accessible English version as well as the Suhrkamp Werke, and we
have greatly benefited from the notes in Croce (2006).
4 Hegel (1986a), 6.291−3, 342−3; (1969): 614−15, 656−7.
5 [a] See especially the introduction to the Phenomenology and the preliminar-
ies to the Encyclopedia; [e] Hegel (1986a), 3.43−4; 8.311−15; (1977): 25;
(1991): 239−42.
6 In his Proslogion, Anselm argued that God’s existence is proved simply by
understanding the proposition that ‘God is that than which nothing greater
can be thought,’ but many other philosophers have rejected Anselm’s onto-
logical proof – including Kant in the first Critique.
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14 [a] Wissenschaft der Logik, II, 48; [e] Hegel (1986a), 6.287; (1969): 611.
15 Brigliadoro and Baiardo are warhorses ridden by the knights of Ariosto’s
Orlando furioso.
16 Trendelenburg (1840), chap. 3.
17 ‘From a fair mother a daughter fairer still,’ Horace, Odes, 1.16.1.
18 The Dionysian and Apollonian are opposing forces in Nietzsche (1872).
19 [a] Saggio storico-critico sulle categorie e la dialettica, opera postuma (Torino:
1883): 371; [e] the second half of this large work is an attack on Hegel.
20 [a] Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in Werke (1832), II, 36−7; [e] Hegel
(1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8.
21 Hegel (1986a), 8.237; (1991): 180.
22 [a] Wissenschaft der Logik, II, 67−8; [e] Hegel (1986a), 6.76; (1969): 440−1.
23 [a] See also the historical introduction to Kuno Fischer, Logik und Meta-
physik (2d ed., 1865) and Bertrando Spaventa, Prolusione e introduzione alle
lezioni di filosofia (Naples: 1862). For the immediate antecedents of Hegel’s
dialectic and the various phases of its development, see especially Aloys
Schmid, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Hegelschen Logik (Regensburg: 1858); [e]
Fischer (1865); Spaventa (1862); Schmid (1858); Hegel (1986a): 18−20.
24 Hegel (1986a), 18.305−19; (1995), I, 267−78.
25 For the fragments and testimonia mentioned here (none of them now
securely attributed to Heraclitus, not even the famous ‘everything flows’),
see Hegel (1986a), 18.323−36; (1995), I, 282−93.
26 Hegel (1986a), 18.320; (1995), I, 279.
27 Hegel (1986a), 19.62, 79−82; (1995), II, 49−50, 56−60; Plato, Parmenides
166C.
28 Philo Judaeus (fl. c. 40 CE) wrote allegorical philosophy based on Biblical
themes; like their early Christian contemporaries, the Gnostics focused on
the problem of salvation, describing the process of the fall and redemption
in an exuberant mythology.
29 The ancient Neoplatonic tradition began with Plotinus in the third century
CE; Proclus, his greatest successor, lived in the fifth century.
30 [a] ¹ ™nantiÒthj ™stˆ diafor¦ tšleioj; Arist. Meta. 1055b16: [e] ‘contra-
riety is complete difference’; on Cusanus, see the note in chap. 1.
31 [a] On Cusanus, see Fiorentino, Il risorgimento filosofico nel Quattrocento
(Naples: 1885), chap. 2; [e] learned ignorance was another paradoxical
theme of great interest to Cusanus.
32 Bruno, De la causa, principio e uno, in Bruno (1907), I, 252. A learned and
creative Dominican, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600. He was the first
great philosopher to write extensively in the Italian vernacular. For Spaventa
and other Italian Hegelians, Bruno was a major inspiration, and his persecu-
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tion by the Church was a lively item in Italian politics when Croce was grow-
ing up.
33 [a] Bruno, De la causa, principio e uno, dialogue 5, near the end; Dialoghi
metafisici, ed. Gentile (Bari: Laterza, 1907): 255−7; [e] Bruno (1907).
34 The German mystic, Jakob Böhme (1575−1625), had great influence in the
seventeenth century, especially because of his Trinitarian theology; Hegel
considered him a pivotal figure in the history of German thought.
35 Hegel (1986a) 20.96−8, 113−19; Hegel (1995), III, 194−5, 211−16.
36 For Vico see the Introduction, section 13, and Fiorentino’s letters to
Florenzi Waddington.
37 [a] For Hamann see Hegel, Vermischte Schriften, II, 36−7, 87−8, and what I
have said about him in La Critica, 4 (1906): 67-84. [e] For Hamann see the
note in Fiorentino’s second letter to Florenzi Waddington; an idiosyncratic
critic of such Enlightenment heroes as Lessing and Kant, he fascinated the
Romantics of Hegel’s generation. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743−1819)
began as an admirer of Kant but changed his mind in reaction to the first
Critique. His views on Spinoza, publicized in the debate about pantheism
that also involved Lessing and Mendelssohn, were particularly controversial.
[e] Hegel (1986a), 11.328−9, where the reference is to ‘Brunos Schrift De
Uno,’ which would seem to be De la causa, principio et uno, the text cited
above.
38 Hegel (1986a), 6.260−1; (1969): 588−9, where Hegel, speaking about
Kant’s ‘synthetic judgments a priori,’ says that such a judgment is an
‘original synthesis of apperception.’ Hegel did not use the thesis/antith-
esis/synthesis relation to describe his own dialectic, but he did apply it to
Kant: Inwood (1992): 12, 81−2. In later versions of this essay, Croce often
replaces ‘antithesis’ with ‘antinomy,’ ‘conflict,’ and other words.
39 Gnoseology is epistemology, more or less: in Croce’s context it is the part of
philosophy that addresses the Erkenntnisproblem, the problem of cognition or
knowledge.
40 Rosenkranz (1844): 94−9.
41 Haym (1857): 215.
42 [a] See my note on ‘Definitions of Romanticism’ in La Critica, 4 (1906):
241−5.
43 [a] ‘For my part, I have to declare that, so far as it has been given me to see,
I have no evidence that any man has thoroughly understood Kant except
Hegel, or that this latter himself remains aught else than a problem whose
solution has been arrogated, but never effected,’ in James H. Stirling, The
Secret of Hegel (London: 1865), I, 14. [e] Against the advice of J.S. Mill, Stir-
ling won the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in 1868, three years
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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
69 [a] In the ‘Aphorisms’ cited above, p. 543; [e] Hegel (1986a), 2.546.
70 [a] For Vico’s historical position and its relation to German philosophy, see
B. Spaventa, op. cit., part 6, pp. 83−102, and also the historical section of
my Aesthetic, chap. 5; [e] Croce (1956): 155−474; Spaventa (1862).
71 Machiavelli (1990): 129.
72 [a] See my ‘Bibliografia vichiana’ (Naples: 1904): 91−5.
73 Vico (1977): 176.
74 Vico (1835-7), V, 235.
75 Vico (1977): 206.
76 Vico (1977): 176−7.
77 Vico (1977): 284−5: ‘Man becomes all things by not understanding.’
78 [a] The passages from Vico are in his Opere, ed. Ferrari, V, 96−8, 117, 136,
143, 146−7, 183, 571−2; VI, 235; [e] Vico (1977): 705−6; Vico (1835−7).
79 Later versions have ‘I am talking about what is theoretically distinct, and
certainly not about naturalist classifications.’
80 Later versions have ‘the theory of classification, whether we call it naturalist
or intellectualist.’
81 For Herbart see section 14 of the Introduction.
82 [a] Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie, in Werke, XVI, 130; [e] Hegel
(1986a), 2.271; 10.13, 241-2; (1971): 4−5, 188−90.
83 Ephes. 4:3: ‘anxious to preserve the unity of the spirit.’
84 Later versions have ‘The classificatory schema must be replaced by the
schema of levels.’
85 Vico (1977): 91, 169, 179, 206, 219, 245, 275; (1975): 169.
86 For Condillac see section 2 of the Introduction.
87 Hegel (1986a), 20.437−49; (1995), III, 528−40: Croce’s ‘levels’ (gradi) are
derived from Hegel’s criticisms of Schelling’s view of nature as a hierarchy
of levels (Stufen) or potencies (Potenzen); see also Inwood (1992): 194−5.
88 [a] In the preface to Cousin’s Fragments; [e] Cousin (1834): xviii.
89 [a] In my Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, cited above;
[e] Croce (1956).
90 Arist. De anima 417b.
91 Spinoza, Ethics 2, prop. 44, corr; 5, prop. 29, schol.; prop. 30, 36: ‘under the
aspect of the eternal.’
92 Hegel (1986a), 3.46−7; (1977): 27−8
93 Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817−1881), who taught mainly at Leipzig and
Göttingen, was an idealist philosopher who tried to accommodate the
findings of the natural sciences; later versions add that Lotze was ‘perhaps
remembering a passage of the Parmenides.’
94 Croce in later editions adds this note: ‘In my Logic (1.1.5−6), I have shown
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how the two distinct series of the distinct and the opposite are unified at a
higher level so that opposition is produced as an aspect of distinction itself
and of its dialectic; but for the criticism developed here, the distinction
between the two series is enough.’ See Croce (1920): 46−67.
95 While Croce’s criticism may be fair to some Hegelians, it is less just to
Hegel himself, who was more cautious about the thesis/antithesis/synthe-
sis relation.
96 Later versions have ‘and also intuition (thesis), representation (antith-
esis), and thought (synthesis); right (thesis), morality (antithesis), and
ethics (synthesis) in his practical philosophy, or also in same area family
(thesis), civil society (antithesis), and state (synthesis).’
97 Hegel (1986a) 2.532: ‘The square is nature’s law; the triangle is the
mind’s’; see also Rosenkranz (1844): 158.
98 The Phenomenology was published in 1807; for the chronology of Hegel’s
life and works, see Pinkard (2000): 745−9.
99 Hegel (1986a), 10.29; (1971): 18.
100 Croce may be thinking of Maudsley (1890), whose author was an impor-
tant psychiatrist, but another possibility is the closing lines of The Way of All
Flesh by Samuel Butler, which appeared four years before Croce finished
this essay, though Butler’s phrase is ‘College of Spiritual Pathology’: see
Butler (1903): 423−4.
101 [a] For a discussion of this issue, see my Lineamenti di logica, chapter 7,
‘The Theory of Error’; [e] Croce (1905); see also the third part, pp.
251−322, of Croce (1920), titled ‘Forms of Error and the Search for
Truth.’
102 ‘Truth is the index of itself and of the false’ comes not from Bacon but
from a letter by Spinoza (76.7), cited by Jacobi (2004): 33, and then by
Hegel (1986a), 16.62.
103 [a] ‘It is the only metaphysics that exists, along with Aristotle’s’: H. Taine,
in a letter of 1851, for which see Sa vie et sa correspondance (Paris: Hachette,
1902), I, 162−3, cf. 145. [e] Having started with Spinoza and Hegel, the
polycephalous Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine (1828−93) eventually became
famous as a philosophical positivist, not to mention his great Origines de la
France contemporaine (1876−93).
104 Charles-Alexandre de Calonne, finance minister under Louis XVI just
before the French Revolution, made this improvident remark to Marie-
Antoinette as she was about to buy another castle, according to Michelet
(1847), I, cvi.
105 Hegel (1986a), 8.60.
106 ‘First for us’ and ‘first by nature: Arist. Post. An. 71b29−72a1.
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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
170 Karl-Ludwig Michelet (1801−93) took over Hegel’s lectures on the phi-
losophy of right in 1830, and in 1847 he edited the Philosophy of Nature;
Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz (1805−79), who taught philosophy
at Königsberg, was his teacher’s first biographer; Vera (see sections 10,
14−15 of the Introduction), who studied with Cousin, translated the Ency-
clopedia into French. Croce, who was Spaventa’s cousin, may have resented
Vera’s hostility towards this other Hegelian Neapolitan: see Hegel (1863),
I, vii; Pinkard (2000): 11, 652; Gentile (2003): 261−73.
171 Wilhelm Krug (1770−1842), Kant’s successor at Königsberg, also taught
philosophy at Leipzig: see Krug (1801): 31; Pinkard (2000): 613.
172 [a] See an article of 1802 in Werke, XVI, 57−9: [e] Hegel (1986a),
2.164−5, 188−207; 9.35; (1970): 23, where Hegel remarked that ‘it was in
this … quite naïve sense that Herr Krug once challenged the Philosophy
of Nature to perform the feat of deducing only his pen … giving him hope
that his pen would have the glory of being deduced, if ever philosophy
should advance so far.’
173 Tommasi (see section 11 of the Introduction) was a physician and biolo-
gist with a serious interest in philosophy; as a professor of medicine in
Naples, his positivism included criticism of De Meis, a colleague whose
idealism Tommasi had shared as a young man: see Tommasi (1868),
(1877); Gentile (1957): 29−52.
174 Hegel (1986a), 8.84−5, 9.34−6; (1970): 22−4; (1991): 58−9.
175 For the first abuse, see chapter 4 of Croce’s essay.
176 Hamlet, II, ii, 223−224.
177 Hegel (1874).
178 [a] See the two discussions by Helmholtz, Über Goethes naturwissenschaftliche
Arbeiten and Goethes Vorahnungen kommender naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen, in
Vorträge und Reden (Braunschweig: 1896), I, 1−24, 333−65. [e] Helmholtz
(1896): for a current re-evaluation of Goethe’s work in biology, see Rich-
ards (2002): 325−508, which points out that Helmholtz, at the peak of his
influence, praised Goethe not only for his biological achievement but also
for his criticism of Newton’s optics.
179 [a] Also relevant is a note by Engels in the Antidühring, 3d ed., pp. xv−xvi,
that emphasizes some of Hegel’s accomplishments in physics and natural
history. [e] Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (1776−1837) published six
volumes on Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur beginning in 1802,
successfully promoting the term ‘biology’ after it had been in use for
several decades; Lorenz Oken (1799−1851) was a physician and anatomist
but also a follower of Fichte and Schelling; Goethe wrongly disputed his
priority in understanding the nature of the bones of the skull: Richards
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Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
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Praying for inspiration at the start of the Paradiso, Dante mentions Mars-
yas, flayed by Apollo when the arrogant mortal challenged the god to a
music contest and lost; his prayer is to sing as sweetly as Apollo sang in
defeating Marsyas. Croce’s point, as he opens the last chapter of his essay,
is not only to put himself in Dante’s company but also to claim that he has
been forced to strip Hegel’s philosophy of its false integuments.
208 Michelet (1859−60), (1861): for Karl Michelet see n170 above, and J.N.
Findlay in his ‘Foreword’ to Hegel (1970): v−ix.
209 Hegel (1986a), 3.20; (1977): 7−8; and chapter 1 above.
210 For Rosenkranz, see n170 above, and Croce (1956): 346−9, 359, on his
Aesthetic of the Ugly: Rosenkranz (1853).
211 Vera (1863−6), I, 30−1, 149.
212 [a] Antidühring, introduction, pp. 9−11, 137−46 on the negation of nega-
tion; an Italian version of this passage is also found in the appendix to
Labriola’s book, Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia (Rome: 1897: 169−78.
[e] Engels (1894); Labriola (1898).
213 Doergens (1872), (1878).
214 [a] These examples taken from C. Kapp, A. von Cieszkowski, and others
appear in Paul Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels und der Hegelianer, pp.
29, 62; for other characteristic examples, see the historical section of my
Estetica, chap. 13; [e] Cieskowski (1838); Barth (1890); Croce (1902).
215 The Letters of Obscure Men, written by Johannes Jäger and Ulrich von Hut-
ten to mock the enemies of Johannes Reuchlin, a Christian Hebraist, first
appeared anonymously in 1515; they are a savage satire against bigoted
pedantry. Illustres is the opposite of obscuri.
216 [a] See Fischer’s Logik und Metaphysik (1852), particularly the second edi-
tion of 1865; [e] Fischer (1865).
217 [a] J.H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel (London, 1865), I, xi, 317: ‘That secret
may be indicated at shortest thus: as Aristotle – with considerable assist-
ance from Plato – made explicit the abstract universal that was implicit
in Socrates, so Hegel – with less considerable assistance from Fichte and
Schelling – made explicit the concrete universal that was implicit in Kant’;
for Stirling see n43 above.
218 [a] Prolusione e introduzione cited above, pp. 182−3; [e] Spaventa (1862).
219 [a] This is also the view of the anti-Hegelian R. Haym in his essay on Scho-
penhauer, reprinted in his Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1903): 390−1.
220 [a] See the review of the Encyclopedia in his Werke, ed. Hartenstein, XII,
670, 685; [e] Herbart (1852).
221 Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg (1802−72), who taught at Berlin, was
Cohen’s teacher and Fischer’s passionate opponent; Paul Janet (1823−99)
640
Croce, The Philosophy of Hegel
taught at the Sorbonne from 1864 until his death: Trendelenburg (1840);
Janet (1861); Rosmini (1883b).
222 [a] Encyclopedia, ¶ 86; [e] Hegel (1986a), 8.184−5; (1991): 138.
223 [a] Geschichte der Philosophie (2d. ed), III, 577−8; [e] Hegel (1986a),
20.414; (1995), III, 504−5.
224 [a] ‘Introduction à la métaphysique,’ Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 11,
29; [e] Bergson (1903).
225 Hegel (1986a) 18.47; (1995), I, 28; Michelet (1871): 129.
226 Martial, Epigrams, 12.46.
227 For Croce’s low opinion of Spencer, see his ‘Concept of Art.’
228 Hegel (1986a), 18.55: ‘Was die Langsamkeit des Weltgeistes betrifft, so ist
zu bedenken, daß er nicht pressiert ist, nicht zu eilen und Zeit genug hat’;
Hegel (1995), I, 36.
641
18
Giovanni Gentile
dinated with a special new system of philosophy in the true and genuine
sense.5
It would be useful to publish this manuscript, because, more than any
other work by Marx, it would support historical reconstruction of the ori-
gin and development of his thought. From the testimony of one of the
two authors, we also know that – for better or for worse – the manuscript
expressed the new concept of history that then had to be perfected and
formulated in the Manifesto and advocated more thoughtfully again in
the Critique of Political Economy. This conception was expressed with the
aim of getting oriented among the various directions of contemporary
philosophy and thereby working out a nucleus of guiding principles that
would be a sort of skeleton for the new system. Marx tells us that this
work clarified his own philosophical thinking, and Engels adds that their
new historical insight was already stated there. Putting these two pieces
of testimony together, it seems there can be no doubt about the scope of
the notion of historical materialism already present in Marx’s thinking
in ’45.
Now I also agree with Croce that in dealing with Marx’s writings, more
than those of any other thinker, ‘the interpreter must proceed with
weights on his feet, working through them case by case, book by book,
proposition by proposition, relating these various productions to one
another, to be sure, but also taking account of the different times and cir-
cumstances in which they were produced, the fleeting impressions, the
mental and literary habits, requiring the interpreter to be resigned to
acknowledging uncertainty and incompleteness where these exist, while
resisting the temptation to correct and complete as he sees fit.’6
While gladly accepting these prudent warnings, I believe an irrefu-
table conclusion follows from the new information cited, and that this
must be the point of departure for our inquiry. For that purpose, it is
useful to state right away that at this time and in this case the task is not to
ask what may be critically acceptable in the end for historical materialism
– a question of great importance, but essentially a critical question and
therefore entirely extraneous to the history of Marx’s thinking, which, in
any event, that question must follow and not precede. Instead, the task
is to study how Marx really conceived of this theory that he put at the
service of a social doctrine of immense importance. And if both Marx
and Engels – referring to a work so voluminous, written as the theory
was emerging in their minds and maturing – if both stated explicitly that
it took shape as a philosophical system (indeed, out of their opposition
to systems then current), it would not then be shrewd and prudent for
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important truths are learned only by way of the senses. Philosophy must
not treat man as thinking or reasoning but as what he is in reality, a
concrete, sensible, living being – a body. The I is just the body, exactly.
Philosophy itself, in that man is its object, turns out to be a physiological
anthropology. According to Feuerbach, then, religion – and like reli-
gion, all facts about human life and society treated as lofty and nobler
– is a product of man as an organic body that lives by the continuing
satisfaction of its needs.
The outcome of this philosophy is obvious.13 For all of history there
can be no explanation except the materialist one. Search out and study
the needs of the human body in its actual existence and you will have the
reason for all human actions, small or large, individual or social. This
means that one seeks the explanation of individual acts in the immediate
physical needs of the individual as such, while the explanation of social
acts must arise, on the other hand, from the analysis of the individual’s
needs as a member of society – of one particular society, in fact. And if
Feuerbach formulated his materialism in a typical concluding remark by
saying that man is no more or less than what he eats (der Mensch sei nur
das, was er esse), and if the explanation of man’s activity as a pure and
simple individual is thus to be provided only by the needs of his stomach,
the explanation of his historical actions can come from no other source
than his economic needs.14
This is how historical materialism emerged by clear and plain logic
from Feuerbach’s materialism. It would seem, then, that there is no
other philosophy but materialism that is immanent in the materialist
conception of history. But let us see what observations Marx made about
this philosophy as he was preparing to write about his own philosophical
orientation in 1845. For this purpose, let me provide the best transla-
tions I can of the fragments printed by Engels.15
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the truth – hence the famous comparison of his art to the midwifery of
his mother, Phenarete. He was not the one who produced knowledge
in the minds of his disciples; he only helped them shape themselves to
make this knowledge – helped them in praxis, as Marx would say. Hence,
knowledge certainly implied productive activity for Socrates; it was a sub-
jective construct, an ongoing and progressive praxis. Nor did Plato let
this exceedingly important doctrine pass him by. He defined it better,
in fact, and developed it in his dialectic of ideas, all supplied by creative
energy and now brought back anew in the so-called idea-forces. And until
Hegel there was no idealist who did not understood knowledge, more or
less adequately, as the product and work of the human spirit – with the
exception of a few proponents of intellectual intuition.
Our Vico, customarily reputed to be the only founder of the philoso-
phy of history, had deep insight into this problem. The whole reason for
his implacable criticism of Descartes was in this concept of cognition as
praxis. The philosopher of Naples could not forgive Descartes for pos-
iting direct consciousness of thought (cogito ergo sum) as the point of
departure and foundation of science. When we do science, according to
Vico, we must justify the fact of consciousness itself by reconstructing its
emergence and development, not beginning with the mere fact, but, as
we now say, starting with the explanation of the fact itself and making it
again for ourselves. Verum et factum convertuntur, and truth thus reveals
itself when we make it. Since this is the result, not the given, of scientific
research, science cannot proceed by analysis, as Descartes claims – an
analysis that would assume that it had the concept of the truth present to
it to be analysed – but rather by synthesis, which is the productive activity
of the mind. Hence the inestimable value of the brilliant insights, the
happy intuitions that somehow create what can be known rather than
making what is so hard to attain.21 Making is the indispensable condition
of knowing, according to Vico. Hence the certainty of mathematics – on
this he agreed with Descartes – where the objects of our knowledge are
not given but constructed.
These principles, already expressed and developed in his work De anti-
quissima italorum sapientia (1710), then had to be admirably applied in his
New Science to construct his historical philosophy.22 And really, if what can
be known is one’s own work, Vico thinks that the natural world must be
entrusted to the knowledge possessed by God, who is its only maker. But
the historical world, a product of human activity, is the object of which
humans can acquire knowledge because they have made it. For Vico,
however, this human activity is an activity of the human mind, which is
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the reason for his notion that history has to be explained entirely by con-
sidering and studying the modifications of the mind and thinking them
through. In Marx, the principle of activity changes – or so he thought:
instead of modifications of the mind, the needs of the individual as a
social being are the root of history. But the notion of praxis that Vico
invoked remains the same.
That notion admits no criticism or correction. Labriola puts it very
well when, referring to it, he writes that ‘to think is to produce. To learn
is to produce by reproducing. We understand well only what we ourselves
are capable of producing – by thinking, working, trying and trying again,
always in virtue of powers that are our own in the social context and
from the perspective in which we find ourselves.’23 Why do we establish
laboratories if not to remake nature (something that Vico did not attend
to, nor could he) and make progress in the science of nature? What is
an experiment but a redoing of what nature does, doing it over in condi-
tions that assist nature and that make observation reliable? Clearly, this
making or remaking is not always a material or causal making; more
often, in fact, it is simply making or remaking by thinking. But might the
material and causal making or remaking not also help us understand the
fact simply by its mechanism, or perhaps by our thinking through each
part of the mechanism, piece by piece?
The answer is easy for anyone who recognizes that the mind has no
eyes or hands or tools, except metaphorically, and that one can follow
the mechanics of external making only through a sequence of represen-
tations. This original activity that must be developed as a result of science
is quite evident, for example, in a calculation of arithmetic. You have the
factors, and you want the product. This product is not something that
you glimpse by intuition; it is the result of an operation that you must
perform. And what is said of this product of arithmetic is to be said of
every product of knowing, of all knowledge. It is not given but must be
attained by a laborious act of the mind. Knowledge given is not true
knowledge, if it is not understood, unless it is reconstructed, and then it
is no longer given but a product or a reproduction, which is the same.
Might science generally be had at one stroke, just by looking around
and taking everything in with a penetrating glance? Remaking is easier
than making, surely, and reading a scientific book is a much simpler
thing than writing one. But if our spirit wants to prosper, even in reading
it cannot remain inert and passive. In fact, it must stay with the author’s
spirit every step of the way and thereby develop an energy of its own – its
own making. Language already shows traces of this enormously impor-
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relation off, and you will no longer have life, only death, no longer two
real objects of making and knowing, but two abstract objects.
One must conceive of them, then, as they really are, in their mutu-
al relation. And what is this relation? Its nature is clarified by what has
been said about the activity that is proper to knowing. When the object
is known, it is made, it is constructed. And when an object is made or
constructed, it is known. This is to say that the object is a product of the
subject, and since there is no subject without an object, one must add
that the subject itself is made or constructed as the object is gradually
made or constructed, so that the moments of the subject’s progressive
formation correspond to various moments in the progressive formation
of the object. They say that someone who has not known much has not
developed his ideas or thinking very much. And as what he knows (the
object) gradually increases, there is a corresponding increase in the
power of his comprehension and understanding (the subject). Knowl-
edge, then, is a development that continues. Since in essence it is only a
relation between two correlative terms, it is equivalent to a progressive
development of these two terms in parallel. But the root, the enduring
cause of this development lies in the activity, in the making of the sub-
ject that shapes itself by shaping the object: crescit et concrescit; p…dosij
™f'aÙtw×Ä (Aristotle).27
But when materialism says that the Spirit is a tabula rasa on which
images of the external world are inscribed, one by one, by the instrumen-
tality of the senses, from one perspective one thinks of this table, per-
fectly blank, ready to receive images from the external world. From the
other perspective, one thinks of objects in this world, perfectly formed
and complete in themselves, such that, if their job is putting images on
that table, they put them there, but if not, they remain just as they are,
losing nothing of what they are, just as they would have gained nothing
by delivering the images. This is the abstract position of materialism,
which does not stand up to the most elementary criticism. Who inscribes
the images on the tabula rasa? Is it the subject that forms them or the
object? And if subject and object exist without these images – a product
of the relation that they can enter into – if they thus exist independently
of one another, what is a subject as pure subject, and what is an object as
pure object? There is no way for materialism to answer these questions
without contradicting its assumptions, since, as we know, an abstraction
can accept no determination unless it is conceived in conditions wherein
and whereby it is concrete – without ceasing to be and being negated as
an abstraction.
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Gentile, Praxis
It is the difficulty of understanding how all ideologies arise from the mate-
rial ground of life that gives force to the arguments of those who deny the
possibility of a complete genetic (materialist) explanation of Christianity. In
general it is true that religious phenomenology or psychology – say what
one likes – raises large questions here and brings up some rather obscure
issues of its own … But is it possible that this psychological difficulty is a
privilege of Christian beliefs? Does this not happen in the formation of all
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And every day do we still not see these cathedrals rising out of inter-
ests, out of material needs? These practical interests, these material
needs have as their object the sensible reality that they strive to capture
and make. But their object is not really distinct and separate from the
object of thinking – as Feuerbach believes and supposes it to be (sinnli-
che, von den Gedankenobiekten wirklich unterschiedene Obiekte) – because the
materialism, if things were like that, would not be able to explain all of
mankind’s activity.31 Such activity can appear to be double in nature,
practical and theoretical, to someone who has not grasped the notion
of knowing as making. But when the making is united with the knowing,
the objects that belong to knowing are also the objects of making, and
vice versa, so that finally there is just a single class of objects related to
praxis (which is making and knowing together) and produced just by it.
And if materialism is good enough to explain objects that are made, it
must also be good enough to explain objects that are known, which are
basically identical in nature with the former objects. Instead, Feuerbach
explains his doctrinal constructions by the abstract activity of the Spirit –
for him, the real human activity – and so he leaps back into the idealism
that he wished so firmly to deny.
Also according to Feuerbach, human activity is therefore not prop-
erly objective (gegenständliche Thätigkeit).32 It does not produce objects
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From this, someone else could say that since the adult comes from
the infant, it is not the adult who works and wages war and does science
and so on, but the infant, in the final analysis. If this person were asked
to point the wonder-working infant out to us, he might find himself in
a real fix, but no worse than Marx’s in showing how sense might really
be the principle of reality, understood as he means it. Who can deny any
longer that the real and true Demiurge of sensible reality is our sensory
activity? It is not a vibration in the ether that appears to the eyes; it is
colour; and colour is therefore the sensible reality. But it is clear that
this reality is not given to the sense, since apart from us there is only
the vibration of the ether; the reality is produced by the sense. Just as
Plato’s Demiurge does not create ex nihilo, however, but has matter there
at hand and opposed to him, and then molds it in various sensible forms
in imitation of the eternal ideas, so also sense does not create colour but
transforms what is given externally (a vibration in the ether) into a visual
sensation. The only given is utterly unlike sensation, but the sensation is
impossible without the given.
So then, what supplies this given? The external world, replies the psy-
chologist, and for psychology this reply is good enough. But when Marx
opposes his sense, body, and matter to Hegel’s Idea and Spirit, it is no
longer a question of psychology or phenomenology but something dif-
ferent. In Hegel’s terminology, it is a question of logic – meaning met-
aphysics. In a psychological sense, one can also say that sense creates
sensation because psychologically there is nothing beyond the colour,
and the vibrations in the ether are a purely physical fact. But when we
move on from a particular treatment of psychic phenomena to a gen-
eral treatment of reality, we see immediately that before the colour and
beyond it there is the vibration in the ether. And who causes the vibra-
tion to be there? God, replies the spiritualist; matter, the materialist.
But given what has been said, it is obvious that this matter is some-
thing beyond human sensory activity; it would need to be fashioned, as
Marx would say, or constructed in its own way. The question is scholastic,
Marx will say. As such, vibrations in the ether are purely an abstraction,
something that does not exist (as far as humans are concerned). Vibra-
tions in the ether exist only as colours. But this answer brings us back to
phenomenology again, though it is Hegel’s logic that the author means
to oppose. It is metaphysical materialism that he believes he is rectifying
with his dynamic concept of matter. And in this domain, the relative
– the as far as we are concerned – must give way to the absolute, as the a
posteriori becomes a priori.
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Gentile, Praxis
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Gentile, Praxis
ing took shape, having become so deeply familiar with Fichte’s philoso-
phy first and then Hegel’s, did not approach Feuerbach’s materialism
by forgetting everything he had learned and was second nature to his
thinking. He could not forget that there is no object without a subject
that constructs it, nor could he forget that everything is in perpetual
becoming, that everything is history.46 Yes, he learned that this subject
is not the Spirit, an ideal activity, but sense, a material activity, and that
this Everything (which is always becoming) is not the Spirit, not the Idea,
but Matter. In this way, he thought that he was travelling along the road
that led from Kant and Fichte to Hegel, from idealist transcendence to
immanence, as it were, thus assuming that he was always moving farther
from the abstract and closer to the concrete.
But on the problem of the abstract and concrete, how could he not
take account of Hegel’s stunning critique of the abstract intellect? Yes to
matter, then, but matter along with praxis (the subjective object). Yes to
matter, but matter in continuous becoming. In this way, he came to grasp
‘the fairest flower’ of idealism and of materialism, the flower of concrete
reality and of concrete conceptions always replacing abstractions, both
Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s. Yes to materialism, but historical materialism.
Except that the irony of logic answered the best intentions of his realism
with a gross contradiction as the result, which I hope will be clear from
now on to attentive readers of these pages – a contradiction between
content and form, analogous to what we have already pointed out in
criticizing historical materialism as a simple philosophy of history.
To conclude, then, I will say that an eclecticism with contradictory
ingredients is the general character of this philosophy of Marx. And if
some of his current disciples do not know what to make of it, perhaps
they are not far wrong. At its basis there are many fertile ideas, and taken
separately they deserve careful consideration. But in isolation they do
not belong to Marx, as has been shown, and therefore they cannot justify
the term ‘Marxism’ that has been synonymous for some time with a phi-
losophy that is purely realistic. The truth is that science is not concerned
with names, and if any of the most important Hegelian ideas can pen-
etrate people’s thoughts if Marx’s name gets used as a charm, then good
luck to ‘Marxism’ too!
NOTES
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Gentile, Praxis
more than four decades later as an appendix to the book that Engels pub-
lished on Feuerbach in 1888: Engels (1888), Appendix, pp. 59−62; Gentile
refers to the Theses as ‘Fragments.’
16 [a] Namely, as an activity that makes, posits and creates the sensible object
(gegenständliche Thätigkeit).
17 Where Marx has ‘revolutionary praxis (revolutionäre Praxis),’ Gentile has
‘praxis rovesciata’ in this and later editions: Turi (1998): 924.
18 Where Marx has ‘understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in
practice (praktisch revolutioniert),’ Gentile has ‘praticamente scalzato.’
19 [a] Showing, in other words, that the holy family is nothing but a duplication
and a hypostasis of the earthly family; [e] Gentile has ‘praticamente rovesciata’
again where Marx has ‘eliminated in practice (praktisch vernichtet).’
20 [a] See Engels, Feuerbach, Appendix, pp. 59−62; [e] Engels (1888).
21 Gentile alludes to Gioberti on creation: see section 8 of the Introduction.
22 [a] There are also hints of this in the inaugural oration published the year
before: De nostri temporis studiorum ratione. On this doctrine of Vico’s, see
two articles by Professor Tocco: ‘Descartes jugé par Vico,’ Revue de metaphy-
sique et de morale, (1896): 568−72; and ‘Rassegna filosofica,’ Rivista d’Italia,
(1898): 762−3; also the study, ‘Kant in Italien,’ by Karl Werner, Denkschrift
der philosophishe-historische Classe der königliche Akademie der Wissenschaftlehre
(Vienna, 1881), section VII, pp. 350 ff., which cites all earlier bibliography.
[e] Vico (1990).
23 [a] Op. cit. p. 43 (pp. 55−6 of the French translation); [e] Labriola (1898).
24 The verb facere, ‘to do,’ is cognate with the adjective facilis (facile in Italian),
‘easy.’
25 [a] F. Fiorentino, ‘F. Froebel,’ Giornale napoletano di filosofia e letteratura,
(1878): 220. [e] Friedrich Froebel (1782−1852) was a pioneer of modern
educational methods, especially for very young children.
26 [a] Ibid.
27 The Greek phrase, ‘growth within itself,’ does not occur in Aristotle; the
Latin means ‘increases and grows.’
28 By ‘Fragments’ Gentile means the Theses on Feuerbach.
29 ‘Filthy’ (schmutzig) is Marx’s word in the first Thesis on Feuerbach.
30 [a] Op. cit., pp. 123−5 (pp. 163−6 in the French translation). Note that in
the end Professor Labriola then reproduces the position for which Marx
had already criticized Feuerbach: he reduces the history of primitive Chris-
tianity to the history of two independent processes, each of them autono-
mous – the history of doctrine (an ideological process); and the history of
the church (an economic process, p. 127). He warns, however, that doctrine
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664
19
Giovanni Gentile
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Gentile, Idealism
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seed that might be the seed of a final cause – materialism seeks the root
of those higher forms.5 It levels everything to make it fit within a single
boundary, not by raising nature to the Spirit but by bringing the Spirit
down to nature, while also trying to avoid any aprioricity in accounting
for all of the Spirit’s deeds, even the highest.
And in the very heart of naturalism, look at the physiology that had its
glory days in the same period, by labouring to extract life – nature’s high-
est form – from physico-chemical forces, which are the lowest, or else
by a new and more miraculous alchemy, to get blood from the turnip,
amidst the general revulsion for the pestiferous Spirit that materialist
philosophy inspired. Look at psychology, at first reduced to mechanics
only metaphorically, and then, by every expedient, from the most clever
to the most naive, compelled by good sense to lie in the Procrustean bed
that was at first physiological and then physical as well, producing experi-
ments, measurements, and laboratories, and then the famous enigma of
psychology without a soul – a bitter joke, it seemed, up until the most
recent theory of feelings as bodily facts!
