Riot Days Maria Alyokhina download

https://ebookbell.com/product/riot-days-maria-alyokhina-7319420

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Riot Days Maria Alyokhina Alyokhina Maria

https://ebookbell.com/product/riot-days-maria-alyokhina-alyokhina-
maria-35428402

May Days In Hong Kong Riot And Emergency In 1967 1st Edition Robert
Bickers Ray Yep

https://ebookbell.com/product/may-days-in-hong-kong-riot-and-
emergency-in-1967-1st-edition-robert-bickers-ray-yep-51693926

The Twelve Days Of Christian Stellar Riot Christmas Caroline Corvin

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-twelve-days-of-christian-stellar-
riot-christmas-caroline-corvin-88163248

The Twelve Days Of Christian Stellar Riot Christmas Caroline Corvin

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-twelve-days-of-christian-stellar-
riot-christmas-caroline-corvin-88163282
The Year Of Dangerous Days Riots Refugees And Cocaine In Miami 1980
Nicholas Griffin

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-year-of-dangerous-days-riots-
refugees-and-cocaine-in-miami-1980-nicholas-griffin-11640990

The Year Of Dangerous Days Riots Refugees And Cocaine In Miami 1980
Nicholas Griffin

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-year-of-dangerous-days-riots-
refugees-and-cocaine-in-miami-1980-nicholas-griffin-62339734

Root Double Before Crime After Days After Souki Tora Tsukishima

https://ebookbell.com/product/root-double-before-crime-after-days-
after-souki-tora-tsukishima-231592968

Root Double Before Crime After Days Vol 1 Light Novel Souki Tsukishima
Tora Tsukishima Yeti Regista

https://ebookbell.com/product/root-double-before-crime-after-days-
vol-1-light-novel-souki-tsukishima-tora-tsukishima-yeti-
regista-37273654

Days Of National Festivity In Rio De Janeiro Brazil 18231889 Hendrik

Kraay

https://ebookbell.com/product/days-of-national-festivity-in-rio-de-
janeiro-brazil-18231889-hendrik-kraay-51930470
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 The Project Gutenberg eBook of The
Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and
Ethic
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic

Author: Benedetto Croce

Translator: Douglas Ainslie

Release date: June 19, 2017 [eBook #54938]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature (online soon

in an extended version, also linking to free sources for
education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational materials,...)
Images generously made available by the Internet Archive.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHILOSOPHY

OF THE PRACTICAL: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC ***
PHILOSOPHY OF THE
PRACTICAL
ECONOMIC AND ETHIC
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN OF
 BENEDETTO CROCE
BY

DOUGLAS AINSLIE

B.A. (OXON.), M.R.A.S.

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1913

Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit, in the English translation by Douglas Ainslie,
consists of 4 volumes (which can be read separately):
1. Aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic. (Second augmented edition.
A first ed. is also available at Project Gutenberg.)
2. Philosophy of the practical: economic and ethic.
3. Logic as the science of the pure concept.
4. Theory and history of historiography.
Transcriber's note.

Contents

NOTE

Certain chapters only of the third part of this book were anticipated
in the study entitled Reduction of the Philosophy of Law to the
Philosophy of Economy, read before the Accademia Pontaniana of
Naples at the sessions of April 21 and May 5, 1907 (Acts, vol.
xxxvii.); but I have remodelled them, amplifying certain pages and
summarizing others. The concept of economic activity as an
autonomous form of the spirit, which receives systematic treatment
in the second part of the book, was first maintained in certain
essays, composed from 1897 to 1900, and afterwards collected in
the volume Historical Materialism and Marxist Economy (2nd edition,
Palermo, Sandron, 1907).
B. C.
NAPLES,
19th April 1908.

TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

"A noi sembra che l' opera del Croce sia lo sforzo più potente che il
pensiero italiano abbia compiuto negli ultimi anni."—G. de Ruggiero in
La Filosofia contemporanea, 1912.
"Il sistema di Benedetto Croce rimane la più alta conquista del
pensiero contemporaneo."—G. Natoli in La Voce, 19th December
1912.

