Benedetto Croce

Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952)

The leading Italian philosopher of his day, Croce presented his philosophy as a humanist alternative to the consolations of religion. A Hegelian idealist, he argued that all human activity was orientated towards either the Beautiful, the True, the Useful or the Good. These ideals were the four aspects of what, following Hegel, he termed spirit or human consciousness. The first two corresponded to the theoretical dimensions of spirit, namely intuition and logic respectively, the last two to spirit’s practical aspects of economic and ethical willing. He contended that the four eternal ideals were ‘pure concepts’ whose content derived from human thought and action. Spirit or consciousness progressively unfolded through human history as our ideas of beauty, truth, usefulness and morality were steadily reworked and developed.

Croce insisted that his idealism was a form of ‘absolute historicism’, since it involved the claim that all meaning and value evolved immanently through the historical process. He strenuously denied that spirit could be regarded as some form of transcendent puppet-master that existed apart from the human beings through which it expressed itself. He accused Hegel of making this mistake. He also maintained that Hegel’s conception of the dialectic as a synthesis of opposites had paid insufficient attention to the need to retain the distinct moments of spirit. He argued that the Beautiful, the True, the Useful and the Good, though linked, ought never to be confused, and he criticized aestheticism and utilitarianism accordingly.

Croce developed his thesis both in philosophical works devoted to aesthetics, ethics, politics and the philosophy of history, and in detailed historical studies of Italian and European literature, culture, politics and society. Opposition to the Fascist regime led him to identify his philosophy with liberalism on the grounds that it emphasized the creativity and autonomy of the individual. In practical politics, however, he was a conservative.

1 Life and works

Born in 1866 at Pescasseroli, in the Abruzzi in Southern Italy, Croce’s family were wealthy landowners; Croce himself never had to pursue a career. In 1883 his parents and sister were killed in an earthquake in which he too was buried. For the next three years he lived in Rome with his uncle, Silvio Spaventa, a prominent liberal statesman of the Cavourian party known as the Historical Right and brother of the prominent Hegelian philosopher Bertrando Spaventa, whose own political thinking also drew on Hegelian themes. Although Croce never took a degree, he attended lectures at Rome university, where he came under the influence of Antonio Labriola who introduced him to the writings of Johann Friedrich Herbart and later Karl Marx. Croce’s political views reflected the conservative liberalism of his uncle, but he claimed never to have been attracted by Bertrando Spaventa’s brand of Hegelianism or his doctrine of the ethical State. Herbart’s Neo-Kantian position, in contrast, inspired his later theory of concept-formation, while his early studies of Marx led him to his view of the Useful as a category distinct from the Good, towards which most practical activity was aimed (see Herbart, J.F.; Marx, K. §11).

Resisting family pressure to enter the law, Croce left Rome in 1886 and settled in Naples, where he determined to become a private scholar. Initially he devoted his energies to numerous antiquarian studies centred on various aspects of southern Italian history in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This research formed the basis of his later books on the Kingdom of Naples and the Baroque era in Italy. This period culminated in his study of Neapolitan theatre from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, published in 1891. The fusion of cultural and social history in these early writings was highly innovative and contained the germs of many of his later philosophical preoccupations – particularly with respect to the nature of human creativity and action.

These theoretical concerns began to come to the fore when in 1893 he published his first essay in philosophy, ‘La storia ridotto sotto il concetto generale dell’arte’ (History Subsumed under the General Concept of Art). Croce used an article by the Italian positivist Pasquale Villari entitled ‘Is History a Science?’ as an excuse both to attack the positivism then dominant in Italy and to enter the contemporary German debate between Windelband and Dilthey over the identity of the human sciences (see Dilthey, W. §3; History, philosophy of §4). Croce argued that while history was like art in representing particular events rather than elaborating general laws, as in the natural sciences, it differed in dealing with what actually occurred, rather than with what might have happened. Prompted by Labriola, he followed up this essay with a number of articles attacking crude quasi-Darwinian materialist interpretations of Marxism, although he went beyond his brief to criticize Marx’s economic doctrines as well. These writings, collected together in book form in 1900 as Materialismo storico ed economia marxista (Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx), brought him to the attention of an international public including Georges Sorel and Vilfredo Pareto, whose interpretation of Marxism as a secular religion he came to share. His friendship with Giovanni Gentile, then working on a doctoral dissertation on Marx’s philosophy, also began at this time (see Gentile, G. §1). Their collaboration over the next twenty years was to transform Italian philosophy, producing a revival of Hegelian Idealism.