Look at historical, and, in general, philosophical positivism, with its
firm intent to see nothing in the Spirit but the fated reflex of the ambi-
ent physical fact. This reduces history to an intricate puppet-show, direct-
ed not by the Providence that Vico taught to us, which is Mind exulting
in time, but by the ineluctable influence of the physical nature around
us and by our own physiology or pathology. Positivism also reduces his-
tory to the piteous duty of gathering up, one by one, the minute facts
that the Spirit throws off here and there as it passes along the avenues
of time and space, without ever wondering or seeking to know who has
thrown them – sometimes actually declaring that asking would be use-
less, perhaps out of fear that the detested Spirit, with its Medusa’s face,
might be seen rising up before us again, in thought and in person, just
because we speak its name. In general, positivism also views the world
not as a hierarchical system of values but as a disorderly mass of phenom-
ena with no origin and no end, either thrown out helter-skelter or else
ordered by a determinism that makes them all the same by eliminating
differences of level and kind. The ethical is then explained by the useful,
right by force, cognition by the mechanics of representations, and these
by sensations as such. In their turn, sensations are understood as subjec-
tive appearances of the physical event, and art itself is reduced to the
play of physiology or just to pleasure. Religion comes down to fear, and
everything in the Spirit is explained as a derivative of nature.
And the experimental sciences? They are arrogant about the differenc-
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Gentile, Idealism
es between them, scornful of a principle that might join them all in the
unity of the mind, and tolerant only of one philosophy that limits itself
to the modest and uncompensated employment of recording results
achieved by each of them in a file of numbered cards – or, even better,
to be made the boss of a communications office on the understanding
that everyone employed in this office should repeat what is transmitted
as faithfully as a phonograph or a typewriter, with never a mistake of
pronunciation or orthography. This is to stick to external appearances,
where only nature’s disconnected parts are in view, and not ever ending
up worried about the soul inside all those parts – which are not as discon-
nected as they seem – or about the Spirit that intus alit! 6
Art itself, having been made naturalist, verist, and realist over the
course of three decades, has seemed not to know that at nature’s head or
summit, in the truest part of the true and in the most real of the real – if
we may call it that – there was also the Spirit, of which only various decep-
tive appearances and some false and distorted manifestations had been
seen for a long time.7 And need I mention here the sympathies widely
encountered by Nietzsche’s egoist philosophy, intent on subjugating the
human world to that same law of the strongest that Darwin pointed out
in nature?8
And at last socialism, which in every era had been an idealist utopia
(just think of Plato’s Republic) carrying within it the light and heat of the
deepest idealist aspirations, has chosen in our day to set aside all moral
grounding and meaning. It has insisted on the thesis that the social ques-
tion is not a question of morality and hence depends not on human
will but on the ineluctable forces of social life that determine willing
itself. In the end, it is a natural problem, and once the data have been
set, the conditions and determinants of the solution have also been set.
Thus, even socialism has thought it best to take a seat at the banquet of
the sciences, accompanied by materialist philosophy, next to that famous
historical materialism which is a contradiction in terms.9
What a magnificent, mindless dance these fair bacchants have danced
through the crags and vales of measureless nature – and all of them
daughters of human thinking! An old Silenus spotted them from a hill,
gazing astonished in voluptuous delight of eye and mind.10 He alone was
concerned to warn them now and then to be careful not to break their
necks in their dizzy and dangerous dance: Neo-Kantianism, so-called,
that deferential – indeed, obsequious – devout and passive admirer of
all the experimental sciences, in its absolute inertia and impotence,
has done and could do nothing but preach that we should not forget
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(as we continue with the only useful research, the experimental) the
problem of knowledge, which is the prior question, thus here and there
contradicting another of the mindless bacchants, who, for their part, do
not know what to make of the old Silenus and his stale warnings.11 The
party has continued without interruption, never beclouded by the least
shadow of melancholy nor by any inkling that at some point it might be
a good time to stop.
But one fine day, a few years ago, a bizarre and peevish spirit came
forth to shout at science’s failure, reproaching it with its very proud
promises of natural solutions to the great problems of mankind’s ori-
gin and destiny, to which religion offers a supernatural solution.12 He
shouted that the promises had never been kept and could never have
been kept, and that it was necessary to drop the pretense of a substitute
for religion, of knocking down the great human idealities (which cannot
be reduced to a mechanical explanation), and of staying within a mod-
est range of particular questions and theorizing about second causes. It
looked like a scandal. Advocates and admirers of the sciences rebelled
at the verdict, which was thought to be false or exaggerated: it was said
to be false that the sciences had solved none of the problems of origin,
and an exaggeration that the notion of evolution had produced nothing
about the origin of mankind. There was protest about the independence
of reason. Many fine things were said, and many truly stirring articles
were written for periodicals. But that bizarre and peevish spirit did not
go silent as a result. In fact, as if to take advantage of the moment, many
who had seemed weak because of their long silence took heart, whether
they were mystics – like the creator of the scandal – or of a different dis-
position. And they joined with him to extend the action to naturalism,
positivism, and historicism.
So it came to be sung in songs of every key that materialism, for reasons
quite unlike those of the Neo-Kantians, is real philosophical naïveté; that
naturalism does not provide an account of thinking and its attributes;
that positivism, with its levelling determinism, destroys all values, all dif-
ferences; and all of them strain their eyes to stay sightless. Physiologists
no longer hesitated to profess vitalism – just calling it neo-vitalism to make
it all new, as we think that a new collar freshens up an old overcoat.13
Psychologists began to be persuaded that experimental methods were
unproductive in their research specialty, and Neo-Kantians were moved
to assert the need for a metaphysics, at least for normative purposes. New
life almost stirred in that neo-critical thought, which, even though it had
survived in France for fifty years, went almost unnoticed up to now or was
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up to that nature. Seeing that this necessary process goes from the dual-
ity of reason and faith to the unity of reason already completes that proc-
ess and overcomes dualism. Therefore, if against naturalism we reaffirm
the long-denied rights of idealism, we are not rising up in the name of
mysticism but on behalf of that reason which is the origin of every truth
and every right. An abyss lies between our cause and that of those who
shout that science has been overthrown. Otherwise, I would not think it
right for me to ascend to this Chair, which is a chair of science.
I too agree with these people in saying that the science of naturalism
has failed at the problems that it set for itself, but I say that naturalist
science is not all of science. To tell the truth, what except reason itself,
which is exactly what science is, puts us in a position to state that this sci-
ence has failed? And since when are the judgments of science superior
to itself? Bruno’s pyre wreaked terrible destruction on his person but did
no harm to his philosophy, nor does the notorious decree of 1616, with
Galileo’s subsequent condemnation, prove that the heliocentric view is
false, revealing instead the resistance to the progress of natural science
exerted in the seventeenth century by a false Aristotelianism, and a still
false theology, through the force of inertia. Above science there is no
authority to act as judge. And when science itself assists at the coronation
of faith and thus of theology, it behaves like a father whose affection for
his little child sometimes makes him forget his own dignity: he kneels
down in front of the child, behaving like an infant and offering to heed
every command. But the child of Themistocles has only the power given
it by the parents.17
In the present resurgence of the ideal, then, it is good for our idealism
to be a party on its own. It sees no limits as it voyages through reality, and
so it sticks by that reality as absolute, opposing critical idealism or Neo-
Kantianism no less than naturalism, mysticism no less than materialism.
And we believe that only this idealism can rise again now by meeting
the needs left unmet by naturalism. Our idealism does not deny the real
progress made by the special sciences since it is their expected rectifica-
tion, as Spaventa said. Yet our idealism never denies the rights of the
Spirit asserted by Neo-Kantianism and by the trend towards mysticism,
though when they offer an agnostic justification of those rights, our ide-
alism rejects this as irrational. It also departs from naturalism by assert-
ing the reality of ideas. But it differs from Neo-Kantianism and mysticism
by aiming to clarify the intrinsic and unbreakable connection between
ideas and nature, to locate the point at which nature and the Spirit make
a unity, and to demonstrate this organic oneness of the real. Since both
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nature and the Spirit derive from the real, nature gains the same intel-
ligibility and transparency that belongs to the Spirit.
In truth, mistrust of the ideas that Plato called divine is an anachro-
nism in today’s philosophy. Ever since Aristotle, once ideas were treated
as outside the individual mind that ascends to them from sensory per-
ceptions, those ideas had looked like a useless and empty reduplication
of sensible reality. But if there were grounds for mistrust, out of opposi-
tion to the Platonic dualism that really was duplicating reality, for us that
same reality is unitary – in all the results of our thinking and at all its
levels. Hence, mistrust has been unjustified ever since idealism, as part
of modern philosophy, took advantage of that same Aristotelian critique
by discarding the caput mortuum that was the matter (ȣ/ȜȘ) of the Timaeus
and Philebus, or rather those ineliminable residues that we sometimes
hear mentioned even today.18
Right from the start of any philosophizing, ideal reality is beyond any
possible dispute because philosophizing entails asserting just such a real-
ity. If reality were just the object of sensory perception, as the object of
sensible perception, then, to pass beyond sensory perception – as phi-
losophy surely does, once it rises beyond bare description and simple
cataloging – would be to pass beyond reality and to be tossed about help-
lessly in an absolute void. But it is the case that philosophy overcomes
one reality by asserting another, by the same right that everyone, philoso-
pher or not, recognizes in sensory perception – to posit its own object.
But the special science itself asserts concepts, precisely because it is a
level of philosophy. Yet it is only to higher or philosophical reflection
that these concepts appear as not entirely stripped of every sensible and
representational element and thus as capable of a new purification and
of rising farther to the ideal. Within the sphere of reflection that belongs
to a special science, however, concepts are kinds, they are categories,
they are laws and they are principles; they are exact, meaning that they
are true; but how could they be all that without corresponding to a real-
ity? How could they be held as true if the very reflection that belongs to
the special science did not regard them as corresponding to a reality? Or
shall we say that kinds, categories, laws, and principles are sensible mat-
ter that can be plucked out of the soil as we go strolling down the lane?19
The reality that seems to grow distant from us, and from which, in
some sense, we are indeed distanced by an abstract process of know-
ing, is the reality that is seen and touched, mere sensible reality. But by
distancing ourselves from this reality and travelling the path of ideas,
we encounter a new reality that is just the reality of ideas. This reality,
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far from being the degraded original, enfeebled in the better part of
its being, must surely have a higher value, if, for the sake of it, we all
depart from the original by a path that is arduous in itself and costs the
investigator sweat and sleepless nights! Otherwise, says Dante in the Con-
vivio (1.4), ‘the greater part of the human race lives by sense and not by
reason, like children, and as such they understand things just by their
outside, not seeing the goodness that is ordained for an obligatory end
because they have shut the eyes of reason that penetrate within and see
the goodness there.’20 And Vico says that ‘the human mind is naturally
inclined by the senses to see itself externalized, in the body, and finds it
very hard to understand itself by means of reflection.’ (Axiom 63)21
Given this natural inclination of the mind, the sensible always turns
out to be treated as the standard of reality, even though the perception
that represents sensible reality to us is just as subjective as the logical
procedure that confirms reality as rational. Reality means an object of
the Spirit – and the Spirit itself, insofar as it is its own object. Nor can
any reality be imagined, unless, through the very act of being imagined,
it is an object of the Spirit. And since the process of the Spirit’s develop-
ment has various levels, the levels of reality are equally various. Reality
has as many levels as that process has levels. Wanting to see and touch,
like St Thomas, in order to believe presumes that God reveals himself to
us by coming to pay us a visit, that he is led to us and introduced by his
priests.22 This is an obvious sign of that wretchedness of the human mind
‘immersed and buried in the body’ that Vico has put among the lumi-
nous definitions of the New Science; it is the sensory need that, when it
is satisfied, satisfies the sense, not the higher requirements of the Spirit,
which, for its part, can have doubts about the senses and refuse to trust
the object of sight and touch.23 But just as the sensible is not and must
not be the object of reason, so the rational is not and must not be an
object of sense. Using two weights and two measures is also illicit in the
phenomenology of the Spirit, and if there is anyone whose law turns
desire into a decree, so much the worse for him.
Surely, in order to see the alpine flora, we must exercise our legs and
climb mountains. If anyone standing on the plain were to deny that such
a flora exists because he does not see it on the plain, then who knows
what position he would be getting among the fauna? Still, for some time
now it has been annoying to keep on saying that when people talk about
ideas not as simple abstractions but as self-standing entities, it gives bod-
ies to ghosts and turns philosophy into a mythology. And yet if philoso-
phy is an elaboration of concepts from the special sciences or is said to
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by the unconscious, nor the psychic fact from the physiological fact as
such, nor the physiological from the chemical, nor the chemical from
the mechanical – as naturalist transformism maintains. For one miracle
it substitutes any number of miracles more incomprehensible than the
old one, and more mysterious.
The truth is that the last in the order of time comes first in the order
of logic, as Aristotle noted. Thinking, which is the last to appear in the
world as the result of nature’s final development in the human soul,
must be the first starting point for anyone who wants to understand the
process of development. While it is true that determinism rules the proc-
ess of the real in everything, this is not mechanical determinism and
is not regulated by the principle of efficient causality. It is teleological
determinism, the domain of final causality. All objections made against
that concept derive from a false view: namely, from the notion that an
end implies a purpose, or a consciousness of the end, whereas purpose
and consciousness are consequent on the end and therefore different
from it. An end implies immanence in the real as pure ideal determina-
tion of its own outer form, which is the terminus of its activity. Nature
is not yet realized as consciousness, of course, and it cannot propose its
own end, as the human person does. But even in the human, the end
does not emerge from having a purpose, from abstract willing, which,
one would hope, is a point that psychology has passed beyond (so-called
free will); as has been observed, in fact, having a purpose emerges from
the end. And if the end precedes the purpose, the end must be disassoci-
ated from it, since none of us can walk hand in hand with an out-of-date
self, even if the out-of-date self is as different from the current one as two
separate persons are from one another.
We can certainly ask those who deny finality in nature whether the
concept of development is intelligible in any other way. Nemo dat quod
non habet: and if you negate reason in nature, it follows that you are also
negating it in the Spirit, or else you give up on the concept of develop-
ment – two hopeless choices, one more than the other.29
Gentlemen: This year, I hope to show the young students who would like
to join me that nature actually has what it gives, and to do this by look-
ing for the Spirit deep in nature’s belly, helping it be born and gradu-
ally take form through the main levels traversed by it in time. In this
inquiry, I shall note how much recent studies have added to the specu-
lative concept of the Spirit already worked out by absolute idealism by
verifying it positively and proving it rationally, and how far some doc-
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trines have strayed from the path of true science – which, as such, is the
only science. This will be the best introduction I could give to the new
development of the idealism to which contemporary thought is return-
ing. If a philosophy of the Spirit is possible on the principles that I have
mentioned today, which remains to be seen, idealism’s rebirth will not
signal a retreat from naturalism’s real and solid victories but a comple-
tion of them and a genuine integration. So as of today, it can be said that
we present ourselves here not as followers of the old but as critics and
promoters of the new, and therefore as pioneers of philosophy’s future.
NOTES
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682
20
Giovanni Gentile
1. Faith in Truth
Therefore, what we call the thinking of another, or our own in the past,
is, in a first moment, our own actual thinking, and, in a second moment,
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a part of our actual thinking, a part inseparable from the whole to which
it belongs, and therefore real in the unity of the whole itself. Hence, the
only concrete thinking is our own actual thinking. And since our non-
actual thinking is no longer our own, we may say that the only concrete
thinking is our own thinking absolutely (but see the meaning of this we
as the subject of our thinking in its context). Equally may one say that
only concrete thinking is absolutely actual thinking, since the thinking
that is not our own is not actual thinking.
6. Thinking as Nature
7. Error
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If error is the thinking that cannot be thought, the true is the thinking
that cannot not be thought: two necessities, which are only one necessity.
Verum norma sui et falsi.5 Thinking thinks itself inasmuch as it thinks itself
necessarily, which is to say, inasmuch as we think by not being able to
think otherwise. Every act of thinking is an exclusion of another act of
thinking (not of all the other possible acts, but of the one thought imme-
diately before). Omnis determinatio est negatio.6 And therefore only by my
becoming aware of an error and freeing myself from it do I know a truth
– and think, in other words. In this living bond that joins (concrete)
truth to (abstract) error is the root of thinking and the fundamental law
of logic. The necessity expressed by the old logic in the law of identity is
an abstract necessity, and likewise abstract was the thinking or the truth
at which that logic aimed, winding through a maze of contradictions.
The principle of identity (or of contradiction), A = A, declares a neces-
sity in regard to what has been called abstract thinking, in regard to
nature, in other words, which, by definition, is the negation of thinking
and thus cannot admit to itself any kind of logical law. A = A is the law of
error in its abstractness. Hence, whatever had been thought according
to such a law would for that very reason be error. There is no thinking,
in fact, that resolves itself into A = A.
Logical necessity is of the real or concrete process of thinking that
instead could be formulated schematically as A = non-A. In fact, every
act of thinking is a negation of an act of thinking, a present in which the
past dies, and thus a unity of these two moments. Take away the present,
and you will have the past blind (abstract nature); take away the past, and
you will have the present empty (abstract thinking or another nature).
Truth is not of the being that is but of the being that annuls itself, and,
by annulling itself, really is – an unthinkable proposition as long as think-
ing is taken to be abstract thinking, where being, having been fixed, can
only be; on the other hand, it is a proposition that cannot not be thought
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he says
because it knows them all, yet I believe that the knowledge of those few
that are understood by the human intellect equals the divine in objective
certainty since it comes to grasp the necessity beyond which, it seems, there
can be no greater assurance.
And one should say, on the contrary, that not only pure mathematics but
all our own thinking (even the most useless trifles) is real in the act that
thinks itself.7
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thinking itself, not as act but as fact – what has already been thought and
thus has become nature.
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NOTES
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694
21
Giovanni Gentile
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ing, and he treated his logic as a movement of ideas that are thought and
therefore must be defined. Such a movement is absurd because the ideas
are thought – defined, in other words – by being shut up in the circle of
their terms and standing fixed. This is the reason why the Platonic ideas
are all linked to one another, and hence they oblige the subjective think-
ing that wants to think one of them to think all the others as well, thus
having to move from one to another without pause while they stand fixed,
like the stadium with athletes running inside it.
They stand fixed, but they are an abstract logos that must get back to
real, actual thinking. Thinking is inasmuch as it is not, and it never stands
fixed, always moving. Yes, it also defines, and it is mirrored in the defined
object, but it does so by starting to define in a different way, always a bet-
ter fit for the unceasing need in whose satisfaction lies its own realization.
Thinking is dialectical through its becoming, which is not a thought unity
of being and non-being, a concept in which the concept of being and the
opposite concept of non-being are identified. It is a realized unity of the
very being of thinking with its real non-being. Obviously we might define
the concept of this unity, but our definition is not an image or a logical
duplicate of a transcendent reality in relation to the logical act. By this act
it is all one and the same.
In this dialecticity lies the answer to the thousand sceptical doubts and
the thousand anguished questions that arise from experience and life’s
conflicts – conflicts between man and nature, life and death, idea and
reality, pleasure and pain, science and mystery, good and evil, and so on:
all the ancient problems that have tortured the religious conscience as
well as the moral life of all people – the anxieties of theodicy as of phi-
losophy. The actualist conception is a spiritualist conception and deeply
religious, even though its religious character cannot satisfy anyone who
is in the habit of conceiving the divine as transcendent or confuses the
act of thinking with the simple fact of experience. Now a coherent reli-
gious conception of the world must be optimistic without denying pain,
evil, and error. It must be idealistic without suppressing reality and all its
defects. It must be spiritualist without shutting its eyes to nature and the
iron laws of nature’s machinery. But all philosophies and all religions,
despite every spiritualist and idealistic effort, are destined to fail if they
stop with the logic of identity where opposites exclude one another –
where, if there is being, there is no non-being, and vice versa – either
by abandoning themselves to an absurd dualism or else shutting them-
selves up in an abstract and hence unsatisfactory and, once again, absurd
monism.
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The antinomies of the moral life and religious conscience, of the world
and humanity, are insoluble by this logic of identity. And there is no faith
in human freedom, in human reason, in the power of the ideal, or the
grace of God that can save mankind and, in brief, prop him up in a life
entirely pervaded, as man’s is, by the thinking that is inquiry and doubt
and perpetual questioning – with life as the answer. Are we are or are we
not immortal? Is there truth for us? Does virtue have a place in the world?
Is there a God who rules it all? Is this life worth the pain that it takes to
live it? These questions keep coming and coming back again from the
bottom of the human heart, which is why people think and have need of
philosophy, which comforts them to go on living with an answer of sorts.
Everyone who lives gets the answer that he can get. But a logical, solid,
rational answer is not possible if thinking does not withdraw itself from
the objects that it thinks from moment to moment and then welds them
together in an iron chain as its world-system, never turning back on itself,
where all reality has its root and whence it draws its life.
This is where being is not already but comes to be, not existing from the
beginning without mediation; where to know is to learn, and, even if we
already know, to learn anew every time; where the good is not what has
been done and already exists but what has not been done and therefore
is being done; where joy is not what we have but what blossoms from its
contrary, what does not stop by falling into the monotonous boredom
that lies stagnant and breeds death but renews and reconquers itself with
new toil and hence through new pains; where, in a word, the Spirit burns
eternal, flashing and gleaming in the blaze as it consumes all the heavy
slag, dead and inert. In that place, to say being is to say non-being: wisdom is
ignorance there, good is evil, joy is pain, conquest is toil, peace is war, and
the Spirit is nature that makes itself spirit.
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one trembles and shies away from taking into his mind this consciousness
of the infinite responsibility whereby man grows weightier by recognizing
and sensing God in himself, he is not a Christian, and – if Christianity is
only a revelation, a clearer consciousness of his own spiritual nature that
the human acquires – he is not even human. By human I mean someone
conscious of his own humanity.
And how will this person be able to feel himself free and thus capable
of recognizing and fulfilling a duty, of grasping a truth, and, in short, of
entering the kingdom of the Spirit, if, in the depths of his own being,
he does not sense history, the universe, the infinite, everything gather-
ing and pulsating? Given the limited powers which, at any moment of his
existence, he finds himself actually possessing, could he confront – as per-
haps he does and ought to do – the problem of life and death that faces
him terribly with the ineluctable might of nature’s laws? And yet, if he is to
live a spiritual life, he must triumph over this law, and, both in the world
of art and in that of morality, by action and by thought, he must partici-
pate in the life of those of immortal things that are divine and eternal. He
must participate in them on his own, freely, since there is no outside help
that can assist the Spirit’s spontaneous capacity unless it is help willed and
valued and therefore freely sought and made effective. In other words,
nothing comes to us from outside that does any good for the salvation of
the soul, the strength of the intellect, and the power of the will.
Therefore, the actualist does not deny God, but along with the mystics
and the most religious souls who have ever lived on earth, he repeats: Est
Deus in nobis.6
NOTES
1 We have used Gentile (1931a), which is the first edition of the Italian version
of the essay that appeared originally in German in Gentile (1931b).
2 Diogenes Laertius, Lives, 2.32: ‘The one thing I know is that I know nothing,’
a saying attributed to Socrates, here in Erasmian Latin.
3 Dante, La vita nuova, 19.
4 Deus absconditus: ‘hidden God.’
5 Bruno (1888): 274 (De la causa, principio et uno, dial. 4).
6 ‘God is in us’ or ‘There is a god in us.’
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22
Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals
Origins
This is the source of the religious character of Fascism. Its religious and
therefore intransigent character explains the method that Fascism used
in its struggle during the four years from 1919 to 1922. Fascists were a
minority in the country and in Parliament, where a small core group
arrived after the elections of 1921. The constitutional state was therefore
anti-Fascist, as it had to be, since it was the state of the majority, and it
was precisely this state that called itself liberal which stood opposed to
Fascism. The state was liberal, but its liberalism was the agnostic and
acquiescent kind that understands only external liberty – the state that is
liberal because it regards itself as external to the free citizen’s mind, as
if it were a mechanical system apart from the activity of each individual.
Although the representatives of hybrid socialism – democratizing and
parliamentary – had adapted themselves, even in Italy, to this individual-
ist conception of the idea of politics, this state was plainly not what social-
ists yearned for. Nor was it the state whose idea had worked so powerfully
in the heroic Italian era of our Risorgimento, when the state rose out
the work of small minorities strengthened by the power of an idea to
which individuals deferred in various ways: its basis was the great project
of producing Italians after having given them independence and unity.
Embattled against this state, Fascism also took strength from its idea,
which gathered around it a rapidly growing number of the young because
of the fascination that comes from any religious idea that calls for sac-
rifice. It was the party of the young – just as Mazzini’s Young Italy grew
out of an analogous political and moral need after the events of 1831.
This party also had its Hymn of Youth, which was sung by Fascists joy-
ously with hearts exulting. And like Mazzini’s Young Italy, Fascism began
to be the faith of all Italians who were offended by the past and eager
for renewal – a faith like any faith colliding with a reality, which comes
from breaking up and melting in the crucible of new energies and being
reshaped in keeping with the new ideal, ardent and intransigent. It was
the same faith that ripened in the trenches and in a deep rethinking of
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the sacrifice offered on the battlefields for the only purpose that could
justify it – the life and greatness of the fatherland – a faith of energy and
violence, disinclined to respect anything that opposed the life and great-
ness of the fatherland.
Thus arose the movement of squadrons – young people, resolute,
armed, wearing the black shirt, and organized militarily, opposing the
law in order to set up a new law, a force armed against the state to estab-
lish the new state. The squadrons moved against the fragmented anti-
nationalist forces whose activity culminated in the general strike of July
1922, and finally risked an uprising on 28 October 1922, when armed
columns of Fascists marched on Rome after occupying public build-
ings in the provinces. Some died in the March on Rome, before and
after it reached its goal, especially in the Po Valley. Like all bold actions
with deep moral content, the march ended first with amazement, then
admiration, and at last with universal acclaim. It thus seemed that at
one stroke the Italian people had rediscovered its enthusiastic pre-war
unanimity, but this was now even more vibrant because people realized
that victory had been won and that a new, refreshing wave of faith had
come to revitalize the victorious nation on its hard new path towards the
urgent restoration of its financial and moral strength.
Fascist Government
The squadrons and the lawbreaking stopped, and Fascism outlined the
elements of the regime that it wanted. Between 29 and 30 October, the
fifty thousand blackshirts who had marched on the capital from the
provinces left Rome in perfect order. They left after parading before
His Majesty the King, and they left at a sign from their Leader, who
became the head of government and the soul of the new Italy that Fas-
cism promised.
Was the revolution over? In a sense, yes: the squadrons no longer had
a reason to exist. The Voluntary Militia for national Security was formed
to incorporate former squadron members into the state’s armed forces.
But the state is not government, and the government was still waiting,
amidst the consensus of the great majority of Italians who saw in Fas-
cism the most potent political force, the one capable of expressing the
nation’s heart and bringing discipline to all its forces for the change in
legislation wherein the state now needed to find the form best suited
to the social trends and spiritual needs current among the Italian peo-
ple. This transformation is gradually taking place amidst perfect public
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order, under a strict financial regime that has put the unstable post-war
budget back in balance by reorganizing the army, the judiciary, and the
educational institutions without wobbling or wavering, even while there
has been, and still is, a great deal of vacillation in public opinion, vio-
lently agitated by a public press whose rigidified opposition becomes all
the more furious as it grows more hopeless about any possibility of a
return to the past. The press takes advantage of every mistake and every
accident to stir the people up against the unrelenting and constructive
hard work of the new government.
But foreigners coming to Italy have crossed the ring of flame drawn
around Fascist Italy by the defensive fire of ferocious propaganda, writ-
ten and spoken, internal and external, from Italians and non-Italians,
which has tried to isolate Fascist Italy by slandering it as a country fallen
into the hands of the most violent and cynical power, arbitrarily elimi-
nating every legal civil liberty and every guarantee of justice. As foreign-
ers have been able to see this Italy with their own eyes, listen with their
own ears to the new Italians, and experience their material and moral
lives, they have come to envy the public order that prevails in Italy today.
They have become interested in the spirit that strives every day to gain
more mastery of this well-regulated mechanism, and they have begun
to sense that here beats a heart, one full of humanity even if agitated by
the frustrations of patriotic passion. The fatherland of the Fascist is also
the fatherland that lives and stirs in the heart of every civic person, the
fatherland that stirred feelings everywhere in the tragedy of the war and
now stands vigilant in every region – must stand vigilant to protect its
sacred interests even after the war, indeed, as a consequence of the war
that no one any longer believes to be the last.
This fatherland, moreover, is a reconsecration of traditions and insti-
tutions that are the constant in civilization, in the flux and perpetuity
of traditions. It is also a school for the subordination of the particular
and inferior to the universal and immortal. It is respect for law and dis-
cipline. It is liberty, but liberty to be won through law, liberty established
by renouncing all petty wilfulness and wasteful, irrational ambition. It
is an austere conception of life and a religious gravity that does not dis-
tinguish theory from practice, talking from doing, and does not paint
grand ideals in order to banish them from this world, where the fact
remains that life may go on in its base and wretched way, while it is hard
work to make life ideal by expressing one’s own convictions in action
and in words – these words themselves being deeds that bind the person
who speaks them, and with him they also bind the world of which he is a
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reasons have shown the need to do so, and all theorists and defenders
of liberalism have always recognized the legitimacy of such suspensions.
The point is to see when the government has used these police meas-
ures, whether it is true or not true that a certain publication (deliberately
or not – it makes little difference) had caused the nation to run the risk
of very serious disturbances of public order, so that it was worthwhile for
the government to take the action that it took for the country and for
the liberty that those disturbances would have compromised. The truth
is that the great mass of the Italian people understands this and proves
it by its calm indifference towards the heated protests and complaints of
the opposition – the fact being that in today’s Italy the work on behalf
of the nation’s liberty in the world is being done not by anti-Fascism
but by Fascism, which takes great pains to build a solid foundation for
the structure in which the free activities of citizens can actually develop,
when citizens have the guarantee of a law that truly expresses their real,
organic, concrete will.
In Italy today, hearts are arrayed in two opposed camps: on one side
the Fascists, on the other their opponents, democrats of all shades and
stripes, two mutually exclusive worlds. But the great majority of Italians
remains outside, feeling that the content of the conflict chosen by the
opposition groups lacks a political solidity that might be valued and suit-
ed to popular interest. Those who stay outside the conflict personally
fully understand that when the word ‘liberty’ is invoked, the meaning of
the term is entirely elastic if it can be on the lips of the different parties.
In the second place, this small opposition to Fascism, formed from the
debris of the old Italian political machines (democratic, rationalist, radi-
cal, Masonic), is irreducible; gradually, through internal strain and inac-
tion, it is bound to end up always on the margin of the political forces
that operate effectively in the new Italy. This is because it has no princi-
ple that really opposes the principle Fascism, only one that is lower. And
it is a law of history without exception that of two opposite principles,
neither wins: a higher principle triumphs which is the synthesis of the
two different vital components that inspire both principles separately.
However, when one of two principles is lower and the other higher, one
partial and the other total, the first must necessarily succumb because
it is contained in the second, and the motive for its opposition is purely
negative, living in the void.
Facing their opponents, the Fascists know this, and thus they have an
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unshaken faith that their side will triumph, and they never give in. From
now on, with patient forbearance, they can wait for opposition groups
that have abandoned the legal ground of the struggle in Parliament to
end up convinced of the inevitable necessity of abandoning their illegal
ground as well, as they recognize that the residue of life and truth in
their programs is contained in the Fascist program, but in a bold form,
more complex, more responsive to historical reality and to the needs of
the human spirit. Then Italy’s current spiritual crisis will be overcome.
Then in the very heart of Fascist Italy and of Italy made Fascist, new
ideas, new programs, and new political parties will slowly ripen and come
to light.
The Italian intellectuals committed to Fascism meeting in Bologna
for their first congress (29−30 March) have decided to formulate these
ideas and thereby bear witness to the many, within Italy and outside Italy,
who wish to give an account of the doctrine and the action of the nation-
al Fascist Party.
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23
A Reply by Italian Authors, Professors, and
Journalists to the ‘Manifesto’ of the Fascist
Intellectuals
politics and science, is a mistake that can scarcely be called fertile, when,
as in this case, it happens by encouraging deplorable acts of violence and
insolence and by suppressing freedom of the press. Moreover, this action
taken by the Fascist intellectuals does not even respond with much sen-
sitivity to the fatherland, for it is not right to submit the fatherland’s
troubles to the judgment of foreigners, who do not take the trouble (nat-
urally, as it happens) to look beyond the various special political interests
of their own nations.
In substance, what they write is a piece of half-baked schoolwork
where one finds intellectual confusions and ill-spun arguments at eve-
ry point – trading the atomism of certain types of eighteenth-century
political science, for example, for nineteenth-century liberalism, treat-
ing anti-historical, abstract, and mathematical democratism, in other
words, as equivalent to the highly historical notion of free competition
and alternation of parties in power, whereby one makes progress, as if in
small doses, thanks to the opposition. Another example is the facile and
fevered rhetoric that celebrates the individual’s dutiful submission to the
whole, as if that were the issue, rather than the capacity of authoritarian
structures to guarantee the most effective moral progress. Or another
example, where we are betrayed by a calamitous inability to distinguish
economic institutions like unions from ethical institutions like legislative
assemblies, thus courting the combining – or rather, the miscegenation –
of the two types, which would end in their mutual corruption or, at least,
their mutual obstruction. And we leave aside the arbitrary interpreta-
tions and manipulations of history, which by now are well-known.
But the violence done by this piece to ideas and history counts for
little in comparison to the abuse of the word ‘religion.’ As the leading
Fascist intellectuals understand things, we should now have found joy
in a war of religion, in the exploits of a new evangel or a new apostolate
against an old superstition that fights to the death what stands above it
and to which it still must bow – and they take this to be proven by the
hatred and spite that now makes Italians rage against Italians as never
before. This is what they are calling a disagreement about religion: the
hatred and spite provoked by a party which denies that elements of other
parties are Italian and insults them as foreigners, by that very act making
itself a foreigner and oppressor in the eyes of the others and thereby
introducing into the life of the fatherland the feelings and habits that
attend such conflicts. Using the word ‘religion’ to dignify the suspicion
and animosity that has been sown everywhere, depriving even univer-
sity students of the trusting sense of brotherhood that they used to have
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Manifesto II
when they shared youthful ideals, turning them against one another in
fake clashes –this sounds like a rather sorry joke, to tell the truth.
Whatever the new evangel might be, the new religion, the new faith,
one cannot tell from the text of this wordy ‘Manifesto.’ As a practical mat-
ter, however, what its mute eloquence reveals to an objective observer is a
bizarre and incoherent blend of appeals to authority and demagoguery;
a profession of reverence for the law and violation of the laws; ultra-mod-
ern ideas and musty old notions; absolutist attitudes and Bolshevik dis-
positions; flattery for the Catholic Church and denials of belief; a dread
of culture and sterile starts at a culture deprived of its premises; mystical
mawkishness and cynicism. And even if there were any plausible propos-
als for the present government to enact or undertake, there is nothing
in them to brag about, no innovative product to identify a new political
system that would be named Fascism.
For this chaotic and incomprehensible ‘religion,’ then, we are not
inclined to abandon our old faith, the faith that for two and a half cen-
turies has been the soul of a resurgent Italy and a modern Italy, the faith
whose ingredients are love of truth; hope for justice; a generous human
and civic sense; zeal for intellectual and moral education; and eager-
ness for liberty, which is the strength and security on which all progress
depends. When we look back at images of the men of the Risorgimento,
those who laboured, suffered, and died for Italy, their faces seem angry
and upset at the words that are said and the things that are done by our
Italian adversaries, and because we are steadfast in their cause we take
the warnings seriously. Our faith is no abstract, artificial contrivance,
no mental obsession produced by theories poorly supported or poorly
understood. It is possessing a tradition that has become an emotional
disposition and an intellectual or moral structure.
In their ‘Manifesto’ the Fascist intellectuals repeat the hackneyed
phrase that Italy’s Risorgimento was the work of a minority, not mention-
ing the weakness of our political and social makeup on this very point.