Those acquainted with my translation of Benedetto Croce's Æsthetic

as Science of Expression and General Linguistic will not need to be
informed of the importance of this philosopher's thought, potent in
its influence upon criticism, upon philosophy and upon life, and
famous throughout Europe.
In the Italian, this volume is the third and last of the Philosophy of
the Spirit, Logic as Science of the Pure Concept coming second in
date of publication. But apart from the fact that philosophy is like a
moving circle, which can be entered equally well at any point, I have
preferred to place this volume before the Logic in the hands of
British readers. Great Britain has long been a country where moral
values are highly esteemed; we are indeed experts in the practice,
though perhaps not in the theory of morality, a lacuna which I
believe this book will fill.
In saying that we are experts in moral practice I do not, of course,
refer to the narrow conventional morality, also common with us,
which so often degenerates into hypocrisy, a legacy of Puritan origin;
but apart from this, there has long existed in many millions of
Britons a strong desire to live well, or, as they put it, cleanly and
rightly, and achieved by many, independent of any close or profound
examination of the logical foundation of this desire. Theology has for
some taken the place of pure thought, while for others, early
training on religious lines has been sufficiently strong to dominate
other tendencies in practical life. Yet, as a speculative Scotsman, I
am proud to think that we can claim divided honours with Germany
in the production of Emmanuel Kant (or Cant).
The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed with us a great
development of materialism in its various forms. The psychological,
anti-historical speculation contained in the so-called Synthetic
Philosophy (really psychology) of Herbert Spencer was but one of
the many powerful influences abroad, tending to divert youthful
minds from the true path of knowledge. This writer, indeed, made
himself notorious by his attitude of contemptuous intolerance and
ignorance of the work previously done in connection with subjects
which he was investigating. He accepted little but the evidence of his
own senses and judgment, as though he were the first philosopher.
But time has now taken its revenge, and modern criticism has
exposed the Synthetic Philosophy in all its barren and rigid
inadequacy and ineffectuality. Spencer tries to force Life into a brass
bottle of his own making, but the genius will not go into his bottle.
The names and writings of J. S. Mill, of Huxley, and of Bain are, with
many others of lesser calibre, a potent aid to the dissolving influence
of Spencer. Thanks to their efforts, the spirit of man was lost sight of
so completely that I can well remember hearing Kant's great
discovery of the synthesis a priori described as moonshine, and Kant
himself, with his categoric imperative, as little better than a Prussian
policeman. As for Hegel, the great completer and developer of
Kantian thought, his philosophy was generally in even less esteem
among the youth; and we find even the contemplative Walter Pater
passing him by with a polite apology for shrinking from his chilly
heights. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that estimable
Kantians and Hegelians did not exist here and there throughout the
kingdom in late Victorian days (the names of Stirling, of Caird, and
of Green at once occur to the mind); but they had not sufficient
genius to make their voices heard above the hubbub of the
laboratory. We all believed that the natural scientists had taken the
measure of the universe, could tot it up to a T—and consequently
turned a deaf ear to other appeals.
Elsewhere in Europe Hartmann, Haeckel, and others were busy
measuring the imagination and putting fancy into the melting-pot—
they offered us the chemical equivalent of the wings of Aurora. We
believed them, believed those materialists, those treacherous neo-
Kantians, perverters of their master's doctrine, who waited for
guileless youth with mask and rapier at the corner of every thicket.
Such as escaped this ambush were indeed fortunate if they shook
themselves free of Schopenhauer, the (personally) comfortable
philosopher of suicide and despair, and fell into the arms of the last
and least of the Teutonic giants, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
spasmodic paragraphs, full of genius but often empty of philosophy,
show him to have been far more of a poet than a philosopher. It was
indeed a doleful period of transition for those unfortunate enough to
have been born into it: we really did believe that life had little or
nothing to offer, or that we were all Overmen (a mutually exclusive
proposition!), and had only to assert ourselves in order to prove it.
To the writings of Pater I have already referred, and of them it may
justly be said that they are often supremely beautiful, with the
quality and cadence of great verse, but mostly (save perhaps the
volume on Plato and Platonism, by which he told the present writer
that he hoped to live) instinct with a profound scepticism, that
revelled in the externals of Roman Catholicism, but refrained from
crossing the threshold which leads to the penetralia of the creed.
Ruskin also we knew, and he too has a beautiful and fresh vein of
poetry, particularly where free from irrational dogmatism upon Ethic
and Æsthetic. But we found him far inferior to Pater in depth and
suggestiveness, and almost devoid of theoretical capacity. Sesame
for all its Lilies is no Open Sesame to the secrets of the world. Thus,
wandering in the obscure forest, it is little to be wondered that we
did not anticipate the flood of light to be shed upon us as we
crossed the threshold of the twentieth century.
It was an accident that took me to Naples in 1909, and the accident
of reading a number of La Critica, as I have described in the
introduction to the Æsthetic, that brought me in contact with the
thought of Benedetto Croce. But it was not only the Æsthetic, it was
also the purely critical work of the philosopher that appeared to me
at once of so great importance. To read Hegel, for instance, after
reading Croce's study of him, is a very different experience (at least
so I found it) to reading him before so doing.
Hegel is an author most deeply stimulative and suggestive, but any
beginner is well to take advantage of all possible aid in the difficult
study.
To bring this thought of Hegel within the focus of the ordinary mind
has never been an easy task (I know of no one else who has
successfully accomplished it); and Croce's work, What is living and
what is dead of the Philosophy of Hegel, as one may render the
Italian title of the book which I hope to translate, has enormously
aided a just comprehension, both of the qualities and the defects of
that philosopher. This work appeared in the Italian not long after the
Æsthetic, and has had an influence upon the minds of contemporary
Italians, second only to the Philosophy of the Spirit. To clear away
the débris of Hegel, his false conception of art and of religion, to
demonstrate his erroneous application of his own great discovery of
the dialectic to pseudo-concepts, and thus to reveal it in its full
splendour, has been one of the most valuable of Croce's inestimable
contributions to critical thought.
I shall not pause here to dilate upon the immense achievement of
Croce, the youngest of Italian senators, a recognition of his
achievement by his King and country, but merely mention his
numerous historical works, his illuminative study of Vico, which has
at last revealed that philosopher as of like intellectual stature to
Kant; the immense tonic and cultural influence of his review, La
Critica, and his general editorship of the great collection of Scrittori
d' Italia. Freed at last from that hubbub of the laboratory, from the
measures and microscopes of the natural scientists, excellent in their
place, it is interesting to ask if any other contemporary philosopher
has made a contribution to ethical theory in any way comparable to
the Philosophy of the Practical. The names of Bergson and of Blondel
at once occur to the mind, but the former admits that his complete
ideas on ethics are not yet made known, and implies that he may
never make them entirely known. The reader of the Philosophy of
the Practical will, I think, find that none of Bergson's explanations,
"burdened," as he says, with "geometry," and as we may say with
matter, from the obsession of which he never seems to shake
himself altogether free, are comparable in depth or lucidity with the
present treatise. The spirit is described by Bergson as memory, and
matter as a succession of images. How does the one communicate
with the other? The formula of the self-creative life process seems
hardly sufficient to explain this, for if with Bergson we conceive of
life as a torrent, there must be some reason why it should flow
rather in one channel than in another. But life is supposed to create
and to absorb matter in its progress; and here we seem to have
entered a vicious circle, for the intuition presupposes, it does not
create its object. As regards the will, too, the Bergsonian theory of
the Ego as rarely (sometimes never once in life) fully manifesting
itself, and our minor actions as under the control of matter, seems to
lead to a deterministic conception and to be at variance with the
thesis of the self-creation of life.
As regards Blondel, the identification of thought and will in the
philosophy of action leads him to the position that the infinite is not
in the universal abstract, but in the single concrete. It is through
matter that the divine truth reaches us, and God must pass through
nature or matter, in order to reach us, and we must effect the
contrary process to reach God. It is a beautiful conception; but, as
de Ruggiero suggests, do we not thus return, by a devious and
difficult path, to the pre-Hegelian, pre-Kantian, position of religious
platonicism?[1]
This, however, is not the place to discourse at length of other
philosophies. What most impresses in the Crocean thought is its
profundity, its clarity, and its completeness,—totus teres atque
rotundus. Croce, indeed, alone of the brilliant army of philosophers
and critics arisen in the new century, has found a complete formula
for his thought, complete, that is, at a certain stage; for, as he says,
the relative nature of all systems is apparent to all who have studied
philosophy. He alone has defined and allocated the activities of the