In 1903 Croce began to publish his bimonthly journal La critica, devoted to reviews of the latest Italian and European books in the humanities and including general surveys of Italian literature and philosophy since unification written by Croce and Gentile respectively. Croce’s Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Aesthetic) had appeared in 1902. This book became the first volume of his Philosophy of Spirit, and was followed by his Logica come scienza del concetto puro (Logic) (1905, completely reworked in 1909), the Filosofia della pratica. Economia ed etica (Philosophy of the Practical) (1909), and the Teoria e storia della storiografia (Theory and History of Historiography) (1917). Prompted by Gentile, Croce’s philosophy took an increasingly historicist direction from 1905 onwards, a shift that led to the rewriting of the Logica). This development also prompted him to write detailed studies of Hegel, Cio che è vivo e cio che è morto nella filosofia di Hegel (What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel) (1907), and of Vico, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico) (1911).

Croce became a life senator in 1910 but only began to write on and participate in politics with the advent of First World War, when he campaigned for Italy to remain neutral. He acted as Minister of Education in the last cabinet of the liberal politician Giovanni Giolitti from 1920 to 1921, putting forward reforms in schools and higher education that he and Gentile in particular had long advocated and which were finally implemented in the Fascist Riforma Gentile. Sympathetic to Fascism as long as he felt it was controlled by the old liberal elite as a bulwark against socialism, he never subscribed to its ideology and broke with it after 1924. Relations with Gentile, already strained due to his aversion to his friend’s extreme subjectivist ‘actual’ idealism, finally collapsed with the latter’s entry into the Fascist Party, of which he became the self-styled philosopher. Croce became a leading opponent of the regime, penning a famous protest against Gentile’s ‘Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals’ in 1925. Opposition gave him a new lease of life and led him to characterize his philosophy as a form of liberalism – most particularly in two series of essays: Etica e politica (Politics and Morals) written largely in 1924–8 and collected in 1931, in which he put forward his ethico-political theory of history, and La storia come pensiero e come azione (History as the Story of Liberty) (1938), where he defined history as the ‘story of liberty’. He also illustrated these theses in four historical studies: La storia del regno di Napoli (A History of the Kingdom of Naples) (1925), Storia d’Italia dal 1871–1915 (History of Italy 1871–1915) (1928a), Storia dell’eta barocca in Italia (A History of the Baroque Era in Italy) (1929) and Storia d’Europa nel secolo XIX (History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century) (1932). He made corresponding changes to his aesthetic doctrine, culminating in La poesia (Poetry) in 1936. Only the allied invasion caused him to stop publishing La critica, and he continued to produce books and essays and occasional Quaderni della critica right up to his death in 1952.

2 Aesthetics

Croce’s aesthetics were tied both to his activity as a literary critic, which was copious, and developments in his general philosophy. He confessed to having no appreciation of music and wrote comparatively little on architecture or the figurative arts, leading some commentators to suggest that his theory is biased towards poetry. As the major influences on his own thinking, he claimed Francesco De Sanctis, whose La storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature) (1870–1) he continued through to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Giambattista Vico, whose aesthetic thought he first brought to prominence.

Commentators commonly identify four phases within Croce’s aesthetic doctrine, roughly corresponding to changes in his philosophy, although opinions differ over their compatibility with each other. The first phase, associated with the Aesthetic of 1902, consists of Croce’s identification of art with intuition. His main targets were positivist or empiricist theories, on the one hand, and intellectualist or rationalist views on the other. Against the first, he claimed that feeling and emotion have to be expressed to have any existence, and that this is a cognitive process. Against the second, he distinguished logical from intuitive knowledge. Whereas the former works through concepts and deals with universal relations between things, the latter is obtained through images of particular things. Adopting a Herbartian reading of Kant, he argued that we organize the world of experience and sensation through the intuitive faculty of the imagination that gave expression to them. Form and content, intuition and expression were identical. That which was not expressed had not been intuited and remained ‘a mere natural fact’. The logical categorization of this intuitive knowledge was a subsequent stage. He also contended that the theoretical activity of the imagination was distinct from any practical or ethical purpose. True art, therefore, was concerned neither with the True, the Useful or the Good – an argument he deployed against the Italian verismo school of naturalist writers influenced by Emile Zola.