Indeed, it almost seems that they take satisfaction when most citizens
of Italy today, faced with disagreements between Fascism and its oppo-
nents, seem to be indifferent – at the least. Liberals have never been
satisfied with such a thing, and they have tried with all their power to
have an ever-growing number of Italians called to public life. This was
the main reason for some of their most controversial actions, such as the
granting of universal suffrage. Even the sympathy with which many liber-
als greeted the Fascist movement in its early days implied, among other
things, the hope that it would introduce fresh new energies into political
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life, innovating energies and (why not?) conservative energies. But they
never thought to keep the bulk of the nation inert and indifferent, buy-
ing them off with various material goods. They knew that doing so would
have betrayed the purposes of the Italian Risorgimento and would have
restored the evil devices of absolutist and quietist governments.
Even now, neither this putative indifference and inertia nor the obsta-
cles that block the path to freedom lead us to despair or resignation.
What matters is to know that what one wants and should want is some-
thing intrinsically good. The present political struggle in Italy, because
it presents such great contrasts, will serve to awaken our people and give
them a more concrete and deeper understanding of the value of liberal
policies and methods, causing people to have a more conscious sense
of their desire for them. One day, perhaps, people will look serenely at
the past and conclude that the ordeal we are now enduring, harsh and
painful for us, was a stage that Italy had to go through in order to revive
its life as a nation, complete its political education, and learn a harsher
lesson about its duties as a civil society.
NOTE
716
24
Antonio Gramsci
The notes contained here, as in the other notebooks, have been written
rapidly in order to make a quick record. All of them need to be reviewed
and carefully checked since they certainly contain false starts, anachro-
nisms, and things that are imprecise. Since they were written away from
the books to which they refer, it is possible that after checking they may
have to be extensively corrected if the opposite of what has been written
turns out to be true.
(a) because it will help reduce the time needed for the period of slavery;
(b) because it will induce those same Papuans to reflect on themselves,
to be self-educated, in that they will feel themselves dependent on
people of higher civilization;
(c) because only this resistance shows that we really are in a higher peri-
od of civilization, of thinking, and so on.
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5. Antonio Labriola. Hegel asserted that slavery is the cradle of liberty. For
Hegel, as for Machiavelli, the new principate (the period of dictatorship
that marks the beginnings of every new type of state) and the slavery
connected with it are justified only as education and discipline for peo-
ple who are not yet free. But Spaventa’s … comment was well chosen:
‘The cradle is not life, however. Some would like us to stay in the cradle
forever.’7 (A typical example of the cradle that becomes all of life is pro-
vided by protectionism in trade, which is always advocated and justified
as a cradle but tends to become an eternal cradle.)
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Notes for an Introduction and Guide to the Study of Philosophy and the History
of Culture, I: Some Preliminary Points of Reference
Having shown that all people are philosophers – though each in his
own way, unconsciously, since even with only the smallest evidence of any
intellectual activity at all, with language, there is a specific conception of
the world – we move to the second moment, to the moment of criticism
and consciousness, to the question of which is preferable:
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Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
activity of the pastor or the imposing old patriarch whose wisdom dic-
tates law, in the old woman who has inherited wisdom from witches, or
in the petty intellectual embittered by his own stupidities and inability
to act);
or else to work out our own conception of the world consciously and
critically, and then, on the basis of our own mental effort, to choose
our own sphere of activity, to participate actively in producing the
world’s history, to be our own guide, and not to accept, passively and
abjectly, any outside imprint on our own personality?
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Note IV. Creating a new culture does not mean just making some ‘origi-
nal’ discoveries on an individual basis; most of all, it also has the specific
sense of spreading truths in a critical way that have already been discov-
ered, socializing them, so to speak, and thereby making them a basis of
living activity, an element of coordination and of intellectual and moral
order. That a mass of people has been led to think coherently and in
a unitary way about current reality is a philosophical fact much more
important and original than the discovery by some philosophical genius
of a new truth that remains the property of small groups of intellectuals.
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ver, common sense is a collective term, like religion; there exists no single
common sense because it too is a product of historical becoming. Philos-
ophy is the critique and the overcoming of religion and common sense,
and as such it coincides with the good sense that is contrasted with com-
mon sense.
Relations between science, religion, and common sense. Religion and common
sense cannot constitute an intellectual framework because even in indi-
vidual consciousness, not to speak of collective consciousness, they can-
not be reduced to unity and coherence. Or they cannot be reduced to
unity and coherence freely, since this could happen authoritatively, as,
in fact, it did happen in the past – within certain limits. The problem of
religion is understood here not in the confessional sense but in lay terms
as a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a matching
rule of conduct. But why call this unity of faith religion and not ideology or
simply politics?
In fact, there exists no general philosophy. What exists are different
philosophies or conceptions of the world, and we always make a choice
among them. How does this choice happen? Is the choice a merely intel-
lectual fact or more complex? And does it not often happen that there
is a contradiction between the intellectual fact and the rule of conduct?
Which will be the real conception of the world, then: the one logically
asserted as an intellectual fact, or the one that comes from each person’s
real activity, the one implied by what the person does? And since what we
do is always to do something political, can we not say that everyone’s real
philosophy is contained completely in his politics? This conflict between
thinking and doing, the coexistence of two conceptions of the world,
one asserted in words and the other emerging from what we really do,
need not always have been in bad faith. Bad faith might be a satisfac-
tory explanation for some individuals taken one at a time, or even for
relatively large groups; it is not satisfactory, however, when the conflict
is clearly observed in the life of large masses. Then it can only be the
expression of deeper conflicts in the historical-social order.
This means that a social group with its own conception of the world,
perhaps in an embryonic state, which becomes manifest in action and
therefore discontinuously and episodically when such a group moves as
an organic whole – it means that this group has borrowed, for reasons
of intellectual submission and subordination, a conception not its own
from another group, putting it in words. The group also believes that
it follows this conception because it follows it in ‘normal times,’ when
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a will that contain an implicit theory as their premise. (We could call it
an ideology if we were careful to give the term ideology the more general
meaning of a conception of the world manifested implicitly in art, law,
economic activity, and all phenomena of individual and collective life.)
This is the problem of preserving ideological unity in the whole social
block that is solidified and unified just by that particular ideology.
The power of religions, and the Catholic Church especially, has con-
sisted, and still consists, in their having a vigorous sense of the need for
doctrinal unity among the whole mass of the religious and in struggling
to prevent the higher intellectual strata from separating from the lower.
The Roman Church has always been the most tenacious in the struggle
to prevent the official formation of two religions, one for intellectuals
and the other for ‘simple souls.’ For the Church itself, this struggle has
not been without serious problems, but these problems are connected
with the historical process that is transforming all of civil society and
which, as a block, includes a corrosive critique of religions. All the more
conspicuous is the clergy’s organizing capacity in the cultural sphere and
in the relation – which in the abstract is rational and just – between intel-
lectuals and simple people that the Church has been able to establish in
its domain. Without doubt, the Jesuits have been the great architects of
this equilibrium, and to sustain it they have brought the Church a pro-
gressive movement that tends to satisfy certain needs of science and phi-
losophy. But the rhythm is so slow and deliberate that changes have not
been detected by the mass of simple people, even though the changes
appear revolutionary and demagogic to ‘integralists.’
In general, one of the greatest weaknesses of immanentist phi-
losophies has really been their inability to create an ideological unity
between low and high, between simple people and intellectuals. In the
history of Western civilization, this fact has been verified on a European
scale by the immediate failure of the Renaissance – and partly of the Ref-
ormation as well – in conflicts with the Roman Church. This weakness
manifests itself in the problem of the schools because the immanentist
philosophies have never even tried to construct a conception that could
take the place of religion in early education – hence the pseudo-histori-
cist sophism that leads non-religious (non-confessional) educators, who
are really atheists, to concede the teaching of religion because religion is
the philosophy of the infancy of the human race and is repeated in every
non-metaphorical infancy.13
Idealism has also shown itself averse to the cultural movements that
‘go towards the people’ and has been seen in the so-called Popular Uni-
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versities and similar institutions, and the aversion has been not only to
their defective features, since, in that case, the movements would only
have had to try to do better. These movements were worth noticing, how-
ever, and they deserved study. They were successful in the sense that
they showed real enthusiasm on the part of the simple, a strong desire
to rise to a higher level of culture and a higher conception of the world.
Missing from the movements, however, was any organic unity, either of
philosophical thinking or of organizational strength and cultural central-
ization. They left the impression of being like the first contacts between
English merchants and black people in Africa: junk was exchanged for
gold nuggets. Besides, there could be organic unity of thought and cul-
tural strength only if between intellectuals, and simple people there had
existed the same unity that must exist between theory and practice –
if the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those same
masses, working out and making coherent the principles and problems
that those masses created by their practical activity, thereby forming a
cultural and social block.
The question already mentioned was raised again: is a philosophical
movement what it is only by striving to develop a specialized culture for
limited groups of intellectuals? Or instead, is it what it is by never for-
getting to stay in contact with simple people while working to develop
a level of thinking that is higher than common sense and scientifically
coherent – indeed, finding in this contact the source of problems to be
studied and solved? A philosophy becomes historical only through this
contact, by purging itself of intellectualist elements of an individual kind
and becoming life …
A philosophy of praxis can present itself initially only with a polemi-
cal and critical attitude, as the overcoming of the preceding mode of
thinking and of the thinking that exists concretely (or the existing cul-
tural world). Above all, then, this philosophy presents itself as a critique
of common sense (although at first it bases itself on common sense in
order to show that everyone is a philosopher and that the point is not to
introduce a science de novo into everyone’s individual life but to renew
an activity that already exists and make it critical). Hence, it is a critique
of the philosophy of intellectuals that has produced the history of phi-
losophy, and which, in individual cases (since it really develops mainly in
the activity of single individuals with special gifts), can be thought of as
peaks in the progress of common sense – at least the common sense of
the better educated strata of society, and, through them, popular com-
mon sense as well.
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ity and maintain unity at the low level of the masses but actually to con-
struct a moral-intellectual block that makes mass intellectual progress
– not just progress for a few groups of intellectuals – politically possible.
The active person of the masses works in a practical way but does not
have a clear theoretical consciousness of the work that he does, which
is also knowledge of the world inasmuch as it transforms the world. His
theoretical consciousness can actually be in conflict historically with his
work. We can almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses (or
one self-contradictory consciousness): one implied in his work and really
uniting him with all his co-workers in the practical transformation of
reality; the other superficially explicit or verbal, inherited from the past,
and accepted without criticism.
This ‘verbal’ conception is not without consequences, however: it ties
back to a particular social group and influences moral conduct and the
direction of will in a more or less vigorous way. This can continue up to
the point where the contradictory character of consciousness permits
no action, no decision, and no choice, producing a state of moral and
political passivity. Our critical understanding of ourselves thus comes
about through a struggle of political hegemonies, of opposing directions,
first in the field of ethics, then in politics, leading to a higher develop-
ment of our own conception of reality.16 Consciousness of being part of
a particular hegemonic force (political consciousness) is the first phase
of movement towards a subsequent and progressive self-consciousness in
which theory and practice are finally united. Also, this does not make the
unity of theory and practice a mechanically given fact but a becoming
of history that has its elementary and primitive phase in the sense of dis-
tinction and apartness, of barely instinctive independence, and that then
progresses to real and complete possession of a unitary and coherent
conception of the world. This is why we must stress that political devel-
opment of the concept of hegemony represents great philosophical as
well as practical-political progress, why it necessarily entails and assumes
an intellectual unity and an ethics conforming to a conception of reality
that has superseded common sense and has become (though still within
narrow bounds) critical.
In the most recent developments of the philosophy of praxis, how-
ever, the deepening of the concept of unity of theory and practice is
still only in its initial phase. Residues of a mechanical conception still
remain when they talk about theory as ‘complementary’ or ‘accessory’
to practice – theory as the handmaid of practice. It seems right that this
problem too must be posed historically, as one aspect of the political
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Why and how do new conceptions of the world spread and become
popular? In this process of diffusion (which is, at the same time, a replace-
ment of the old, and, quite often, a combining of old and new), how
and to what degree do these conceptions influence the rational form in
which the new conception is presented and explained; the authority (to
the extent that this is recognized and valued, at least generically) of the
person who explains and of the thinkers and experts whom the person
cites to support himself; and membership in the same organization for
anyone who supports the new conception (after joining the organization
for a different motive, however, and not sharing the new conception)? In
reality, these things vary depending on the social group and the cultural
level of the particular group. But the question is especially interesting
in the case of masses of people who find it harder to change concep-
tions, and, in any event, never change them at all by accepting things in
pure form, so to speak, but always and only in a more or less bizarre and
irregular mix.
Logically coherent rational form, the thorough reasoning that disre-
gards no positive or negative argument of any weight, has its importance
but is very far from being decisive. It can be decisive in a minor way
when the person involved is already in a state of intellectual crisis, waver-
ing between old and new, having lost faith in the old but not yet having
decided for the new, and so on. We can say the same for the authority
of thinkers and experts. Their authority is great among the people. But
every conception, in fact, has thinkers and experts to put forward, and
authority is divided. Besides, it is possible to make distinctions about any
thinker, to raise doubts about what was really said in the way it was said,
and so on. We can conclude that the process of spreading new concep-
tions happens for political reasons – social reasons, in the final analy-
sis – but that the formal element of logical coherence, the element of
authority, and the element of organization have very large roles in this
process immediately after the general orientation has occurred, both in
single individuals and in large groups. From this we conclude, then, that
in the masses as such, philosophy can be lived only as a faith.
After all, picture the intellectual position of a man of the people. He
has formed various opinions, convictions, rules of judgment, and rules
of conduct for himself. Anyone who takes a position opposed to his, as
long as that person is intellectually superior, knows how to argue a case
better than he, how to swindle him with logic, and so on. So why should
the man of the people change his convictions? Because he cannot pre-
vail in a particular discussion? But then he might need to change once
a day, whenever he meets an ideological opponent intellectually supe-
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732
Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
(a) never tire of repeating one’s arguments (while varying their literary
form); repetition is the most effective teaching method when work-
ing with the popular mind;
(b) work ceaselessly to elevate the intellectual conditions of ever larger
strata of the people, to give personality to the amorphous compo-
nent of the masses, which means working to stimulate intellectu-
al élites of a new kind that emerge directly from the masses and
remain in contact with it in order to become its ‘stays.’20
If the second requirement is met, this is what really changes the ideo-
logical panorama of an era. On the other hand, these élites cannot be
constructed and developed unless inside them there arises a hierarchy
of authority and intellectual competence that can culminate in a great
individual philosopher. This person must be capable of reliving, in a
concrete way, the needs of the mass ideological community; capable of
understanding that it cannot have the agility of movement possessed by
an individual mind; and therefore capable of developing the collective
doctrine formally in a manner that is closer and better suited to the way
that a collective thinker thinks.
It is obvious that a mass construct of that type cannot arise arbitrar-
ily, around just any ideology, through the formally constructive will of
a person or group advocating its own religious or philosophical convic-
tions out of fanaticism. The adhering or non-adhering of the masses to
an ideology is how a real critique occurs of the rationality and historicity
of ways of thinking. Arbitrary constructs are eliminated rather quickly
in historical competition even if, through a combination of currently
favourable circumstances, they sometimes manage to gain some popular
support, while constructions that correspond to the needs of a complex
and organic historical period always end up asserting themselves, and
also prevailing, though they pass through many intermediate phases
where they assert themselves only in more or less bizarre and irregular
combinations.
These developments pose many problems, the most important of
which are included in the mode and character of relations among var-
ious strata of the intellectually qualified – in the importance and use
that the creative contribution of higher groups must and can have in
connection with the organic capacity for discussion and development of
new critical concepts on the part of intellectually lower strata. The point,
then, is to define the limits of freedom of discussion and propaganda,
a freedom that must not be understood in the sense of administration
and policing but in the sense of self-defined limits that leaders impose
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on their own activity – or rather, in the strict sense, defining the direction
of cultural politics.
Who will define the ‘rights of science’ and limits on scientific inquiry,
in other words, and will it be possible for these rights and limits to be
properly defined? It seems necessary that the labour of seeking new and
better truths, more coherent and clearer formulations of those same
truths, should be left to the free initiative of individual experts, even
if they keep questioning the very principles that seem most essential.
Besides, it will not be hard to make it clear when such initiatives for dis-
cussion have interested motives and are not of a scientific kind. Nor is it
impossible to think that individual initiatives might be disciplined and
organized by passing through the sieve of academies or cultural insti-
tutes of various kinds and becoming public only after they are vetted,
and so on.
It would be interesting to make a concrete study, for a single country,
of the cultural organization that keeps the country’s ideological life mov-
ing, and then examine its functioning in practice. Studying the numeri-
cal relation between people professionally committed to active cultural
labour and the population of each country would also be useful, with a
rough calculation of the unemployed. By number of people employed,
schools at all levels, along with the church, are the two largest cultur-
al organizations in every country. There are also newspapers, journals,
book-selling and private educational institutions, either to complete
state schooling or to serve as cultural institutions of the People’s Uni-
versity type. Other professions incorporate no small part of culture in
their specialized activity – physicians, military officers, and lawyers. But it
should be noted that in all countries, though in varying degree, there is a
big break between the masses of the people and intellectual groups, even
those that are most numerous and most on the margins of the nation,
like teachers and priests. This happens because the state as such has no
unitary, coherent, homogenous conception, even where the state claims
in its speeches to have one, and so intellectual groups are fragmented
from stratum to stratum and within the same stratum. Except in some
countries, the university plays no unifying role. A private thinker often
has more influence than the whole university structure …21
13. A work like the People’s Essay, meant basically for a community of
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Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
readers who are not professional intellectuals, should have started with
a critical analysis of the philosophy of common sense, ‘the philosophy of
non-philosophers,’ a conception of the world absorbed uncritically by
the different social and cultural domains in which the moral personality
of the average person develops. Common sense is no single conception,
stable in time and space. It is philosophy’s folklore, and, like folklore,
it appears in countless forms. Its fundamental and most characteristic
feature (even in individual minds) is that it is a fragmented, incoher-
ent, and inconsistent conception, conforming to the cultural and social
position of the multitude whose philosophy it is. When a homogenous
social group develops in history, there also develops – counter to com-
mon sense – a homogenous philosophy that is coherent and systematic.
The People’s Essay goes wrong by starting (implicitly) with the assump-
tion that this development of an original philosophy for the masses of
people is opposed by the great traditional systems of philosophy and
the religion of the higher clergy, conceptions of the world belonging to
intellectuals and the high culture. In reality, these systems are unknown
to the multitude and have no direct effect on how they think and act.
This certainly does not mean that they are completely without historical
effect, but the effect is of a different kind. These systems influence the
popular masses as an external political force, as an element of the force
that keeps the ruling classes together, and thus as an element of subor-
dination to an outside hegemony. This is a negative limit on the original
thinking of the masses of people. It has no positive influence as a vital
ferment of internal change acting on what the masses think, embryoni-
cally and chaotically, about the world and life.
The main elements of common sense are furnished by religions, and
so the relation between common sense and religion is much deeper than
the one between common sense and the philosophical systems of intel-
lectuals. But critical distinctions have to be made for religion as well.
Every religion, even the Catholic religion (indeed, especially the Catho-
lic religion, precisely because of its efforts to remain superficially unitary
by not breaking up into national churches and social stratifications), is
really a multiplicity of distinct and often contradictory religions. There
is a Catholicism of peasants, a Catholicism of the petty bourgeoisie and
the urban workers, a Catholicism of women, and a Catholicism of intel-
lectuals, which is itself variegated and disaggregated. But it is not only
the cruder and less developed forms of these various Catholicisms, as
they actually exist, that influence common sense. Earlier religions and
earlier forms of today’s Catholicism, popular heretical movements and
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Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
And what will ‘healthy person’ mean? Physically healthy? Not mad? Or
rather that this person thinks in a healthy way – a conformist, a philis-
tine? And what is meant by ‘truths of common sense’? Gentile’s philoso-
phy, for instance, is completely contrary to common sense, whether by
common sense we mean the naïve philosophy of the people that abhors
any kind of subjective idealism or good sense as an attitude of disdain for
the abstrusities, complexities, and obscurities of certain scientific and
philosophical views. This flirtation of Gentile’s with common sense is
quite amusing.
What has been said up to now does not mean that there are no truths
in common sense. It means that common sense is an ambiguous, con-
tradictory, and polymorphous notion and that referring to common
sense as confirmation of truth is nonsense. We can say correctly that a
particular truth has become common sense in order to show that it has
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spread beyond the sphere of intellectual groups. But in that case we are
only making an observation of an historical nature and a claim about
historical rationality. In this sense, provided that that we use it soberly,
the argument has its value, precisely because common sense is narrowly
misoneist and conservative, while success in making us dig into a new
truth is proof that this truth has enough strength to grow and to be clear.
Remember Giusti’s epigram:
This could serve to introduce a chapter and to show how the terms
good sense and common sense are used ambiguously: both as philosophy, a
particular mode of thought, with a certain content of beliefs and opin-
ions; and as an attitude, well-meaning and generous in its disdain for the
abstruse and convoluted. This is why it was necessary for Science to kill
a certain kind of traditional Good Sense in order to create a ‘new’ good
sense.
Marx often refers to common sense and the strength of its convic-
tions. But his references point not to the validity of the content of those
beliefs, just to their formal strength and hence their commanding char-
acter when they produce rules of conduct. In fact, these references imply
an assertion of the need for new popular beliefs, for a new common
sense, and thus a new culture and a new philosophy rooted in popular
consciousness, with the same strength and power of command found in
traditional beliefs.
738
Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
of louche culture in which all cats are grey, religion embraces atheism,
immanence flirts with transcendence and Antonio Bruers rejoices, since
the more tangled the knot and the darker the thought, the more Bruers
is seen to have been right in his pidgin syncretism26 … If Gentile’s words
meant what they say, literally, actual idealism would have become ‘the
manservant of theology’27 …
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20. The objectivity and reality of the external world … To get a precise under-
standing of meanings that the problem of the external world can have, it
can help to follow the example of notions of ‘east’ and ‘west’ that never
cease to be objectively real even though analysis shows them to be noth-
ing more than a conventional construct, which is historical-cultural (the
terms artificial and conventional often indicate historical facts produced
by the development of civilization, not rationally arbitrary nor individu-
ally fabricated constructs). We should also recall the example contained
in a little book by Bertrand Russell translated into Italian … The Problems
of Philosophy. This is roughly what Russell says: ‘Unless humans exist on
earth, we cannot think about the existence of London or Edinburgh, but
we can think about the existence of two points in space, where London
and Edinburgh are today, one north and the other south.’29 One can
object that unless we think about the existence of people, we cannot
think about thinking – in which case, generally, we cannot think about
any fact or relation that exists only insofar as people exist.
Without people, what would north/south and east/west mean? These
are real relations, and yet they would not exist without people and with-
out the development of civilization. It is clear that east and west are arbi-
trary constructs, conventional and historical, since outside of real history
every place on earth is east and west at the same time. This can be seen
more clearly by the fact that these terms have not been crystallized from
the perspective of some sad, hypothetical person-in-general but from the
perspective of the educated European classes which have made them
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Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
32. Quantity and Quality. In the People’s Essay it is said (off-handedly, since
the claim is not justified or evaluated, and does not express a produc-
tive concept, being casual, without antecedent or consequent connec-
tions) that every society is something more than the mere sum of its
individual parts. Abstractly, this is true, but what does it mean concretely?
The explanation provided, empirically, was often baroque. It is said that
a hundred cows one by one are quite different than a hundred cows
together because then they are a herd – which is simply a question of
words. Likewise, it is said that by counting up to ten we get a decade, as if
there were not also a pair, a triplet, a tetrad, and so on – just a different
way of counting.
The more concrete explanation in theoretical-practical terms can be
found in the first volume of the Critique of Political Economy, where it is
shown that there is a production quota in the factory system that can
be assigned not to any single worker but to the whole workforce, to the
collective human.31 Based on the division of labour and jobs, something
similar happens with the whole society, which therefore is worth more
than the sum of its parts. How the philosophy of praxis has concretized
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44. The Technique of Thinking. On this topic, compare the claim made in
the preface to the Antidühring … that ‘the art of operating with concepts
is nothing innate or given in ordinary consciousness; it is a technical
742
Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
effort of thinking that has a long history, no more nor less than experi-
mental research in the natural sciences’ … Citing this passage, Croce
notes in parentheses that the issue is not a foreign concept but one that
had already become common sense before Engels.34 The issue, however,
is not the greater or lesser originality or strangeness of the concept, in
this case and in this context; it is the importance and position that the
concept must have in a system of philosophy of praxis, and the point is
to see if the concept gets the practical and cultural recognition that it
must have.
We must refer to this concept to understand what Engels means when
he writes that some old philosophy – including formal logic – remains
after the innovations produced by the philosophy of praxis, a claim
that Croce reports in his essay on Hegel, marking it with an exclama-
tion point.35 Croce’s amazement at the ‘rehabilitation’ of formal logic
that seems implicit in the claim that Engels made must be connected
with Croce’s teaching on the technique of art, for example, and with
the whole series of other views that add up to Croce’s basic anti-histor-
icism and his being abstract in method. (The distinctions, the principle
of method that Croce was proud to have introduced into the dialectical
tradition, became scientific from the start, causing abstractness and anti-
historicism in their formal application.)36
But the analogy between artistic technique and the technique of think-
ing is superficial and false, at least in a certain sense. An artist can exist
and understand nothing consciously or reflectively about earlier devel-
opments in technique. (He will get his own technique naïvely from com-
mon sense.) But this cannot happen in the domain of science, where
there is progress and must be progress, where the progress of knowledge
is closely connected with instrumental, technical, and methodological
progress and is actually conditioned on it – especially in the experimen-
tal sciences in the strict sense. This immediately makes us ask wheth-
er modern idealism – and Croceanism especially, with its reduction of
philosophy to a methodology of history – is not basically a technique,
whether the very concept of speculation is not basically a technical
inquiry, though understood in a higher sense, obviously, as less external
and material than the inquiry that resulted in the construction of for-
mal scholastic logic … A question may arise about the place that such
a technique must have in contexts of philosophical science, whether it
becomes part of that science as such, as already developed, or part of
the propaedeutic to science and of the process of its development as sci-
ence. (No one can deny the importance of catalytic agents in chemistry
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just because no trace of them remains in the final product.) The same
problem arises for the dialectic, which is a new way of thinking, a new
philosophy, but thus also a new technique.
The principle of distinction maintained by Croce – and hence all his
battles with Gentile’s actualism – are they not technical problems too?
Can we detach the technical fact from the philosophical fact? If not, we
can isolate it for practical educational purposes. In fact, we must note
the importance of the technique of thinking in constructing educational
programs. And the technique of thinking cannot be compared with old
rhetorical techniques. These did not create artists, did not create taste,
and did not produce criteria for appraising beauty. They were useful
only for creating a cultural conformism and a language for conversa-
tion among the educated. The technique of thinking, developed as such,
will surely not create great philosophers, but it will provide criteria of
judgment and verification and will correct deformities in the way that
common sense thinks. This would be interesting: a comparative test of
the technique of common sense, of the philosophy of the man on the
street, and the technique of reflective and coherent thought. Macaulay’s
observation about the logical weaknesses of culture formed by means of
oratory and declamation also holds in this case.37
This whole topic must be carefully studied after gathering all the
information about it that we can get. And with this topic we must con-
nect the question asked by the pragmatists about language as a cause of
error – Prezzolini, Pareto, and so on.38 We must carefully examine the
question of the study of the technique of thinking as propaedeutic, as
a process of development, but we must be cautious because the image
of a technical instrument can lead us into error. There is more likeness
between technique and thinking in act than there is in the experimental
sciences between material instruments and science, properly speaking.
Perhaps we can conceive of an astronomer who does not know how to
use his instruments (he could get research material from elsewhere by
developing it mathematically) because the relations between astronomy
and astronomical instruments are external and mechanical, and even
in astronomy there is a technique of thinking beyond the technique of
material instruments. A poet might not know how to read and write. In
a certain sense, a thinker also might make himself read and write eve-
rything that interests him by other thinkers or everything that he has
already thought. The reason is that reading and writing have to do with
memory: they are aids to memory. The technique of thinking cannot be
compared to these activities, for which we can say that it is important
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54. Unity of Theory and Practice. We must research, analyse, and criticize
the different form in which the concept of the unity of theory and prac-
tice appears in the history of ideas, since it is beyond doubt that every
conception of the world and every philosophy is concerned with this
problem:
746
Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
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62. The Historicity of the Philosophy of Praxis. That the philosophy of praxis
conceives of itself in a historicist way, as a transitional phase of philo-
sophical thinking, is clear not only implicitly, from the system as a whole,
but also explicitly, from the well-known thesis that historical develop-
ment will be marked at a certain point by the passage from the kingdom
of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.42 All philosophies (philosophi-
cal systems) existing up to now have been the manifestation of inter-
nal contradictions that have torn society apart. But each philosophical
system, taken by itself, has not been the conscious expression of these
contradictions since that expression could be produced only by all the
systems struggling against one another. Every philosopher is, and can
only be, convinced that he expresses the unity of the human spirit, the
unity of history and nature. In fact, if there were no such conviction, peo-
ple would not act, they would not create new history, and philosophies
could not become ideologies, could not in practice take on the fanatical
granitic solidity of popular beliefs that have the same energy as physical
forces.
In the history of philosophical thinking, Hegel represents a direction
of his own because, in his system, in one way or another, perhaps in the
form of a ‘philosophical novel,’ he manages to grasp what reality is.43
In other words, in a single system and in a single philosopher, there is
that consciousness of the contradictions that came previously from all
systems together, from all philosophies in dispute with one another, con-
tradicting one another. In a certain sense, therefore, the philosophy of
praxis is a reform and a development of Hegelianism. It is a philosophy
liberated (or seeking to be liberated) from every one-sided and fanati-
cal ideological element. It is full consciousness of the contradictions by
748
Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
NOTES
1 We have used Gramsci (1975), II, 1365−1487, along with the extensive
notes and bibliography in vol. IV of Gerratana’s edition, though biblio-
graphical references supplied in the Italian text have sometimes been
omitted in our translation. We have also made less use of quotation marks
for emphasis (scare-quotes), which are frequent in the Italian text. Since
Gramsci’s access to books and journals was limited and erratic, his refer-
ences are sometimes from memory and sometimes indirect.
2 Croce (1918b): 601: for Labriola and Herbart, see section 14 of the Intro-
duction; Papua was a British and then an Australian colony in Labriola’s
lifetime.
3 Labriola (1906): 432−41; until the Italian invasion of 1911, the territories
now called Libya were part of the enfeebled Ottoman Empire.
4 See n13 below.
5 Gramsci cites Spaventa from Alderisio (1931): 287−8.
6 Gramsci alludes to a famous purple passage from Marx’s Contribution to the
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, for which see the Italian version in Marx,
Engels, and Lasalle (1922), I, 25: ‘One school (the historical school of law)
that legitimizes the disgrace of today with yesterday’s disgrace is a school
that declares a rebellion at every cry of the serf against the knout, once the
knout is antique, an ancestral knout, a knout with history.’
7 Gramsci cites Hegel, Machiavelli, and Spaventa from Alderisio (1931):
287−8; see also the master/slave dialectic in Hegel (1986), 3.145−55, and
new princes in Machiavelli (1990): 103−21.
8 Anon. (1930a).
9 Bruno Bauer (1809−82), a theologian of the Young Hegelian Left, and his
brother Edgar were targets of The Holy Family of 1844, which was the first
collaborative project by Marx and Engels (1845).
10 In the stirring prologue to the Communist Manifesto, the Pope is one of the
old powers chasing down the specter of communism. Pius IX, who was
responsible for the infamous Syllabus of Errors (1864), had been close to
Rosmini until the events of 1848−9 ended the philosopher’s political useful-
ness. For Gramsci’s source, see Tarozzi (1930).
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Gramsci, Introduction to Philosophy
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teenth century. They were well known to Gramsci, whose formal higher
education was in linguistics.
40 Gramsci alludes to the story that ‘cannibal’ came from a name (Galibi),
meaning ‘brave people,’ that Columbus heard Native Americans calling
themselves.
41 ‘The speculative intellect becomes practical by extension’; ‘The more specu-
lative, the more practical’; ‘Truth itself is made.’ Gramsci could have found
these learned aphorisms in sources well known to him: Anon. (1932);
Croce (1911a), (1921b):226; see also Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IIa-IIae
4.2.ad 3; cf. Aristotle, De anima, 433a15.
42 Engels (1894), though the original conception of the opposition between
physical necessity and moral freedom is Kant’s.
43 For ‘philosophical novel,’ see Croce, ‘Philosophy of Hegel,’ chapter 5.
752
25
Benedetto Croce
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Croce, Liberty
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Croce, Liberty
the very excesses that activism allows itself, the passion in which it writhes,
the shakeups that it threatens, signal that a healing of the fever that has
infected and still infects Europe and the world is not far off – a fever, and
not an ideal, unless we want to sublimate the fever in an ideal.
Communism, which is usually said to be a settled and accomplished
fact in Russia now, has not been accomplished as communism but in the
way that its critics pointed out and which was suited to its internal contra-
diction – as a form of autocracy, in other words, which has deprived the
Russian people of what little mental space or liberty they had or procured
under the earlier autocracy of the czars. The evolution of the state, the
‘transition from the kingdom of necessity to that of liberty’ that Marx the-
orized, has not only not happened, since communism has not abolished
the state – and could not abolish what no one will ever be able to abolish
– but also, given the irony of things, has put together the most ponderous
state of which one could ever conceive.7 In saying this there is no intent
to take anything away from the necessity that the Russian revolutionaries
faced, forcing them to follow that path and no other; nor of the immense
labour that, in those conditions, they undertook and pushed forward,
seeing to it that the rich productive forces of that land were made fruitful;
nor of the various lessons that can be drawn from their various deeds; nor
of the mystical enthusiasm, even if it is a materialist mysticism, that ani-
mates them and alone can enable them to bear the huge weight placed
on their shoulders and give them the courage to tread underfoot – as
they are now doing – religion, thought, and poetry, everything that we
revere as sacred, everything that we love as noble.
The point of our assertion, rather, is that by now, with words, acts of
violence, and repressive methods, they have arbitrarily denied but have
not solved – nor could they ever solve in that way – the basic problem of
human community, which is that of liberty, the only condition in which
human society flourishes and bears fruit, the only reason for humans to
live on earth, without which life would not be worth living. That prob-
lem remains there and cannot be eliminated; it is born out of the guts of
things, and they must feel it stirring in the same human material that they
want to pick up and shape according to their own notions. If they ever
face up to it in the future – or if others face it for them – it will destroy the
materialist basis of what they have constructed, and then that construct
will need to be sustained in a different way and greatly modified. And just
as pure communism has not been achieved now, likewise it will not be
achieved even then.
Even though that pseudo-communism impresses thinkers outside Rus-
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sia because of the added impact described by the old saying that ‘maior
e longinquo reverentia,’ because fascination with what is remote in time
and space gives it fantastic and alluring forms, this communism has still
not spread, or else it has been suppressed as soon as it has appeared.8
Actually, in Western and Central Europe, the two conditions that were
present in Russia are absent: the czarist tradition and mysticism. So Milyu-
kov was not wrong twelve years ago when he said that he thought Lenin
‘was building on the firm soil of the good old autocratic tradition in Rus-
sia, while designing castles in the sky for other countries to see.’9 And
even if experiments of this kind are done in other parts of Europe, one
of two things will happen: either that pseudo-communism will become,
under similar names and appearances, an entirely different thing when
transported to countries that differ in religion, civilization, culture, cus-
tom, and tradition – countries that have different histories, in short; or
else we will have a time, perhaps a long one, of dark anguish, and, sooner
or later, out of the heart of that travail, liberty, or rather humanity, will
grow again.
Liberty is the only ideal that has the solidity that Catholicism once had
and the flexibility that it could not have; it is the only ideal that always
faces up to the future and makes no pretense of containing it in a particu-
lar contingent form; it is the only ideal that stands up to criticism, and, for
human society, constitutes the point where equilibrium always reasserts
itself amid society’s continuing oscillations and frequent losses of equi-
librium. Hence, when we hear people asking whether liberty can achieve
what they call the future, we must answer that it has something better – it
has eternity. Even today, despite the coldness, contempt, and scorn that
liberty faces, it still exists in many of our institutions, our customs, and
our habits of mind, and there it does its good work. More important is
that it survives in many of the best minds in every part of the world. Even
scattered and isolated, reduced almost to an aristocratic but small repub-
lic of letters, they still keep the faith, surrounding it with more reverence
and following it with a hotter love than in the days when there was no
one to harm it or call its absolute mastery into question. Around them
swarmed the mob that shouted liberty’s name, infecting it with the vulgar-
ity of which it has now been cleansed.