human spirit; he alone has plumbed and charted its ocean in all its
depth and breadth.
A system! The word will sound a mere tinkling of cymbals to many
still aground in the abstract superficialities of nineteenth-century
scepticism; but they are altogether mistaken. To construct a system
is like building a house: it requires a good architect to build a good
house, and where it is required to build a great palace it requires a
great genius to build it successfully. Michael Angelo built the Vatican,
welding together and condensing the works of many predecessors,
ruthlessly eliminating what they contained of bad or of erroneous:
Benedetto Croce has built the Philosophy of the Spirit. To say of
either achievement that it will not last for ever, or that it will need
repair from time to time, is perfectly true; but this criticism applies to
all things human; and yet men continue to build houses—for God
and for themselves. Croce is the first to admit the incompleteness,
the lack of finality of all philosophical systems, for each one of them
deals, as he says, with a certain group of problems only, which
present themselves at a definite period of time. The solution of these
leads to the posing of new problems, first caught sight of by the
philosopher as he terminates his labours, to be solved by the same
or by other thinkers.
And here it may be well to state very briefly the basis on which rests
the Philosophy of the Spirit, without attempting to do anything more
than to give its general outline. The reader should imagine himself
standing, like bold Pizarro, on his "peak of Darien," surveying at a
great distance the vast outline of a New World, which yet is as old as
Asia.
The Spirit is Reality, it is the whole of Reality, and it has two forms:
the theoretic and the practical activities. Beyond or outside these
there are no other forms of any kind. The theoretic activity has two
forms, the intuitive and individual, and the intellectual or knowledge
of the universal: the first of these produces images and is known as
Æsthetic, the second concepts and is known as Logic. The first of
these activities is altogether independent, self-sufficient,
autonomous: the second, on the other hand, has need of the first,
ere it can exist. Their relation is therefore that of double degree. The
practical activity is the will, which is thought in activity, and this also
has two forms, the economic or utilitarian, and the ethical or moral,
the first autonomous and individual, the second universal, and this
latter depends upon the first for its existence, in a manner
analogous to Logic and to Æsthetic.
With the theoretic activity, man understands the universe, with the
practical, he changes it. There are no grades or degrees of the Spirit
beyond these. All other forms are either without activity, or they are
verbal variants of the above, or they are a mixture of these four in
different proportions.
Thus the Philosophy of the Spirit is divided into Æsthetic, Logic, and
Philosophy of the Practical (Economic and Ethic). In these it is
complete, and embraces the whole of human activity.
The discussion of determinism or free will is of course much more
elaborated here than in the Æsthetic, where exigencies of space
compelled the philosopher to offer it in a condensed form. His
solution that the will is and must be free, but that it contains two
moments, the first conditioned, and that the problem should be first
stated in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, seems to be the only one
consonant with facts. The conclusion that the will is autonomous and
that therefore we can never be obliged to do anything against our
will may seem to be paradoxical, until the overwhelming argument in
proof of this has been here carefully studied.
Croce's division of the practical activity into the two grades of
Economic and Ethic, to which Kant did not attain and Fichte failed
fully to perceive, has for the first time rendered comprehensible
much that was hitherto obscure in ancient history and contemporary
history. The "merely economic man" will be recognised by all
students of the Philosophy of the Practical, where his characteristics
are pointed out by the philosopher; and a few years hence, when
Croce's philosophy will have filtered through fiction and journalism to
the level of the general public, the phrase will be as common as is
the "merely economic" person to-day.
For indeed, all really new and great discoveries come from the
philosophers, gradually filtering down through technical treatises and
reviews, until they reach the level of prose fiction and of poetry,
which, since the Æsthetic, we know to be one and the same thing
with different empirical manifestations. In truth, the philosophers
alone go deeply enough into the essence of things to reach their
roots. Thus some philosophy, generally in an extremely diluted form,
becomes part of every one's mental furniture and thus the world
makes progress and the general level of culture is raised. Thought is
democratic in being open to all, aristocratic in being attained only by
the few—and that is the only true aristocracy: to be on the same
level as the best.
Another discovery of Croce's, set forth in this volume for the first
time in all the plenitude of its richness, is the theory of Error. The
proof of the practical nature of error, of its necessity, and of the fact
that we only err because we will to do so, is a marvel of acute and
profound analysis. Readers unaccustomed to the dialectic may not at
first be prepared to admit the necessary forms of error, that error is
not distinct, but opposed to truth and as such its simple dialectic
negation, and that truth is thought of truth, which develops by
conquering error, which must always exist in every problem. The full
understanding of the Crocean theory of error throws a flood of light
on all philosophical problems, and has already formed the basis of at
least one brilliant study of contemporary philosophy.
To the reduction of the concept of law to an economic factor, which
depends upon the priority and autonomy of Economic in relation to
Ethic, is devoted a considerable portion of the latter part of the
Philosophy of the Practical, and it is easy to see that an elaborate
treatment of this problem was necessary, owing to the confusion as
to its true nature that has for so long existed in the minds of
thinkers, owing to their failure to grasp the above distinction. In
Great Britain indeed, where precedent counts for so much in law, the
ethical element is very often so closely attached as to be practically
indistinguishable from it, save by the light of the Crocean analysis.
In the Logic as Science of the Pure Concept will be found much to
throw light upon the Philosophy of the Practical, where the
foreshortening of certain proofs (due to concentration upon other
problems) may appear to leave loopholes to objection. Thought will
there be found to make use of language for expression, though not
itself language; and it will be found useless to seek logic in words,
which in themselves are always æsthetic. For there is a duality
between intuition and concept, which form the two grades or
degrees of theoretic knowledge, as described also in the Æsthetic.
There are two types of concept, the pure and the false or pseudo-
concept, as Croce calls it. This latter is also divided into two types of
representation—those that are concrete without being universal
(such as the cat, the rose), and those that are without a content
that can be represented, or universal without being concrete, since
they never exist in reality (such are the triangle, free motion). The
first of these are called empirical pseudo-concepts, the second
abstract pseudo-concepts: the first are represented by the natural,
the second by the mathematical sciences.
Of the pure concept it is predicated that it is ineliminable, for while
the pseudo-concepts in their multiplicity are abolished by thought as
it proceeds, there will always remain one thought namely, that which
thinks their abolition. This concept is opposed to the pseudo-
concepts: it is ultra or omni-representative. I shall content myself
with this brief mention of the contents of the Philosophy of the
Practical and of the Logic upon which I am now working.
Since the publication of Æsthetic as Science of Expression and
General Linguistic, there has been some movement in the direction
of the study of Italian thought and culture, which I advocated in the
Introduction to that work. But the Alps continue to be a barrier, and
the thought of France and of Germany reaches us, as a rule, far
more rapidly than that of the home of all the arts and of civilization,
as we may call that Italy which contains within it the classical
Greater Greece. A striking instance of this relatively more rapid
distribution of French thought is afforded by the celebrated Lundis of
Sainte-Beuve, so familiar to many readers; yet a critic, greater in
depth than Sainte-Beuve, was writing at the same period—greater in
philosophical vision of the relations of things, for the vision of
Sainte-Beuve rarely rose above the psychological plane. For one
reader acquainted with the History of Italian Literature of De Sanctis,
a hundred are familiar with the Lundis of Sainte-Beuve.
At the present moment the hegemony of philosophical thought may
be said to be divided between Italy and France, for neither Great
Britain nor Germany has produced a philosophical mind of the first
order. The interest in Continental idealism is becoming yearly more
keen, since the publication of Bergson's and of Blondel's treatises,
and of Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit. Mr. Arthur Balfour, being
himself a philosopher, was one of the first to recognise the
importance of the latter work, referring to its author in terms of high
praise in his oration on Art delivered at Oxford in the Sheldonian
Theatre. Mr. Saintsbury also has expressed his belief that with the
Æsthetic Croce has provided the first instrument for scientific (i.e.
philosophical, not "natural" scientific) criticism of literature. This
surely is well, and should lead to an era of more careful and less
impartial, of more accurate because more scientific criticism of our
art and poetry.
I trust that a similar service may be rendered to Ethical theory and
practice by the publication of the present translation, which I believe
to be rich with great truths of the first importance to humanity, here
clearly and explicitly stated for the first time and therefore (in Vico's
sense of the word) "created," by his equal and compatriot,
Benedetto Croce.

