PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT. — An expression disseminated and popularized by B. Croce (born in 1866), and hence, in current usage, equivalent to the system of Crocianism. Naturally, however, a philosophical conception of the spirit, and therefore a more or less extensive and profound philosophy of the spirit, is an integral part of every philosophical system. For Croce, the philosophy of the spirit is philosophy tout court, in its totality, because, according to the idealist postulate, reality is spirit and there is no reality other than spirit. Croce sharply contrasts his philosophy of the spirit with metaphysics, failing to realize that the spirit, all the more so if conceived as universal spirit, the metempirical principle of reality and history, is and cannot but be an entity of a metaphysical character, whatever its ontological value.
Unfortunately, the metaphysics underlying idealism is aporetic and contradictory, and consequently so too is the conception of the human spirit. Within a realistic vision of the world—and realism does not mean materialism—the conception of the spirit also finds its proper place; for its clarity, the distinction between human spirit and divine spirit is indispensable, whereas in Crocianism, as in every other system of idealism, they tend instead to overlap and become confused.
The Crocian system develops from a germinal nucleus already implicit in the aesthetic conception (the fundamental thesis of Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics, Bari 1900; Aesthetics, ibid. 1902). For Croce, art is pure intuition, which, as such—that is, as the form of the spontaneity of the spirit in theoretical activity—differs from sensation, representation, and perception, in the common psychological meaning of these terms. Pure intuition apprehends the real, not yet mediated and illuminated by the concept. But “the spirit intuits only by doing, forming, expressing. Whoever separates intuition from expression can never join them together again” (Aesthetics, 7th ed., Bari 1941, p. 11). Art is expression, it is language, not insofar as it is a series of sounds conventionally fixed as expressive signs of abstract concepts pre-existing in the mind, but insofar as language is already, in turn, consciousness, creation, and the expression of feelings vibrating in the soul. What arises in the innermost depths of the human spirit is transformed into images; life becomes contemplation, and the passionate impulse, which in its immediacy is mute, becomes expression—that is, awareness imbued with lyricism and colored by feeling—thereby distinguishing itself from logical and historical consciousness. Art is an aspiration enclosed within the scope of a representation. Hence its intrinsic lyrical character, its universal lyricism.
If art is the dawn-form of knowledge, the concept is its fulfillment and completion. The pure concept, which is the concept proper, is beyond and all-inclusive of representation, since “precisely because it is not representation, it cannot have as its content a single representative element, nor refer to this or that particular representation,” or to this or that group of representations; although, on the other hand, precisely because it is universal with respect to the individuality of representations, it refers to all of them and to each of them together” (Logic, 4th ed., Bari 1920, p. 14). By these extrinsic and constitutive characteristics, the concept differs from pseudo-concepts, or conceptual fictions, which the spirit elaborates for a practical purpose and for mnemonic utility, whether they are representative without universality, like those of the empirical sciences (rose, cat, etc.), or universal but empty of representations, like those of mathematics (triangle, etc.).
The concept is thought only insofar as it takes concrete form in an expressive form and thus becomes judgment. Judgment may be definitional or individual; but far from “opposing and excluding one another,” according to Croce, the definitional judgment and the individual judgment, presupposing, implying, and conditioning one another, are identified with one another; and in their identity lies the basis of Croce’s identification of philosophy, woven from definitional judgments, with history, composed of individual judgments.
Pure intuition and concept, art and philosophy, are the moments in which the theoretical activity of the spirit unfolds; this activity, on the one hand, presupposes practical activity and, on the other, is its presupposition. In an identical rhythm, practical activity unfolds as volition of the individual (the useful) and volition of the universal (the good), that is, as economics and ethics. Utilitarian life is not immoral, but rather amoral or premoral, insofar as it precedes the awakening of ethical consciousness, which acts for universal ends. Yet these, on the other hand, do not exclude particular ends.
As the dialectical culmination of the activity of the spirit, ethical life also implies individual volitions.
The activities of the spirit become clear as distinct, rather than opposed (as Hegel had regarded them, thereby giving rise to numerous errors and confusions): every higher form implies the lower, just as the universal implies the particular. The spirit is the a priori synthesis of distincts, whereas opposition takes place in the becoming of each distinct, as an intrinsic process of the overcoming of the ugly in the beautiful, the false in the true, the harmful in the useful, and evil in the good; this is achieved through a recurrent dialectical circularity and an eternal process of mutual implication. There is no reality other than the universal spirit, immanent in empirical individuals, in whom it realizes itself, making and unmaking them; “the spirit, eternal possibility passing into infinite actuality, is history, a process of development, the eternal solution of an eternal problem.” History is always and wholly contemporary history, because “only an interest of present life can move us to investigate a past fact; which therefore, insofar as it is unified with an interest of present life, does not answer to a past interest, but to a present one” (Theory and History of Historiography, 3rd ed., Bari 1943, p. 4).
These are the fundamental lines of the Crocian system, dominated, as can be seen, by a rigorous immanentism, which the author refuses to call into question, as an already definitively acquired truth (he, the denier of definitive truths). And yet it is precisely this immanentism that produces the most inextricable aporiae of Crocian philosophy. For while the universal spirit, which Croce sometimes takes pleasure in calling God and Providence, appears as the Cyrenean bearing the burden of men’s crimes and miseries, human beings, on the other hand, are swept up in the storm of history, in which the Spirit makes and unmakes their life, using it as the spoils, “instruments or institutions,” of its becoming. The freedom of which Croce is a lofty “noble advocate” in the political sphere threatens, in the ethical sphere, to allow itself to be suffocated by the coils of historical determinism. Art oscillates between a theoretical and cognitive significance that it fails to secure and the irrelevance of a fleeting aspiration or a transitory dream. In the recurrent circularity of the spirit, every value is submerged in that which, as the greatest of all, ought in itself to contain and resolve them: becoming.
As a historian and critic, Croce wrote pages that will remain for their depth of intuition and “subtlety of psychological penetration,” but some judgments betray a strong, if unconscious, polemical passion. In keeping with the immanentism of his philosophical system, Croce was a proud and not always even-tempered opponent of Catholicism. Nevertheless, in his later years he moved toward a more objective evaluation of the historical merits of the Catholic Church and of the human content of its doctrine, while remaining alien to the deepest spirit of Catholicism.
Opere principali di B. Croce: Logica come scienza del concetto puro (7ª ed., Bari 1928); Filosofia della pratica (4ª ed., ivi 1932); La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (3ª ed., ivi 1933); La poesia (ivi 1936); Saggio sullo Hegel (3ª ed., ivi 1937); La storia come pensiero e come azione (3ª ed., ivi 1939); Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale (7ª ed., ivi 1941); Teoria e storia della storiografia (4ª ed., ivi 1941); Il carattere della filosofia moderna (ivi 1941); Filosofia e storiografia (ivi 1949).
Opere letterarie e storiche: Storia dell'età barocca in Italia (Bari 1920); La letteratura della nuova Italia (4 voll., 3ª ed., ivi 1934; V, ivi 1938; VI, ivi 1940); Storia d'Italia dal 1891 al 1915 (6ª ed., ivi 1938); Storia d'Europa nel secolo XIX (4ª ed., ivi 1938); Goethe (3ª ed., ivi 1939). Tutte le opere di B. Croce furono messe all'Indice con decr. del 20 giugno 1934.