It is not only in those people that liberty lives. It is not just that liberty
exists and resists in the government of many of the greater states and in
institutions and customs. Its power also operates in things themselves,
opening a path, more or less slowly, amid the severest difficulties. We see
this mainly in the feeling and thinking that people are now concerned
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Croce, Liberty
NOTES
1 We have used Croce (1932): 349−60: although this version was released in
April, only two months after the book first appeared, the title-page calls it the
‘third edition revised’: very large sales required rapid reprintings, in which
Croce undoubtedly made small changes, although the text of the part trans-
lated here seems to be very close, if not identical, to the standard version, as
in Croce (1991).
2 Oswald Spengler (1880−1936) was not a Nazi or a racist, although he was
an authoritarian nationalist, but also a sort of socialist and a critic of liberal-
ism; his enormously influential Decline of the West was first published in 1918:
Spengler (1918−23).
3 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1100a10−12: ‘Should we regard no other
human being as happy while alive, following Solon’s saying, “Look to the
end”?’
4 For ‘conjectural history’ in Kant and other writers, see Palmieri (2003).
5 Perhaps Croce is thinking of Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-
Acton, 1834−1902), an eminent Catholic liberal, a protégé of the theologian
Johann Döllinger and a Regius professor of history at Cambridge who wrote
about the history of freedom.
6 I have found it more bitter than gall; cf. Eccles, 7:27; Prov. 5:3−4 (Vulgate).
7 The words that Croce paraphrases actually come from Engels: see section 62
of Gramsci’s ‘Introduction.’
8 ‘Awe inspires better at a distance’: Tacitus, Annals, 1.47.
9 Pavel Milyukov (1859−1943) was a leading Russian liberal who lived in exile
in France after the Bolsheviks came to power: Milyukov (1922): 49.
10 In Hegel, ‘Religion der Freiheit’; see Hegel (1986), 17.203−4, and section 26
of the Introduction.
761
26
Antonio Gramsci
Dearest Tania:2
Thanks for making me a copy of the letter in which Giulia gave you more
details on the state of Delio’s health. I will take the Somatose, as I wrote
to you – no need to get me too worked up about it because I’m already
persuaded, enough to make me take it anyhow.3
When I’ve read the Croce book, I’ll be very happy to help you with it
by writing some critical notes about it – though not a complete review, as
you ask, because it would be hard to gulp it all down right away. However,
I’ve already read the introductory chapters of the book, which appeared
some months ago as a separate work.4 So I can already start to make some
points today that might help you do research and get better information,
if you want to give your work a certain unity and broaden it somewhat. In
my opinion, this might be the first question to ask: What cultural inter-
ests now dominate Croce’s literary and philosophical activity, both those
that are currently relevant and those of more general significance relat-
ing to deeper needs and not arising from the passions of the moment?
The answer is not in doubt: Croce’s activity has distant origins, from the
period of the War, to be precise. To understand his recent work, one
must review his writings on the War, collected in two volumes (Pagine
sulla guerra, 2d ed., enlarged).5
I don’t have these two volumes, but I did read the pieces one by one as
they were published. Their essential content can be briefly summarized:
a struggle against the definition given to the War under the influence
of French and Masonic propaganda, whereby the War became a War
Gramsci, Letters
763
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has written of being convinced to rework all his philosophical and eco-
nomic thinking after having read Croce’s essays.9 The close link between
Sorel and Croce was known, but its depth and persistence became espe-
cially obvious after the publication of the letters of Sorel, who, in a sur-
prising way, often shows himself to be Croce’s inferior intellectually. But
Croce carried his revisionist activity still farther, especially during the
War and especially after 1917. The new series of essays on the theory of
history begins after 1910 with the memoir, Cronache, storie e false storie,
and it continues up to the final chapters of the Storia della storiografia
italiana nel secolo XIX, the essays on political science and the most recent
literary appearances, among which is the Storia dell’ Europa – so it seems,
at least, from the chapters that I’ve read.10 I find that Croce holds above
all to his position as leader of revisionism and that he understands this
to be his best current work … He says explicitly that the whole reworking
of his theory of history as ethical-political history (meaning all or almost
all that he has done as a thinker for almost twenty years) is meant to
complete his revisionism of forty years ago.11
Dearest Tania, if suggestions like this can be useful to you for your
work, let me know when you write, and I will try to do more of them.
Dearest Tania:
I received your postcards of April 17 and 22. I’ve also received a book, as
you promised. How is your cough? The weather here keeps changing a
lot. Maybe it’s been changing in Rome too, and you’ll need to be a little
careful of your health. I’m glad that my letter to Delio arrived. We’ll see
if he answers and if it will be possible, even with so many ups and downs,
to put a correspondence together.
I still don’t know if the notes about Croce that I wrote for you were
interesting to you and if they suit the needs of you work: I’m sure you’ll
tell me, and then I’ll be able to do better. In any case, understand that
these are bits and pieces that would have to be developed and completed.
I’m writing a paragraph for you again this time, and then you can reor-
ganize as seems best. One question that I find very interesting asks about
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Gramsci, Letters
the reasons for the great success of Croce’s work; this does not usually
happen to philosophers during their lifetimes, and it is especially unu-
sual outside of academic circles. I think we should look to his style for one
reason. It has been said that Croce is the greatest writer of Italian prose
since Manzoni.12 The claim seems true to me, with this qualification: that
Croce’s prose derives not so much from Manzoni’s as from the great writ-
ers of learned prose, and especially from Galileo. Croce’s innovation as
stylist is in the domain of learned prose, in his ability to explain with great
simplicity, as well as great power, explaining material that other writers
usually present in a muddled, quibbling, obscure, and wordy way.
Croce’s literary style expresses a style that suits his morality, an attitude
that can be called Goethian in its serenity, order, and unshakable confi-
dence. As so many people lose their heads, wavering among apocalyptic
feelings of intellectual panic, Croce, with his steadfast certainty that evil
cannot prevail metaphysically and that history is rationality, becomes a
point of reference for acquiring inner strength. Moreover, we must note
that to many people Croce’s thinking does not present itself as a cumber-
some philosophical system and hence as something hard to assimilate.
I find that Croce’s outstanding quality has always been this: putting his
conception of the world in circulation unpedantically in a whole series
of brief writings in which philosophy is presented straightforwardly and
then absorbed as good sense and common sense. In this way, his solutions
to many problems end up circulating anonymously, finding their way into
newspapers and everyday life. There are a great many ‘Croceans’ who do
not know what they are and may not even know that Croce exists. In this
way, a kind of summa of idealist notions has penetrated into Catholic writ-
ers, who are now seeking to free themselves from them, though without
success, attempting to present Thomism as a self-sufficient conception
and one that suffices for the intellectual needs of the modern world.
Dearest Tania:
I’ve received three letters, of April 23, 25, and 27. I’ve read and re-read
the letter from your Dad and your long thoughts about it, which gen-
erally seem right to me.13 There are other pieces of the problem that
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Part II: Translations
necessarily elude you, of course, and those may be the main and decisive
causes of the state of confusion and painful powerlessness in which they
are all floundering a bit. But the greater difficulty lies in not knowing
where to start in order to react with energy to the situation and fix it. You
talk about energy, energy, always energy. But in Rome, thinking about it
now, even applying all your energy, what would you be able to get? You
would not be up against anything solid and well founded that could be
cleanly reversed, but a gelatinous state of affairs, so to speak, offering no
resistance and shifting its shape continuously and invincibly.
You once criticized me for not having asked you the question in Rome
and for not having tried to make an alliance between the two of us, as it
were, and unite our forces. Maybe you were right, and this was the duty
that I ought to have done. But then there were many things to which I
did not attach the same importance that I would now, and it happened to
me then as if I were in the middle of a forest, seeing each tree clearly but
not seeing the whole. Many things appeared to me rather as picturesque
qualities, aesthetically interesting, not as symptoms of a sickly condition.
You see that I am very frank with you and give you the evidence to judge
me harshly. I believe there are mitigating circumstances, however. The
most important, as far as I’m concerned, is that I’ve always lived isolated,
outside the family, and I’ve actually always had a certain impatience with
family life. Therefore, I’ll convict myself of being hypercritical, of seeing
the mote in the eye of the next person and not the beam in my own eye.
This made it necessary for me not to intervene but to let everyone live
his own life independently.
But I don’t know what to do and where to begin. I’m grateful to you
for what you’ve written because I can at least orient myself concretely,
which until now has not been possible. From now on, anyhow, I won’t
throw stones in the dark, something that may have happened on these
recent occasions.
I don’t know if I’ll ever send you the outline on ‘Italian intellectuals’
that I promised you. The point of view from which I see the problem
sometimes changes: maybe it’s still early to summarize and synthesize.
The material is still in a fluid state and will need further development.
Don’t get it in your head to re-copy the proposal for publishing on Ital-
ians abroad: it seems not worth the trouble to me, especially since Mar-
zocco has given a rather accurate summary of it.14 If you can get a copy of
it, fine; otherwise, relax. Likewise, I certainly have no need of the works
of William Petty to deal with the problem of Machiavelli’s economic ide-
as. The reference is interesting, but the reference is enough.15 Instead,
in a little while I’ll ask for the complete works of Machiavelli himself,
766
Gramsci, Letters
which, as you may recall, I asked for when for when I was still in Milan,
but publication had not yet happened.
I can still give you a point of reference for a study of Croce’s book
(which I have not yet read as a whole). Even if these notes are a lit-
tle disconnected, I think that they may be useful to you all the same.
You might then think of organizing them on your own, for the purposes
of your work. I’ve already mentioned the great importance that Croce
assigns to his theoretical activity as a revisionist – also, by his own explicit
admission, how all his work as a thinker during these last twenty years has
been aimed at completing the revision until it becomes liquidation. As
a revisionist, he has contributed to maintaining the trend of economic-
legal history (still represented today in a weakened form by Academician
Gioacchino Volpe especially).16 He has now given written form to the his-
tory that he calls ethical-political, of which the Storia d’Europa is supposed
to be and to become the model.
What is Croce’s innovation? Does it have the significance that he
attributes to it, and, in particular, does it have that liquidating effect that
he claims? We can say concretely that Croce, in his historical-political
activity, puts the accent solely on the moment which in politics is called
the moment of hegemony, consensus, and cultural direction, in order to
distinguish it from the moment of force, compulsion, and intervention
by the legislature and the state or the police.17 In fact, I cannot under-
stand why Croce believes that his position on the theory of history has
the capacity to liquidate every philosophy of praxis definitively. In the
same period when Croce fashioned this so-called truncheon of his, what
actually happened is that the philosophy of praxis, according to its great-
est modern theorists, was fashioned in the same way, and the moment
of hegemony or cultural direction was systematically revalued exactly
against the mechanist and fatalist conceptions of economism. In fact,
it has been possible to assert that the essential feature of the most mod-
ern philosophy of praxis is precisely the historical-political concept of
hegemony. So it seems to me either that Croce is not ‘up to date’ with
the research and bibliography of his chosen fields or that he has lost his
capacity for critical orientation. As for his own information, it is based
directly on a notorious book by a Viennese journalist, Fülop-Miller.18
This point should be developed thoroughly and analytically, but that
would require very long treatment. For your interests, I think these sug-
gestions are enough. It would not be easy for me to extend them.
767
Part II: Translations
Dearest Tania:
768
Gramsci, Letters
769
Part II: Translations
Dearest Tania:
I received your postcard of the 17th and the letter of the 19th. The
news that Carlo gave you about the state of my health is not very clear. I
haven’t had serious bouts of uric acid, even though the continuing intes-
tinal inflammation must certainly be connected with excessive acidity.
On the other hand, I have been suffering for some time from insomnia,
if you can call it that. More precisely, I don’t sleep not because I’m not
sleepy but because sleep is interrupted by external causes, which has
put me in a state of great fatigue and exhaustion, and this is apparent
even externally, as Carlo noticed. The problem is complicated, and I’ll
be able to speak with you about it if you come to talk. For the date when
you come I have no special preferences. You should pick the time that’s
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Gramsci, Letters
convenient for you from any point of view. I’ve read your Dad’s letter
with great interest. It’s quite charming and full of observations that make
me think. As far as what you say about my being able to write him, I don’t
agree. It would be hard for me to give you a full account of the reason.
Some things I don’t like writing about in a letter from prison.
You haven’t given me your opinion of the notes I wrote you about
Croce. Do they seem generally useful to you? Anyhow, you must keep in
mind that they cannot be complete, that they could not deal with cer-
tain issues that may need to be dealt with, and that, even as they stand,
they’ve suffered voluntary mutilation.
I finally got the books ordered a long time ago. But I haven’t received
the issue of Riforma Sociale for September-October 1931. I’m also missing
the April 1932 issue of Problemi del Lavoro, and I’ll be grateful if you ask
for it. (I’ve never received the first issue of Cultura for the year.)
If you happen to write to Piero, mention to him that in a passage of
Certezze, a recent book by Silvio D’Amico, a chapter dedicated to Spiel-
berg talks about a petition for mercy sent by Federico Confalonieri to
the Emperor of Austria that should go straight to Spielberg’s own Italian
museum. D’Amico does not reprint this entreaty, but he hints around
as if it were written by a person reduced to the lowest level of degra-
dation and humiliation. Piero may know if this piece by Confalonieri
was already printed in some publication about Confalonieri. I think I’ve
never heard anything about it.24
Could you also send me some Hunt Salts, dearest? I can no longer do
without taking them, and I’ve almost finished the supply. I’ve tried to
stop using it, but the problems come right back.
Dearest Tania:
I received your postcard of the 25th and the money order of the 28th.
I’m deeply grateful, but I assure you that there was no urgency. As I
wrote some months ago, the expenses that I have are relatively small;
and besides, it’s impossible to buy anything worth eating. It’s really bet-
ter not to go off a strict diet so things don’t get worse. Any change or any
771
Part II: Translations
attempt to increase the amount of food that I eat causes me such trouble
that from now on I’d rather not even try. Besides, I’m not worried about
this now, and I feel no weaker than usual. You must not think that I’ve
turned into a fatalist and abandoned myself to the moving current like a
chien crevé.25 On the contrary, I keep fussing about it to find more rational
solutions, but my range of choice is quite restricted and keeps becoming
more restricted with every effort that turns out to be useless.
But let’s talk about more interesting things that will let me express my
mania and string four bits of gossip together. I want to make a series of
observations so that, if you have a chance, you can send a copy to Piero
and ask him for any bibliographical information that would help me
enlarge the scope of my thinking and orient myself better. I would like
to know if there is any special publication, even in English, on Ricardo’s
own method of research in the economic sciences and on the innova-
tions in methodological criticism that Ricardo introduced. Ten years ago,
specifically on the centenary of his death, I believe that a rich literature
on this subject appeared, and that there is some likelihood of finding
there exactly what has to do with my topic.26 This is where my thinking
is going: can we say that Ricardo was important for the history of phi-
losophy as well as the history of economics, where he certainly stands
in the first rank? And can we say that Ricardo contributed to pointing
the first theorizers of the philosophy of praxis towards their overcom-
ing of Hegelian philosophy and towards the construction of their new
historicism, purged of every trace of speculative logic?27 It seems to me
that one could try to prove this proposition, and that it would be worth
the trouble to do so.
I start with two concepts, fundamental for economics, which I believe
we owe to Ricardo, those of a determinate market and of a trend law. Here
is my reasoning: may it not be from these two concepts that we get the
motive to reduce the immanentist conception of history, as expressed in
the speculative and idealist language of classical German philosophy, to
a directly historical, realist immanence, wherein the law of causality in
the natural sciences has been purged of its mechanism and identified
synthetically with the dialectical reasoning of Hegelian thought? Maybe
this whole nexus of ideas still seems a bit muddy, but what matters to me
is just the overall understanding, even if it is approximate, as long as it
suffices to learn whether the problem has been foreseen and studied by
some expert on Ricardo.
We must remember how Hegel himself, in other contexts, had seen
these necessary connections between different scientific activities, and
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Gramsci, Letters
also between scientific activities and practical activities. Thus, in the Lec-
tures on the History of Philosophy, he found a nexus between the French
Revolution and the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and he
said that ‘only two peoples, the German and the French, as opposed
as they may be to one another, yet, just because they are opposed, have
taken part in the great epoch of universal history’ at the end of the eight-
eenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century, once the new
principle ‘erupted as Spirit and concept’ in Germany while in France it
unfolded ‘as effective reality.’28 From the Holy Family it appears that this
nexus between French political activity and German philosophical activ-
ity posited by Hegel was taken over by the theorists of the philosophy
of praxis.29 The point is to see how and to what extent classical English
economics, in the methodological form worked out by Ricardo, contrib-
uted to the later development of the new theory. That classical English
economics contributed to the development of the new philosophy is
commonly accepted, but we usually think of Ricardo’s theory of value. It
seems to me that we must look farther and identify a contribution that
I would call synthetic, having to do with the world view and the mode of
thinking, and so it is not only analytic, regarding a particular doctrine,
but also fundamental.
In his research for the critical edition of Ricardo’s Works, Piero might
be able to collect valuable material on this topic. In any case, let him see
if some publication exists that deals with these issues or might help me
in my imprisoned state, when I cannot do organized research in a library.
Dearest Tania:
I received your letter of May 30, and I’ve also received the samples deliv-
ered with the medicines. I’ve already taken the Sedosine, but I have to
say that it doesn’t do anything for me. I’ve taken Somatose now and then,
but still not on a regular basis. I really don’t know what to do because the
food that I get doesn’t work for mixing with a preparation of that kind.
I’ll just trying swallowing it loose in cold water, but I not sure how that
will work. Maybe you have to put it in a hot liquid.
I assure you that I have no problem calling things by their names. I
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Part II: Translations
call them as I can, given what I know. I don’t know how to call ‘intesti-
nal inflammation’ anything but that. Likewise, it is correct that it is not
‘organic’ insomnia that keeps me from sleeping. I believe that not sleep-
ing, even if it is called ‘insomnia,’ is not always to be cured like insomnia.
I think it better not to ask questions about words. The important thing
is to understand, and I think you have understood what the problem is.
For the three months beginning on July 1, please subscribe again to
the Corriere della Sera, but this time please send L17 instead of L14.50,
and specify that you also want the Monday issue.30 Looking closer at
the subscription advertisement that they sent me because the last three
months is expiring, I noticed that you can also subscribe for the Monday
issue, which was not clear from the heading in the newspaper. I’m send-
ing you the form for the checking account that you can use to send the
money from Rome without delivery charges!
I’ll try to answer the other questions that you ask me about Croce, even
though I don’t quite understand why they are important, and maybe I
think I’ve already answered them in what I said before. Look again at the
note in which I mentioned the attitude maintained by Croce during the
War, and see if it doesn’t contain the answer to one part of your current
questions implicitly.
The break with Gentile occurred in 1912, and it’s Gentile who dis-
tanced himself from Croce and tried to make himself philosophically
independent.31 I don’t believe that Croce has changed his position from
that time on, even though he has defined his teachings better; the more
notable transformation occurred between 1900 and 1910. The so-called
‘religion of liberty’ is not a discovery of the present years. In one sharp
formulation, it sums up his thinking over the whole period from the
moment when he abandoned Catholicism – as he himself writes in his
intellectual autobiography (Contributo alla critica di me stesso). And I do
not think that Gentile disagrees with Croce about this.
I believe that the interpretation of the ‘religion of liberty’ formula
that you give is incorrect since you attribute a mystical content to it (one
might think so from the fact that you refer to a ‘taking refuge’ in this reli-
gion and thus to a kind of ‘flight’ from the world, and so on). Nothing
of the sort. ‘Religion of liberty’ simply means faith in modern civilization
that has no need of the transcendental and revelatory but contains in
itself its own rationality and its own origin. Hence, it is an anti-mystical
formula, and, if you like, anti-religious. For Croce, every conception of
the world, every philosophy, insofar as it becomes a rule of life and a
morality, is religion. Religions in the confessional sense are religions too,
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Gramsci, Letters
but mythological religions, and thus, in a certain sense, ‘lower’ and primi-
tive, as if corresponding to an historical infancy of the human race. The
origins of this doctrine are already there in Hegel and Vico, and they are
the common heritage of all Italian idealist philosophy, whether Croce’s
or Gentile’s. This doctrine is the basis of Gentile’s educational reform
with regard to religious instruction in the schools, which even Gentile
wanted to restrict to elementary schools alone (infancy true and prop-
er), and which, in any event, not even the government has wanted to
introduce into the upper level.
Thus, I think you may be exaggerating Croce’s position at the present
moment, seeing it as more isolated than it is. We must not let ourselves
be deceived by the polemical effervescence of writers who are dilet-
tantes, more or less, and irresponsible. Croce has explained much of his
current thinking in the journal Politica, edited by Coppola and Minister
Rocco.32 Not only Coppola, I believe, but many others are persuaded of
the usefulness of the position taken by Croce, which creates the situation
that makes it possible to give real education, aimed at the life of the state,
to new groups of leaders who surfaced in the postwar period.
If you study the whole history of Italy from 1815 on, you see that a
small leadership group managed methodically to absorb into its circle
all the political personnel produced by originally subversive mass move-
ments. From 1860 to 1876, the Action Party of Mazzini and Garibaldi
was absorbed by the monarchy, leaving an insignificant residue that con-
tinued to exist as the Republican Party, but with an effect that belongs
more to folklore than to the history of politics. The phenomenon has
been called transformism, but it was not an isolated phenomenon.33 It
was an organic process, which, for the formation of the ruling class,
took the place of what had happened in France with the Revolution and
Napoleon and happened in England with Cromwell. Indeed, even after
1876, the process continues, bit by bit. This phenomenon is of great
moment in the postwar period when the traditional leadership group is
apparently in no position to assimilate and digest the new forces thrown
up by events. But this leadership group is more malin and capable than
we might have supposed. Absorbing them is difficult and burdensome,
but, despite all that, it happens, in many ways and by various methods.
Croce’s activity is one of these ways and these methods. His teaching
produces perhaps the largest quantity of ‘gastric juices’ involved in the