Then leaning upon the arm of time came Truth, whose radiant
face,
Though never so late to the feast she go, hath aye the foremost
place.

DOUGLAS AINSLIE.

ATHENAEUM CLUB, PALL MALL,

January 1913.
[1] G. de Ruggiero, La Filosofia contemporanea, Laterza, Bari,
1912.

CONTENTS

Translator's Preface
FIRST PART
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL

FIRST SECTION
 THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS
I 3

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY AS A FORM OF THE SPIRIT

Practical and theoretic life—Insufficiency of descriptive distinctions —
Insufficiency of the psychological method in philosophy—Necessity of
the philosophical method—Constatation and deduction—Theories
which deny the practical form of the spirit—The practical as an
unconscious fact: critique—Nature and practical activity—Reduction
of the practical form to the theoretical: critique—The practical as
thought in action—Recognition of its autonomy.
II 21

NEGATION OF THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FEELING

The practical and the so-called third spiritual form: feeling—Various
meanings of the word: feeling, a psychological class—Feeling as a
state of the spirit—Function of the concept of feeling in the History
of philosophy: the indeterminate—Feeling as forerunner of the
æsthetic form—In Historic: preannouncement of the intuitive
element—In philosophical Logic: pre-announcement of the pure
concept—Analogous function in the Philosophy of the practical—
Negation of feeling—Deductive exclusion of it.
III 33
RELATION OF THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY WITH THE THEORETICAL

