Originally published in 1949, Croce's essays on political, philosophic and aesthetic subjects, selected from both his earlier and later writings possess a remarkable underlying unity. The political essays which form a major part of this volume display a criticism, either direct or implied of the mass creeds and movements that subordinate the individual to history. They combine a passionate belief in liberty with critical and historical judgment.
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Yes, you can access My Philosophy by Benedetto Croce, E. F. Carritt in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Business General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
MANKIND NEVER WEARIES of advising and reminding its poets, philosophers and historians to keep clear of the tendencious passions of politics. The universal truth of pure humanity can indeed only be reached in their works by rising above private aims and passions such as are eminently those classed under the name of ‘polities’. It is impossible to concentrate upon the eternal truth which is above all private interests, and at the same time to look on some one of these interests with favour and to promote it. Or at least this can only be done by a more or less skilful hypocrisy, which may sometimes serve the politician’s aim, but brings a blush of shame to the man who reverences the chastity of truth and beauty, and who feels that the mere suggestion is an insult to his moral character and a threat to the very roots of his higher life. The poet or philosopher or historian who stoops to such deception and trickery is, to that extent, not what he professes himself but a mere politician or rather the tool of politicians. He cannot but have a bad conscience, for his act is in contradiction with the assumed character of a free intelligence, with the function he has undertaken, and with the tacit contract between himself and society not to fail in this peculiar duty. The only exception is the more or less innocent simplicity (an exception we must allow, since ‘the kinds of fool are infinite’) which does not clearly know what it is doing. As a rule, behind all such unprofessional behaviour we find the motive of self-interest, a fear of loss or a hope of gain. When we meet with such sham artistic or scientific products, we can always be sure that we are justified in asking their authors: ‘What did you get for it? What was the price?’ The philosopher or the historian or the poet gets nothing.for it; his work is priceless. He shoots his golden arrow against the sun and is glad to watch its flight; if he wants anything more, it is only that others should share his pleasure and emulate him with such arrows of their own.
Another piece of urgent advice given by society to the artists and philosophers is to abstain, even in their practical life, from political activity, or at least from any ambition to play a conspicuous or leading part. There is a difference amounting almost to opposition, both between the habits and capacities to be cultivated and also between the experiences to be sought by the two professions. Artists and philosophers relate ideas or shape visions; politicians work on men’s passions and interests, to unite or to embroil them; the very virtue of the one class is the defect of the other. The man of thought or contemplation, if dragged into the arena of political conflict, can do little good and some evil; the little good cannot make up to society for its loss in distracting him from the work for which he was born and bred. This second piece of advice cannot have the peremptory unconditional character of the first, since philosophers and artists are not abstract thought or imagination but men; their activity is primarily directed to these pursuits but is not thereby exhausted. Moreover, the state and society itself treat them as members and citizens call on them for services in peace and war. Thereby they are stimulated in some degree to share in political discussion and conflict and to join a political party, if only as auxiliaries assigned the work for which they are suited. Their work is ‘cloister-work’, as Ariosto called it (who, by the way, had to be governor of Garfagnana), that is to say, not the dirty work of sham poetry and sham philosophy, but legitimate, straightforward political propaganda.
Are then the first unconditional prohibition of adulterating pure art and science and the second conditional precept to keep political activities within very narrow limits intended to make artists and philosophers indifferent to politics—unpolitical men? Could artists and philosophers for their part accept the latter precept and obey it?
