PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT. - An expression popularized and made current by B. Croce (b. 1866), so that in ordinary language it serves as a synonym for the Crocean system. But, naturally, a philosophical conception of the spirit, and therefore 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 without qualification, in its totality, because, according to the idealistic postulate, reality is spirit and there is no reality other than spirit. Croce sharply contrasts his philosophy of the spirit with metaphysics, not realizing that the spirit, all the more so if conceived as universal spirit, a metempirical principle of reality and of 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 the conception of the human spirit also turns out to be such. In a realistic vision of the world — and realism does not mean materialism — the conception of the spirit also finds its perfect place, and for its clarity the distinction between human spirit and divine spirit is indispensable, whereas these tend instead to overlap and to be confused in Croceanism as in every other system of idealism.
The Crocean system develops from a germinal nucleus already implicit in the aesthetic conception (the fundamental thesis of Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale, Bari 1900; Estetica, ibid. 1902). Art is, for Croce, pure intuition, which, as such, that is, as a form of the spontaneity of the spirit in theoretical activity, is distinguished from sensation, from representation and from perception, in the common psychological meaning of these terms. Pure intuition grasps the real, not yet mediated and illuminated by the concept. But « the spirit does not intuit except by making, forming, expressing. Whoever separates intuition from expression never succeeds again in joining it » (Estetica, 7th ed., Bari 1941, p. 11). Art is expression, is language, not as a series of sounds, conventionally fixed as expressive signs of abstract concepts pre-existing in the mind, but insofar as language is itself in turn consciousness, creation, expression of feelings vibrating in the soul. What arises in the depths of the human spirit is transformed into images; life becomes contemplation, the passionate impulse, which in its immediacy is mute, becomes expression, that is, awareness pervaded with lyricism, colored with feeling, whereby it is distinguished from logical and historical consciousness. Art is an aspiration enclosed within the circuit of a representation. Hence its intrinsic lyrical character, its universal lyricism.
If art is the auroral form of knowledge, the concept is its completion and its term. The pure concept, which is the concept properly so called, is ultra-and omni-representative, insofar as « precisely because it is not representation, it cannot have as its content a single representative element, nor refer to this or that particular representation » to this or that group of representations; although, on the other hand, precisely because it is universal with respect to the individual character of representations, it refers to all and to each together » (Logica, 4th ed., Bari 1920, p. 14). By these extrinsic and constitutive characters the concept is distinguished from pseudo-concepts, or conceptual fictions, which the spirit elaborates for a practical end and for mnemonic utility, whether they be 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 is concretized in an expressive form and thus becomes judgment. Judgment can be definitional or individual: but far from opposing « or excluding each other, according to Croce the definitional judgment » the individual judgment, presupposing, implying « and conditioning each other, are identified, and in their identity lies the reason for Croce's identification of philosophy, woven of definitional judgments, with history, made up of individual judgments.
Pure intuition and concept, art and philosophy are the moments in which the theoretical activity of the spirit unfolds, which, on the one hand, presupposes practical activity and, on the other, is its presupposition. With 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 as ethics. Utilitarian life is not immoral, but rather amoral or pre-moral insofar as it precedes the awakening of the ethical consciousness, which works for universal ends. But 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 are clarified as distinct, rather than opposed (as Hegel had considered them, giving rise to multiple errors and confusions): every higher form implies the lower, as the universal implies the particular. The spirit is an a priori synthesis of distincts, while opposition takes place in the becoming of each distinct, as an intrinsic process of overcoming the ugly in the beautiful, the false in the true, the harmful in the useful, evil in good, and is realized in a recurrent dialectical circularity and in an eternal process of implication. There is no reality other than the universal spirit, immanent in empirical individuals, in which it realizes itself, making and unmaking them; « the spirit, eternal possibility that passes into infinite actuality, is history, process of development, 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 unifies itself with an interest of present life, does not answer 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 the Crocean system, dominated, as can be seen, by a rigorous immanentism, which the author refuses to call into question, as a truth by now definitively acquired (he, the denier of definitive truths). And yet it is this immanentism that produces the most inextricable aporias of Crocean philosophy. While, in fact, the universal spirit, which Croce sometimes takes pleasure in calling God and Providence, appears as the Simon of Cyrene of men's crimes and miseries, these, on the other hand, are swept up in the storm of history, in which the Spirit makes and unmakes their life, using them as spoils « instruments or institutions » of its becoming. The freedom of which Croce is a lofty « noble assertor in the political sphere threatens to be suffocated, in the ethical sphere, by the coils of historicist determinism. Art oscillates between a theoretical and cognitive meaning that it fails to secure and the irrelevance of a fleeting aspiration or a caducous dream. In the recurrent circularity of the spirit every value is submerged in that which, as the greatest of all, should in itself comprehend and resolve them: becoming.
As a historian and as a critic, Croce wrote pages that will endure for depth of intuition « finesse of psychological penetration, but some judgments bear the mark of a strong, even if unconscious, polemical passion. In coherence with the immanentism of his philosophical system, Croce was a proud and not always serene adversary of Catholicism. Yet in his last years he oriented himself toward a more objective evaluation of the historical merits of the Catholic Church and of the human content of its doctrine, while remaining estranged from the deepest spirit of Catholicism.
Principal works of 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 1920); La letteratura della nuova Italia (4 vols., 3rd ed., ibid. 1934; V, ibid. 1938; VI, ibid. 1940); Storia d'Italia dal 1891 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.
Bibliography13 works
Nicola Petruzzella