Precedence of the theoretical over the practical—The unity of the

spirit and the co-presence of the practical—Critique of pragmatism—
Critique of psychological objections—Nature of theoretic precedence
over the practical: historical knowledge—Its continual mutability—No
other theoretic precedent—Critique of practical concepts and
judgments—Posteriority of judgments to the practical act—
Posteriority of practical concepts—Origin of intellectualistic and
sentimentalistic doctrines—The concepts of end and means—Critique
of the end as plan or fixed design—Volition and the unknown—
Critique of the concept of practical sciences and of a practical
Philosophy.
IV 53

INSEPARABILITY OF ACTION FROM ITS REAL BASE AND PRACTICAL NATURE OF

THE THEORETIC ERROR
Coincidence of intention and volition—Volition in the abstract and in
the concrete: critique—Volition thought and real volition: critique—
Critique of volition with unknown or ill-known base —Illusions in the
instances adduced—Impossibility of volition with erroneous
theoretical base—Forms of the theoretic error and problem as to its
nature—Distinction between ignorance and error: practical origin of
latter—Confirmations and proofs—Justification of the practical
repression of error—Empirical distinctions of errors and the
philosophic distinction.
V 73

IDENTITY OF VOLITION AND ACTION AND DISTINCTION BETWEEN VOLITION

AND EVENT
Volition and action: intuition and expression—Spirit and nature—
Inexistence of volitions without action and inversely—Illusions as to
the distinctions between these terms—Distinction between action
and succession or event—Volition and event—Successful and
unsuccessful actions: critique—Acting and foreseeing: critique—
Confirmation of the inderivability of the value of action from success
—Explanation of facts that seem to be at variance.
VI 86

THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL

Practical taste and judgment—Practical judgment as historical

judgment—Its Logic—Importance of the practical judgment—
Difference between practical judgment and judgment of event—
Progress in action and progress in Reality—Precedence of the
Philosophy of the practical over the practical judgment—
Confirmation of the philosophic incapacity of the psychological
method.
 VII 103

PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION, RULES AND CASUISTIC

Justification of the psychological method and of empirical and
descriptive disciplines—Practical Description and its literature —
Extension of practical description—Normative knowledge or rules:
their nature—Utility of rules—The literature of rules and its apparent
decadence—Relation between the arts (collections of rules) and
philosophic doctrines—Casuistic: its nature and utility—Jurisprudence
as casuistic.
VIII 121

CRITIQUE OF THE INVASIONS OF PHILOSOPHY INTO PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION

AND INTO ITS DERIVATIVES
First form: tendency to generalize—Historical elements that persist in
the generalizations—Second form: literary union of philosophy and
empiria—Third form: attempt to put them in close connection—
Science of the practical, and Metaphysic: various meanings—
Injurious consequences of the invasions—1st, Dissolution of
empirical concepts—Examples: war and peace, property and
communism, and the like—Other examples—Misunderstandings on
the part of the philosophers—Historical significance of such
questions—2nd, False deduction of the empirical from the
philosophic—Affirmations as to the contingent changed into
philosophemes—Reasons for the rebellion against rules—Limits
between philosophy and empiria.
IX 144

HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Distinction between history of the practical principle and history of
liberation from the transcendental—II. Distinction of the practical
from the theoretical—III. Minglings of the Philosophy of the practical
with Description—Vain attempts at a definition of empirical concepts
—Attempts at deduction—IV. Various questions—Practical nature of
error—Practical taste—V. Doctrines of feeling—The Wolfians—Jacobi
and Schleiermacher—Kant—Hegel—Opponents of the doctrine of the
three faculties. Krug—Brentano.

SECOND SECTION
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS DIALECTIC
I 173

NECESSITY AND FREEDOM IN THE VOLITIONAL ACT

The problem of freedom—Freedom of willing and freedom of action:
critique of such distinction—The volitional act, both necessary and
free—Comparison with the æsthetic activity—Critique of determinism
and arbitrarism—General form of this antithesis: materialism and
mysticism—Materialistic sophisms of determinism—Mysticism of
doctrine of free will—Doctrine of necessity-liberty and idealism—
Doctrine of double causality; of dualism and agnosticism—Its
character of transaction and transition.
II 192
FREEDOM AND ITS OPPOSITE. GOOD AND EVIL

Freedom of action as reality of action—Inconceivability of the

absolute absence of action—Non-freedom as antithesis and
contrariety—Nothingness and arbitrariness of non-liberty—Good as
freedom and reality, and evil as its opposite—Critique of abstract
monism and of dualism of values—Objections to the irreality of evil—
Evil in synthesis and out of synthesis—Affirmative judgments of evil
as negative judgments—Confirmations of the doctrine—The poles of
feeling (pleasure and pain); and their identity with the practical
opposites—Doctrine relating to pleasure and happiness: critique—
Empirical concepts relating to good and evil—To have to be, ideal,
inhibitive, imperative power—Evil, remorse, etc.; good, satisfaction,
etc.—Their incapacity for serving as practical principles—Their
character.
III 215
 THE VOLITIONAL ACT AND THE PASSIONS
The multiplicity of volitions and the struggle for unity—Multiplicity
and unity as good and evil—Excluded volitions and passions or
desires—Passions and desires as possible volitions—Volition as
struggle with the passions—Critique of the freedom of choice—
Meaning of the so-called precedence of feeling over the volitional act
—Polipathicism and apathicism—Erroneity of both the opposed
theses—Historical and contingent meaning of these—The domination
of the passions, and the will.
IV 229