work of digestion.
When we put it in historical perspective – Italian history, naturally –
Croce’s energy seems to be the most powerful machine for ‘conforming’
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Part II: Translations
the new forces to the vital interests (not only current, but also future)
of the group dominant today, which, I believe, puts the right value on it,
certain superficial appearances notwithstanding. When you melt down
different substances to produce an alloy, effervescence on the surface
indicates that the alloy is actually forming, and not the reverse. And
likewise in these human cases, concord always shows up as discord, as a
struggle and a battle, not a hug on the stage. But concord it always is, and
the deepest and most effective kind.
NOTES
1 We have used Gramsci (1996a): 562−87, along with Antonio Santucci’s very
informative notes.
2 For Tania Schucht (1887−1943), see section 27 of the Introduction. Tania
was the sister of Giulia Schucht (1896−1980), Gramsci’s wife, and both were
daughters of Apollon Schucht, a Russian exile. Giulia joined the Bolsheviks
in 1917. When Gramsci went to Moscow in 1922, Giulia met him while he
was recovering from exhaustion in a sanatorium near Moscow. She was very
ill for much of the time that Gramsci spent in prison.
3 Delio was Giulia’s and Antonio’s oldest son, born in Moscow in 1926. Soma-
tose was a dietary supplement.
4 The book in question is Croce (1932), parts of which Gramsci had read in
Croce (1931b): see section 27 of the Introduction.
5 Croce (1928b), collecting essays from La Critica and elsewhere.
6 The Liberal Giovanni Giolitti (1842−1928) was the most persistent presence
in Italian politics between Cavour and Mussolini, premier five times between
1892 and 1921. Croce served his last government as minister of public educa-
tion in 1920−1: Duggan (1994): 178−90; Bonetti (2001): 149−50.
7 The Italian text has più che in tedesco e più che in italiano.
8 Eduard Bernstein (1850−1932) became the champion of an anti-Hegelian
critique of orthodox Marxism that came to be called ‘revisionism’ (by
Lenin, for example, referring to the possibility of participation in electoral
politics), in the way that criticisms of early Christianity came to be called
‘heresy.’ For Sorel, see sections 14 and 27 of the Introduction.
9 Sorel (1927): 311.
10 Croce (1912), (1921a), (1925b), (1932).
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778
References and Abbreviations
780
References
781
References
782
References
783
References
784
References
785
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804
Name Index
317−21, 323, 329, 331, 340, 345, Bebel, August, 477, 483
378−9, 387, 396, 409, 412, 418, 458, Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 245, 263, 373, 448
469, 472, 549−50, 571, 580, 589, 608, Bergson, Henri, 117, 623, 641
632, 640, 652, 659, 663−4, 673, 679, Berkeley, George, 8, 21, 245−8, 250−2,
687, 696, 752, 761 254, 263, 448
Arnauld, Antoine, 263 Berlin, 61, 401, 625, 629−30, 635, 638,
Aryan, 392, 470, 482 640
Asia, 116, 266, 400, 468, 610−11, 614 Bern, 69, 421
Aspasia, 505 Bernard, Claude, 371, 382, 399
Assyria, 469,482 Bernard of Clairvaux, 268−9
Asturaro, Alfonso, 473, 482 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques
Athens, 83, 432, 435, 468, 472, 621, Henri, 558, 629
682 Bernheim, Ernst, 465, 467, 485, 491,
Augustine, 30, 257, 267−8, 284, 694 494, 502−3, 506, 509, 513−14
Australia, 610, 749, 795 Bernstein, Eduard, 160, 763, 776
Austria, 11, 24−5, 45, 505, 508, 753, Berthelot, Marcelin, 371, 399
771, 777 Berti, Domenico, 635
Avellino, 60 Bethnal Green, 495, 509
Avesta, 277 Bettinotti, Mario, 768
Bibel-Babel, 468, 482
Babel, 468, 482 Bible, 11, 264, 276, 482, 627
Babylon, 468 Bichat, Marie F.X., 453, 461
Bacinetti family, 68 Bismarck, Otto von, 562, 630
Bacon, Francis, 47, 56, 62−3, 73, 324, Bobbio, Norberto, 3−6, 163, 165,
330−3, 341, 352, 357, 378, 398, 401, 167−9, 171, 173, 189−90, 370
410−11, 431, 448, 579, 589, 632, 636, Bologna, 45, 50, 52, 66−7, 70, 143, 343,
694 433, 439, 444, 712−13
Bactria, 277 Bolshevik, 715, 761, 776
Baillie, J.B., 681 Bomba, 48
Bain, Alexander, 88, 682 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 45
Balzac, Honoré de, 512 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 595
Barbaro, Ermolao, 317, 340 Bonatelli, Francesco, 87
Barth, Paul, 469, 482, 640 Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, 7, 30,
Barzellotti, Giacomo, 86−9, 142, 181 267, 269, 284, 289, 311
Bastille, 429, 444 Born, Friedrich Gottlob, 23, 174
Bauer. Bruno and Edgar, 720, 749 Bosanquet, Bernard, 504, 629
Bavaria, 68 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 374, 390,
Bayard, 544, 627 399, 437, 445
Beatrice, 487, 504 Bothwell, Earl of (James Hepburn),
Beattie, James, 338 513
806
Name Index
807
Name Index
808
Name Index
Italian University Life,’ 131; Aes- Inferno, 513, 693; La Vita Nuova, 504,
thetic as a Science of Expression and 705; Paradiso, 639−40; Purgatorio, 46,
General Linguistics, 94, 99, 107, 695; 177
Contribution to the Critique of Myself, Darnley, Henry Stuart, 501, 513
153, 169, 182; Critical Conversations, Darwin, 65, 124, 127, 165, 475, 603,
717; History as Thought and Action, 636, 669
153; History of Europe in the Nine- Darwinism, 54, 78, 475, 603, 666, 680
teenth Century, 153−61, 168, 753−78; David, Jacques-Louis, 96, 495, 509
History of Italian Historiography, 153, Davidson, Donald, 107, 183
168, 764; History of Italy from 1871 De Gérando, Joseph, 176
to 1915, 153; History of the Age of the De Meis, Camillo, 606, 635, 637
Baroque in Italy, 153, 168; History De Ruggiero, Guido, 5−6, 143
of the Kingdom of Naples, 153, 168; De Sanctis, Francesco, 7, 48, 51, 53,
History, Chronicle and False Histo- 60−6, 77, 90, 167, 170, 401−17, 490,
ries, 764; Logic as Science of the Pure 498, 503−6, 510−11, 680; ‘Science
Concept, 99, 515−32; New Essays on and Life,’ 60−1, 66; ‘The Ideal,’
Italian Literature in the Seventeenth 64−5, 413−17; ‘The Principle of
Century, 153, 168; Outlines of Logic, Realism,’ 61−4, 66, 401−12; The His-
106; Philosophy as Science of the Spirit, tory of Italian Literature, 60−1
107; Philosophy of Practice, 107; The Delfico, Melchiorre, 493, 507
Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 747; Delitzsch, Friedrich, 482
Theory and History of Historiography, Demiurge, 123, 267, 656
107; What is Living and What is Dead Democritus of Abdera, 579, 582, 662
in Hegel’s Philosophy?, 106, 533−641 Dennett, Daniel, 183
Cromwell, Oliver, 775 Descartes, René, 8, 11−12, 19−20, 37,
Croton, 266−7 47, 50, 52, 67, 70−2, 74, 88, 120, 193,
Cuoco, Vincenzo, 46, 67 267, 270, 276, 281, 297, 328, 331−3,
Curci, Carlo, 38 336, 352, 357, 398, 401, 409, 430−1,
Cusani, Stefano, 48 436−9, 442−4, 446, 454, 551−2, 562,
Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), 353, 356, 564, 577, 579, 582, 597, 618, 649,
550, 626−7, 694 663
Cyprus, 341 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine, 10, 174,
193, 234
d’Amico, Silvio, 771 Devenir social, 106, 662
d’Ancona, Alessandro, 118 Dewey, John, 4
d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 751 Diana, 462
Dante Alighieri, 46, 60, 115, 127, 154, Dilthey, Wilhelm, 91, 510
167, 177, 188, 266, 350, 389, 400, 432, Diogenes, 705
445, 465, 487, 496, 499, 504, 511, 513, Dionysian, 545, 627
590, 639−40, 674, 682, 693, 705; Döllinger, Johann, 761
809
Name Index
Dominic Guzman, 727, 750 372, 378, 394−5, 397, 430, 467, 496,
Dominican, 48, 323, 352, 354, 627 510, 611, 614, 629, 713, 741, 750,
Don Abbondio, 492, 507 753−5, 757−9, 764, 767−9
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 182, 484−6, Eustachi, Bartolomeo, 327, 341
495−6, 502−3, 508
Dumas fils, Alexandre, 499, 511 Fabroni, Angelo, 460, 462
Edinburgh, 291, 628, 740 Fallopio, Gabriele, 327, 341
Egypt, 64, 466, 468, 480, 483, 508, 611, Fascism, 3−7, 117, 132, 137, 142−7, 149,
741 153−4, 158, 161, 163−4, 169, 173,
Einaudi, Luigi, 143 706−15, 770, 777−8
Einstein, Albert, 117 Fascist regime, 3, 132, 143, 153−4, 163,
Eleatic, 46, 114, 268, 316, 324, 376, 548, 708−9, 716
576−7, 579, 624 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 431, 444
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 167 Ferrari, Sante, 87
Empedocles, 7, 46, 316 Ferri, Luigi, 86−7, 181
Enciclopedia Italiana, 142 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 77, 83, 119−22,
Engels, Friedrich, 49, 79, 83, 119, 400, 473−4, 482, 642, 644−8, 651,
149−50, 473, 482, 561, 620−1, 630, 653−5, 661, 663−4, 751
637−8, 640, 642−4, 646, 662−3, 742−3, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 5, 12, 35, 120,
749, 751−2, 761, 777 126, 250−1, 253−4, 263, 272, 337, 363,
England, 3−5, 9, 24, 49, 53, 67, 88, 93, 403, 407, 409, 478, 553−4, 561, 570,
101, 128, 167, 169−70, 173−5, 182−3, 579, 622, 629, 637, 640, 651, 661, 699,
232, 245, 248, 269, 333, 355, 369, 773
371−2, 448, 451, 457, 461, 485, 487, Ficino, Marsilio, 378
503, 507, 509, 530, 579, 601, 608, Fiorentino, Francesco, 7, 66−75, 118,
624−6, 633, 660, 671, 681, 693, 718, 168, 170−1, 429−62, 504, 531, 627−8,
726, 736, 741, 763, 772− 3, 775 635−6, 663, 680; Giordano Bruno and
English Channel, 73, 448, 629, 681 His Times, 69; Letters on the New Sci-
Enlightenment, 9, 11, 27, 36, 86, 126, ence to the Marchesa Florenzi Wadding-
131, 163−4, 263, 507, 562, 564, 597, ton, 67−8, 70−3, 429−46, 628, 636;
628, 664 The Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, 66;
Epicurus, 565, 658, 662 The Philosophical Resurgence of the
Erizzo, Sebastiano, 322, 331, 339, 341 Fifteenth Century, 66−7, 627; ‘Positiv-
Erkenntnisproblem, 628 ism and Idealism,’ 67, 73−6, 170−1,
Ermengarda, 685, 693 447−62
Esperti, Giuseppe Luigi, 438, 446 Fischer, Kuno, 535, 621, 625, 627, 636,
Etruscan, 72, 266−7, 441 640
Europe, 5, 8, 13, 36, 48, 50, 52, 69, 88, Florence, 45, 49, 53, 86, 117−18, 330,
90, 116, 122, 126, 154, 156−8, 160, 334, 389, 399−400, 464, 467, 482, 487,
163, 168, 193, 273, 275−6, 351, 355, 496, 562, 630, 777
810
Name Index
811
Name Index
695−705; From Genovesi to Galluppi, 37, 40−4, 278−311; On the Civil and
119; A General Theory of the Spirit Moral Primacy of the Italians, 4−5, 8,
as Pure Act, 132; The Philosophy of 36−9, 47, 50, 168, 264−77, 609; The
Marx, 119; ‘The Philosophy of Modern Jesuit, 38; On the Philosophi-
Praxis,’ 118−25, 642−64, 751, 777; cal Errors of Antonio Rosmini, 38; Phi-
‘The Rebirth of Idealism,’ 126−30, losophy of Revelation, 348; Protology,
665−82; Rosmini and Gioberti, 348; Theory of the Supernatural, 37
118−19, 126, 173; A System of Logic as Giobertians, 51, 66, 86, 347
a Theory of Knowledge, 132; Teaching Gioia, Melchiorre, 10, 24, 174
Philosophy in High Schools, 126 Giolitti, Giovanni, 142, 161, 763, 776
Gerdil, Hyacinthe, 257, 263 Giornale critico della filosofia italiana,
German, 9, 11, 23, 27, 37−8, 48−50, 61, 142
66−70, 77−8, 80, 87, 91−2, 94, 97, 122, Giornale dei letterati, 440, 443, 445−6,
132, 148, 159, 163, 174, 236, 239, 253, 462
265, 269, 271−2, 281, 359, 363, 371−4, Giusti, Giuseppe, 738, 751
399, 401, 410, 429, 443−4, 463, 468, God, 13, 30−1, 33, 37, 42, 44, 47, 59,
471−2, 482, 485, 499, 501, 503−4, 506, 68, 107, 120, 123, 128, 155, 197,
566, 609−11, 624, 626, 628−31, 635, 207−8, 211, 230, 243, 246−7, 249−51,
638, 642, 667, 695, 705, 713, 747−8, 257−8, 263, 265, 270, 276, 279, 282,
753, 756, 759, 763, 772−3 284−5, 289, 295−6, 302, 306−10, 318,
Germany, 5, 48, 77, 86−7, 89, 126, 154, 344, 346−9, 351−3, 355−68, 373, 376,
157, 194, 251, 272, 280, 355, 371, 384, 383, 385, 388, 390−1, 397, 399, 405,
400−1, 430, 445, 477, 482−4, 487, 418−19, 421−8, 433, 438, 442, 445−6,
502−4, 528, 551, 562, 597, 611, 621−2, 460, 462, 501, 526, 549−51, 564, 576,
624, 629−30, 638, 671, 751, 753, 763, 578, 583−4, 597, 613, 618, 625−6,
773 639−40, 645, 649, 656, 671, 674−5,
Gerson, Jean Charlier de, 311 687, 694, 701, 704−5, 737−8, 769
Gervinus, Georg, 463, 465, 482 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 160, 384,
Giani, Costanzo, 441, 446 435, 496, 501, 513, 557, 561, 597, 604,
Gibbon, Edward, 96 608, 629−30, 634−8, 765
Gioberti, Vincenzo, 5, 7−8, 25, 36−47, Goldbach, Christian, 505
50-52, 57, 66−8, 86−8, 106, 118−19, Goldberg, Rube, 168
126, 163, 166−8, 170, 173, 177, 263−5, Goldbridle, 544, 627
267, 269, 271, 273, 275−9, 281, 283, Golgatha, 429, 444
285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 295, 297, Goncourt, Edmond de, 512
299, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309−11, Gospel, 271, 415, 417, 694
344−9, 354, 362, 364−6, 368−9, 400, Gracchi brothers, 267
417, 426, 428, 609, 663, 695; The Grammont, Philibert, Comte de, 509
Catholic Reform of the Church, 348; Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 7, 147−53,
Introduction to the Study of Philosophy, 159−64, 166−8, 170, 188−90, 717, 719,
812
Name Index
721, 723, 725, 727, 729, 731, 733, 735, Hebrew, 435, 445, 564, 640
737, 739, 741, 743, 745, 747, 749−52, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 5,
761−3, 765, 767, 769, 771, 773, 775−7; 8, 37, 48−53, 57, 60−4, 68, 70, 77−8,
Letters from Prison, 159−62, 762−78; 87−9, 96, 99, 104−22, 125−6, 148,
Prison Notebooks: Introduction to the 150−1, 155−6, 162, 170, 184, 188, 251,
Study of Philosophy, 147−52, 717−52 265, 267, 272, 363, 369, 373−4, 384,
Gramsci, Carlo, 770 387, 392, 397−9, 402−3, 405, 408−10,
Gramsci, Delio, 762, 764 412, 451, 473, 476, 482, 493−4, 496,
Gramsci, Teresina, 768, 777 498, 502, 504, 508, 525, 532−641,
Graz, 508 644−5, 649, 653−64, 671, 680−1,
Greece, 37, 46, 72, 80, 187, 194, 241, 694−5, 699, 717, 719, 743, 748−9,
266−8, 270, 274, 277, 317, 320, 333, 751−2, 761, 772−3, 775, 777; Aesthet-
345−6, 348−9, 378, 387, 390−1, 394, ics, 576, 584, 587, 609, 613; Encyclope-
403, 428, 432−3, 440, 445, 451, 457, dia Logic, 576, 633, 639, 694; Lectures
462−3, 468, 479−80, 482, 497, 509, on the History of Philosophy, 548,
528, 548, 554, 580, 593, 609−11, 663 579−80, 583, 592−3, 604, 608, 610,
Gregory XVI, 24−5, 165 621, 773; Philosophical Dissertation
Grotius, Hugo, 431, 445, 600, 636 on the Orbits of the Planets, 604; Philo-
Guardian (newspaper), 3 sophical Propaedeutic, 583; Philosophy
Guelf, 38, 50−1, 66, 87, 400 of History, 78, 96, 115, 156, 482, 493,
Guerrini, Orlindo (Lorenzo Stec- 508, 591−5, 601−2, 604−7, 621, 630,
chetti), 511 634−5; The Difference between Fichte’s
Gumplovicz, Ludwig, 508 and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy,
Guyau, Jean Marie, 504 629; The Encyclopedia of the Philosoph-
Göttingen, 77, 421, 631 ical Sciences, 106−7, 533, 535, 566,
569, 576, 587, 591−2, 600, 604, 608,
Haeckel, Ernst, 512 617, 625, 633−4, 636−7, 639−40, 694;
Halley, Edmond, 327 The Phenomenology of Spirit, 48, 156,
Hamann, Johann Georg, 67, 435, 445, 535, 546, 554, 566, 575−6, 580−1, 583,
552, 628 585, 587, 599, 613, 625, 629−30, 632,
Hamilton, Anthony, 495, 509 674; The Philosophy of Nature, 115,
Hampton Court Palace, 495, 509 566, 583, 591, 599, 601−5, 607−8, 611,
Hartmann, Eduard von, 94, 409, 615−17, 619−21, 633, 637, 639; The
412, 488, 497, 504−6, 510−12, 618, Philosophy of Right, 629, 637, 749;
639; German Aesthetics, 94, 504−5, The Philosophy of Spirit, 582−3, 591,
510−11; Philosophy of the Beautiful, 601, 613, 633, 636, 681; The Science of
488, 505−6, 511−12; Philosophy of the Logic, 531, 535, 576, 578, 580−3, 599,
Unconscious, 94, 409, 412 614, 681, 699; The System of Ethical
Harvard University, 186 Life, 583
Haym, Rudolf, 640 Hegelian, 7−8, 48−53, 60−2, 64, 67−8,
813
Name Index
77−8, 83, 87−8, 94, 104, 106−7, 110, Hutten, Ulrich von, 640
115−16, 119, 128, 143, 148, 160, Hölderlin, Friedrich, 629
169−70, 188, 267, 272, 452, 473−5,
487−8, 493, 503−4, 533, 544, 548, 556, I Ching, 266
561−3, 566−8, 571, 583, 595−6, 606−7, Iago, 94−5, 490
614−15, 618−22, 624−7, 629, 632, Idéologues, 10, 234
636−7, 640, 642, 644−5, 661, 666−7, Il Cimento, 49
671, 681, 699, 741−2, 748−9, 772, Il Contemporaneo (newspaper), 4
776 Il Mondo (newspaper), 143
Heidelberg, 625 Il Piemonte (newspaper), 49
Helmholtz, Hermann von, 637 Imbriani, Vittorio, 503−4, 506, 513
Helvétius, Claude-Adrien, 245, 263 Index of Forbidden Books, 12, 25−6, 157,
Heraclitus, 549, 579, 582, 608, 624, 627 263, 348
Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 77−8, India, 266, 279, 293, 310, 610−11
84, 87, 90−1, 94−5, 181−2, 475, 483, Inquisition, 355, 396
487−9, 491, 505−6, 562, 569, 622, Ionia, 376
630−1, 640, 717, 749 Iran, 275
Hercules, 430, 451 Ireland, 510, 581, 633
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 67, 508, Israel, 469
579, 635 Italy, 189, 663, 769, 779−80, 782−5,
Herodotus, 463, 479, 482 789−91, 796−7, 799−802, 804
Hidden God (Deus absconditus), 699,
705, 769 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 19, 67–68,
Hirth, Georg, 512 175, 277, 552, 579, 597-598, 608, 623,
Historical Right (Destra storica), 119, 628, 632, 635, 694
504 Jacobin, 24, 156, 559, 562-563
Hitler, Adolf, 117, 154, 157 Jäger, Johannes, 640
Hobbes, Thomas, 321, 330, 658 Jaja, Donato, 118-119, 127, 142, 665,
Holmes, Roger, 186 680
Homer, 274, 391, 395, 435, 460, 468, James, William, 167, 170
499, 609 James I of England, 513
Horace, 626−7, 662, 682 Janet, Paul, 622, 640−1
Horapollon, 483 Jannelli, Cataldo, 508
Huizong (U Sheng), 266, 277 Jansenist, 509
Hume, David, 8, 16, 19−22, 62, 163, Japan, 741
203, 232−3, 244, 246−8, 250, 252, Jena, 625
410, 442, 444, 448−9, 451, 552, 577, Jerome, 633
579 Jesuit, 25, 38, 49, 164, 178, 340, 497,
Hungary, 753 725, 727
Hus. John, 633 Jesus, 164, 399−400, 727
814
Name Index
Jews, 121, 508, 549, 611, 635, 647, 653, Köstlin, Karl, 499, 505
785 Krug, Wilhelm, 606, 637
John’s Gospel, 417, 639, 682, 694
Jouffroy, Théodore, 9−10, 174 La Critica, 5−6, 106, 117, 126, 142−3,
Jowett, Benjamin, 682 153, 164, 169, 628, 681, 695, 776
Judgment of Paris, 604, 636 La Critica Fascista, 770
Jupiter, 169, 375−6, 410, 449, 460 La Revue des deux mondes, 127
La Stampa (newspaper), 3, 483
Kaffir, 392 La Voce, 117
Kant, Immanuel, 5, 7−8, 10, 12, 14, 16, Labriola, Antonio, 7, 77−86, 90−1,
19−23, 27−8, 35, 38, 49−50, 52, 55−6, 94, 106, 119−20, 122, 149, 170, 181,
62, 66−8, 70, 72−4, 77, 88, 93, 107, 463−83, 506−8, 511, 513, 638, 640,
123, 126, 129, 136, 138, 148, 163, 168, 644, 650, 653, 658, 660, 662−4,
170, 174−5, 187, 194, 212, 214−16, 717−19, 749; Dell’insegnamento della
218−22, 225, 227−8, 230−3, 235−44, storia, 513; Discorrendo di socialismo
248−51, 253−4, 271, 318, 325, 336−7, e di filosofia, 640, 662; ‘History,
363, 370, 373, 386, 398−400, 405−7, Philosophy of History, Sociology
409, 430−1, 433, 435, 437, 439, 441−5, and Historical Materialism,’ 80−5,
450−1, 454, 458−9, 504, 536, 552−5, 463−83, 638; I Problemi della filosofia
569−70, 577, 579, 582, 587, 597−8, della storia, 506, 508, 511; In Memory
608, 613, 621−2, 625, 628, 637−40, of the Communist Manifesto, 79, 106
657, 661, 663, 676−7, 681−2, 690, Lammenais, Hugues Félicité Robert
695−6, 752, 761, 773; Critique of Judg- de, 25
ment, 552, 587; Critique of Practical Lamprecht, Karl, 503
Reason, 639; Critique of Pure Reason, Lange, Friedrich, 400
19−24, 72, 74, 163, 174, 214, 236−7, Lao Tse, 266
243, 249−50, 373, 399, 430, 444, 454, Lasalle, Ferdinand, 749, 751
487, 552, 625, 628, 639 Lateran Pacts, 157, 164, 750
Kantian, 8, 21, 24, 38, 48−9, 55, 67, 75, Laterza, Giovanni, 106
77, 87−8, 117−18, 126−8, 138, 167, Latin, 23−4, 42, 64, 71, 174, 267−70,
169−70, 215, 229, 271, 412, 487, 504, 296−7, 317, 325, 333, 349, 415,
549, 552, 555, 559, 621, 624, 629, 438−41, 472, 474, 480, 501, 651
638−9, 669−70, 672, 681, 690−1 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 634
Kapila, 279, 310 Lavoisier, Antoine, 65, 453
Kepler, Johann, 266, 327 Lazarus, Moritz, 95, 182, 492, 495, 506,
Kirchmann, Julius von, 61, 401, 509, 511−12
409−12 Lecky, William, 182, 496, 510
Kitcher, Patricia, 21 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 318, 340
Königsberg, 12, 23, 35, 77, 212, 232, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 8, 11, 27,
248, 442, 637 52, 77, 163, 270, 281, 321, 340, 357−8,
815
Name Index
370, 390, 398, 409, 489, 505, 539, 270, 331, 399, 435, 437, 467, 496, 564,
551−2, 579, 582, 597, 626, 691, 747 609, 630−1, 719, 749, 766, 768, 770,
Leipzig, 401, 469, 482, 631, 637 777
Lely, Peter, 495, 509 McTaggart, John, 629, 681
Lenin, Vladimir, 758, 776 Mai, Angelo, 462
Leo XII, 45 Malatesta, Paolo, 685, 693
Leo XIII, 26, 164, 189, 750 Malebranche, Nicolas, 8−9, 30, 257,
Leonardo da Vinci, 46, 117, 326−7, 263, 277, 281, 284, 426, 428
330−1, 334, 339 Mamiani, Terenzio, 7−8, 25, 45−7,
Leopardi, Giacomo, 60, 416−17, 457, 51−2, 69, 87, 167−8, 173, 177−8,
462, 489, 505 180−1, 273−4, 310, 312−42, 363−4,
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 68, 510, 368, 370, 400; Dialogues, 368; The
628 Renewal of the Ancestral Italian Phi-
Lewes, George, 448, 461 losophy, 45, 312−42
Lewis, C.I., 186 Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals,
Libya, 749 142−6, 706−12
Littré, Paul-Émile, 75, 371, 385, 399, Mann, Thomas, 154
455, 461, 474 Manzoni, Alessandro, 25, 36, 159, 167,
Livy, 465 492, 507, 511, 693, 765
Locke, John, 8−11, 14, 28, 33−4, 47, Marat, Jean-Paul, 96
62, 163, 175, 229, 234, 245−8, 252, Marie Antoinette, Queen of France,
263, 270, 335−7, 352, 357, 387, 401, 632
410−11, 444, 448−9, 579, 602 Marinetti, Filippo, 143
Lockhart, William, 174 Marsyas, 639−40
Lombroso, Cesare, 509 Martha, Constant, 510
London, 69, 421, 509, 740 Marucci, Achille, 479, 483
Loria, Achille, 480, 483 Marx, Karl, 49, 79−80, 83−4, 106,
Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 504, 573, 631 119−27, 148−9, 473, 475−6, 480, 482,
Louis XIV, 509 620, 630, 636, 642−4, 646, 648−51,
Louis XVI, 632 653, 655−64, 680−1, 738, 749, 751,
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, 45 757, 777; A Contribution to the Cri-
Lucan, 626 tique of Political Economy, 642−3; A
Ludwig I of Bavaria, 68−9 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Lull, Ramon, 322 Philosophy of Right, 749; Theses on
Luther, Martin, 37, 267, 270, 595 Feuerbach, 119−20, 644−8, 662−3
Lybia, 717 Marx and Engels, The Communist
Manifesto, 49, 79, 106, 562, 749; The
Macaulay, Thomas, 73, 448, 744, 751 German Ideology, 482; The Holy Fam-
Macedonia, 621 ily, 720, 749, 777
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 7, 37, 53, 161, Marxism, 80, 86, 106, 119, 126, 151,
816
Name Index
160, 638, 644, 661−2, 680−1, 750, Montaigne, Michel de, 451−2, 461
776 Montecassino, 49
Marzocco, 766, 777 Moore, Thomas, 633
Masci, Filippo, 504 Morocco, 741
Masons, 145, 159, 711, 762 Moscow, 147, 776
Maudsley, Henry, 632 Moses, 424
Maurolico, Francesco, 327, 341 Moslem, 497, 741
Maximilian II of Bavaria, 421 Munich, 69, 508
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 36, 47, 60, 144, Mussolini, Benito, 3, 5, 132, 142−3,
417, 707, 775 147, 154, 157−8, 161, 163, 169, 706,
Mazzoni, Domenico, 48 750, 776
Medici family, 327, 334 Müller, Friedrich Max, 392, 400
Medusa, 668
Mendelssohn, Moses, 68, 628 Nahlowsky, Josef, 505
Mesopotamia, 482 Naples, 5, 11, 13, 46, 48−51, 53, 60−1,
Messalina, 416−17 64, 66−8, 77−8, 86, 90−1, 117, 119,
Methuselah, 678 126, 131, 143, 153, 168, 334, 354, 417,
Metrodorus of Chios, 642, 662 429, 431−2, 434−5, 439, 444, 454, 460,
Mexico, 610 504, 513, 533, 566, 606, 624, 637, 649,
Michelet, Jules, 67, 163, 632 665, 680, 695, 759
Michelet, Karl Ludwig, 605, 619, 637, Napoleon Bonaparte, 8−9, 24, 154−5,
640 167, 509, 595, 635
Middle Ages, 37−8, 269, 274, 293, 344, Nask (Avestan), 266, 277
349−51, 353−4, 356, 367, 377−82, 389, Neo-Guelf, 38
410, 467, 609 Neo-Kantian, 181, 672
Milan, 55, 334, 767 Neo-scholasticism, 6, 149, 164, 166,
Mill, John Stuart, 4, 52, 56, 73−5, 88, 189, 719
170, 371−2, 385, 448−9, 451−3, 456−7, Neoplatonism, 316, 346, 550, 608, 624,
461−2, 624, 628 627
Milyukov, Pavel, 758, 761 Nero, 417
Mind, 86 Nerva, 267
Minerva, 375, 410 Neudecker, Georg, 504
Mnesarchus of Tyre, 267 New Testament, 466
Moby Dick, 168 Newton, Isaac, 55, 62, 163, 380−1, 398,
Mocenigo, Filippo, 323, 341 431, 600, 604, 620, 636−7
Modena, 50 Niebuhr, Barthold, 609, 638
Modernism, 165, 727 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 545, 627, 669
Mommsen, Theodor, 465−6, 482, 496, Nineveh, 468
609, 638 Nizolio, Mario, 321, 326, 328, 331,
Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 143 339−40
817
Name Index
818
Name Index
347, 438, 440, 549, 577−9, 624, 660, Reid, Thomas, 8−10, 12, 27−8, 33−5,
673, 676, 696, 699−700 37−9, 126, 163, 174, 176, 247−8, 251−
Pliny the Elder, 323 3, 263, 271, 291, 304, 306, 336, 338
Plotinus, 7, 403, 408, 550, 627 Remus, 465
Plutarch, 682 Renaissance, 8, 46−7, 50, 53, 56, 66−7,
Po (river), 708 71, 127, 168, 369, 453, 461, 469, 482,
Poland, 753 562, 595−6, 609, 630, 695, 725
Politecnico, 55, 399 Renan, Ernest, 371, 399, 502
Poliziano, Angelo, 317, 340 Restoration, 8−11, 24−6, 45, 161, 354,
Polonius, 607 561, 630, 769
Polybius of Megalopolis, 609 Reuchlin, Johann, 640
Pomponazzi, Pietro, 46, 66−7, 127, 2 Revolutions, Italian and European,
69, 317−19, 333−4, 340, 352−4, 671, 19th Century, 8, 11, 25, 36, 45, 47,
681 50, 60, 65, 87, 121, 154, 161, 234, 277,
Popper, Karl, 169 481, 561−2, 595, 647, 655, 664, 777
Porphyry of Tyre, 277, 317, 532 Rhea Silvia, 465
Poseidon, 369 Ricardo, David, 161, 772−3, 777
Prague, 505, 508 Richter, Johann Paul (Jean Paul),
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 117, 744, 751 526, 532
Proclus, 316, 320, 331, 550, 627 Risorgimento, 66−7, 69, 71, 73, 75, 79,
Procrustes, 582, 668 144, 146, 168, 173, 369, 461, 482, 627,
Protestant, 37, 68−9, 88, 270, 340, 554, 695, 707, 715−16
633 Rivista italiana di filosofia, 47, 181
Proteus, 75, 455 Rocca family, 445
Provence, 461 Rocco, Alfredo, 775, 778
Prussia, 69, 212, 421, 482, 484, 503, Rodin, Auguste, 96
561, 630 Rollin, Charles, 495, 509
Pythagoras, 7, 265−7, 445 Romagnosi, Gian Domenico, 10, 24,
Pythagorean, 37, 70, 265−9, 275, 376, 37, 270, 277, 508
579 Roman, 37, 64, 71−2, 79, 83, 168,
267−9, 349−50, 355, 378, 389, 394,
Quattrocento, 67, 627 417, 436, 440−1, 444, 468−9, 472, 477,
Quine, W.V., 183 480, 495−6, 507, 509, 610−11, 624,
Quintilian, 297 725
Roman Catholic, 10, 68, 164, 166, 725
Rabelais, François, 583, 633 Rome, 12, 25, 45, 47, 69, 72, 77, 79,
Ranke, Leopold von, 503 86−7, 90, 142−3, 147, 165, 169, 186,
Ravenna, 68 267−8, 277, 334, 348−9, 421, 436, 441,
Reformation, 354, 471, 595, 609, 725 444, 470, 481−2, 504, 509, 513, 528,
Regno (Kingdom of Naples), 759 590, 609, 621, 638, 708, 764, 766
819
Name Index
820
Name Index
821
Name Index
Stuart, Mary, 501, 513 Trent, Council of, 164, 277, 595
Sturm und Drang, 597 Treviranus, Gottfried Reinhold, 608,
Sturzo, Luigi, 750 637−8
Swift, Jonathan, 71 Trieste, 768, 777
Swiss, 45, 66, 634 Tropea, 11, 193
Sybel, Heinrich von, 503, 507 Troy, 604, 636, 662
Symonds, John Addington, 53 Tübingen, 629, 664
Syria, 611 Tuscan, 167, 327, 507, 750
Tyrrhenian, 267
Tabor, 429, 444
Tacitus, 431, 437, 467, 501, 513, 761 Ullmann, Heinrich, 503
Tai Chi, 266 United States, 4, 167, 753
Taine, Hippolyte, 371, 385, 399, 609,
632, 638 Vacherot, Étienne, 70, 371, 399
Tantalus, 667 Valbusa, Domenico, 179
Taoism, 266, 277 Valla, Lorenzo, 46, 317−18, 321, 326,
Targioni Tozzetti, Fanny, 505 328, 331, 340
Tari, Antonio, 48, 503−4 Vanini, Giulio Cesare, 319, 333, 340
Tartaglia, Niccolò, 327, 341 Vatican, 25, 387
Tasso, Torquato, 462 Vatolla, 437, 445−6
Telesio, Bernardino, 66−7, 269, 319, Venice, 277, 355
323−6, 328, 334, 340−1, 352, 354, 378, Venn, John, 86
695 Venus, 449
Tertullian, 268 Vera, Augusto, 48, 77, 87, 605, 620,
Thales of Miletus, 581 635, 637, 640, 662
Themistocles, 672, 682 Verdi, Giuseppe, 167, 511
Theophrastus of Eresos, 269 Vergil, 154, 513, 680
Thomism, 164, 166, 765 Vico, Giambattista, 7, 10, 37, 45−6, 50,
Thucydides, 467, 609 52, 56, 58, 67, 70−4, 88, 91, 120, 127,
Tiber, 268 131, 150, 162−3, 168, 190, 270, 273−4,
Tiedemann, Dieterich, 608, 638 277, 297, 334, 344, 348, 360−5, 367−8,