In order to obey it they would have to tear out from the organic texture of their interests the whole life of political activity. But the concrete man unites in his soul interests for every activity of life, and his blood is warmed by them all. The philosopher and the historian trace out the relation and the dialectical connections of these activities; the poet lives them over again and portrays their living semblance. If one were to be cut out, if one were banished from the mind, the effect of the mutilation would be that all the others would pale before the sight and wither in the heart. The love for another human being, the affection for family and children, are of necessity an interest in the moral and political society that surrounds us, in which we ourselves and those whom we love draw our breath. If in the height of passion we vainly try to evade one of these activities, and (to keep to our example) to shun politics, that is really the effort not of disinterestedness but of self-interest, which surrenders to what it would escape. In the same way, the mistaken attempt of the philosopher to deny one of these activities turns out a reaffirmation of it; the poet who sighs to escape from politics is really obsessed by them; the shepherd of Erminia1 in his solitary lodging among trees and streams is always mindful of the court intrigues. A man could only suppress his political interest by at the same time suppressing all his others; he would not be unpolitical only but apathetic, and total apathy is death, the death of thought and imagination, of philosophy and poetry, which have no subject matter but the life of the passions. These alone move our imagination, prompt us to define our ideas and to verify our history and, less directly, to invent the formulas of science and the symbolism of mathematics. And the passions are always grievous: ‘alas, it was in grief that Italian song had birth,’ wrote Leopardi; and the grief which inspires thought no less than poetry is not the crude degrading pain of egotism, but care and sorrow for human society. It is true that the intellectual activities of imagination and understanding subdue passion by using it as their material, but in subduing it they do not exterminate it, rather they tame and domesticate it. So far from losing interest in it, they are enough interested to make it their own. In fact, the proper purpose of the maxims with which we started is to produce not an unpolitical man but, if we may so speak more exactly, a ‘sympolitical’ one, who is concerned in politics as in every human activity. He is concerned not to produce bad propagandist poetry, philosophy or history, still less to undertake political activities outside his province, but simply to transmute his passionate concern into pure poetry, philosophy or history; and this he could not do if he had not this passionate concern, if his mind were indifferent, that is to say empty.
1Tasso; Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto VII. (Translator’s note.)
The proof of this interpretation of our maxims is to be found in the contempt with which society itself regards writers who are really unpolitical, calling them versifiers, mere literary men, dreary æsthetes, dull commentators, pedantic philosophisers of bloodless categories, with many other compliments. It is to be found too in the ‘decadence’ ascribed to periods in which such writers were the rule, as in the Italian counter-reformation and sixteenth century, when political or ‘sympolitical’ writers were the exception.
This discussion may be summed up in a way which seems apt to our own times. When, as so often, you hear a writer of genuine thought or a poet of genuine feeling declare, ‘I am absolutely unpolitical’, say to him, ‘You don’t know yourself well enough’. But when you hear the. same remark from a poet without feeling and therefore without real imagination, or from a philosopher or historian without intimate feeling for human nature and therefore without understanding of it, some dry manipulator of forms and formulas, then you can say, ‘You know yourself pretty well!’
1931
5
THE STATE AS FRIEND AND AS ENEMY
THE STATE HAS SUFFERED, even in the sphere of theory, the extremes of love and hatred, of eulogy and vilification. Even its ideal nature has been diversely interpreted and treated as a manifestation now of good, now of evil, the highest good or the greatest evil. It has been loved and worshipped by the ‘statolatrists’ who under various names and disguises have figured in the history of ideas and of political alignments. It has been hated and reviled by anarchists, who likewise have their various disguises and names. Various, in fact, are the motives leading to either attitude, some noble and some mean. The ‘anarchists’ have sometimes been moved by a thirst for the freer development of human powers or even by a vision of the purest and most abstract moral ideal, or, like the anchorites, by the horror of social brutalities; but sometimes by a morbid intolerance of duty and discipline. The ‘statolatrists’ at some times have been moved by an austere reverence for the moral law and at others have truckled to the powers that be or tried to propitiate them and use them for their own purposes. But whatever the psychological motives discernible in each case according to the historical situation and the temperaments and characters of individuals, they all lead to the same error, in which men are led astray by false imaginations of good and evil. The theoretical formula for this kind of error is ‘the fallacious denial or misinterpretation of some necessary stage or element in life and reality’
This is certainly not the place to go over again the whole dialectical process by which the conception of the practical spirit is reached; it is enough for our present purpose to recall the conclusion: that the two stages or elements of expediency or might and of morality or right are equally indispensable; that these severally correspond to the coercive state and to the free ethical will; that they do not stand in a relation of opposition but of mutual implication. If the element of utility and force disappeared, so too would that of morality which is based upon it and can only work through it. And conversely, if the element of utility and force should usurp the prerogative of its superior, the moral consciousness, the human drama would lose all meaning, life and purpose; an insignificant, blind vibration to vanish again in the void. The necessity of both these elements is recognised, though in an imperfect and inconsistent way, by certain doctrines which allow the state to be a condition or an instrument of morality, but one that can and must be superseded in its functions. On their view the perfectly moral life would be one which, having completely realised itself, is emancipated from any bondage or any relation to the state and dismisses it as something no longer required. In other language, the necessity of the state is here at once asserted and denied, since it is reduced from a timeless and unconditional necessity to one that is only contingent and temporary.