VOLITIONAL HABITS AND INDIVIDUALITY

Passions and states of the soul—Passions understood as volitional
habits—Importance and nature of these—Domination of the passions
in so far as they are volitional habits—Difficulty and reality of
dominating them—Volitional habits and individuality—Negations of
individuality for uniformity and criticism of them—Temperament and
character—Indifference of temperament—Discovery of one's own
being—The idea of "vocation"—Misunderstanding of the right of
individuality—Wicked individuality—False doctrines as to the
connection between virtues and vices—The universal in the
individual, and education.
V 246

DEVELOPMENT AND PROGRESS

Multiplicity and unity: development—Becoming as synthesis of being
and not-being—Nature as becoming. Its resolution in the Spirit—
Optimism and pessimism: critique—Dialectic optimism—Concept of
cosmic progress—Objections and critique—Individuals and History—
Fate, Fortune, and Providence—The infinity of progress and mystery
—Confirmation of the impossibility of a Philosophy of history—
Illegitimate transference of the concept of mystery from History to
Philosophy.
VI 262
 TWO EXPLANATIONS RELATING TO HISTORIC AND ÆSTHETIC
Relation between desires and actions; and two problems of Historic
and Æsthetic—History and art—The concept of existentiality in
history—Its origin in the Philosophy of the practical: action and the
existing, desires and the non-existent—History as distinction
between actions and desires, and art as indistinction—Pure fancy
and imagination—Art as lyrical or representation of feelings—Identity
of ingenuous reality and feeling—Artists and the will—Actions and
myths—Art as pure representation of becoming, and the artistic form
of thought.
VII 273

HISTORICAL NOTES
I. The problem of freedom—II. The doctrine of evil—III. Will and
freedom—Conscience and responsibility—IV. The concept of duty—
Repentance and remorse—The doctrine of the passions—Virtues and
vices—V. The doctrine of individuality: Schleiermacher—Romantic
theories and most modern theories—VI. The concept of development
and progress.

THIRD SECTION
UNITY OF THE THEORETICAL AND THE PRACTICAL
Double result: precedence of the theoretical over the practical, and
of the practical over the theoretical—Errors of those who maintain
the exclusive precedence of the one or the other—Problem of the
unity of this duality—Not a duality of opposites—Not a duality of
finite and infinite—Perfect analogy of the two forms: theoretic and
practical—Not a parallelism, but a circle—The circle of Reality:
thought and being, subject and object—Critique of the theories as to
the primacy of the theoretical or of the practical reason—New
pragmatism: Life conditioning Philosophy—Deductive confirmation of
the two forms, and deductive exclusion of the third (feeling).
 SECOND PART
THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS SPECIAL FORMS

FIRST SECTION
THE TWO PRACTICAL FORMS: ECONOMIC AND ETHIC
I 309
DISTINCTION OF THE TWO FORMS IN THE PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The utilitarian or economic form, and the moral or ethical form—

Insufficiency of the descriptive and psychological distinction—
Deduction and necessity of integrating it with induction—The two
forms as a fact of consciousness—The economic form—The ethical
form—Impossibility of eliminating them—Confirmations in fact.
II 323

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ETHICAL FORM

Exclusion of materialistic and intellectualistic criticisms—The two
possible negations—The thesis of utilitarianism against the existence
of moral acts—Difficulty arising from the presence of these—Attempt
to explain them as quantitative distinctions—Criticism of it—Attempt
to explain them as facts, either extraneous to the practical or
irrational, and stupid—Associationism and evolutionism. Critique—
Desperate attempt: theological utilitarianism and mystery.
III 337

CRITIQUE OF THE NEGATIONS OF THE ECONOMIC FORM

The thesis of moral abstractionism against the concept of the useful
—The useful as means, or as theoretic fact—Technical and
hypothetical imperatives—Critique: the useful is a practical fact —
The useful as the egoistic or the immoral—Critique: the useful is
amoral—The useful as ethical minimum—Critique: the useful is
premoral—Desperate attempt: the useful as inferior practical
conscience—Confirmation of the autonomy of the useful.
 IV 348

RELATION BETWEEN ECONOMIC AND ETHICAL FORMS

Economic and ethic as double degree of the practical—Errors arising
from conceiving them as co-ordinated—Disinterested actions:
critique—Vain polemic conducted with such Supposition against
utilitarianism—Actions morally indifferent, obligatory, supererogatory,
etc. Critique—Comparison with the relation between art and
philosophy—Other erroneous conceptions of modes of action—
Pleasure and economic activity, happiness and virtue—Pleasure and
pain and feeling—Coincidence of duty with pleasure—Critique of
rigorism or asceticism—Relation of happiness and virtue—Critique of
the subordination of pleasure to morality—No empire of morality
over the forms of the spirit—Non-existence of other practical forms;
and impossibility of subdivision of the two established.
V 364

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY AND THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF ECONOMY

Problem of the relations between Philosophy and Science of
economy —Unreality of the laws and concepts of economic Science
—Economic Science founded on empirical concepts but not empirical
or descriptive—Absoluteness of its laws—Their mathematical nature
—Its principles and their character of arbitrary postulates and
definitions—Its utility—Comparison of Economy with Mechanic, and
reason for its exclusion from ethical, æsthetic, and logical facts—
Errors of philosophism and historicism in Economy—The two
degenerations: extreme abstractism and empiristical disaggregation
—Glance at the history of the various directions of Economy—
Meaning of the judgment of Hegel as to economic Science.
VI 382