Tissot, C.J., 174 370, 376, 392, 394, 399, 429−46, 454,
Tocco, Felice, 118−19, 635, 663 461, 508−9, 531−2, 551−2, 564−5,
Tommasi, Salvatore, 54, 606, 637 570−1, 597, 624, 628, 631, 649−50,
Torino, 3, 25, 36, 38, 46−7, 49, 60, 147 663, 668, 674, 695, 717, 747, 775;
Tours, 437 Autobiography, 430; The Most Ancient
Trajan, 267−8 Wisdom of the Italians (De antiquis-
Treitschke, Heinrich von, 561, 630 sima italorum sapientia), 437−40, 445,
Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf, 622, 649; The New Science, 67, 70, 72, 163,
627, 640−1 168, 270, 359−60, 370, 392, 429−34,
822
Name Index
437−9, 442−6, 532, 566, 649, 674; The Werner, Karl, 663
Sole Origin and End of Law, 437, 441, Westphalia, 642
445; Universal Right, 439 Windelband, Wilhelm, 91
Vienna, 505, 767 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 184
Vieusseux, Giovan Pietro, 45 Wolff, Christian, 11, 358, 370, 579, 638
Villari, Pasquale, 7, 51, 53−60, 73, 82, Woltmann, Ludwig, 609, 638
88, 90, 92, 118, 127, 165, 168, 170, Wundt, Wilhelm, 475, 483, 507, 681
371−400, 445, 467, 482, 503, 509−10;
History of Girolamo Savonarola and Xenophon of Athens, 317, 320
His Times, 53; ‘Is History a Sci-
ence?’ 54, 90, 92, 482, 503, 509−10; Yoga, 310
Niccolò Machiavelli and His Times, Young Italy (newspaper, movement),
53; ‘Positive Philosophy and His- 36−7, 60, 144, 707
torical Method,’ 51, 371−400, 445
Villers, Charles, 174 Zabarella, Jacopo, 319, 340, 352
Volapük, 745, 751 Zanella, Emilio, 768, 777
Volpe, Gioacchino, 143, 154, 767, 777 Zarathustra, 127
Voltaire, 163, 499, 511 Zeller, Eduard, 77
Vulgate Bible, 639, 761 Zeno of Elea, 46, 316, 320, 331, 548−9
Zervan Akarana, 266, 277
Waddington, Evelino, 68 Zeus, 499
Waddington-Kastus, Charles, 69, 421 Zimmermann, Robert, 488, 504−5
Wagner, Richard, 501, 638 Zola, Émile, 61
Wallace, William, 681 Zoroaster, 266, 277, 428
Waterloo, 595, 635 Zumbini, Bonaventura, 511
Weber, Max, 751 Zurich, 60
823
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General Index
a priori, 22, 34, 61, 74, 123, 128, act, 28−9, 34, 41−2, 70, 104, 123,
194, 213−22, 224, 226, 228−30, 132−4, 138−41, 157, 169, 196,
232, 234−7, 240−1, 243−4, 289, 201−2, 205−6, 216, 221−2, 248,
298, 302, 314, 322, 328, 336−7, 251, 274, 280, 282−5, 290−305,
410, 450, 515, 532, 552−3, 577, 309, 311, 313, 325, 360−1, 365,
583, 592−5, 628, 656−8, 677, 682, 368−9, 414, 428, 455, 516, 519,
740 525−6, 532, 555, 559−61, 566,
Absolute, 16−18, 22, 57, 62, 114−15, 580, 586, 589, 634, 646, 650, 674,
206−8, 230−1, 243, 280, 373, 377, 683−93, 696−704, 714, 721, 730,
384−5, 388, 390, 404, 407, 412, 735, 739, 744, 748, 757
420−1, 451−2, 529, 550, 553, action, 14, 71, 79, 81, 85, 104,
557, 576−7, 579, 581, 585, 587−8, 138−9, 146, 153, 157−8, 195−6,
601, 616, 618−19, 623, 626, 629 203, 208, 216, 220, 238, 240,
abstract, 30−2, 41−2, 58, 70−1, 246, 251, 268, 276, 282−3, 285,
82−4, 102−4, 108, 110, 113−15, 297, 300, 302, 304−5, 318, 337,
120−2, 125, 131−4, 136−7, 349−50, 360, 372, 388, 402, 407,
139−41, 250, 259−60, 282−4, 414, 419, 424−7, 437, 449−50,
290−4, 361, 363, 470−2, 476−7, 455−6, 464−5, 474, 490, 492, 494,
495, 510, 519−30, 547, 549−50, 501, 510, 519, 525−6, 531, 560,
576, 634, 645−61, 682−92, 696−7, 594, 599, 646, 651, 670, 698−9,
700−4, 740, 743, 745 703, 705, 708−9, 711−12, 714−15,
abstraction, 15, 28−9, 31, 33, 723, 728, 746−7, 749, 753, 755−6,
137−40, 196−7, 260−1, 283−4, 759, 761, 775
292−3, 545−6, 556, 576, 651−2, activism, 117, 145, 157−8, 169, 730,
656, 658, 684, 692, 696 751, 754, 756−7, 763, 777
accident, 201−2, 214, 219−20, 239, activity, 14−15, 28−9, 33−5, 40−1, 44,
243, 258−60, 405, 523, 532, 556, 75, 78−80, 99, 103, 105, 108, 110,
593 120−3, 134, 136, 138−40, 148,
General Index
155, 195−6, 203, 213, 216−17, 156, 181, 237, 374, 401, 464,
228−9, 233, 236, 246, 266, 282, 487−8, 495, 497−9, 503−6,
295−6, 299−301, 305, 309, 313, 510−12, 519, 534, 564, 568−9,
324−5, 334, 345−6, 348, 351−2, 576, 584, 587, 609, 613, 625
362, 365−9, 375, 382, 403, 406−7, affect, 14, 19, 194−5, 200, 215−18,
424, 427, 450, 455−7, 486−7, 491, 229−30, 236−8, 262, 425, 499,
497, 500, 514, 516, 520, 524, 604, 672
534−5, 537−8, 543, 555, 559−60, affirmation, 15, 28, 43, 110, 133−40,
563, 568−70, 572, 576, 579, 197, 218−19, 234, 306−7, 363,
584−8, 592, 595, 599−600, 605, 420, 517, 519, 524, 527, 540,
616, 626, 646−57, 661, 663−4, 543−4, 558, 572, 602, 617, 629,
667, 675, 679, 687, 690, 697, 645, 671−2, 683−4
702−3, 707, 710−11, 720−8, 730, affirmative, 211, 218, 220, 234, 238,
734, 744−8, 762−4, 767, 772−3, 580
775 age, 13, 36−7, 52, 60, 70, 85, 147−8,
actual, 7, 43, 97, 121, 126, 131, 163, 171, 266, 281, 323, 326, 329,
133−41, 149, 164, 169, 220, 239, 358, 362, 368, 377, 391, 399, 411,
260, 287, 290, 296−7, 303, 306, 416, 444, 455, 481−2, 508, 530,
347, 363, 529, 546−7, 559−60, 622, 695, 759−60
563, 593, 595, 646, 651, 676, age (epoch), 157, 562, 595, 608−9,
683−700, 703, 719, 730, 739, 742 746
actual idealism, 7, 121, 126, 131, agency, 58, 79, 94, 120, 122−3, 146,
149, 164, 695−6, 719, 739 156, 388−9, 456, 560, 742−3
actualism, 126, 131−3, 137, 140, agnostic, 128, 144, 552, 672, 682,
142, 151, 158, 164, 186, 695−6, 707, 745
699−700, 704−5, 742, 744 alchemy, 56−7, 374, 377−8, 381,
actuality, 141, 169, 243, 282, 309, 384−5, 668, 682
423, 428, 559, 684, 689, 696, 699, alienation, 127, 562, 616−17, 667
703, 722 alteration, 75, 239, 243, 289, 301−2,
actualization, 155, 296, 309, 368, 304, 454−6, 517, 521, 653
522, 560, 606, 693, 696−7, 699, ambiguity, 80, 149, 239, 290, 486,
703, 747 505, 606, 737−8
aesthetic, 72, 81, 92, 94−7, 117, anachronism, 128, 151, 673, 717,
216−17, 237−8, 352, 415, 478, 722
485−9, 496−9, 504−5, 511, 516, analogy, 3, 17, 56, 70, 97, 110, 138,
526, 528, 541, 551, 553, 573, 581, 167, 210, 231, 243, 254, 288, 290,
584−9, 597, 620, 623, 631, 640, 296, 312, 326, 329, 348, 378, 393,
695, 766 428, 463, 496, 516, 522, 541−2,
aesthetics, 78, 91, 93−4, 96, 99, 576, 590, 600−3, 606, 654, 661,
106−7, 112, 114−15, 131, 153, 702, 707, 729, 743, 745−6
826
General Index
analysis, 12, 15−16, 22, 38, 40, 42−3, anticlericalism, 118, 165
62, 88, 102−4, 141, 152, 183, antinomy, 62, 72, 74, 136, 138, 405,
193−202, 216−17, 229−33, 235, 450, 552, 554, 577, 628, 690, 701
246, 262, 271, 273, 279, 281, 289, antithesis, 62, 114, 145, 160−1, 293,
292, 310, 319, 322, 324, 327, 330, 345, 405, 451, 538−9, 541, 543,
336−7, 370, 403−4, 408, 419−20, 550−4, 557, 573−4, 581, 601, 610,
469, 473, 476, 487, 494, 537, 582, 612−13, 618, 628, 632, 690, 692,
590, 614, 646, 648−9, 699, 701, 710, 727, 770
735, 740, 742, 746, 767, 773 anxiety, 270, 320, 427, 456, 700
ancestor, 45−6, 149, 270, 312, aphorism, 557, 630−1, 638, 747, 752
315−16, 326, 330, 332, 334, 339, apodictic, 46, 220, 289, 316, 335−6
368, 449, 457, 749 apparent, 212, 216, 283, 293, 345,
ancient thought and culture, 8, 36−7, 423, 491, 500, 549, 617, 620, 688,
46, 56, 70, 167−8, 238, 264−6, 695
269−70, 273, 275−6, 278−9, 281, appearance, 20−1, 42−3, 96, 111,
296, 300−1, 309−10, 313, 319−20, 127, 129, 138, 202, 214−16,
322, 324, 333, 340, 346, 348−9, 229−30, 236−40, 242, 244, 246,
353, 367, 377, 379, 382, 385, 248−50, 296, 298, 304, 311, 351,
388−9, 396, 419, 428, 437−42, 356, 360, 362, 365, 402, 405,
451, 460, 465−70, 479−80, 523, 407−8, 415−16, 422−3, 425, 438,
548, 608−10, 621, 627, 676, 696, 464, 472, 478, 485, 489, 492, 494,
699−700, 706, 755 497, 506, 536, 538, 548, 552,
ancient wisdom, 8, 37, 46, 168, 266, 555−7, 568, 570, 575−8, 582, 593,
270, 272−5, 320, 437−40, 442, 460 599, 603, 606, 615, 654, 656, 662,
ancients, 238, 265, 279, 281, 301, 668−9, 673, 675, 677, 695, 710,
322, 324, 333, 349, 379, 467 724−5, 732, 735, 756, 758, 766,
anglophone, 3−5, 7, 24, 53, 86, 88, 776
99, 107, 112, 163, 167, 169−71, apperception, 19, 84, 222, 236, 240−
174,763 1, 402, 478, 490, 497, 628, 698
animal, 9, 32, 64−5, 84, 116, 124, appetite, 65, 70, 361, 416, 432−3
217, 223−4, 234, 241, 252, 258, apprehension, 10, 29, 33−4, 115,
262, 327, 360, 362, 376, 382, 176, 201, 239, 244, 251, 282−3,
391−2, 414−16, 426, 433, 464, 285−6, 289−91, 300−1, 303−5,
478, 489−90, 515, 522, 532, 565, 309, 348, 365, 479, 551, 587
594, 602−3, 605, 612, 617, 636, arbitrary, 27, 34−5, 149, 157, 232,
658−9, 678, 687, 724 314, 517, 520, 522−3, 528, 532,
annihilation, 205, 214, 327−8, 357, 536, 541, 543, 545, 556, 560, 571,
544−5, 591, 692 578, 581, 583, 587, 592, 599, 602,
anthropology, 72, 114, 313, 398, 606, 612, 660, 667, 690, 709, 714,
574, 608, 613, 645−6 733, 740, 742, 747, 757
827
General Index
architecture, 228, 387, 495, 497, 292, 294−5, 384, 416, 526, 530,
605, 613 539, 547−8, 551, 558, 577−9, 582,
argument, 18−19, 27−8, 32, 68, 72, 590, 593−4, 615, 657−8, 672−3,
76, 95, 120, 146, 176, 219−20, 683−7, 696, 723, 733, 738−9
233, 235, 246, 250−1, 264, assumption, 17, 31−2, 64, 129, 175,
279−80, 282−4, 288, 298, 313, 203−4, 210−11, 221−3, 226−9,
317, 322, 324, 330, 333, 335−6, 235, 260−1, 285−9, 292, 300,
338, 346, 411, 430, 438, 445−6, 302−4, 314, 316−17, 325, 329,
450, 455, 459−60, 492, 496, 536, 336−7, 407−8, 433, 450, 458, 469,
546, 549, 575, 604, 608, 625, 653, 471, 474, 498, 535−6, 538, 570,
677, 714, 731−3, 738, 742 575, 579, 588, 590, 599, 602, 617,
aristocracy, 11, 68, 70, 267, 570, 610, 620, 623, 635, 644, 649, 652, 657,
758, 777 675, 728, 735
arithmetic, 50, 347, 489, 505, 571, astrology, 56−7, 374, 377, 381,
582, 600, 620, 650, 688 384−5, 395
art, 54, 58, 61, 64, 80−1, 85, 91−9, astronomy, 56, 266, 341, 374, 380,
107, 111−15, 119, 167, 241, 275, 611, 620, 744
321−4, 326−7, 329−32, 350−1, atheism, 149, 250, 265, 269, 279−80,
364, 372, 378, 381, 387−8, 393, 562, 704, 725, 739
395, 397−8, 401−2, 404, 407, atom, 64, 74, 100−1, 123−4, 340,
414−16, 428, 434, 443, 451, 453, 358, 412, 453, 516, 519, 523, 569,
457, 463−5, 467, 470−1, 480−2, 579, 603, 659, 704, 710, 714
484−91, 493−503, 505, 507, attention, 15, 34, 196−200, 212, 242,
509−14, 519, 521, 528−9, 532, 403, 406, 477, 689, 702
534−5, 541, 553, 558, 560, 568, attitude, 5, 84, 119, 148, 169, 302,
570−4, 584−90, 594, 596, 601, 354, 402, 463, 476, 481, 535, 559,
607, 609−11, 613, 618, 621, 623, 561−2, 564, 586, 594, 623, 666,
634, 638−9, 641, 649, 666, 668−9, 704, 706, 715, 726, 736−8, 760,
671, 680, 682, 705, 713, 725, 765, 770, 774
742−3, 750, 753−4, 777 attribute, 358−9, 409, 422, 478,
artificial, 79, 102, 120, 150, 289, 517, 551, 557, 578, 618, 670, 685,
295, 407−8, 435, 602, 678, 713, 691
715, 740, 751 authentic, 84, 103, 115, 352, 377,
artist, 96−7, 113−15, 127, 143, 326, 477−8, 481, 570, 677
387−8, 465−6, 484−5, 490−1, authority, 6, 25, 53, 139, 152, 165,
494−6, 499−502, 510−13, 558, 170−1, 209−10, 212, 274−5, 302,
560, 568, 571−3, 584, 586−8, 590, 314, 316, 318−19, 321, 325, 328,
597, 610, 619, 713, 743−4, 751 331−2, 334, 339, 362, 372, 378−9,
assertion, 31, 41, 128, 132, 140, 219, 400, 406, 435−6, 447, 454, 467,
238, 247−8, 252−5, 258, 260, 289, 471, 515, 552, 564, 672, 698, 706,
828
General Index
714−15, 718, 727, 731, 733, 756, 222, 230, 237, 243, 247−8, 254,
761 257−63, 275, 280−2, 284−311,
autobiography, 152−3, 163, 169, 173, 314, 325, 329, 335, 345−8, 355,
182, 444, 511, 580−1, 768, 774 357−69, 377, 384−5, 402−11,
autocracy, 157, 757−8 414, 419−20, 422−8, 438, 517,
autoctisis (self-creation), 140, 187 525−9, 532, 538−9, 543−7, 549,
autonomy, 41, 80, 115−16, 294, 357, 551, 557−9, 571−8, 581−3, 592,
367, 400, 415, 423, 469, 476, 572, 613−16, 626, 652, 674, 686, 692,
584, 589, 591, 601, 607, 619, 663, 698−701, 705
671, 722, 724, 739 belief, 28, 30, 33−4, 134−5, 248−9,
axiom, 108, 264, 297, 301, 329, 255, 258, 275, 283, 288, 339,
335−7 350−6, 375, 379, 390, 411, 451,
456, 460, 497, 564, 651, 653−4,
bacchant, 355, 546, 611, 667, 674, 715, 720, 737−8, 748
669−70, 680 biography, 175, 177, 182, 185, 188,
bad habit, 319, 323, 334, 457 446, 461−2, 512, 561, 564, 581,
bad infinity, 62, 105, 529, 532, 556 637
baptism, 164, 280, 576 biology, 54, 67, 73, 83, 124, 448,
barbarian, 150, 268−9, 273, 317, 453, 474, 478, 637
321, 350, 392, 468, 498, 523, 536, body, 15, 22, 27, 34, 39, 75, 120,
563, 604, 610, 622, 745, 768 140, 155, 166, 194, 196−7, 201−2,
baroque, 153, 168, 497, 741 207, 211−12, 214, 217−20, 222,
beauty, 55, 61, 64, 92−4, 103−4, 224, 229, 233−4, 246, 248, 250,
108, 111−12, 328, 330, 348, 374, 253−4, 256, 270, 272, 283−4, 288,
386−7, 415, 425, 486−90, 505−6, 290−1, 296, 301, 304, 327, 337,
511, 516−17, 520, 524, 526, 528, 358, 360, 372, 375−6, 380−1, 383,
538−9, 541, 557, 572, 583, 587, 403−4, 408, 416, 423, 426, 456,
611, 744, 754 489, 510, 557, 577, 579, 612, 617,
becoming, 61, 64, 116, 125, 133, 646, 655−6, 668, 674, 701−3, 799
140, 216, 228, 283−4, 293, 355, botany, 327, 391, 494, 507, 608, 611
357, 361, 406, 414, 424, 426−7, bourgeois, 120, 471, 648, 719, 735
435−6, 452, 472, 525, 543−5, 549, brain, 236, 337, 403, 407, 410, 499,
557, 560, 565, 571−3, 575−6, 581, 539, 552, 559, 675
583−4, 596, 601, 603, 613−14,
616, 620−22, 626, 655, 659, 661, canon, 19, 67, 163, 223−4, 229, 269,
667, 687, 692, 699−700, 723, 726, 475, 578, 629, 660
728, 739 categorical, 219−20, 239, 243, 267,
being, 12, 17, 30−4, 41−4, 51, 57, 763
61−2, 108−9, 111, 114, 116, 136, categorical imperative, 552
139−41, 196, 203−8, 213, 216, category, 19, 62, 80, 93−4, 101−2,
829
General Index
112, 128, 220, 222−30, 233, 81, 85, 138, 160, 168, 194, 202,
237−9, 241, 256, 317−18, 336, 209−210, 213, 221, 223, 242,
395, 402, 406−7, 410, 424, 443, 246−50, 260, 280, 294−5, 302,
448, 480, 490, 494, 498, 518, 305−6, 312−14, 316, 320, 324−5,
538−9, 549, 570, 576, 580−3, 589, 328−9, 332, 335−8, 354, 357, 359,
593, 614, 621, 627, 657, 673, 676, 362, 365, 374, 378−9, 383−4, 388,
690−1, 699, 706, 710, 720, 740 393, 398, 403, 406, 419, 425−6,
cathedral, 122, 431, 458, 497, 654 430, 433−5, 439, 441−3, 454,
Catholic, 10, 12−13, 24, 38, 49, 68, 466−7, 478, 493, 495, 528, 544,
86−7, 127, 156−8, 161, 164−7, 558−60, 564, 581, 585−6, 597,
171, 263−8, 310, 340, 348, 352, 599, 643, 649, 683, 688, 737−8,
354, 477, 564, 566, 595, 633, 704, 745, 747, 765, 771
715, 719, 725, 727, 732, 735, 738, change, 19, 43, 74−5, 77−8, 81, 84,
755−6, 758, 761, 765, 774 120, 124, 148, 151−2, 155, 163,
causality, 16, 18−21, 42−3, 109, 166, 193, 208, 228, 243, 298, 304,
137−9, 203, 205−8, 211, 219, 228, 306, 313, 338, 374−6, 386, 389,
232−3, 239, 297, 299−302, 304, 391−2, 398, 430, 452−6, 465, 473,
306, 336, 402, 448−50, 467, 507, 476, 481, 492, 502, 512, 520−1,
511−12, 514, 650, 679, 690, 740, 543, 555, 559−60, 565, 577−8,
772 582−3, 585, 623, 626, 647−8, 650,
cause, 11−12, 14, 16−19, 21, 43, 659−60, 704, 708, 725, 731, 733,
70, 72−5, 84, 121, 129, 138, 195, 735, 748, 750, 755−6, 760, 774
197−8, 203−12, 219−20, 228−9, chaos, 71, 146, 151, 265, 349, 369,
231, 239−40, 246−8, 252, 264−5, 477, 675, 715, 735, 737
274−6, 280, 288, 290−1, 294, character (abstract/empirical/intel-
297−302, 304, 307−8, 312−13, ligible), 138, 305
315, 317−19, 324, 328, 330, 332, character (dramatic, fictional), 94,
337−9, 348−9, 351, 354−5, 357, 150, 369, 488−90, 492, 506−7, 512
361−2, 366−7, 375−9, 381−2, 384, character (intellectual, moral, aes-
386, 389−90, 393, 401, 405, 419, thetic, historical, national, ethnic),
422, 424, 426−7, 431−2, 437, 52, 124, 144, 160, 169, 268,
442−3, 447−8, 450, 453, 457−8, 275−6, 279, 330, 343, 345, 349,
467, 476, 481, 492−3, 501, 506, 353, 367−8, 371, 375, 392, 398,
512, 530, 538, 540, 542, 553, 441, 460, 469−70, 481, 484, 486,
562−5, 567−9, 573, 600, 604, 607, 488−9, 492−4, 514−15, 529, 533,
620, 652, 656, 664, 666, 668, 535, 542, 563, 567, 576, 584−5,
670, 672, 676−7, 690, 703, 711, 588−9, 594−6, 599−600, 609−10,
715−16, 730, 740, 742−4, 750, 661, 675, 677, 700, 707, 718, 721,
756, 759, 766, 770, 772 727, 730, 733, 735−6, 738, 746,
certainty, 41, 46, 55, 57, 70−2, 74, 763
830
General Index
character (logical, metaphysical), 607, 610, 617, 620, 698, 707, 709,
523, 529−30, 535, 542−3, 545, 718−19, 725, 740−1, 753, 758−9,
553, 563, 589, 594−5, 599, 618, 763, 768, 774
728 class (logic, taxonomy, metaphysics),
character (objective/subjective), 29, 30−1, 100, 122, 218, 238, 249,
284, 304, 324 257−8, 279, 456, 496, 516, 520,
character (phenomenal), 409 537, 558, 587, 590, 595, 606, 634,
characters (symbols), 243, 657 654
chemistry, 27, 56, 65, 73, 116, 312, class (socio-economic, political), 36,
372, 374, 377, 383, 399, 416, 48, 82, 85, 88, 90, 97, 118, 147,
448−9, 453, 485, 507, 582−3, 605, 151−2, 167, 469−71, 476−7, 481,
611−12, 657, 668, 679, 682, 743 499, 561, 587, 680, 719, 732, 735,
choice, 58, 85, 136, 138, 148, 154, 740, 750, 760, 775
157, 271, 275, 344, 360, 408, classical (curricular, theoretical),
424−5, 428, 452, 479, 512, 520, 36, 148, 183, 193, 508, 533, 642,
532, 566, 669, 679, 697, 711, 721, 747−8, 772−3, 777
723−4, 728, 760, 772 classical English economics, 773, 777
chronicle, 513−14 classical German philosophy, 148,
chronology, 10, 173, 180, 188, 289, 508, 642, 747−8, 772
446, 514, 579, 632−3, 691 classics (ancient), classicism, 37, 71,
church, 75, 164, 199−200, 352, 497, 269, 399, 496, 508, 510, 610, 621
663, 732, 734−5, 756 classification, 30, 62, 70, 82, 101,
circulation, 8, 48, 50, 126, 343 103, 112−13, 258, 317, 338,
circumstance, 70, 75, 97−8, 330, 387−8, 392, 424, 464, 467, 470,
432, 437, 454, 490, 496, 498−9, 488, 494, 496−7, 499, 522−3, 532,
561, 595, 733, 754, 760 568−9, 571, 589, 602, 613, 631,
citizenship, 4, 37, 112, 144−5, 270, 740, 745
369, 410, 706−7, 710−11, 713, 715 clergy, 25, 51, 69, 79, 87, 446, 725,
city, 3, 25, 60, 69, 90, 143, 147, 165, 735, 756
268, 303, 349, 362, 387, 400, 432, coercion, 478, 697, 719, 750
480, 507 cogito, 18, 72, 443, 649, 691
civil, 37, 114, 145−6, 267−8, 350, cognition, 12, 14−22, 28−9, 35,
359, 477, 565, 574, 614, 632, 709, 40−1, 46, 54, 74, 96, 113, 138,
715−16, 719, 725, 750 193−4, 198, 204, 209−25, 230−1,
civil society, 114, 146, 477, 574, 614, 234−42, 245−51, 253−6, 258, 260,
632, 716, 725, 750 262, 265, 275−6, 282, 289, 291,
civilization, 53, 64, 72, 84, 159, 161, 293, 304−5, 308, 313, 315, 322,
164, 275−6, 333−4, 349, 388, 324−5, 332, 337−8, 361, 363−4,
390−1, 394−5, 410, 416, 441, 468, 368, 384, 402−3, 406−7, 411, 425,
472, 477−8, 480, 484, 507−8, 518, 428, 442, 453, 509, 515, 531, 571,
831
General Index
574, 582, 585, 597, 602, 615, 628, conceiving, 29, 64, 105, 137, 204−5,
649, 655, 668, 692 220, 226−8, 256, 282, 287−8, 291,
collective, 84−5, 151, 334, 454−5, 298−300, 302, 348, 358, 367,
465, 478−80, 506, 721, 723−5, 403, 414, 422−3, 426, 451, 466,
733, 741 518−19, 524, 526, 528, 530, 539,
colony, 37, 46, 168, 472, 717−18, 543, 545, 553, 562, 567, 569−71,
749 574, 577−8, 581, 589, 594, 601,
colour, 30−1, 100, 123, 213, 215−16, 610, 618, 643, 646−8, 651−3, 655,
226−7, 232, 241, 404, 489, 551, 657, 664, 688, 690, 694, 696−700,
586−7, 613, 656−7 704, 736, 739, 744−5, 747−8, 756
comedy, 50, 65, 97, 115, 417, 493, concept, 40, 42−3, 62−4, 83, 95−109,
496, 499−500, 504, 506, 569, 590, 112−16, 121−3, 128−9, 132,
596, 625, 742 155−6, 160, 183, 216−21, 225−9,
commerce, 82−3, 219−20, 239, 350, 231−3, 236−9, 241−3, 265, 275,
753 278−309, 336, 346−8, 359, 362,
commune, 464, 467, 501, 513 367−8, 402−12, 422, 458, 465,
communication, 19, 42, 223, 253−4, 479−80, 484−6, 489−95, 498,
257, 284, 491, 501, 518, 585, 634, 502−3, 515−32, 534−45, 549,
669, 713 551−2, 555−7, 565−6, 568−623,
communism, 3, 79, 85−6, 106, 147, 626, 629, 634−5, 638, 643−4,
149, 156−8, 473, 476, 480, 562, 648−9, 655−8, 660, 671, 673−4,
620−1, 648, 720, 749−50, 754, 676, 678−9, 687, 689−92, 694,
757−8 699−700, 703, 720, 728, 733,
community, 51, 152, 157, 239, 343, 739−43, 746, 760, 767, 769−70,
349, 352, 401, 727, 732−4, 757, 772−3
759 conception, 20, 22, 29, 34, 56, 74,
comparison, 33, 83, 204, 215, 234−5, 81, 93, 119, 124, 138, 145, 155,
286−7, 297, 300, 303, 314−15, 160, 315, 327, 409, 434, 457, 461,
323, 325, 334, 345, 391, 397, 400, 464−6, 473, 481, 527, 545, 548,
403, 406, 468, 479, 493, 497, 500, 550, 554−5, 557−8, 561, 563, 566,
506, 510, 512−13, 518−19, 521, 572, 577, 587, 599, 611, 642−3,
539, 542, 585, 602, 649, 720, 742, 646, 648, 655, 658−9, 661, 691,
744, 753 700, 707, 709, 719−32, 734−7,
competition, 264, 477, 714, 733, 759 742, 745−8, 752, 759, 765, 767,
comprehension, 109, 253, 274, 280, 769, 772, 774, 798
290, 300, 355−6, 364, 373, 391, concrete, 30−2, 41−2, 70−1, 82−3,
420, 535, 550−1, 577−8, 586, 602, 95−6, 108−10, 113, 115−16, 121,
607, 652 131−41, 145, 151, 156, 250,
compulsion, 160, 750, 767 259, 282, 288, 291−4, 302, 314,
conceivable, 137, 524, 539, 571, 699 349−50, 361, 387, 390, 436, 438,
832
General Index
441, 454, 470−2, 475−6, 487, 490, 284, 303, 321, 327, 337, 347, 353,
492, 494, 498, 520, 535−8, 541−3, 355, 359−61, 366, 368, 375, 387,
545, 547, 549, 552, 556−7, 562, 390, 418, 425, 427, 433−4, 451,
564, 566, 568, 570−2, 574, 576−8, 486, 497, 541−2, 553, 573, 585,
580, 583, 588, 591−2, 594, 600, 587, 594, 597, 600−1, 623, 753,
608, 610, 612−13, 617, 619, 623, 755
626, 640, 645−6, 651−3, 661, content, 29, 40, 61−2, 82−4, 94−7,
683−7, 690, 692, 696−7, 703−4, 128, 213, 278, 303, 305, 307,
710−11, 716, 726, 729, 732−4, 313−14, 340, 365, 402−8, 465,
737, 739, 741, 745, 766−7 469, 475, 477−9, 486, 488−90,
concreteness, 41−2, 83, 284, 288, 495−500, 505−6, 509, 511, 517,
291−3, 305, 488, 494, 545, 576, 521, 531−2, 544−5, 582−3, 586,
616, 623, 696 590, 600, 610, 618, 644−7, 653,
condensation, 95−6, 182, 492, 495, 660−2, 671, 676−7, 720, 738, 741
531, 613 contingency, 17, 22, 29, 34, 42−3,
conscience, 12, 25, 356, 389, 667, 58, 203, 206−7, 214, 220, 231,
700−1, 755 234, 239−40, 257, 261, 263, 267,
consciousness, 12, 14−16, 18, 46, 285, 289, 292, 294, 299, 302, 304,
72−4, 84−5, 123, 139−41, 151, 306, 308, 337, 364, 386, 426, 529,
194−203, 208−12, 215, 221−4, 545, 592, 595, 619, 718, 758
226, 230, 235, 240, 242, 244, contract, 358, 373, 613
253, 273, 290, 316, 323, 325, 337, contradiction, 62−3, 72, 77, 104−5,
339, 343−4, 347−8, 352−4, 357−9, 110−11, 114, 124−5, 134−9, 143,
362−3, 366−7, 369, 386−7, 390−1, 204, 210, 232−3, 257, 262−3, 294,
397, 402, 410, 414, 416, 420, 338, 356, 375, 404−10, 422, 491,
426−7, 434−5, 442−4, 450, 453−5, 527−30, 541, 543, 546−52, 568,
459, 472, 474, 477−80, 486, 492, 573, 578−9, 584−7, 591, 594, 602,
500−1, 516, 535, 539−41, 549, 619, 622, 634, 644, 647, 652,
555−6, 560, 563, 565−6, 571, 659−61, 663, 669, 686, 690, 697,
588, 592, 601, 611, 613, 617−18, 721, 728−9, 737, 746, 748−9, 757
623−4, 649, 655, 662, 666, 671, contrary, 103, 129, 264−5, 291−2,
678−9, 683, 688, 691−2, 698, 294, 405, 422, 524, 538, 543, 546,
701−5, 707, 710, 716, 720−1, 549−51, 556, 615, 627, 676−7, 710
723−4, 728−9, 737−8, 742−3, 748, corso e ricorso, 531
750, 759, 769 cosmos, 265, 267, 275, 277, 310,
conservative, 127, 151, 165, 561, 319, 346, 366, 549, 562, 581, 611
716, 738 country, 3−4, 37, 167, 270−1, 331,
constitution, 24−5, 37, 69, 142, 145, 339, 394, 401, 410, 487, 493,
154, 277, 389, 707, 710 502−3, 621, 681, 707, 709, 711,
contemplation, 70−1, 114, 266, 274, 734, 755, 758, 763
833
General Index
creation, 37, 42−4, 51, 57−8, 65, 68, 323−5, 363, 431−2, 445, 451,
79, 115, 126, 138, 140−1, 148, 459, 463, 468, 470, 477, 484,
155, 165, 187, 195, 208, 228, 251, 488, 494, 498, 501, 505−6, 509,
256, 264−9, 274−6, 282, 285−8, 511−12, 533, 535, 545, 568−9,
292, 295, 298−309, 333, 344, 584, 589, 592, 597, 608−9, 615,
347−9, 362−9, 384, 394, 414−15, 619, 621, 623−4, 628, 630, 632,
420, 422, 424−5, 427−8, 431, 443, 637−8, 642−4, 647, 649−50, 652,
457, 478, 501−2, 509, 528, 560, 655, 657, 662, 666, 670−2, 680−1,
590, 618−19, 639, 649, 656−7, 695−6, 713, 717, 719−22, 724,
660, 663, 670, 676, 690, 692, 713, 726, 728−9, 733−8, 745−6, 754−6,
742, 747−8, 754−5, 759, 769 758, 762, 767, 769−70, 772−4, 776
Creator, 32, 43, 208, 260, 262, 285, critique, 12, 19, 21, 23−4, 50, 52,
308, 348, 365, 368 67, 72, 74, 106, 119−20, 125, 148,
creature, 140, 285, 292, 308, 350, 151, 153, 163, 176, 212, 214,
353, 490, 526 236−7, 243, 249−51, 257, 373,
crime, 96, 143, 444, 494, 509 399, 430, 444, 454, 487, 503,
criminology, 96, 494, 509 515, 519, 552, 579, 581−2, 587,
criterion (aesthetic, moral, political, 617, 625, 628−9, 639, 642−5, 655,
historical), 81, 112, 345, 464, 468, 660−1, 664, 666, 671, 673, 723−6,
481, 496−7, 514, 519, 548, 568, 733, 739, 741−2, 749, 776, 794,
744, 763 796, 800
criterion (logical, epistemic), 248, cronotopos, 275, 277
329, 442−3, 451, 459, 528, 548, culture, 4, 6−7, 9, 11, 25, 47, 53, 55,
568, 626, 744 64, 66, 68, 70−1, 78, 81, 88, 90,
critic, 48, 52, 55, 57, 60−1, 63, 66, 92, 117, 119, 126, 131, 142−3,
72, 92, 95, 107, 119, 122, 126−7, 145, 147, 149, 151−5, 157, 160,
165−6, 194, 263, 277, 417, 439, 163−4, 166−71, 189, 266, 349,
446, 461, 473, 482, 498, 506, 394, 398−9, 410, 468, 506−7, 609,
511−12, 535, 562, 581, 601, 608, 635, 638−9, 665, 680, 695, 703,
619, 622−3, 626, 628, 630, 633, 715, 720−2, 724−7, 729, 731−2,
680, 682, 739, 750, 757, 761, 777 734−41, 743−4, 746−7, 750−1,
critical philosophy, 12, 23, 27, 38, 758, 760, 762−3, 767−8, 771, 777
212, 250−1, 271−2, 325, 363, 451,
696 Dasein, 239, 243, 581
criticism, 5−6, 10, 12, 19, 23, 27, data, 16, 21, 58−9, 73, 75, 90−1, 95,
34−6, 38, 51, 61−3, 81, 88, 96−7, 123, 127, 213, 217, 230−3, 236,
104, 106−7, 117, 120, 126, 128, 331, 474, 492, 523, 567, 592−3,
142−3, 146, 148, 151−3, 157−8, 601, 667, 669, 676, 727
160, 164, 166, 169, 176, 183, dead, 64−5, 103, 106−7, 121, 136,
212, 249−51, 271−2, 277, 316−17, 141, 170, 355, 376, 398, 413−14,
834
General Index
417, 420, 498, 508, 524, 533, 567, 322−3, 327, 330, 336, 359, 384,
588, 624, 666, 682, 698, 701, 703, 388, 392, 394, 408, 418, 449, 451,
707, 738 460, 522, 536, 570−1, 579, 589,
death, 108, 129, 136, 382, 392, 423, 623, 633−4, 672, 676, 720
523, 538, 549, 557, 559, 572, 588, dependency, 16−18, 40, 42−3, 85,
591, 626, 652, 676, 682, 700−1, 101−3, 108−10, 203−4, 223, 279,
705 298, 308−9, 449, 480−1, 507, 539,
decadence, 37, 65, 158, 415, 480, 561, 565, 572, 669, 718, 731
622, 706, 746, 755 derivation, 44, 63, 83, 103, 123, 141,
decline, 82, 96, 153, 269−70, 274, 233, 280, 297, 318, 330, 373, 375,
333, 346, 370, 392, 428, 430, 445, 379−80, 386, 419, 474, 520, 522,
466, 468, 526, 706, 755, 761 544, 651, 664, 667−8, 673, 718,
deduction, 21−2, 56, 73−4, 76, 85, 739−40
194, 202, 210, 234−5, 240, 243, description, 31−2, 73, 95, 103, 105,
245, 289−90, 378, 380, 407, 442, 260, 262, 329, 335, 449, 477−8,
449, 453, 458−9, 479, 570, 580, 492, 494, 507, 509, 549, 600, 673,
583, 595, 600, 606, 612, 637 755
deed, 104, 343, 445, 559−60, 599, desire, 121, 198, 200, 276, 402, 404,
635, 668, 693, 709, 754, 757 416, 420−1, 447, 494, 523, 526−7,
definition, 32, 73, 82, 97, 101−2, 529, 674, 682, 698, 716, 726
122, 148−9, 155−6, 193, 229, 235, destiny, 68, 263, 271, 327, 397, 430,
238, 247, 254−5, 261−2, 292, 294, 449, 466, 471−2, 528, 553, 559,
311, 316, 322, 325, 330, 332, 339, 592, 601, 667, 670, 700, 703
352, 361, 371, 382, 385, 388−9, determination, 15, 30−2, 34, 100,
392−3, 409, 438, 445−6, 449, 460, 102, 125, 138, 141, 154, 197,
474, 476−7, 480, 484, 489−91, 202, 216−17, 224−5, 227, 235,
500−2, 514−16, 520−3, 534, 239−40, 242−3, 249, 257−62, 294,
555−6, 562, 579, 581, 586, 589, 348, 361, 364−5, 394, 404, 406,
594, 599, 602, 634, 642, 649, 655, 424−6, 428, 492−3, 497, 518−20,
674, 682, 686, 696, 700, 720, 727, 522−3, 526, 528−9, 535, 543−4,
734, 737, 747, 755 547, 550, 572, 575, 580−1, 583,
degeneration, 119, 158, 270, 358, 585, 599−601, 604, 612−13, 615,
573, 644 617−18, 622, 626, 652, 660, 662,
degree, 227, 230, 243, 292, 427 669, 679, 686, 690, 693−4, 697−9,
demagogue, 146, 159, 715, 725, 763 751, 772
democracy, 3, 69−70, 145, 152, 156, determinism, 129, 137−9, 141, 150,
432, 476, 483, 570, 610, 619, 707, 450, 483, 645, 660, 667−71, 676,
710−11, 714, 727, 750 679, 690, 730
demonstration, 46, 58, 203−4, 275, development, 52, 56, 78−82, 85,
282, 289, 310, 314, 316, 319, 95, 125, 127, 156, 289, 343, 345,
835
General Index
349, 352, 362, 365, 367, 391−2, doctrine, 12, 33, 39, 63, 68, 83,
404, 407−10, 414−15, 424, 426−7, 87−8, 104−5, 122, 150−1, 162,