I will confine myself, by way of example, to two historical forms of this doctrine, very different in origin yet substantially identical. One is the traditional teaching of the church that the earthly city of state-organisation is necessary for sinful man but no longer for the citizen of the kingdom of heaven. The other is the Marxist doctrine which sees the human race, throughout its history, struggling in an economic class-war, oppressed by a governing class and its instrument the state. In this struggle humanity goes through a series of stages to the conclusion of the class-war and the consequent abolition of the state with the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of liberty. This parallel suggests some not unprofitable reflections on the degree to which the historical materialism of Marx was influenced by Judaic and other unhistorical ideas of a millenium. This degradation of the state to a merely educative function is to be found also with an altered accent in writers of a very different tendency, such as Fichte. According to him the state was to develop a superior generation which, when it had been perfected, would kick away the ladder by which it had climbed. Here we cannot help noticing a very inadequate grasp of the essentially polemical and critical nature of the moral consciousness, which, in such abstract perfection and self-sufficiency, far from being perfected, would be stifled.
These favourable and unfavourable attitudes are mainly of theoretical interest as more or less successful efforts of thought to define and value the state and its relations. But devotion and hostility, more directly practical and moral, are inspired by states in the concrete, by this or that particular state. I say ‘moral’, because I do not intend, nor would it be profitable, to consider the attitude of individuals to the state arising from accidental situations or a conflict of interests. In such cases the devotion would be mere complicity in profit, and the hostility a rivalry for favours, easily bribed to complicity. If then our principle has been established that the state is indispensable to the moral life, both as the basis for its development and as the appropriate material for its activity, what would be a genuine devotion to the state and to its political life? It could only be a love for the field in which the moral man must work, and with him the thinker and the artist, a field where alone the delight of labour can be tasted. We love the state as we love our home, our family, the country round us, our friends, and companions. All.these are the conditions and the objects both of our congenial activities and of our duties. These loves are not without their anxieties and their sorrows or they would not be loves, which are always bitter-sweet.
In this aspect devotion to the state is collaboration with it, putting the best part of ourselves into its political life—our affections, the truths which make our effective creed, and our ideals. Such a participation is what is called liberty; for liberty is not opposition to the state or an offence against its majesty, but the life of the state itself, unless we think that the blood circulating in our veins and constantly renewing itself is a lawless disturbance of the sovereign calm of our physiological organism. There is no conceivable liberty within a state except political liberty or, as we have said, collaboration in its life. It is in vain that theorists have laboured to delimit the state and individual liberty, to define how far the state should control and how far respect individual freedom of action. Vainly have they tried to prescribe and reserve the sphere of liberty as being that of the family or of religion or of science or art or of all together. None of these are effectively free except so far as they can influence the life of the state; confined to their special interests, however much honoured and indulged, they lack the sap which should nourish them, and feed upon themselves and wither. So when Italy entered on her risorgimento, the demand, already made by Vico, was heard on all sides that .her philosophers should not be ‘monks’ but ‘politicians’, and her poets neither courtiers nor academicians but citizens. Her ideal of the ‘honest man’ was no longer one who honestly attends to his own business and keeps clear of politics but, instead, one who is wide awake to the connection of his private life with the public, of his family with the state, who watches his children not with an eye to segregating them from the surrounding society, but with one that sees them as at once its members and its subjects, sharing its strength and weakness and responsibilities, its glories and its shame.
History reveals this love of a state in action, a state which need not always have just the constitutional form which we admire and take for granted today; still less need it be transfigured into the ‘ideal state’ unknown to history, but imagined either in the naïve belief that it once existed in the past and has been corrupted or with the hope of one day realising it upon earth. This ideal state is equally unknown to sound theory, which only recognises states that really exist or have existed. But whenever a man has been able to work within a state and to realise there his moral ideal, he has loved-it and been devoted to it, and for it has gladly sacrificed his life; a state which perhaps, in the various stages of civilisation was theocratic or feudal, absolute or democratic, multi-national or national. On the other hand, whenever t...