CRITIQUE OF THE CONFUSIONS BETWEEN ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND

PHILOSOPHY OF ECONOMY
Adoption of the economic method and formulæ on the part of
Philosophy—Errors that derive from it—1st, Negation of philosophy
for economy—2nd, Universal value attributed to empirical concepts.
Example: free trade and protectionism—3rd, Transformation of the
functions of calculation into reality—The pretended calculus of
pleasures and pains; and doctrines of optimism and pessimism.
VII 391

HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Greek Ethic and its ingenuousness—II. Importance of Christianity
for Ethic—The three tendencies that result from it: utilitarianism,
rigorism, and psychologism—Hobbes, Spinoza—English Ethic—
Idealistic Philosophy—III. E. Kant and his affirmation of the ethical
principle—Contradictions of Kant as to the concept of the useful, of
prudence, of happiness, etc.—Errors that derive from it in his Ethic—
IV. Points for a Philosophy of Economy—The inferior appetitive
faculty—Problem of politics and Machiavellism—Doctrine of the
passions—Hegel and the concept of the useful—Fichte and the
elaboration of the Kantian Ethic—V. The problem of the useful and of
morality in the thinkers of the nineteenth century—Extrinsic union of
Ethic and of economic Science, from antiquity to the nineteenth
century—Philosophic questions arising from a more intimate contact
between the two—VII. Theories of the hedonistic calculus: from
Maupertuis to Hartmann.

SECOND SECTION
THE ETHICAL PRINCIPLE
I 425

CRITIQUE OF MATERIALISTIC AND OF FORMALISTIC ETHIC

Various meanings of "formal" and "material"—The ethical principle as

formal (universal) and not material (contingent)—Reduction of
material Ethic to utilitarian Ethic—Expulsion of material principles—
Benevolence, love, altruism, etc.; and critique of them—Social
organism, State, interest of the species, etc. Critique of them—
Material religious principles. Critique of them—"Formal" as statement
of a merely logical demand—Critique of a formal Ethic with this
meaning: tautologism—Tautological principles: ideal, chief good,
duty, etc. Critique of them—Tautological significance of certain
formulæ, material in appearance—Conversion of tautological Ethic
into material and utilitarian Ethic—In what sense Ethic should be
formal; and in what other sense material.
II 440

THE ETHICAL FORM AS ACTUALIZATION OF THE SPIRIT IN UNIVERSAL

Tautological Ethic, and its partial or discontinuous connection with
Philosophy—Rejection of both these conceptions—The ethical form
as volition of the universal—The universal as the Spirit (Reality,
Liberty, etc.)—Moral actions as volitions of the Spirit—Critique of
antimoralism—Confused tendency of tautological, material, religious
formulæ in relation to the Ethic of the Spirit—The Ethic of the Spirit
and religious Ethic.
III 452

HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Merit of the Kantian Ethic—The predecessors of Kant—Defect of
that Ethic: agnosticism—Critique of Hegel and of others—Kant and
the concept of freedom—Fichte and Hegel—Ethic in the nineteenth
century.

THIRD PART
LAWS
I 465

LAWS AS PRODUCTS OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Definition of law—Philosophical and empirical concept of society—
Laws as individual product: programmes of individual life—Exclusion
of the character of constriction: critique of this concept—Identical
characters of individual and social laws—Individual laws as the sole
real in ultimate analysis—Critique of the division of laws into judicial
and social, and into the sub-classes of these. Empiricity of every
division of laws—Extension of the concept of laws.
II 481

THE CONSTITUTIVE ELEMENTS OF LAWS. CRITIQUE OF PERMISSIVE LAWS AND

OF NATURAL LAW
The volitional character and the character of class—Distinction of
laws from the so-called laws of nature—Implication of the second in
the first—Distinction of laws from practical principles—Laws and
single acts—Identity of imperative, prohibitive, and permissive laws
—Permissive character of every law and impermissive character of
every principle—Changeability of laws—Empirical considerations as
to modes of change—Critique of the eternal Code or natural right—
Natural right as the new right—Natural right as Philosophy of the
practical—Critique of natural right—Theory of natural right persisting
in judicial judgments and problems.
III 497

UNREALITY OF LAW AND REALITY OF EXECUTION. FUNCTION OF LAW IN THE

PRACTICAL SPIRIT
Law as abstract and unreal volition—Ineffectually of laws and
effectuality of practical principles—Exemplificatory explanation—
Doctrines against the utility of laws—Their unmaintainability—
Unmaintainability of confutations of them—Empirical meaning of
these controversies—Necessity of laws—Laws as preparation for
action—Analogy between practical and theoretical Spirit: practical
laws and empirical concepts—The promotion of order in reality and
in representation—Origin of the concept of plan or design.
IV 511
CONFUSION BETWEEN LAWS AND PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES. CRITIQUE OF
PRACTICAL LEGALISM AND OF JESUITIC MORALITY

Transformation of principles into practical laws: legalism—Genesis of

the concept of the practically licit and indifferent—Its consequence:
the arbitrary—Ethical legalism as a simple special case of the
practical—Critique of the practically indifferent—Contests of rigorists
and of latitudinarians and their common error—Jesuitic morality as
doctrine of fraud on moral law—Concept of legal fraud—Absurdity of
fraud against oneself and against the moral conscience—Jesuitic
morality not explainable by mere legalism—Jesuitic morality as
alliance of legalism with theological utilitarianism—Distinction
between Jesuitic practice and doctrine.
V 526