437−8, 442, 459, 464−5, 475, 164, 170−1, 174, 231, 234, 236,
477, 491, 494, 516, 542, 544−5, 266−9, 275−6, 278, 282, 290, 301,
548−9, 553, 557−8, 562, 572, 578, 304, 308, 310, 319−21, 324−5,
592−3, 601, 610, 616, 620, 623, 331−2, 337−40, 354, 371−3, 389,
636, 651−2, 655, 660, 667, 674, 409, 411, 422, 426, 447, 449−50,
678−80, 728−9, 732, 740, 742, 461, 463, 473−5, 477, 481, 498,
748, 755 511, 518, 520−2, 532, 536−7,
dialect, 392, 395, 507, 511, 722 539, 542, 548, 563, 566, 570,
dialectic, 46, 80, 83, 104−5, 109−16, 577−9, 582−3, 596, 600, 614, 617,
122, 125, 134−6, 141, 145, 150, 619−20, 625, 629, 643, 647−9,
152, 155−6, 265, 316−17, 320−1, 651, 654, 663, 666, 681, 712, 725,
340, 354, 407−8, 410, 473, 526, 733, 741
528−30, 534, 542−5, 547−9, dogma, 9, 35, 46, 50, 54, 61, 63,
551−8, 563−4, 566, 568, 571, 68, 72, 86−8, 130, 157, 165, 167,
574−8, 580, 582, 588, 594, 603, 211−12, 249, 251, 305, 312−13,
607, 609−14, 616−17, 619−22, 316, 320, 328, 331, 333, 335−7,
626−8, 632, 649, 655, 660, 681, 353−4, 474, 503, 654, 677, 704,
686−7, 689, 692, 699−700, 704, 719, 739, 746
718−19, 729, 739−40, 743−4, 746, doubt, 66, 71, 78, 90, 94, 119, 144,
749, 770, 772 211, 251, 253, 272, 281, 291,
dictator, 157, 269, 719, 754 305−6, 316, 322−4, 329, 332, 336,
dignity, 349, 351, 419, 563, 584, 595, 348, 356, 373, 383, 396−7, 399,
672 406, 408−9, 424, 431, 447, 457,
distinction, 93, 95, 99−116, 118, 469, 480, 490, 499, 501−2, 509,
134−9, 146, 150, 182−3, 253−6, 520, 523−4, 534, 541, 548, 558,
264, 308, 356, 366, 434, 442, 490, 564−5, 578, 584, 589, 592, 597,
515−30, 532, 537−8, 543, 547−8, 616, 622, 643−4, 674, 678, 682,
551−2, 555−7, 562, 566, 568−89, 700−1, 725, 731, 746, 762
592, 594−6, 612, 616−19, 623, 626, drama, 90, 94, 155, 558, 595, 613
631−2, 698, 729, 742−4, 751, 770 dualism, 37, 55, 109, 122, 124,
divine, 9, 30, 41−2, 56, 68, 71, 107, 129, 136, 264−5, 267, 353, 408,
115, 117, 128, 251, 257−8, 267−9, 538−40, 542−3, 548, 550, 553,
273, 280, 284, 295, 302, 306−8, 555, 557−8, 562−3, 614−18, 660,
348, 350−3, 355−6, 358, 360, 362, 672−3, 675, 700
364−6, 369−70, 372, 376−7, 391, duration, 16, 21, 204−6, 208,
404, 409, 418−20, 423−8, 438, 213−14, 403
550, 565, 570, 645, 673, 687−8, duty, 33, 64, 115, 146, 263, 399, 413,
700, 703−5, 742, 761 458, 460, 500, 559, 565, 605, 629,
836
General Index
677, 705, 713−14, 716, 754−5, empiricism, 14, 16, 18, 20−1, 23,
763, 766 29, 33, 38−9, 45, 47, 50, 52, 57,
61, 63, 77−8, 82, 85, 100, 103,
eclecticism, 125, 270, 339, 499, 661, 108−9, 112, 115−16, 121, 127,
745 129, 137−41, 166, 193−4, 211,
economics, 54, 80−5, 93, 106, 120, 215−16, 221−4, 226−9, 231−4,
122, 151, 158−61, 170, 411, 464, 236−41, 312, 314, 325, 327, 330,
469−72, 475−6, 478, 480−1, 483, 335, 339, 345, 352, 357−9, 394,
526, 534, 563, 568, 609, 642−3, 402, 410−11, 426, 466, 471, 478,
646, 654−5, 659, 663−4, 710, 714, 495, 509, 511, 515−16, 522−4,
722, 725, 727, 729, 741, 746, 750, 528, 530, 535−7, 539, 545, 556,
759−60, 764, 766−9, 772−3, 777 567, 569, 571, 582, 584, 590, 593,
education, 50−1, 54, 60, 77, 81, 597, 599−600, 602, 605−9, 611,
118, 126, 129, 131, 142−3, 149, 613, 615, 617, 619, 624, 645, 657,
152, 164, 234, 351, 381, 459−60, 676, 682, 688, 693, 696, 698, 718,
464−5, 482−3, 487, 504−5, 513, 739−41
532, 537, 624, 633, 647, 663, 709, encyclical, 164−5, 720
715−19, 725, 734, 744, 750, 761, encyclopedia, 106−7, 264, 266, 274,
763, 775−6 276, 307, 329, 410, 448, 465, 476,
egoism, 539, 645, 669, 704 533, 535, 559, 564, 566, 569, 576,
election, 25, 61, 267, 680, 707, 776 587, 591−2, 600, 604, 608, 625,
electricity, 381, 612, 621 629, 633−4, 636−7, 639−41, 694
element, 21−2, 42−3, 116, 164, energy, 124, 144, 161, 358, 431,
193−5, 197, 199, 201−5, 207, 503, 649−50, 655, 660, 667, 704,
209, 211−33, 235, 237, 239, 241, 707−8, 715−16, 748, 766, 775
243, 258−60, 270, 275, 278, 280, entailment, 101−2, 105, 108−9, 133,
285−8, 290−3, 297, 304, 307, 321, 422, 490, 492, 673, 678, 728
323, 352−4, 365, 403, 419, 435, enthusiasm, 324, 355, 447, 456, 458,
438, 457, 464, 470−1, 474−5, 481, 599, 666, 708, 726, 757
484, 509, 511, 531−2, 581, 584, entity, 39, 246, 280, 284, 304, 308,
586, 588−9, 592−3, 605, 611, 617, 358, 367, 386, 472, 659, 742
623, 634, 652, 673, 684, 690, enumeration, 280, 320, 514, 522,
697, 708, 714, 719, 721−2, 726, 570
728−31, 735−6, 746, 748, 750, 775 environment, 19, 75, 79, 149, 455−6,
eloquence, 73, 87, 146, 317, 328, 467, 469, 647, 720, 738, 760
465, 502, 550, 715 epistemic, 40−4, 132, 168
emanation, 266, 269, 298−9, 301−2, epistemology, 12, 18, 21, 40, 58,
306, 579, 742 77−8, 126, 277, 628
emotion, 85, 156, 364, 391, 416, equality (logical, mathematical,
479, 514−15, 529, 666, 690, 715 physical), 15−16, 197, 204, 213,
837
General Index
218, 226, 234, 242, 282, 285−6, 487−8, 524, 531, 534, 568−9,
380, 390, 405, 422, 427, 517, 660 574−5, 583, 600, 613−14, 631−3,
equality (moral, political, legal), 51, 639, 658, 668, 714, 728−9, 747,
83, 154−5, 343, 472, 759 761, 764, 767−70
equivalence, 75, 105, 347, 363, 383, etymology, 42, 80, 241, 254, 296−7,
450, 455, 470, 476, 509, 584, 616, 321, 445, 461, 651, 681, 745
652, 660, 676−7, 714, 769 event, 31, 80−2, 85, 135, 138−40,
Erkenntnisproblem, 628 228, 265, 274, 334, 344, 351, 376,
error, 18−19, 40, 74, 110, 115−16, 393, 431, 435, 437, 447, 449−50,
134−6, 165, 209−13, 253, 272, 463−8, 470−1, 476, 478, 481, 485,
301, 303, 315, 328, 335, 408, 489, 492, 494, 496, 506−7, 512,
496, 517, 519, 532, 557−8, 567−8, 514, 561, 588, 594, 605, 643, 668,
576−80, 607, 614−15, 632, 685−6, 703, 707, 713, 730−1, 737, 739,
694, 700, 744, 749 749, 756, 760, 775
erudition, 71, 118, 319, 366, 431, evidence, 39, 56, 72, 75, 96, 157,
436 208−10, 212, 278−9, 294, 304,
esperantism, 150−1, 745, 751 310, 314, 316, 327−8, 336, 426−7,
essence, 29, 32−3, 57−8, 100, 108, 435−6, 445, 455−6, 458, 464, 469,
111, 120, 123−4, 201−3, 239, 478, 495, 503, 534, 546, 550, 555,
252−3, 255−6, 259, 262, 265, 275, 628, 644, 650, 678, 766
290, 300, 311, 318, 335, 338, evil, 104, 108−12, 136, 156, 160,
354, 356−8, 361, 364−5, 368−9, 169, 245, 293, 422, 424, 428,
377−83, 386−8, 391−3, 396, 405, 524−6, 538−9, 543, 551, 557−9,
419−28, 449, 532, 536, 556−7, 562, 599, 698, 700−1, 716, 755,
562, 573, 578, 582−3, 593−7, 765
617−18, 621, 629, 645, 647−8, evolution, 54, 61, 64, 67, 78, 83, 124,
655, 657, 660, 676, 691−2, 702, 149, 376, 412, 414, 472, 510, 603,
704, 767 636, 644, 670, 680, 682, 718, 740,
eternity, 30, 33, 56, 58, 70−1, 74, 757
105, 127, 136, 138−40, 158, 165, existence, 15−18, 20, 22, 27, 29, 33,
257, 263, 280, 284−5, 347, 350−1, 42−4, 51, 57, 61−3, 65, 72, 82, 85,
359, 370, 381, 383, 386, 388, 396, 96, 109−10, 129, 136, 156, 197,
403, 406, 412, 418−27, 432, 445, 203−13, 215−16, 220, 228, 230−1,
449, 453, 518, 521, 529−31, 544, 233, 239−40, 243, 246−8, 250−4,
547, 570, 573, 577, 588, 594, 602, 256, 263, 272, 282−3, 285−9,
618, 631, 656, 667, 689, 691−2, 291−3, 296−8, 300−2, 304−9,
694, 699, 701, 703, 705, 719, 758 311, 313, 324, 336, 346, 348−50,
ethics, 52, 78, 93, 106−7, 112, 352−5, 357, 359, 361−4, 366, 373,
114−15, 156, 160−1, 266, 268, 376, 384, 388−91, 393, 395−6,
271, 407, 450, 466, 478, 481, 402−6, 408, 411, 415, 419−28,
838
General Index
433, 438, 443, 445, 449−50, 122−3, 138, 144, 159, 166, 194,
459, 468, 470−4, 476−80, 486−7, 196−201, 205, 207, 209, 212,
492−3, 496, 498, 500, 510, 516, 215, 217, 221, 223−5, 228, 230,
519, 525−6, 529, 534, 536, 538, 235, 237, 239, 247−8, 250−3, 256,
547, 555, 557, 559, 561, 565, 258−61, 271, 275−6, 281, 287−8,
571−2, 575, 585, 595, 602, 605, 295, 300, 302, 305−8, 313−17,
607, 612−13, 615, 617, 625, 632, 325−6, 329, 335, 337, 345, 353,
635, 643, 645−6, 652, 656−7, 659, 358, 362, 364, 368, 371, 373,
664, 671, 674−5, 684, 693, 701−3, 376−7, 379, 387, 390−2, 394, 396,
705, 708, 721, 723, 726, 732, 735, 402, 409, 416, 428, 432, 442, 445,
739−40, 743, 745, 747−8, 751, 448−9, 458, 464, 466−7, 473−6,
758, 765, 773, 775 478−81, 485, 488−9, 492, 504,
existent, 51, 57, 206, 209, 220, 507, 512−13, 522, 564−8, 570,
298−9, 303−9, 311, 365−6, 384−5, 575, 577−8, 588, 609, 624, 635−6,
402, 405, 612, 699 646−50, 653−4, 668, 670, 695,
existential, 519, 529, 612 702, 707, 713, 723−4, 727, 730−2,
existentialism, 3, 6 741−2, 751, 765, 775
experience, 12, 14−24, 27, 42, 47, expression, 15, 18, 40−3, 87−8, 94−7,
52, 61−2, 64, 74, 78−9, 94, 100−1, 102, 105, 113−14, 122, 129, 136,
107, 123, 140, 166, 173, 198, 202, 145, 197, 199, 203, 206, 209−10,
204, 206, 209−10, 213−16, 218, 219−20, 229, 243, 246, 256−7,
222−4, 226−33, 235−8, 241−3, 269−70, 273−4, 276−8, 280, 282,
247, 249, 252, 259, 261, 271, 287, 290, 292, 294−301, 303−4,
273, 281, 301, 308, 314, 319, 307−11, 325, 329, 333, 340, 344,
324−6, 330−2, 335−7, 352, 354, 350, 355, 361, 364−5, 368, 375,
357, 365−6, 369, 375, 377−8, 402, 392, 403, 405−6, 410, 440, 453,
404−9, 411, 420, 426, 434, 442, 458, 460, 462−3, 465, 470, 477−8,
450, 452, 454, 458, 479, 552, 599, 481, 486, 488−92, 496−7, 505,
601−2, 604, 615, 623, 639, 657, 508−9, 516, 518, 526−7, 530, 532,
666, 681, 696−7, 700−3, 709−10, 541−3, 548, 550, 557, 561, 569,
718, 722, 756, 760 572, 586, 590, 597, 599, 613, 615,
experiment, 38, 46, 57−9, 74−5, 624, 631, 638, 643, 649, 659,
127−8, 234, 270−1, 278, 307, 312, 677, 686, 706, 708−9, 711, 713,
316, 319, 326−32, 334, 336, 364, 718−19, 722−4, 730, 739, 741,
379−80, 382, 385, 390−5, 397, 745−6, 748, 765, 772
399, 409−10, 454−5, 464, 483, extension (logical, semantic, spatial),
534−5, 596, 604, 620, 650, 657, 102, 214−15, 224, 229, 356, 358,
668−70, 678, 681, 729, 743−4, 758 409, 416, 498, 517, 520, 528−30,
explanation, 27, 35, 38, 70, 72−3, 551, 577, 586, 618, 685, 747, 752
79, 83−5, 96, 100, 103, 109, 116, externality, 171, 273, 285, 298−9,
839
General Index
305, 350, 427, 593, 596, 603, 477, 481, 528, 565, 574, 614, 632,
612−13, 639, 674 647, 663, 720, 749, 766, 773, 777
extinction, 156, 386, 777 fantasy, 85, 205, 266, 281, 316, 320,
329, 333, 337, 347, 383, 404, 457,
fact, 17−18, 33, 35, 38, 43−4, 51, 479, 487, 516, 585, 611, 622, 645,
53, 55−9, 73−6, 80−5, 94−6, 111, 758
115−16, 123, 138−9, 193, 208−10, fatalism, 160, 276, 301, 730, 767, 772
214, 230, 247, 253, 268−9, 271, fate, 156, 302, 355, 357, 360, 566,
273, 279, 285, 289, 291, 301, 668
305−8, 321−6, 328−9, 331−2, 336, fatherland, 144, 161, 267, 271−3,
339, 353, 365, 372, 377−9, 381, 315, 335, 414, 707−9, 714, 759
383−4, 388−90, 393−7, 406−8, feeling, 22, 64, 108, 119, 128, 216,
419−20, 433−4, 437, 448−50, 221−2, 261, 272, 288, 291, 320,
452−60, 463−4, 466−8, 470−8, 349, 352, 365, 387, 390−1, 394,
487−8, 492−3, 506−10, 512−14, 397, 402, 404, 413−15, 421, 425,
518−19, 526, 529, 558−62, 565, 444, 456, 468, 477, 484, 486, 488,
590, 592−6, 602, 604−7, 612, 617, 493−4, 497, 499, 529, 535−6, 541,
635, 646−7, 649−50, 653, 655−6, 549, 557, 559−60, 566−7, 573,
658, 660, 667−8, 679, 681, 683, 584, 607, 612, 621−5, 645, 648,
690−2, 697, 700, 710, 723−4, 728, 662, 666, 668, 671, 698, 704−5,
740−2, 744, 747, 755, 769−70 709−11, 714, 718, 730, 737,
faculty, 9, 14−15, 18, 20−2, 28, 59, 756−8, 761, 765, 769, 772
70, 85, 195−6, 198, 200−1, 213, feudalism, 471, 476, 481, 545
228, 231, 237−8, 240−1, 245, fiction, 61, 103, 531, 599, 604, 760
247−8, 252, 261, 271, 283−4, 288, finality, 330, 332, 448, 552, 558, 611,
313, 315, 317, 319, 327, 337−8, 668, 679
361, 364, 376, 384−5, 387, 389, finite, 17, 29−30, 101−2, 111, 138,
393, 398, 404, 414, 426, 432−3, 207, 257−8, 291−2, 299, 308,
454, 509, 569−70, 635 353−4, 364, 367, 405, 419, 422−5,
faith, 12, 51, 68, 88, 121, 128, 132, 427, 517−18, 536, 549, 556, 562,
144, 146, 151, 154, 156, 161, 578, 589, 597, 600, 615, 618, 645,
164−5, 167, 237, 266, 275, 348, 690
353−6, 360, 364−5, 383, 390−1, folklore, 720, 735, 775
393, 397, 406, 451, 457, 459, force, 51, 116, 125, 155, 160−1,
472−3, 535, 553, 594, 613, 619, 273, 288, 315, 326, 328, 347,
633, 644−5, 648, 666, 669, 671−2, 351, 358, 360, 379−83, 387−8,
681, 683, 701, 707−8, 710, 712, 395−6, 407−8, 416, 428, 432, 450,
715, 723−4, 727, 731−2, 746, 754, 453, 456−7, 465, 507, 556, 565,
758, 774 569−70, 599, 601−5, 649, 660,
family, 114, 116, 360−2, 392, 456, 664, 667−9, 672, 697, 707−8,
840
General Index
710−11, 727−8, 730, 735, 742, 263−4, 271, 279, 307, 330, 333,
746, 748, 757, 767, 769, 775−6 347−9, 352, 363, 374−5, 402, 407,
foreign, 10−11, 37, 48, 51, 68, 89, 410, 418−19, 423, 426−7, 435,
144, 166, 214, 237, 271−3, 280, 442, 451−2, 576, 590, 597, 604,
318, 333−4, 344, 371−2, 429, 617, 621, 648−9, 655, 695, 703, 711,
709, 714, 722, 743 747
form, 27, 32, 37, 42−3, 61−3, 73−5, freedom, 12, 65, 74, 78, 137−9, 145,
82−5, 93−7, 99, 103, 107, 114−16, 154−6, 188, 266, 268, 321, 356,
121, 151, 153, 183, 215−17, 367−9, 415, 424−5, 427, 450, 480,
224−9, 236−8, 244, 249−51, 259, 505, 512, 565, 587, 615, 624, 665,
261−2, 280, 283, 289, 292, 296, 687, 689, 692, 697−8, 701, 710,
298−9, 301, 304, 318, 338, 356, 714, 716, 733, 737−8, 748, 752,
366, 376, 387, 394−5, 402−3, 761
405−7, 410, 414−15, 423−4, 428, fundamental, 32, 79, 81, 94, 128,
442, 448, 451−2, 455−6, 461, 236, 252, 267, 276, 307, 310, 385,
464, 468, 470, 472, 474−5, 480, 399, 445, 536, 539, 553, 582,
488−90, 499−500, 505−6, 511, 610−11, 671, 686, 697, 702, 724,
516−31, 534−8, 540, 542−3, 545, 727, 735, 772−3
548−51, 553−6, 566, 568, 571−5,
579, 582−91, 596−8, 600, 603, genre, 127, 153, 465, 497, 499, 508
605, 609−19, 623, 632, 634, 639, genus, 103, 111−13, 225, 350, 392,
642, 644−8, 653, 656, 659−62, 438, 515, 523−4, 532, 550, 571
667−8, 671, 678−9, 689, 691, 694, geography, 474, 492−3, 619, 741,
696−7, 701, 708, 724, 729−36, 753
739−40, 745−8, 758, 767, 769−70, geology, 270, 312, 327, 395, 611−12
773 geometry, 224, 226, 312, 314, 316,
formal, 93, 108, 148, 150, 164, 241, 320, 327, 330, 332−3, 407, 523,
274, 403, 487−8, 490, 498, 589, 611, 688
591, 601, 620, 719, 731, 733, 738, gnoseology, 553, 564, 582, 590,
740, 743, 745 599−600, 613, 623, 628
formalism, 93−4, 96, 150, 349, Gnostics, 269, 549, 579, 627
487−8, 498, 505, 510, 512, 589 government, 70, 142−5, 154−5, 157,
formula, 39−43, 51, 62, 166, 274−9, 164, 267−8, 307, 313−14, 324,
281−3, 285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 340, 351, 388−9, 411, 432−3, 452,
295−7, 299−301, 303−5, 307−9, 460, 493, 513, 545, 556, 561,
311, 320, 368, 373, 375, 402, 407, 564−5, 570, 619, 635, 657, 698,
527−8, 536, 542, 561−2, 610, 657, 708−11, 715−16, 722, 750, 756,
745, 774 758, 763, 769−70, 775−8
foundation, 13, 18, 40, 43−4, 55, grammar, 318, 321, 340, 463, 474−5,
62, 72−4, 90, 207, 231, 248, 257, 508, 586, 720, 745
841
General Index
harmony, 119, 246, 248, 265, 267, historicism, 54, 61, 149−50, 155,
338−9, 350, 357, 377, 383, 409, 160−1, 170−1, 474, 564, 670, 719,
481, 540, 549, 551, 554, 566, 569, 725, 737, 740−1, 743, 745, 747−8,
602, 626, 644, 698 769−70, 772
heaven, 92, 164, 235, 266, 329, 351, historiography, 5, 8, 47, 54, 67, 79,
355, 437, 472, 487, 536, 546, 559, 107, 153, 168, 502, 584, 589,
687, 756 591−2, 634
hegemony, 151−2, 160−1, 166, 728, history, 3−5, 7−10, 12, 46, 50−4,
735−6, 741, 746, 750, 767−9, 777 56, 58−61, 64−5, 67, 70−1, 73−8,
heresy, 9, 37, 68, 165, 266, 270, 352, 80−7, 90−9, 106−7, 112, 115−16,
467, 633, 735, 776, 800 118−20, 124, 127−8, 131, 141,
hierarchy, 85, 152, 354, 432, 454, 143, 145−6, 151, 153−60, 163−5,
480−1, 491, 631, 668, 732−3 167−71, 173, 181, 193, 266−7,
historian, 51, 53−4, 60, 66, 72, 75, 277, 313−15, 317, 325, 330−1,
81−2, 84, 92, 95−9, 154, 169−70, 333, 335−7, 343−4, 346, 349,
355, 394, 398−9, 444, 456, 466−7, 351−2, 354, 358, 361−2, 364−7,
469−71, 482, 484−5, 487, 496, 369−72, 374−6, 378, 388−91,
500−3, 509−14, 547, 560−2, 393−5, 398−401, 406, 410,
590−2, 594, 604, 608−10, 616, 414−15, 419−20, 431, 433−8,
638, 703, 755, 759, 768 441−5, 447−8, 450−7, 459,
historical, 8−9, 12, 45, 50−6, 59, 70, 463−77, 479−82, 484−8, 490−7,
75−86, 88, 90−1, 95−8, 106, 115, 500−4, 506−10, 512−14, 518−19,
118−20, 124−5, 127, 141, 149−51, 521, 531, 534−5, 540, 547−9,
153, 156−7, 160−1, 167, 169, 551−2, 555, 557, 562−4, 566−7,
173−4, 182, 189, 314, 331, 371, 569−73, 576, 578−80, 582−4,
392−3, 395−9, 414, 435, 438, 454, 587−96, 599−602, 604−11, 614,
456, 459−60, 463, 465−8, 470−82, 616, 619−21, 623−5, 628−30,
484−5, 491−7, 500−3, 507−9, 511, 634−5, 637−8, 642−4, 646,
515, 518, 530, 534, 540, 545, 648−50, 653, 659−61, 663−4,
548, 559, 561−3, 567, 574, 590−3, 667−8, 671, 692−3, 703, 705−6,
595−6, 601−2, 606−10, 615, 624, 711, 714, 720−2, 724−8, 735,
627, 631, 634−5, 638, 640, 642−4, 739−40, 743, 746−9, 753−5, 758,
646, 648−9, 655, 659−61, 663−4, 760−1, 763−5, 767−70, 772−3, 775
668−9, 695, 703, 707, 712, 714, holism, 102−3, 105, 183
717−19, 721−3, 725−6, 728−30, human, 9, 12, 14, 16, 19, 27, 30,
732−3, 735, 737−41, 745−9, 754, 32−4, 41−4, 51−60, 64−5, 68,
759, 767−70, 772, 775 70−4, 76, 78−81, 83−5, 93, 96−7,
historical materialism, 78, 80, 83−6, 99, 120−4, 128, 138, 146, 152,
90, 106, 118−20, 124−5, 149, 157, 156−8, 201−3, 209, 211−12,
160, 463, 473−81, 642−6, 655, 228−9, 241, 245−53, 255−63,
659−61, 664, 669, 754, 768 266−8, 275−6, 278, 283−4, 290,
842
General Index
292−3, 295, 299−301, 305−7, idea, 8−9, 14−16, 18, 20, 27−35,
313, 315−16, 318, 321, 324−5, 39−44, 55−9, 64, 71, 73−9, 88,
327, 329−30, 332−3, 336−8, 344, 93−4, 96, 107, 119, 122, 128−30,
346−63, 365−70, 372−9, 384, 136, 141, 144, 146, 166, 197−202,
386, 388−9, 391−9, 405, 407, 206−8, 214−15, 221, 229−30,
411, 414−16, 418, 420, 424−7, 234, 236, 238−40, 244, 251, 256,
430, 432−7, 442−4, 447, 449−50, 258−62, 268−70, 273−5, 278−94,
452−4, 456−9, 464, 466, 468, 297−307, 309, 317, 323−5, 328,
470−3, 475−6, 478, 481, 487, 490, 335, 345−50, 353, 357−8, 361,
494−5, 499−501, 507−8, 519, 525, 363−6, 377−93, 410, 414−16,
535, 538−9, 550−2, 557, 559−60, 420, 423, 425, 430−5, 438, 445,
562−5, 570, 573, 576−7, 579, 584, 448−9, 452, 458, 465−7, 472, 487,
586−8, 592, 594, 602, 604, 617, 489, 495, 498, 504, 529, 548,
619−20, 622−3, 639, 645−9, 651, 550, 552−4, 557−60, 562−3, 568,
653−6, 660, 664, 667, 669−70, 574, 578−83, 586, 589, 593−7,
674, 679, 688, 701, 704−6, 710, 603−4, 607, 615−16, 618, 624,
712, 715, 721, 725, 737, 741, 745, 649, 655−7, 661, 671, 675−6, 678,
747−8, 755−8, 760−1, 775−6, 783, 696, 700, 706−7, 710, 724, 741,
793, 795 756, 769
human nature, 9, 32, 72, 81, 248, 252, ideal, 15−16, 30, 32, 40, 42−3, 56,
256, 374−5, 393, 457, 466, 737 61, 64−5, 70−1, 78, 80, 88, 94−5,
human race, 59, 64, 84, 97, 349, 97, 111, 119, 122, 128, 145−6,
360−1, 365, 372, 376, 379, 389, 153−6, 158, 169, 197−8, 204−5,
391, 394, 414, 416, 447, 450, 256, 258, 262, 267, 284−5, 300−1,
454−5, 457, 459, 467, 469, 475, 306−8, 346−7, 350−2, 356−7, 363,
478, 508, 562, 577, 604, 619, 674, 365, 367, 370, 381, 389, 391, 397,
721, 725, 755−6, 775 409, 415, 419, 423, 425, 432,
humanist, 54, 168, 340, 737 434−5, 445, 488, 490, 492, 496,
humanity, 55, 58, 64−5, 79, 81, 85, 498, 501, 512, 518, 521, 523, 526,
140, 267, 293, 349−50, 353, 358, 529, 531, 539, 545, 552, 557−60,
361, 367, 386, 390−1, 393−4, 570−1, 573, 576, 587, 594, 597,
415−16, 433−4, 453, 459, 461, 603, 612, 622−3, 633, 661, 667,
464−5, 472, 519, 536, 560, 568, 672−3, 679, 701, 707, 709−10,
620, 638, 648, 698−9, 701, 705, 715, 746, 755−9
709, 758 Ideal Formula, 39−44, 51, 166,
hypostasis, 151, 663, 742 276−311, 368
hypothesis, 57, 63, 203, 207, 239, idealism, 4−9, 20−1, 23, 28−9, 33,
243, 285, 287, 296, 303, 305−6, 35, 40, 45, 48, 50−2, 61−4, 66−7,
314, 328−30, 336−7, 374, 379, 70−5, 78, 83, 87−9, 93−6, 117,
397, 404, 409−11, 441, 474, 481, 120−3, 126−9, 131−2, 137, 142,
488, 740 146, 149−51, 155, 161−7, 169−70,
843
General Index
190, 229, 246, 248, 250−1, 253−4, 490, 494−5, 500, 502, 528, 535,
301, 306, 345, 354, 402−3, 407−9, 537−8, 541, 552, 554, 566, 570,
412, 417, 447−8, 451−3, 457−9, 572, 576, 578, 614, 625, 645, 674,
473−5, 478, 487, 493, 495, 498, 689, 694, 697, 742, 759, 769
503, 505, 508, 510−11, 615, 618, immanence, 107, 117, 123−5, 129,
621, 629, 631, 637, 645−6, 648−9, 140, 149, 155, 161, 166, 301, 304,
651, 653−4, 657, 660−1, 665−7, 309, 345, 347, 355, 366, 368, 560,
669, 671−3, 675−81, 686, 689, 563, 618−19, 639, 644, 646, 648,
691, 695−7, 699−701, 703, 705, 657−8, 660−1, 676, 679, 684, 691,
719, 725, 737−43, 745, 747, 765, 696−7, 699, 702, 704, 725, 739,
772, 775, 778 772
ideality, 93, 99, 346−7, 358, 416, independence, 14−16, 18−19, 32−3,
487, 490, 519, 613, 670, 702−3 36−7, 45, 108, 113, 161, 165, 167,
idealize, 108, 121, 358, 510, 635 203, 205, 213−14, 216−18, 221−2,
identical, 17, 29−31, 75, 102, 110, 224, 228−30, 236, 248, 250, 252,
124, 203, 208, 234, 264, 275, 256, 263, 267, 279, 304, 309,
280, 282, 285−6, 289, 305−6, 363, 317−18, 351, 354, 388, 393, 415,
403, 422−3, 425, 427−8, 454, 450, 476, 488, 567, 569, 572, 601,
518, 520−2, 532, 544, 592, 654, 608, 615, 647, 651−2, 655, 658,
659−60, 692, 704, 761 663, 670, 696, 707, 724, 728−9,
identity, 16, 93, 105, 110, 124, 766, 774, 777
134−7, 194, 202, 204, 209−11, individual, 30−1, 41−2, 65, 74, 79,
231, 234, 251, 265, 267, 280, 81, 84−5, 95, 97, 99−105, 112,
285−6, 304, 329, 356, 403, 116, 120, 123−4, 139−40, 144,
408−10, 521, 526−8, 530, 539, 146, 152, 225−8, 288, 291−2, 334,
546−7, 549, 552−3, 556, 568, 570, 347, 357, 360−1, 372, 376, 389,
577, 582, 594, 617, 626, 645, 658, 393, 415, 420, 423−4, 426, 442,
677, 686−7, 691−2, 699−701 454−5, 465, 467, 473−5, 478−80,
ideology, 8, 10, 14−19, 21, 23, 28, 483, 487, 492, 499, 507, 515−16,
32, 54, 118, 121−2, 149, 152, 158, 519, 530, 535, 539, 541, 545,
161, 193, 201−2, 206, 208, 221−2, 560−1, 573, 586, 591, 593, 595,
235, 247, 263, 472−4, 482, 503, 606−7, 609−12, 616, 619, 633,
562, 642, 653, 655, 660, 663, 723, 645−8, 650, 658, 673, 696, 698,
725, 730−1, 733−4, 736, 738−9, 706−7, 710, 714, 722−3, 725−6,
745−6, 748, 750, 763, 769−70 733−5, 741, 747, 749, 760
imagination, 15, 33−5, 40, 63−5, individualism, 144, 706−7
81, 85, 96−7, 108, 119, 156, 158, individuality, 41−2, 85, 99, 140, 283,
197−200, 228, 238, 241−3, 245, 288, 291−2, 357, 422, 424−5,
273, 286, 293, 324, 361, 376−9, 478−9, 492, 516, 560, 579, 587,
393, 409−11, 414−16, 454−7, 466, 593, 595, 688
844
General Index
individuation, 31, 42, 102−4, 137, 150−2, 156, 159, 165−6, 409,
139, 702, 770 706−16, 720−38, 750−1, 760, 763,
induction, 19, 38, 46, 56−9, 62, 765−6, 769, 774
73−6, 271, 289, 316, 322−3, intellectualism, 116, 156, 357, 359,
325−7, 329−32, 376, 378−80, 409, 552, 554, 562, 566, 588, 597,
393−5, 398, 407−10, 412, 449, 631, 726
454−60, 552, 589, 678, 718, 756 intelligence, 17, 32, 207−8, 240, 254,
infallibility, 318, 338, 430 257, 260−1, 268, 280, 316, 348,
infinite, 16−17, 30, 41−2, 62, 100−1, 357, 360, 425, 428, 450, 453, 458,
105, 111, 140, 205−8, 214, 216, 463, 565−6, 617
218, 238, 242, 257, 284, 287, intelligentsia, 713, 730
291−3, 298−9, 308, 320, 329, intelligible, 115, 128, 138, 141, 280,
344, 347−9, 351, 355, 357, 362−5, 285−8, 290−1, 293−5, 300, 307,
367−8, 377, 389−90, 393, 397, 346−7, 536, 570, 646, 657, 664,
405, 415, 418−20, 422−8, 438, 673, 677−9
476, 517, 522, 529, 531−2, 549, interest, 97, 472, 486, 492, 496,
556, 562, 597, 606, 645, 667, 688, 499−500, 506, 510−11
692, 697−8, 701−2, 704−5, 721 interpretation, 22, 56, 120, 329,
innate, 27, 32, 34−5, 129, 245, 250, 429−30, 440−1, 467, 472, 475,
262, 321, 335−6, 338, 357, 404, 484, 492, 501, 566−7, 592,
676, 742 615−19, 624, 643−4, 648, 654,
instinct, 27, 65, 150, 248, 250, 660, 662, 684, 703, 713−14, 747,
252−3, 270, 276, 290, 314−15, 760, 774
327, 338, 351−2, 414, 416, 431, intuition, 19, 28−30, 34, 39−44, 88,
450−1, 530, 586, 602, 621, 706, 99, 105, 108, 114, 121, 129, 131,
724, 728 176, 215−16, 221, 223−5, 227,
intellect, 9, 28, 32−4, 62, 71−2, 112, 229−30, 236−8, 240−2, 244, 251,
125, 141, 198, 200−1, 235, 254, 255, 258, 262, 265, 275, 282−6,
257, 262, 266, 273, 282, 284, 288−92, 294−5, 302−6, 308−9,
289−90, 297, 306, 308, 313−14, 311, 345, 348, 365, 367−8, 409,
323−5, 328, 347, 354−5, 357, 420, 425−6, 428, 458, 464, 466,
361−2, 367−8, 374−5, 390, 392, 481, 487, 515−16, 520, 523,
398, 404, 406, 409, 412, 425−6, 529−30, 536, 541−2, 545, 553−4,
451, 457, 459, 466, 499, 508, 518, 570, 574, 576, 585−6, 588, 590−2,
550, 553−5, 562, 566, 585−9, 597, 597, 615−16, 623, 632, 646−51,
599−600, 611, 631, 636, 649, 653, 655, 657−8, 662, 667, 676,
657−8, 661, 676, 688, 701, 705, 689, 721, 724
714−15, 720−3, 746, 752, 756 investigation, 240, 258, 281, 312,
intellectual, 3−6, 46, 53, 60, 70, 79, 319−20, 322−3, 326−7, 329, 332,
90, 118−19, 132, 143, 145−6, 148, 335, 431, 440, 442, 501, 507, 509,
845
General Index
534, 538, 549, 561, 564, 570, 592, language, 30, 71−2, 75, 78, 83, 85,
665, 674, 677 150−1, 167, 202−3, 243, 270, 294,
296, 321, 333, 337, 358, 364,
journalism, 36, 49, 60, 68, 117, 143, 391−2, 395, 398, 400, 403, 405−7,
147, 170, 609, 713, 767, 777−8 436, 440−1, 455−6, 461, 474−5,
just, 83, 93, 97, 101, 114, 134, 140, 479, 489, 495−6, 508, 511, 538,
206, 265, 300, 305, 307, 345, 350, 563, 570, 584−9, 623, 629, 650−1,
362, 431, 468, 500−1, 515, 523, 720−4, 744−5, 750−1
564, 568, 573−4, 601, 656, 755 law, 15, 24, 34−5, 53−9, 62, 70−5,
justice, 25, 85, 164, 349, 351, 479, 78, 81, 83−5, 95, 105, 109, 123,
559, 709, 715 128, 137, 139, 144−5, 150, 154,
justification, 18, 240, 353, 475, 490, 164, 166, 194, 199, 216, 228,
514, 536, 540−2, 546, 551, 553, 233−6, 241, 248−9, 254, 267,
555, 558−9, 561, 579, 581, 599, 275, 293, 316, 323, 327, 331−2,
605, 609, 649, 661, 672, 708, 719, 335, 349−51, 358, 360, 362, 364,
730, 741, 756, 770 369−70, 372, 374, 379−89, 392−6,
398−9, 402−9, 412, 416, 419,
kind, 94−5, 128, 492, 516, 602, 668, 425, 427, 431−7, 441−50, 453−4,
673 458, 460, 464, 467, 469−70, 472,
knowledge, 18−19, 22, 28−30, 32, 474−6, 479−81, 492−3, 507−10,
34−5, 39, 46, 58−9, 61−2, 70, 527−30, 538, 547, 559, 563, 565,
72−3, 78, 85, 92, 112, 115, 120−2, 570−1, 599, 601−5, 613−14, 618,
128, 132, 134, 136, 150, 157, 194, 620, 632, 635−6, 657, 659, 667,
198, 209, 211−12, 217, 220−1, 669, 671, 673−4, 682, 685−6, 690,
224, 228−9, 233−6, 243, 246−66, 694, 697, 700, 705−11, 715, 721,
274−6, 279−80, 283, 286, 288−90, 725, 740, 742, 749, 756, 772, 777
294−5, 298, 301−10, 312−15, lawyer, 149, 417, 575, 635, 719, 734
318−27, 331−5, 338, 346, 352−60, level, 102−4, 113−16, 123, 164, 488,
364−8, 375, 378−99, 401−11, 514−22, 528−9, 569−78, 582,
420, 424−7, 430, 435−8, 442−4, 587−8, 591−3, 603, 613, 619,
449−53, 458−60, 485, 491−5, 631−2, 634, 648, 655, 667−8,
499, 502, 507−8, 510, 517, 521−3, 673−6, 679, 706, 713, 718, 721,
530, 539, 548, 550−2, 556, 563−4, 726
584, 590, 592−3, 597, 600, 611, liberalism, 7, 25, 36, 69, 86−7, 118,
613, 618, 623, 628, 649−59, 665, 143−6, 153−8, 160−1, 165, 168,
670−3, 676, 682, 684−8, 697−8, 482, 503, 707, 710−11, 714−16,
701, 705, 721, 728, 737, 743, 747, 719, 753−61, 776
749, 755, 761 liberty, 37, 139, 145, 153−8, 160−1,
188, 354, 360, 503, 559−60, 565,
landscape, 97, 500 592, 611, 664, 706−7, 709−11,
846
General Index
715, 718−19, 746, 754−5, 757−61, 449, 475, 492, 515−39, 542−57,
769−70, 774 563−71, 574−83, 586−92, 594,
liceo, 66, 90, 126, 131, 680 596, 598−601, 605, 613−21, 625,
life, 58−61, 66, 75, 83, 108, 124, 629, 631−5, 639, 644, 646, 648,
128, 136, 141, 144−5, 155−6, 656, 661−2, 674−9, 681, 686,
164, 198, 220, 246, 265−6, 268, 690−4, 697−701, 704, 719, 723,
274, 290, 306, 343, 348−55, 358, 731, 740, 743−5, 751, 772
360−6, 369−70, 374, 376, 382, logicism, 116, 516, 532, 614, 619,
389, 396−402, 404, 407, 411, 639
414−30, 439, 441, 448−57, 460, logos, 141, 267, 616−18, 639, 696−7,
468, 470−6, 490, 493, 495, 498, 700−1, 704
507, 509, 516, 518−19, 524, 527,
529, 534, 538, 540, 542, 545−7, materialism, 10, 55, 61−3, 78−80,
551, 555, 557−62, 565−8, 572−4, 83−6, 90, 106, 109, 111, 118−25,
579, 583−4, 587, 590, 594, 596, 127−9, 149, 151, 157, 160, 167,
610, 612, 615, 621, 623−4, 626, 245, 250, 254, 263, 310, 357−9,
632−3, 638, 645−8, 651−3, 658, 372, 374, 381, 390, 396, 399−400,
665−71, 676, 682, 684, 692, 402−3, 410−11, 423, 463, 465,
697−703, 705−9, 712−19, 723−7, 467, 469, 471, 473−7, 479−81,
730, 734−5, 753−7, 760−1, 765−6, 483, 506−7, 539−40, 548, 556−7,