The second phase of Croce’s aesthetics came with his theory of the lyrical nature of art. First enunciated in an article of 1908, and subsequently elaborated in the Breviario di estetica (The Essence of Aesthetic) (1913), this doctrine attempted to specify further just what artistic expression consisted of: namely the lyrical intuition of ‘intense feelings’ or emotions. Such feelings, he still insisted, could not be described in sensationist terms, but could only be expressed through images. For analogous reasons, he also rejected romantic theories that treated art as no more than a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. Art is a spiritual activity that transforms our bare animal existence. However, he continued to distinguish the images of intuition from the categories of logical thought, and he criticized the artificial canons and rules of classical theorists for ignoring this fact.

While distinct from either philosophy or practice, art was related to them. Drawing on his contemporaneous revision of Hegel and the resulting thesis that spirit evolved via a dialectic of distincts rather than of opposites, Croce argued that intuition tends to give way to perception and so to conceptual thought or judgment. Furthermore, such knowledge leads us to take up a new attitude to life and so affects our practice. This new will in its turn solicits new passions and feelings that find expression in a new lyric and fresh art, constituting a process which Croce termed the ‘circle of spirit’, in which each moment is both independent and dependent, condition and conditioned.

The third phase of Croce’s aesthetics builds on this thesis by insisting on the ‘cosmic’ or ‘universal’ character of art. Put forward in his article ‘Il carattere di totalità dell’espressione artistica’ (The Totality of Artistic Expression) (1918a), this doctrine served to underline the cognitive aspect of his theory by stressing that as an aspect of spirit ‘every genuine artistic representation is itself and is the universe, the universe in that individual form’ (1926: 122). However, intuition formed only a part of the ‘circle of spirit’, and he rebutted criticisms of mysticism or aestheticism which accused him of reducing all knowledge to artistic intuition. Nevertheless, at this time Croce tended to reify spirit and treat human activity as a mere manifestation of its unfolding, a position he later rectified. Croce illustrated his argument in studies of Goethe (1919a), Ariosto, Shakespeare, Corneille (1920) and La poesia di Dante (The Poetry of Dante) (1921).

The final phase was signalled by La poesia (1936). Croce regarded this book as incorporating all the subsequent revisions of his aesthetic theory and replacing the Aesthetic of 1902. He argued that there were four types of ‘expression’: the ‘sentimental or immediate’, the ‘poetic’, the ‘prosaic’ and the ‘rhetorical’. True poetry, he argued, only arose when these types originated from a ‘lyrical expression’ and had no ulterior utilitarian, moral or philosophical purpose. When lyricism was absent, one had literature, which he further subdivided into the sentimental, moralistic, entertaining or instructive.

3 Logic and history

Croce’s Logic centred on his notion of the ‘pure concept’ as a universal idea that could not be confused with the particular representations it encompassed. As such, it was to be distinguished from ‘pseudo-concepts’, which were mere classes of objects. These latter were empirical rather than theoretical categories.

The content of ‘pure concepts’ came through history. The identification of history and philosophy in the second edition of the Logic (1909) was the most important revision Croce was to make to his theory. Judgment, he argued, is essentially historical in nature, involving the union of a pure universal concept with a historically given particular object. When we say ‘Peter is a man’ we not only define a characteristic of Peter with a preformed concept of what a man is, we reaffirm and change the concept of man in relation to Peter. Our notions of maleness are historical products of past meetings with other Peters and Pauls, and modifiable by other future encounters. Similarly, Peter’s conception of himself was equally defined by a given notion of man. In this way, Croce argued, philosophy proved both conditioned by history and a means, through conceptual innovation, for the making of new history. Likewise, theory and practice are mutually related, the one influencing the other.

Croce carried this thesis further in the final volume of the Philosophy of Spirit, the Theory and History of Historiography. Here he famously claimed that ‘All history is contemporary history’ because ‘it meets a present need’ (1917: 5–17). The collection of facts about the past, while a necessary preliminary for historical writing, was not yet history but ‘chronicle’. It was a ‘dead’ past because it had yet to be interpreted and given a meaning. Interpretation involved entering the minds of the historical actors and understanding the inner significance of their actions by reliving these events in the historian’s own consciousness. Croce believed that this was possible because we are what our past has made us, so that our knowledge of ourselves is historically conditioned. The past literally lives within us.