JUDICIAL ACTIVITY AS GENERICALLY PRACTICAL ACTIVITY (ECONOMIC)

Legislative activity as generically practical—Vanity of disputes as to
the character of institutions, whether economic or ethical:
punishment, marriage, State, etc.—Legislative activity as economic—
Judicial activity: its economic character: its consequent identity with
economic activity—Non-recognition of economic form, and meaning
of the problem as to distinction between morality and rights—
Theories of co-action and of exteriority, as distinctive characteristics:
critique of them—Moralistic theories of rights: critique—Duality of
positive and ideal rights, historical and natural rights, etc.; absurd
attempts at unification and co-ordination—Value of all these
attempts as confused glimpse of amoral character of rights—
Confirmations of this character in ingenuous conscience—
Comparison between rights and language. Grammar and codes—
Logic and language; morality and rights—History of language as
literary and artistic history—History of rights as political and social
history.
VI 543

HISTORICAL NOTES
I. Distinction between morality and rights, and its importance for the
history of the economic principle—Indistinction lasting till Tomasio—
II. Tomasio and followers—Kant and Fichte—Hegel—Herbart and
Schopenhauer—Rosmini and others—III. Stahl, Ahrens,
Trendelenburg—Utilitarians—IV. Recent writers of treatises—Strident
contradictions. Stammler—V. Value of law—In antiquity—Diderot—
Romanticism—Jacobi—Hegel—Recent doctrines—VI. Natural rights
and their dissolution—Historical school of rights—Comparison
between rights and language—VII. Concept of law, and studies of
comparative rights and of the general Doctrine of law—VIII.
Legalism and moral casuistic—Probabilitism and Jesuitic morality—
Critique of the concept of the licit—Fichte—Schleiermacher—
Rosmini.

CONCLUSION 586

The Philosophy of the Spirit as the whole of Philosophy—

Correspondence between Logic and System—Dissatisfaction at the
end of every system and its irrational motive—Rational motive:
inexhaustibility of Life and of Philosophy.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

This translation of Benedetto Croce's Philosophy of the Practical

(Economic and Ethic) is complete.

FIRST PART

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN GENERAL

FIRST SECTION

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY IN ITS RELATIONS

 I

THE PRACTICAL ACTIVITY AS A FORM OF THE SPIRIT

A glance at the life that surrounds us would seem

more than sufficient to establish, without the Practical and
theoretic life.
necessity of special demonstration, the existence of
a circle of practical activity side by side with the theoretical. We see
in life men of thought and men of action, men of contemplation and
of action, materially distinct, as it were, from one another: here,
lofty brows and slow dreamy eyes; there, narrow brows, eyes
vigilant and mobile; poets and philosophers on the one side; on the
other, captains and soldiers of industry, commerce, politics, the
army, and the church. Their work seems to differ as do the men.
While we are intent upon some discovery just announced, in
chemistry or in physic, or upon some philosophy that comes to
shake old beliefs, upon a drama or a romance that revives an artist's
dream, we are suddenly interrupted and our attention is called to
spectacles of an altogether different nature, such as a war between
two states, fought with cannon or with custom-house tariffs; or to a
colossal strike, in which thousands upon thousands of workmen
make the rest of society feel the power of their numbers and of their
strength, and the importance of their work in the general total; or a
potent organization which collects and binds together the forces of
conservative resistance, employing interests and passions, hopes
and fears, vices and virtues, as the painter his colours, or the poet
his words, sometimes making like them a masterpiece, but of a
practical nature. The man of action is from time to time assailed as it
were with nausea at his orgies of volitional effort and eyes with envy
the artist or the man of science in the same way as polite society
used to look upon the monks who had known how to select the best
and most tranquil lot in life. But as a general rule they do not go
beyond this fleeting feeling, or if they do resolve to cease their
business on the Ides, they return to it on the Kalends. But the
contemplative man in his turn also sometimes experiences this same
nausea and this same aspiration; he seems to himself to be idle
where so many are working and bleeding, and he cries to the
combatants: "Arms, give me arms,"[1] for he too would be a miner
with the miners, would navigate with the navigators, be an emperor
among the kings of coal. However, as a general rule, he does not
make more out of this than a song or a book. Nobody, whatever his
efforts, can issue from his own circle. It would seem that nature
supplies men made precisely for the one or for the other form of
activity, in the same way as she makes males and females for the
preservation of the species.
But this mode of existence with which the practical
activity manifests itself in life, as though physically Insufficiency of
descriptive
limited, has no certainty, when separated from the distinctions.
theoretical life, nor is it, as might be believed, a
fact that imposes itself. Facts never impose themselves, save
metaphorically: it is only our thought which imposes them upon
itself, when it has criticized them and has recognized their reality.
That existence and that distinction, which seem so obvious that one
can touch them with one's hand, are at bottom nothing but the
result of primary and superficial philosophic reflection, which posits
as essentially distinct that which is so only at a first glance and in
the mass. Indeed, if we continue to meditate with the same method
and assumptions as in the first instance, we shall find that those
very distinctions, which reflection had established, are by reflection
annulled. It is not true that men are practical or theoretical.
The theoretical man is also practical; he lives, he wills, he acts like
all the others. The so-called practical man is also theoretical; he
contemplates, believes, thinks, reads, writes, loves music and the
other arts. Those works that had been looked upon as inspired
entirely by the practical spirit, when examined more closely, are
found to be exceedingly complex and rich in theoretic elements—
meditations, reasonings, historical research, ideal contemplations.
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com