PHILOSOPHY OF THE SPIRIT — An expression popularized by B. CROCE (b. 1866), which in current usage serves as a synonym for Croce’s system. Naturally, however, a philosophical conception of the spirit, and thus a philosophy of the spirit, more or less extensive and profound, is an integral part of every philosophical system. For Croce, the philosophy of the spirit is philosophy itself in its entirety, because, according to the idealist postulate, reality is spirit and there is no other reality than spirit. Croce sharply contrasts his philosophy of the spirit with metaphysics, failing to realize that spirit—especially when conceived as universal spirit, the metempirical principle of the real and of history—cannot but be a metaphysical entity, whatever its ontological value may be.
Unfortunately, the metaphysics underlying idealism is aporetic and contradictory, and consequently so is the conception of human spirit. Within a realistic vision of the world—where realism does not mean materialism—the conception of spirit also fits perfectly, and for its clarity the distinction between human spirit and divine spirit is indispensable; yet these tend to overlap and merge in Croce’s thought, as in every other idealist system.
Croce’s system unfolds from a nucleus already implicit in his aesthetic conception (the fundamental thesis of *Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale*, Bari 1900; *Estetica*, ibid. 1902). For Croce, art is pure intuition, which, as such—that is, as the form of the spontaneity of spirit in theoretical activity—differs from sensation, representation, and perception in the common psychological sense of these terms. Pure intuition grasps the real before it is mediated and sifted by concept. Yet spirit does not intuit except by doing, forming, and expressing. Whoever separates intuition from expression can never reunite them (*Estetica*, 7th ed., Bari 1941, p. 11). Art is expression, it is language—not as a series of sounds conventionally fixed as expressive signs of preexisting abstract concepts, but because language itself is already consciousness, creation, and expression of feelings vibrating in the soul. What arises within the human spirit is transformed into images; life becomes contemplation, and passionate impulse—which in its immediacy is mute—becomes expression, that is, a consciousness suffused with lyricism, colored by feeling, and thus distinct from logical and historical consciousness. Art is an expression confined within the orbit of a representation. Hence its intrinsic lyrical character, its universal lyricism.
If art is the dawn-like form of knowledge, concept is its fulfillment and end. Pure concept, which is proper concept, is ultra- and non-representational, inasmuch as “precisely because it is not representation, it cannot at the same time have any single representational 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 and each together” (*Logica*, 4th ed., Bari 1902, p. 14). By these extrinsic and constitutive characteristics, concept differs from pseudoconcepts, or conceptual fictions, which spirit elaborates for practical ends and mnemonic utility—whether representational without universality, as in the empirical sciences (rose, cat, etc.), or universal yet devoid of representations, as in mathematics (triangle, etc.).
Concept is thought only insofar as it takes concrete form in an expressive mode and thus becomes judgment. Judgment may be definitive or individual; but far from opposing or excluding one another, Croce holds that definitive judgment is individual judgment, presupposing, implying, and conditioning one another, identifying with one another, and in their identity lies the reason for Croce’s identification of philosophy—woven of definitive judgments—with history, with individual judgments.
Pure intuition and concept, art and philosophy are the moments in which the theoretical activity of spirit unfolds; this activity, on the one hand, presupposes practical activity and, on the other, is its presupposition. With an identical rhythm, practical activity unfolds as the violation of the individual (the useful) and the violation of the universal (the good), that is, as economy and as ethics. Utilitarian life is not immoral but rather amoral or personal, insofar as it precedes the awakening of ethical consciousness, which operates for universal ends. Yet these, in turn, do not exclude particular ends.
As the dialectical culmination of spirit’s activity, ethical life also implies individual violations.
The activities of spirit are clarified as distinct rather than opposed (as Hegel had considered them, giving rise to many errors and confusions); each higher form implies the lower, just as the universal implies the particular. Spirit is a synthesis a priori of distincts, whereas opposition occurs in the becoming of each distinct, as the intrinsic process of overcoming the ugly by the beautiful, the false by the true, the harmful by the useful, the evil by the good, and it is realized in a recurring dialectical circularity and an eternal process of implication. There is no reality other than universal spirit, immanent in empirical individuals, in whom it is realized, making and unmaking them; the spirit, without possibility of transition into infinite actuality, is history, a process of development, the eternal solution of an eternal problem. History is always and entirely 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 respond to a past interest but to a present one” (*Teoria e storia della storiografia*, 3rd ed., Bari 1943, p. 4).
These are the fundamental lines of Croce’s system, dominated, as can be seen, by a rigorous immanentism that the author refuses to question, since he regards it as a truth definitively acquired (he, the denier of definitive truths). And yet it is this immanentism that produces the most intractable aporias of Croce’s philosophy. While, indeed, the universal spirit that Croce sometimes takes pleasure in calling God and Providence appears as the Cyrenean bearing the crimes and miseries of men, these men, on the other hand, are swept up in the storm of history, in which Spirit makes and unmakes their lives, using them as mere instruments or “institutions” of its becoming. The freedom Croce proudly asserts in the political sphere threatens to be stifled in the ethical sphere by the coils of historicist determinism. Art oscillates between a theoretical and cognitive meaning it cannot secure and the irrelevance of a fleeting aspiration or a fading dream. In the recurring circularity of spirit, every value is submerged in that which, being the greatest of all, should comprehend and resolve them all.
As a historian and critic, Croce has written pages that will endure for their depth of intuition and psychological penetration, though some judgments betray a strong, even if unconscious, polemical passion. Consistent with the immanentism of his philosophical system, Croce has been a free but not always unopposed critic of Catholicism. In his later years, however, he has moved toward a more objective assessment of the historical merits of the Catholic Church and the human content of its doctrine, while remaining estranged from the deepest spirit of Catholicism.
Main works by B. Croce: *Logica come scienza del concetto puro* (7th ed., Bari 1928); *Filosofia della pratica* (4th ed., ibid. 1932); *La filosofia di Giambattista Vico* (3rd ed., ibid. 1933); *La poesia* (ibid. 1936); *Saggio sullo Hegel* (3rd ed., ibid. 1937); *La storia come pensiero e come azione* (3rd ed., ibid. 1939); *Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale* (7th ed., ibid. 1941); *Teoria e storia della storiografia* (4th ed., ibid. 1941); *Il carattere della filosofia moderna* (ibid. 1941); *Filosofia e storiografia* (ibid. 1949).
Literary and historical works: *Storia dell'età barocca in Italia* (Bari 1929); *La letteratura della nuova Italia* (4 vols., 3rd ed., ibid. 1934; V, ibid. 1938; VI, ibid. 1940); *Storia d'Italia dal 1871 al 1915* (6th ed., ibid. 1938); *Storia d'Europa nel secolo XIX* (4th ed., ibid. 1938); *Goethe* (3rd ed., ibid. 1939). All of B. Croce’s works were placed on the Index by decree of 20 June 1934.