774−7 562−3, 566, 597, 618, 621, 638,
linguistics, 42, 75, 84, 94, 147, 392, 642−8, 651−62, 664, 667−70, 672,
464, 466, 476, 482, 508, 631, 752 682, 697, 736, 739, 741−2, 754,
literature, 45, 60−1, 81, 92, 96, 106, 757, 768
118, 126, 153, 164, 168, 170, 268, mathematics, 56−7, 62, 71−4, 108,
273, 275, 321, 351, 381, 391, 395, 115, 232, 236, 307, 327, 341, 358,
399, 463, 465, 482, 485, 488, 375, 383, 385, 398, 404, 438,
503−4, 507, 511, 563, 580, 584, 442−3, 448, 452−3, 460, 489, 496,
607, 609, 635, 643, 654, 713, 720, 534−6, 545, 551−2, 556, 567, 581,
755, 762, 764−5 596−604, 608, 611, 618, 620,
logic, 3, 13−22, 28, 34, 51−2, 57-58, 623, 633, 635, 649, 657, 688, 714,
63, 68, 73, 77−8, 86, 93, 99−109, 744−5
111−12, 115−16, 125, 132, 136, matter, 27, 77−85, 111, 122−5, 151,
150−1, 164, 184, 193−4, 197, 155, 215−16, 228, 236−7, 249−50,
204−5, 209, 212−13, 225, 231, 332, 337, 356, 359, 366−7, 373,
234−5, 238−42, 247, 251, 253, 379, 381, 402, 420, 423, 428, 556,
256, 280, 282−4, 293, 296, 298, 617, 635, 645, 655−61, 667, 673,
301, 306, 317, 322, 331, 337, 696, 742, 755
341, 363, 379−80, 383−4, 386, meaning, 50, 78, 82, 94, 96, 133,
393, 404, 408, 416, 426, 432, 438, 155, 164, 170, 202, 274, 276,
847
General Index
278, 287, 296−7, 300, 303, 317, 70−1, 77−8, 80−1, 83, 85, 99,
336, 343−6, 351, 359−63, 368, 101, 103, 105−6, 108, 112, 116,
390, 407, 419, 429, 436, 466−72, 123, 126, 136, 141, 151, 160,
478, 480, 487−92, 508−9, 526, 166, 176, 202, 209−10, 221, 223,
539, 543−6, 549, 553−4, 558, 562, 234−5, 267, 277, 296−7, 309−10,
572, 580−1, 583, 586, 592−3, 313, 315, 319, 321, 324, 329,
595−6, 600, 612, 616, 629, 647, 332, 359−60, 363−8, 370, 373−4,
669, 684−5, 691, 696, 702−6, 711, 377−8, 383−6, 389−90, 393,
724−5, 729−30, 737, 740−1, 745, 395−400, 409, 412, 420, 430,
747 432−3, 438, 441−2, 479, 491, 506,
measure, 82, 206, 241, 313, 325, 508−9, 535, 549, 553, 569, 577,
334, 358, 375, 380, 426, 467, 508, 580, 591, 593, 599−600, 603−4,
552, 578−9, 611, 668−9, 674, 696, 614, 618−19, 622−3, 625, 627,
702 632, 634, 639−40, 656, 663, 666,
mechanical, 65, 81, 109, 129, 137, 670, 691, 696, 699, 739, 765, 769
139, 156, 160, 212, 327, 358, method, 38, 40, 45−7, 51, 53−4,
367, 396, 423, 438, 448−9, 467, 56−9, 63, 71, 73−6, 81, 91, 102,
523, 537, 539, 552, 582−3, 587, 107, 111−12, 116, 140, 148,
611−12, 616, 621, 650, 668, 670, 150−1, 169, 194, 211−12, 269,
676, 679, 689−90, 697, 707, 709, 271, 274− 5, 278, 281, 285, 293,
718, 720, 728−30, 740−2, 744, 299, 302−3, 305, 310, 312−16,
747, 767, 772 318, 320−42, 371−2, 375−6, 379,
memory, 15, 18, 34−5, 100, 198−200, 382, 384−5, 387, 391−3, 395−9,
209−10, 212, 235, 245, 403, 450, 408−9, 411, 416, 436−7, 449−52,
455, 475, 586, 685, 707, 744 454−5, 457− 60, 463−7, 472,
mental, 14, 18, 20, 28−9, 31−4, 476, 484−5, 492, 494, 503, 506,
39−41, 44, 58, 61, 74−5, 84, 90, 510, 512, 534−6, 568−70, 580−2,
109, 113, 120−1, 171, 205, 213, 589, 591−3, 597−8, 600, 605−8,
217, 220, 236, 254, 293, 297−8, 619−21, 634, 651, 663, 670,
303−6, 308, 317, 326, 332, 336−7, 695−6, 699, 707, 713, 716, 733,
402−4, 419, 447, 454, 457, 460, 736, 739−40, 743, 745, 757, 769,
476, 479, 484, 520, 534−5, 555, 772−3, 775
570, 595, 623, 625−6, 643−4, mind, 12, 14−16, 19−20, 27−35,
657−8, 715, 721, 739, 754, 757, 40−1, 44, 56, 58, 70−1, 73−4,
760 96, 108, 111, 120−1, 128, 152,
metaphor, 113, 296−7, 518, 525, 155, 176, 195−206, 209−19,
542, 546, 549, 566, 571−3, 577, 223−36, 240−1, 245−63, 271, 273,
650, 668, 725, 742 278−309, 313−14, 320−1, 325−37,
metaphysics, 12−13, 15, 18, 27, 34, 343, 346, 352, 355, 359−64, 367,
37, 47, 51−2, 54−7, 59, 63−4, 370, 373, 376−83, 386−7, 390,
848
General Index
393−4, 403−4, 408, 411, 415−16, 474, 476, 480−1, 498−9, 502−3,
419−20, 422−5, 431−8, 441−4, 508−10, 516, 519, 524, 534−5,
450−62, 475, 483, 487, 489, 494, 538, 553, 559, 568, 571, 575, 587,
509, 531, 538−42, 550−1, 566, 597, 613, 621, 628−9, 632, 641,
569−70, 586, 615, 626, 632, 663, 669, 700−1, 705−9, 714−15,
649−50, 653−4, 657−8, 668−70, 717, 722, 728, 730, 735, 739, 745,
673−4, 689, 698, 703, 705, 707, 750, 752, 754, 756, 760, 763, 765,
710, 733, 735, 745 769−70, 774
mistakes (philosophical), 109, Mother Idea, 27−35, 166, 261, 290,
114−15, 313, 335, 500, 557, 567, 297
575−609, 614, 622−3, 724, 759 motion, 110, 197, 207, 214, 233,
modality, 14−16, 29, 108, 194−8, 267, 329, 347, 383, 387, 423,
200−3, 205−6, 212−13, 215−21, 599−600, 617
227−8, 231, 245−7, 249−50, movement, 42−3, 80, 86−9, 129,
253−4, 256−7, 281, 285, 288−9, 139, 143−4, 195−6, 201, 226, 267,
299−301, 356−9, 370, 392, 405−7, 297, 303, 305, 309, 311, 355, 362,
424, 497, 516, 518, 522−3, 535, 380−1, 403, 419, 421, 456, 464,
551, 555, 586−7, 613, 650, 653, 542, 545−6, 548−9, 554, 559−60,
660, 733, 738, 755, 757, 760, 773 592−4, 601, 623−4, 660−1, 675,
moment, 81, 104, 110−11, 113−16, 678, 687, 692, 699−700, 703
121, 128, 134, 141, 159−60, music, 94, 266, 387, 397, 453, 487,
344−5, 367, 369, 464, 523, 525, 489, 495, 504−5, 573, 585, 587,
527, 529, 532, 542−4, 571−4, 576, 591, 613, 640
578, 592, 612−16, 621−2, 652−3, mysticism, 47, 71, 79, 108, 128, 157,
658, 671, 684−92, 699, 701, 718, 161, 168, 181, 316, 337, 461, 477,
720−1, 729, 746−7, 756, 763, 516−17, 536, 541, 550, 552, 563,
767−9 608, 623, 628, 648, 670, 672, 705,
monism, 55, 62−3, 74−5, 101, 109, 715, 755, 757−8, 774
122, 124, 129, 136, 403, 408, 453,
539−40, 542−3, 548, 558, 655, narrative, 7, 80−1, 85, 95, 97, 118,
660, 675, 691, 700 370, 463−5, 467, 469, 476, 481,
morality, 4, 14, 24−5, 32−3, 37, 54−5, 492−3, 497, 501−2, 506, 509, 514,
58−9, 65, 71−2, 74−5, 77−9, 81, 590−1, 595, 602, 760
85, 88, 90, 94, 103, 111−12, 128, nation, 7−8, 37−8, 51, 58, 60, 66−7,
144, 148, 155, 161, 197, 235, 69, 73, 78, 86−8, 97, 118, 127,
245, 247, 263−4, 268, 275, 316, 142, 144, 146, 151, 154, 156−8,
349−51, 359, 367, 371, 373−5, 164−71, 268, 333, 335, 343−4,
379, 392, 395−6, 398, 404, 407, 349−51, 358−61, 364, 369−70,
410−11, 414, 416, 419−20, 424, 376, 394, 430, 432, 445, 448−9,
449−50, 453−4, 456, 465, 470, 468, 499, 504, 509, 531, 565−6,
849
General Index
592, 609−10, 630, 695, 706, 708, 315−16, 319−20, 323−7, 329−30,
710−14, 716, 718, 722, 734−7, 332, 334−5, 337−9, 346−9,
742, 750−1, 753−4, 756, 759, 761, 352−62, 364−7, 370−1, 373−5,
763, 790−1, 803 377, 379−93, 396−8, 403, 405,
natural, 9, 14, 17−18, 24, 32, 44−7, 409−10, 414−16, 418−19, 422−8,
50, 55−9, 62, 64, 72, 74-75, 78, 81, 430, 432, 434−7, 445, 450−1,
95, 108, 112, 114, 116-117, 120, 453−8, 465−6, 473, 475, 479, 486,
127-129, 137-139, 166, 193, 196, 489−90, 496−7, 500, 502, 506−7,
201, 211, 224, 228, 230, 245, 248, 509, 514, 521, 524, 527, 530, 533,
253, 262, 267, 275−6, 282, 293, 535, 549−53, 555−7, 559, 565−6,
307, 309, 312−15, 318, 320−2, 570, 573, 576, 583, 586−7, 591−2,
324, 326, 328−30, 332−6, 338−40, 596−608, 611−13, 615−21, 623,
347, 349, 351−4, 358−63, 366−71, 629, 631−3, 635, 637, 639, 650,
374−5, 377−8, 381−2, 385, 387, 652, 654, 657, 659−61, 667−9,
389−92, 395−6, 399, 405, 407, 671−3, 675−9, 685−91, 694,
410−12, 419, 441, 445, 449−50, 696−8, 700−3, 705, 717, 732,
452, 454−6, 460, 466−7, 469, 737−9, 748, 756, 759
472−3, 477−9, 481, 484, 490, 507, necessary, 16−17, 20−2, 29−30, 32,
511−12, 514, 516, 533−4, 536, 34, 41−3, 62, 78, 102, 104−5, 111,
541−2, 564−5, 567, 574, 576, 582, 113, 115−16, 119, 124, 129, 134,
584−5, 587, 596−8, 600, 602−4, 137−8, 145, 155, 195, 202−3, 205,
606, 608, 610−11, 613, 615, 617, 208, 212, 214, 217−22, 226−9,
620, 623, 626, 631, 633, 635−7, 231−4, 239, 243−4, 248, 253,
646, 648−9, 655, 659−60, 669−72, 257−8, 261−2, 280, 283−4, 286,
674, 678, 681, 689, 695−7, 714, 289, 294, 297−9, 302−3, 306, 308,
737, 740, 743, 769, 772, 775 313, 320, 322, 332, 337, 345,
naturalism, 35, 40, 54, 61, 74, 79, 350−1, 357, 359, 363, 402, 422,
89, 117, 124, 127-129, 166, 279, 425−7, 432, 440, 443, 449−50,
306, 359, 367, 453, 511, 534, 551, 458−60, 498, 517, 521−2, 528−9,
554-556, 563-564, 568, 587, 589, 536, 539, 543−4, 551−2, 564, 578,
597-598, 600-603, 605, 629, 631, 581−2, 587−9, 592, 595−6, 598,
658-659, 666-670, 672, 675, 678- 619, 651, 655, 657−8, 660, 666,
680, 686, 695, 745 670, 672, 676, 685−7, 690, 704,
nature, 9, 32, 34−5, 40, 43, 53, 55, 711, 718, 722, 728, 730, 734,
57−8, 61, 72, 74−5, 81, 85, 113, 738−9, 747, 766, 770, 772
115−17, 123, 127−30, 136−41, necessity, 22, 29−30, 41, 74, 119,
166, 196, 200−1, 204−9, 226, 137, 158, 212, 214−15, 220, 233,
228−9, 232−3, 240, 248−9, 252−6, 237, 239, 256−7, 280, 283, 285,
262, 268, 270, 278−9, 285, 293, 298, 336, 339, 353, 367, 370,
298, 300−2, 305, 307−11, 313, 402−3, 406−8, 419, 424−5, 427−8,
850
General Index
448, 534, 573, 581, 587, 595, 599, 651−2, 655−7, 663, 668−70, 675,
612−13, 647, 667, 675, 686−8, 677, 682, 690−2, 696−7, 699,
697, 712, 718, 724, 730, 732, 702−5, 715, 724, 740, 742−5, 747,
746−8, 752, 757 756, 760, 763, 774
negation, 42, 57, 65, 104−5, 108−10, noumenon, 19, 221, 223, 230, 451
113, 129, 133−40, 183, 218−20, nullism, 364−5
234, 238−9, 251, 292−3, 349−50, number, 100−2, 205, 207, 219,
363−4, 379, 403, 405, 415−16, 224−6, 229, 242, 256, 259−60,
427, 473, 482, 493, 517, 524−9, 264−6, 280, 284, 301, 312, 317,
536, 538, 542−5, 549, 556−8, 572, 325, 338, 369, 374−5, 377, 390,
574−5, 579, 588, 591, 594, 596, 405, 410, 421, 425, 428, 452, 456,
599, 612, 615−17, 620−1, 626, 479, 505, 517−18, 522−3, 525,
640, 652, 660, 671, 675−6, 678−9, 528, 538, 543, 569, 600, 613, 629,
684−90, 692, 694, 704, 711, 731, 633, 669, 678−9, 687, 689−90,
735, 746 694, 707, 715, 734, 747−8, 750,
newspaper, 3−4, 37, 49, 60, 483, 734, 755
751, 765, 774, 777
nominalism, 15, 55, 176−7, 269, 276, object, 14−22, 28−35, 39, 41, 44,
377, 602, 658, 687 61, 63, 70, 74−5, 78−83, 94−9,
non-being, 114, 136, 525−7, 532, 107−8, 120−5, 133−4, 139−40,
539, 543, 545, 549, 557−9, 571−2, 195−8, 209−33, 236, 238−57,
574−5, 578, 581, 616, 692, 260, 283−91, 294−5, 303−6, 309,
699−701 324−7, 346−8, 353, 355, 357,
nothing, 29, 32, 61−3, 65, 73−4, 84, 359, 363, 366−7, 375, 402−9, 452,
86−7, 90, 95, 98, 101−2, 108−11, 465−70, 487−500, 506−7, 510−14,
114, 116, 123, 139, 141, 155, 516, 518, 523, 531, 534−6, 553,
160, 166, 170, 204−8, 214, 217, 556, 558, 570, 579, 585, 587, 594,
219−21, 223, 230, 236, 238−9, 599, 610, 617, 638, 645−6, 649,
241, 245−6, 248, 250−1, 254−8, 651−5, 658, 661−4, 667, 673−4,
261−2, 271, 279, 281−3, 287, 683−4, 690−1, 696−7, 699−702,
289−90, 292, 294−5, 298, 300, 704, 740, 760
303−5, 323, 327, 332−3, 336, 345, objectifying, 570, 699, 741
348−53, 357, 361−4, 366−8, 374, objectivity, 12, 15−16, 20−2, 28−9,
378, 383, 393, 397, 403, 408, 412, 35, 39, 41, 44, 55, 79−81, 120−1,
416−18, 422−7, 430, 434−7, 446, 128, 133−4, 137, 139, 197−8,
449, 451−2, 464, 477−9, 485, 502, 202−6, 213−15, 219−23, 226−33,
511, 514, 525, 530, 536, 538, 540, 237, 240−3, 248−50, 252, 267,
543−6, 556, 558, 560, 562−3, 576, 284, 293−5, 303−6, 310, 324, 346,
583−5, 591, 593, 597, 600, 606−7, 367, 384, 386, 390, 407, 410,
610, 614−18, 623, 625−6, 646−7, 420, 464−7, 497, 512, 526, 544,
851
General Index
564, 570−2, 581−2, 595, 601, 613, 672−3, 684, 686, 689−90, 692−3,
646−7, 653−4, 662, 664, 683−4, 697−8, 704, 712, 723−4, 726, 736,
688−91, 696, 715, 740−1, 747, 756 739−40, 755, 759, 772
observation, 18, 38, 46, 53, 56−7,
59, 62, 64, 75, 97, 212, 232, 249, painting, 96−7, 387, 494−5, 497,
254, 269, 271, 281, 291, 314, 500, 509−10, 573, 587, 591, 594,
316, 319, 321, 324−31, 339, 365, 609, 613
372, 376, 378−9, 383−4, 386−90, panlogicism, 116, 532, 614−15, 619,
393, 403, 407, 410, 412, 419, 437, 639
452, 454−5, 464, 480, 487−8, 495, pantheism, 25, 37, 40, 48−9, 55, 66,
500−1, 504, 507, 510, 513, 521, 68−9, 180, 250, 253, 264−9, 272,
534, 540, 552, 560, 598−9, 604, 274−6, 279−81, 288−9, 298−302,
608, 612, 615, 622, 650, 654, 658, 306, 308, 357−8, 363, 372, 374,
678, 688, 715, 723, 730, 745, 755, 382, 390, 418−19, 421−3, 425,
760 427, 562, 579, 628
ontologism, 50, 275−6, 281, 285, papacy, 25, 38, 45, 50, 69, 88, 164,
302−3, 310, 323, 345−8 269, 277, 400, 465, 720
ontology, 40, 43−4, 50, 63, 84, 109, paradox, 21, 33−4, 319, 588, 627, 745
254, 272, 275−82, 284−5, 290, paralogism, 301, 739
295, 302−6, 308, 310, 320, 322−3, participation, 286, 360, 383, 419,
325−6, 331, 337, 345−8, 366, 424, 705
419−20, 445−6, 536, 625, 693 particular, 15, 22, 28, 30−1, 41,
opinion, 338, 349, 411, 496, 557, 62, 82−3, 95, 99−102, 105, 108,
720, 724, 731, 738, 745, 771 116, 127, 136−40, 144, 194, 202,
opposite, 70, 101−5, 108−16, 124, 217−18, 222, 234, 238, 250,
136, 145, 183, 235, 254, 267, 310, 257−61, 292, 314, 319, 322, 326,
346, 382, 405, 524−9, 534−58, 332, 336, 347, 357, 379, 383,
562−3, 566−78, 582, 584, 586, 398, 408, 434, 441, 459, 466, 469,
588, 603, 616−17, 619, 622, 626, 472−3, 479, 488, 490, 492, 494,
632, 658, 697, 700, 711 509, 514, 516, 520−3, 529, 531,
opposition, 71, 82, 104−5, 108−10, 536−8, 543, 550, 555, 560, 565,
112, 118, 136−7, 150, 155, 568, 570, 572−615, 645−8, 656−7,
290, 352−4, 405, 408, 448, 468, 662, 670−1, 687−90, 698, 702,
523−30, 538−43, 557, 577, 612, 704, 709−10, 718−20, 725, 728,
626, 632, 646, 690, 698, 752, 768 730−2, 736−41, 745−6, 750, 758,
overcome (aufheben), 110, 141, 763, 773
145, 344, 358, 367, 471, 476, passion, 14, 65, 195, 203, 375−7,
516, 523, 540, 542, 547, 553−4, 384, 389, 393−5, 416, 516, 560,
557−8, 560, 566, 571−2, 574, 585, 565−6, 594, 599, 604−5, 703, 706,
614, 617−18, 622, 658, 666−7, 724, 753, 756−7
852
General Index
passivity, 14, 28, 43−4, 108, 110, 121, 551, 563, 650, 652, 737, 739−40,
138−9, 148, 151, 195, 203, 216, 770, 775
228, 238, 246, 528, 538, 572, 616, pessimism, 94−5, 139, 155, 182, 540,
650−1, 721, 728, 730 558, 755
past, 15, 33, 80−2, 97, 115, 128, phenomenon, 21, 38, 56−8, 83, 116,
133−6, 141, 153, 157, 167−71, 127, 206−7, 213−14, 229−30, 236,
198−200, 206, 252, 272, 345, 372, 252, 271, 314, 319, 325, 327,
394−5, 464, 466, 468, 501, 506, 330, 332, 335−6, 351, 358, 376−7,
588, 603, 612, 638, 654, 658, 671, 379, 383, 387−8, 390, 407, 409,
684−6, 691, 693, 699, 703, 707, 415−16, 419, 422−3, 436, 448−50,
709, 716, 721−4, 728, 736, 754−5, 452, 469, 474−6, 488−9, 504,
759−60 556−7, 581, 585, 596, 604, 656,
patriotism, 5, 24, 36, 64, 143, 165, 668, 725, 729
168−9, 709 phenomenology, 3, 31, 48, 123, 156,
pedagogy, 77, 118, 120, 131, 151, 535, 546, 554, 566, 575−6, 580−1,
476, 518, 581, 584, 633, 651, 583, 585, 587, 599, 613, 625, 629−
717−19, 742 30, 632, 653, 655−6, 674, 677, 793
perception, 14−16, 18, 20, 31, 33−5, philology, 54, 64, 67, 71−2, 80, 351,
39, 43, 61−3, 108, 195−6, 198−9, 366, 369, 392, 395, 397, 400, 413,
201−2, 204−5, 209−15, 221, 223, 417, 435−7, 441−2, 454, 456, 460,
230−3, 237, 241−3, 247−8, 254, 462, 464−6, 533, 564, 593
260, 282−3, 285, 288, 290−2, 301, philosophy of praxis, 79, 118−25,
303−6, 324, 328, 357, 367, 402−4, 148, 151−2, 160, 642−64, 726−8,
407, 411, 422, 434, 442, 449, 456, 736−45, 748, 751, 767, 769,
497, 524, 536, 556, 560, 571, 588, 772−3, 777
597, 622−3, 673−5, 748 physical, 15, 81, 83, 90, 101, 109,
perennial, 50, 338, 349, 372, 667 116, 119, 123−4, 127, 129, 131,
perfect, 79, 200, 238, 273, 284, 166, 202, 213, 220, 222−3, 234,
330, 337, 357, 366, 389, 418−19, 263, 296, 313−14, 317, 320, 326,
423−6, 433, 438, 468, 490, 499, 330, 338, 351, 399, 419−20, 438,
506, 514−15, 541, 643, 652, 442, 450, 457, 489, 519, 584,
687−8, 719, 746 595, 605, 610−12, 615, 618, 620,
personality, 56, 64, 103, 123, 161, 645−6, 656, 668, 677, 702, 737,
307, 346−8, 356−8, 363, 373, 408, 740, 742, 748, 752
413, 418−19, 460, 467, 479−80, physics, 54, 73, 197, 307, 314, 319,
488, 492, 496, 524, 593, 595, 618, 323, 327, 329, 331, 341, 352, 372,
679, 699, 703−4, 707, 721, 727, 377, 383, 395−6, 438, 449, 485,
733, 735, 775 507−8, 519, 552, 599, 601−5, 608,
perspective, 81−2, 97, 120, 254, 280, 611−12, 620, 635−7, 668, 742
334, 346, 424, 467, 490, 497, 506, physiognomy, 402, 634
853
General Index
physiology, 80, 116, 371, 382, 399, 461, 468−9, 474, 479, 483, 503−4,
403, 408, 464, 489, 501, 507, 512, 506, 562−3, 587, 605, 607−8, 611,
542, 605−6, 608, 611−12, 646, 617, 620−2, 632, 635, 637, 668,
668, 670, 679 670, 682, 695, 740, 745
poetry, 15, 24, 46, 60, 64, 75, 90, practice, 7, 15, 37, 52, 55−9, 62,
96−7, 115, 156−7, 198, 266, 318, 70, 72, 74, 79−85, 91, 93, 98−9,
341, 347, 361−2, 372, 378, 384, 103, 107, 114, 119, 122, 139−40,
387, 395, 397, 403−4, 412, 417, 148, 151−2, 155−6, 159, 161, 198,
426, 431, 453, 461, 464, 479, 228, 264, 266, 268, 278, 281−2,
482−3, 488, 490, 493−4, 496−7, 285, 302, 306, 310, 314, 316−19,
499, 505, 509−11, 514−15, 519, 323−8, 331−2, 334, 339−40, 352,
526, 529, 534−5, 541−2, 545, 552, 360, 362, 378, 389, 391, 393, 404,
566, 568, 570−1, 573, 585−8, 590, 411, 419, 441−3, 447, 450, 457,
594, 597, 605, 609, 613, 616, 624, 464, 477, 479, 488, 499, 502, 505,
633−4, 682, 689, 698−9, 744−5, 514, 516, 519, 523−4, 531−2, 535,
751, 754, 757 572, 574, 576, 582−3, 597−9, 601,
politics, 3−6, 9, 12, 24, 26, 28, 36−9, 613, 632, 635, 647−8, 653−5, 663,
47, 49, 51−5, 58, 60−1, 66−70, 680, 690, 709, 715, 724, 726,
78−81, 84−6, 88, 90, 106, 119, 728−30, 732, 734, 741−4, 746−8,
122, 124, 142−9, 152−5, 158−61, 751−2, 754−6, 760, 763, 769−70,
163, 165, 167−9, 171, 173, 234, 773
264−5, 267−9, 276, 331, 341, pragmatism, 6, 58, 117−18, 744
350−1, 359, 388−9, 394, 399, praktri, 279, 310
417, 445, 465, 469, 476, 481, praxis, 79, 119−26, 148−52, 160,
483−4, 499, 503−4, 507, 509, 519, 573, 623, 642−3, 645−51, 653−5,
561−2, 565, 601, 609, 628, 630, 657−61, 663, 726−8, 736−7,
642−3, 659, 664, 666, 680, 706−8, 739−43, 745, 747−8, 751, 767,
710−16, 723−4, 727−9, 731−2, 769, 772−3, 777
734−5, 741, 746−7, 749−51, Primacy (Primato), 4−5, 8, 36−9, 47,
753−4, 759−60, 763−4, 767−70, 50, 168, 177, 264−77, 609
773, 775−7 Prime (principle), 264, 275, 277,
pope, 25−6, 37−8, 45, 47, 69, 156, 279−82, 290, 292, 367
164−6, 263, 269, 352, 354, 400, prolusione, 49−51, 53, 60, 73, 78, 127,
446, 564, 749−50 170, 399, 445, 627, 640
positivism, 6, 47, 51, 53−4, 56−7, 59, prose, 95−6, 159−60, 318, 485, 491,
61, 66−7, 73−6, 78, 80, 83, 85−6, 496−7, 570−1, 587, 765
88, 90−1, 93, 117−19, 126−8, 150, protology, 37, 183, 264, 275−7, 348
165−6, 178, 330, 334, 336, 366, providence, 5, 71, 81, 127, 273,
371−9, 381−5, 387, 389, 391−3, 359−62, 374, 399, 437, 444, 467,
395−400, 447−9, 451−3, 455−9, 565, 668, 761
854
General Index
psychologism, 37, 40, 43−4, 52, 272, 498, 510, 554, 564, 695, 711, 760
276, 281, 284−5, 295, 302−4, 345, rationality, 131, 160−1, 313, 435,
367 522−3, 560, 606, 647, 657−8, 679,
psychology, 12−15, 18, 28, 32, 37−40, 681, 730, 733, 738, 740, 747−8,
54, 57−9, 68−70, 77−8, 83−6, 765, 774
94−6, 114, 123, 129, 138, 193−6, reaction (historical), 24−6, 45, 47,
200, 213, 231, 234−5, 263, 270−1, 145, 154, 158, 165, 372, 402, 561,
275−85, 290, 292, 295, 303−10, 566−7, 569, 597, 609, 666, 710,
316, 319, 325, 332, 335−7, 359, 718−19, 727
361−8, 384, 394−5, 399, 454, 467, realism, 5, 21, 37, 55, 61−6, 71, 122,
474−8, 481, 483, 487, 492, 494−7, 125, 127, 161, 229, 267, 269−70,
500−1, 504, 506, 508, 512, 514, 274, 276, 365, 377, 401−12,
519, 569, 574, 586, 590, 601, 608, 415−16, 511−12, 661, 669, 680,
613, 618, 620, 653, 656, 668, 670, 687, 696−7, 736, 772
676, 679, 682, 688, 759 recirculation, 48−51
regulative, 79, 148, 240, 328, 747,
quality, 21, 64−5, 151, 196, 202−3, 760
205, 215, 217−20, 224, 227−8, religion, 24, 28, 36−8, 59, 64, 69,
230, 238, 246, 249, 259, 281, 318, 85, 97, 114, 119−22, 127−8, 131,
327, 332, 360, 388, 414, 416, 419, 144−6, 149, 151−66, 188, 193,
425, 468, 567, 613, 617, 626, 702, 245, 247, 266, 268, 274−6, 280,
729, 741−2, 756, 760, 765−6 301, 340, 350, 352−3, 356, 362,
quantification, 73−4, 77, 448, 553, 364−5, 389−91, 393, 398, 400,
556, 626, 694 404, 409, 414−15, 434, 443, 449,
quantity, 151, 217−18, 220, 225−8, 451, 455, 457, 461, 467, 470,
234, 238, 241−2, 249, 375, 425, 473−4, 481, 497, 499, 507, 553,
448, 456, 582, 612−13, 621, 741−2 563−4, 570, 574, 581, 587−8,
590, 601, 608−9, 611, 618, 624,
racism, 156, 168, 638, 761, 778 633, 639, 645−8, 653−4, 666, 668,
railroads, 25, 165, 381 670−1, 700−1, 705, 707, 709,
rational, 18, 32, 74, 108, 111, 125, 714−15, 717−25, 727, 730, 732−6,
166, 209−10, 234, 243, 261, 267, 739, 742, 746, 750, 754, 757−8,
289−90, 307, 312, 318, 324, 330, 761, 763, 769−70, 774−5
332−3, 350, 365, 532, 557−8, 561− representation, 20, 28−9, 33, 44,
3, 565, 567, 591−3, 599, 611, 630, 81, 85, 88, 95−100, 105−8, 114,
648, 657, 660, 674−5, 677, 699, 138−9, 141, 144, 183, 207,
701, 724−5, 731−2, 741, 747, 772 214−15, 217−18, 221−7, 229−32,
rationalism, 37−8, 93−4, 96, 145, 236−7, 239−43, 251, 269, 282−4,
266, 270, 272, 276, 321, 328, 290, 297−8, 303−4, 307, 309, 345,
330−1, 335−7, 352, 487, 495−6, 350, 352, 357, 361, 366, 368,
855
General Index
403−6, 415, 432, 445, 463−4, 466, scholasticism, 6, 18, 26, 37, 62, 87,
469−70, 476, 478−9, 481, 484, 149−50, 164−6, 189, 269, 317−18,
487, 490−2, 494−502, 506, 509, 321, 333, 353−4, 357−8, 377−8,
512, 517, 523, 529−32, 536, 541, 380−4, 388, 393−4, 396−8, 409,
545, 548, 557, 569, 574, 586−7, 412, 569, 579, 586, 591, 647, 656,
592, 594−6, 599, 603, 611, 619, 696, 719, 743, 746
622, 632, 634, 644−5, 647, 650, scientism, 156, 182
662, 668, 673−4, 678, 680, 693, Scotism, 272
696−8, 703, 706, 710, 713, 721, secular, 9, 25, 87, 118, 161, 165, 269,
728, 746−8, 756, 767 399−400
republic, 11, 25, 69−70, 83, 267−8, seminary, 49, 168, 629
432−4, 438, 472, 477, 565, 630, sensation, 9, 14, 16, 19, 28−9,
633, 669, 753, 758, 775 31−4, 38, 121, 123, 140, 174,
revelation, 41−2, 108, 266, 274, 276, 194−6, 199−202, 211, 215−19,
290, 295, 307, 348, 355−6, 362, 221, 223−4, 226−30, 236−7, 243,
390, 705, 774 245−8, 252, 254, 257, 259−62,
revisionism, 160, 763−4, 767−8, 776 271, 288, 291, 323−4, 374, 449,
revolution, 4, 8, 11, 25, 36, 45, 47, 454, 474−5, 515, 623, 633, 653,
50, 56−7, 60, 65, 82, 85, 87, 111, 656, 668, 702, 736
121, 149, 157−8, 167, 193−4, 234, sense, 9, 14−17, 27−9, 31−5, 38, 62,
277, 347, 378, 385, 394−6, 398, 83, 123, 129, 134−5, 140, 147−52,
481, 509, 552, 561, 564, 569, 647, 160, 164, 194−201, 209−16, 220,
655, 660, 663−4, 708, 725, 751, 223−4, 229−30, 237−42, 247−9,
754, 757, 777 252−4, 256, 259, 262, 269−73,
rhetoric, 19, 73, 81, 146, 170, 439, 286−8, 291, 301, 315−19, 325,
444, 446, 465, 480, 485, 497, 502, 328−32, 335−9, 352−7, 360−2,
587, 613, 714, 744, 769 368, 402, 404, 407, 412, 424,
Romantic, 36, 46, 70, 145, 156, 164, 426, 433, 454, 480, 489−90, 509,
417, 496, 510, 532, 554, 564, 584, 541, 549−50, 565, 570, 581,
587, 610−11, 623, 628, 630, 636, 585, 603, 606, 612−13, 617,
760 646, 652, 655−8, 661, 668, 671,
674−8, 701−5, 709, 716, 720−8,
scepticism, 18−20, 33, 35, 40, 44, 52, 732, 735−8, 743−4, 747−8, 765;
73, 75, 87, 90, 101, 130, 132, 211, common sense, 27, 32, 34−5, 38,
246, 248−51, 272, 283−5, 294, 134−5, 147−52, 160, 164, 166,
301, 312, 316, 324, 337−8, 346, 247−8, 262, 271, 315−17, 328,
353−4, 356, 364−5, 367−8, 390, 335−9, 368, 480, 606, 720, 722−8,
393, 396, 399, 409, 451, 508, 516, 732, 735−8, 743−4, 765; good
549, 577, 579, 608, 624, 677, 683, sense, 147−52, 160, 273, 541, 668,
692, 700, 739, 745 720−4, 737−8, 747−8, 765
856
General Index
sensibility, 14−16, 22, 195−6, 198, 248, 316, 328, 451, 457, 473, 549,
200−1, 215−17, 221, 224−5, 228, 608, 719, 725, 754
237−8, 240−1, 249, 270, 317, 655 soul, 10, 14, 32−3, 68, 114, 141,
sensible, 31, 38, 44, 93−4, 111, 115, 194−5, 198, 200−3, 218−19,
123−4, 128, 196, 211, 215−17, 236−8, 241, 246, 254, 261−3, 272,
221, 224−6, 228, 230, 233, 236−7, 274, 310, 349, 351, 353, 355,
240−2, 247, 249, 254, 260, 271, 358−9, 363, 373, 383, 386, 397,
285−7, 291, 293, 307−9, 314, 337, 402−5, 407, 411, 415, 418−20,
339, 346, 376, 387, 391, 426, 425−6, 433, 513, 557, 559−60,
487−8, 545, 551, 556, 585, 588, 566, 569, 574, 613, 666, 668−9,
612, 645−6, 651, 653−60, 663−4, 679, 681, 698−9, 703, 705−6, 708,
673−4, 703 715, 725, 753, 755
sensism, 7−9, 23−4, 28−9, 33, 37−8, Spirit, 93, 99, 103, 107, 113−17,
45−6, 48, 61, 63, 109, 126, 166−7, 121−2, 125−32, 136−41, 151, 155,
174, 248, 252, 256, 269−72, 276, 157, 165−70, 344−9, 355−69,
285, 287, 301, 324, 335, 337, 373, 419, 426−7, 451, 454, 456, 496,
402, 411, 474, 507, 539, 562, 570, 510, 516, 518−21, 524−5, 529,
581, 597 531−2, 535, 537, 550, 553−63,
sensory, 14−15, 18−22, 41, 121−3, 566−87, 591−5, 601, 610, 613−23,
129, 140, 248, 252, 254, 282, 285, 626, 633−6, 639, 652−6, 659−61,
291, 646−8, 653, 655−6, 673−4 666−81, 685, 690, 692, 695−705,
sensual, 92−4, 96, 404, 432, 487, 740, 742, 753, 755, 769, 773
498, 539 squadrons, 144, 158, 708
sentiment, 60, 63−4, 145, 156, 402, state (physical, metaphysical, moral),
404, 409−11, 493, 497, 510, 541, 14, 29, 43, 46, 51, 64, 84−5, 158,
564, 597−8, 608, 611, 613, 622, 200, 208−9, 216, 218, 236, 284,
662 291, 297, 304, 307, 315−16, 360,
slavery, 83, 85, 137, 149, 378, 365, 367, 375−7, 382, 390, 402−4,
469−70, 472, 560, 565, 717−19, 412, 414, 426, 461, 464, 467, 469,
749, 754 475, 478, 480−1, 493, 531, 536,
socialism, 4, 78−9, 84, 118−19, 147, 545, 548, 567, 574, 586, 603, 644,
473, 476−7, 479, 483, 561, 620, 651, 654, 685, 723, 728, 731, 742,
640, 642, 662, 669, 706−7, 710, 745, 759, 762, 766, 770, 773
720, 750, 754, 761 state (political), 51, 85, 114, 144−5,
sociology, 73, 80−5, 127, 149−50, 149, 151, 157−8, 160, 169, 267,
448−9, 453, 463, 468−77, 479, 349−52, 358, 361, 408, 460, 476,
482, 507−8, 590, 609, 734, 739, 479, 561−5, 574−5, 580, 594, 600,
745, 751 610, 614, 630, 632, 706−10, 719,
solipsism, 137, 148, 689, 704, 747−8 734, 742, 746, 753−4, 757−9, 763,
sophism, 9, 23, 35, 149, 157, 164, 767, 775
857
General Index
style, 321, 333, 546, 720, 765 427, 448, 453, 486, 517, 541, 551,
subaltern, 730, 750 556−7, 560, 568, 578, 605, 609,
subject, 15, 20−1, 28−9, 35, 40, 612, 615, 618, 657, 671, 677, 694,
72, 78, 81, 84, 121, 123−4, 132, 699, 714, 776
135−7, 140, 194, 197−8, 202−6, supernatural, 37, 50, 86, 111, 166,
209, 213, 215, 218−20, 227, 177, 352−4, 366, 437, 556−7, 670
229−35, 238, 240, 243, 249−50, superstition, 150−1, 376, 391, 654,
253−6, 282, 299, 301, 304, 307, 714, 720, 736, 745, 769
312−13, 316, 318, 320−1, 324, syllogism, 50, 75, 149, 194, 243, 289,
327, 333, 338, 355, 366−7, 369, 320, 326, 407, 449, 537, 574, 582,
371, 373−4, 385, 388, 391, 395, 589, 603, 612−13, 634
400, 404, 407, 409, 413, 423−4, syndicalism, 79, 106
436, 446, 449, 464−5, 475, 477,
479−80, 503, 511, 517, 532, 537, theism, 24, 279, 566, 618
548, 551, 553, 557, 570, 578, theocosm, 275, 277
585, 587, 610, 612, 615, 618, 638, theology, 10−11, 14, 18, 23−4, 32,
651−3, 658, 661, 667, 677, 684−5, 36−7, 56, 68, 87−8, 121, 149, 160,
688−90, 696−7, 703−4, 717, 759, 165−6, 193, 257, 263, 275, 277,
772 298−9, 310, 318, 350, 353−6, 376,
subjectivity, 13, 15, 19−22, 29, 35, 399−400, 421, 464−6, 503, 554,
38−9, 44, 46, 81, 121, 125, 140, 597, 618, 628, 634, 645, 672, 739,
197−8, 204, 213−21, 224−33, 237, 749, 752, 761, 768−9
240−1, 248−50, 252, 271, 288−9, tradition, 50, 84, 148−9, 170−1,
294−5, 306, 316, 324, 332, 367, 273−4, 343−5, 368, 445, 447, 456,
381, 386, 420, 443, 449, 454, 459, 460, 478, 492, 648, 704, 707, 709,
463, 467, 478, 512, 544, 547, 553, 715, 738, 758
564, 570, 574, 578, 594, 601−2, tragedy, 97, 493, 500, 558, 609
613, 646, 648−9, 653, 655, 661, transcendence, 14, 19−21, 23, 29,
668, 674, 696, 699−700, 737 35, 71−2, 78, 84, 117, 129, 138,
subsistence, 28−9, 31, 34, 202, 206, 140− 1, 149, 155, 157, 160, 166,
255−6, 258, 260, 262, 280, 284−8, 194, 212−14, 216−17, 221−4, 226,
290, 297, 303, 309, 311, 347, 408 229− 33, 236−9, 243, 249−51, 253,
substance, 14−16, 21, 33, 41, 43, 57, 332, 336, 345, 366−8, 443, 478,
73, 77, 129, 141, 196, 200, 202−3, 536, 553, 555, 560, 563, 577−8,
206, 208, 219−20, 227−30, 237, 618−19, 645, 657, 661, 676, 691,
239, 243, 247−8, 250, 252, 268−9, 696−7, 700, 739, 746, 756, 768−9,
274−5, 279−80, 282, 288−9, 291, 774
297−9, 301, 304, 308, 310, 318, transcendental aesthetic, 216−17,
336, 346−7, 356−8, 361, 367, 237−8
377−9, 384, 404−5, 422−3, 425, transcendental analytic, 238
858
General Index
859