Croce was careful to avoid any suggestion of relativism or subjectivism. He denied that history was whatever we took it to be. Indeed, at times he appeared to argue that it was not so much individuals, as spirit ‘eternally individualizing itself’ that was the true subject of history. This thesis, together with his contention that we are all products of the past, risked denying individuals the possibility for any creative action at all. During the 1920s and 1930s he modified his position on both these fronts. In a series of essays written in 1922–4, he proposed the view that history was ‘ethico-political’ in nature. In other words, the conflict of different individual ideals was the true dynamic of history, a view he deployed against both Marxism and Fascism. Historicism, therefore, buttressed liberalism. He was not thereby advocating voluntarism, however. As he made clear in his final major work, History as the Story of Liberty, successful action depends on a correct appraisal of one’s current situation – itself a matter of historical judgment. Knowing the world in thought gives an impetus to the ethical desire to transform it through action.

4 Ethics and politics

Croce’s initial concern in the field of practical philosophy was to distinguish the concepts of the Useful and the Good and to combat both utilitarian moralities and moralistic politics as category mistakes. Although this distinction figured in his writings on Marx and formed the basis of an influential debate with Vilfredo Pareto on the relation of economics to ethics, he did not expound it fully until the Filosofia della pratica: economia ed etica, where he integrated it into his general theory of the circle of spirit within history.

He did not draw any practical inferences from this doctrine until the First World War. In a series of articles later collected as Pagine sulla guerra (Writings on the War) (1919b), he attacked those who maintained that the war was between two rival moralities – the democratic and the autocratic. Croce contended that war, like politics in general, was pre-moral in being orientated towards the Useful. The state had no purpose but that of power and no means other than force, so that the military struggle should be seen as a matter of pure realpolitik. He strenuously denied that this view entailed identifying might with right. However, in essays published as Frammenti di etica (The Conduct of Life) (1922), he did insist that morality was not something that could be pursued directly, but was a matter of the judgment of history. Accordingly, he argued that each person should simply fulfil the duties of their appointed station and trust in Providence.

The dangers of this deeply conservative position became evident with the rise of Fascism (see Fascism). Croce initially supported it, albeit lukewarmly, as leading to a strengthening of the state. However, Gentile, now a keen supporter of Fascism, made precisely the jump that Croce feared of identifying the force of the state with its moral strength. This move, and his resulting doctrine of the ethical state, led Croce to clarify his position. He accused Gentile and the Fascists of putting forward a ‘governmental morality’. While he continued to regard the state in the narrow sense as belonging to the realm of the Useful, he now maintained that politics in general had an ethical dimension in the struggle to realize certain ideals and he endorsed liberal democracy for allowing the widest possible competition between different points of view. However, he claimed his liberalism to be ‘metapolitical’ rather than narrowly party political. While he believed that liberalism entailed a free market in ideas, he argued that different economic and political policies might be appropriate in different historical circumstances – even communism. This argument provoked a debate with the economist Luigi Einaudi over whether moral and political liberalism entailed libertarianism. Against Einaudi, Croce maintained that economic liberals erred in attempting to categorize everything in terms of the Useful and so failed to see that liberalism was the dialectic of spirit in all of its moments throughout the whole of history. Croce made the same criticism of left-of-centre liberals such as Guido Calogero and Guido de Ruggiero, who campaigned for a social welfare view of liberalism similar to that of the English New Liberals, such as L.T. Hobhouse. While Croce’s ‘metapolitical’ position proved useful in uniting the various opponents of Fascism, it yielded little except a certain pragmatism when it came to practical politics. After the war, Croce acted as President of a new formed Liberal Party. However, he was unable to forge a broad non-Catholic non-Socialist bloc, as he had hoped. Instead, he found himself presiding over an increasingly right-wing party and ultimately resigned.

The shifts in Croce’s politics highlight a constant tension in his philosophy as a whole between historicism and idealism, realism and rationalism, politics and ethics, the Hegelian and the Kantian aspects of his thought. In some respects, his chief claim was to have made a virtue out of this tension, rather than attempting to synthesize these two elements. The constant revisions that his thought underwent, however, suggests that he found himself constantly pulled in different directions, emphasizing one then the other.