Chapter VIII

CRITIQUE OF THE INVASIONS BY PHILOSOPHY OF THE DOMAIN OF PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION AND OF ITS DERIVATIVES

In demonstrating the legitimacy and necessity of practical description and of its derivatives, Regolistic and Casuistic, we have not fulfilled, as it were, our whole knightly duty, which binds us to that discipline, which we have been obliged to maltreat so exceedingly, and shall further maltreat, when it has been or shall be presented as a philosophical method. It is now necessary to defend its existence against the invasion of philosophy, or rather of philosophers. We must make it obvious that if the empiricists and psychologists, who swell themselves out to philosophers, are bunglers, those too are bunglers who claim to solve empirical questions philosophically. Perhaps they are bunglers less worthy of pardon, because it is part of philosophy to know itself clearly, and consequently its own limits.

[Sidenote: _First form: tendency to generalize._]

The first bad effect that philosophy has upon practical description is the tendency to change it from description and collection of particular descriptions into something that has the air of generality and comprehensiveness. Because, if practical description be closely connected with the historical conditions of definite individuals and societies and with their wants, the more specific and near to the concrete it is, the better it will be, and the more useless by as much as it goes wandering toward the general. We owe to the evil influence of philosophy those verbose treatises upon psychological classes, such as virtue, duties, things good, affections, passions, and human types, to read which nourishes less than fresh water, which at least refreshes.

Let him who wishes to be convinced compare the books of rules and observations that we owe to men of experience and to men of the world, such as the _Ricordi_ of Guicciardini, the _Maximes_ of Larochefoucauld, and the _Oraculo Manual_ of Balthazar Gracian, with the _Traité des passions_ of Descartes, with that section of the _Ethica_ of Spinoza that relates to this matter, with the _Anthropologia_ and the _Doctrine of Virtue_ of Kant (we prefer to record great names). He will then see on whose side is the advantage, an advantage of originality, of importance, and even of style, which is in this case a revelation. Those books by philosophers contain for the most part definitions of vocabulary and of words which there is no need to define, because everybody knows them to such an extent that the definitions, rather than make them more clear, make them obscure. Who, for example, can resist the philosophical triviality of the _Aphorisms for the Wisdom of Life_ of Arthur Schopenhauer? Take the trouble to open a book to learn that good things are to be divided into personal, wealth and imagination, or reputation, and that the first (such as good health and a gay temperament) are pre-eminent over the others. Do we not learn more and with greater rapidity and efficacy from such proverbs as "God helps the merry man"? It is superfluous to observe that those books, in so far as they generalize, can never attain to philosophy. They remain at bottom more or less historical.

[Sidenote: _Historical elements persisting in generalizations._]

The good and generous wine of the born psychologists and precept-makers is diluted in a great deal of water, but that water, however much there be of it, never becomes pure and is always discoloured and of an unpleasant taste. Thus in classifications of ancient Ethic the idea of "virtue" or of "good" was announced as the most important, in Christian Ethic that of "duty," in the same way as in ancient Ethic the political character was dominant, in the modern the individualistic, according to the different character of the corresponding civilizations. Historical elements differentiate the Ethic of Aristotle, impregnated with sane Greek life, from that of the Stoics, in which is foretold the decadence of the antique world and the germs of the future discovered (for instance, cosmopolitanism, which precedes the Christian idea of the unity of the human race). The four Platonic virtues retain the name, but are filled with a new content, in the four cardinal virtues of the Christian Ethic; the seven deadly sins are not to be explained in all their settemplicity without the ascetic ideal of the Middle Ages.

Among the various writers of treatises, the foreground is filled, now with the idea of effort or of duty, now with that of enjoyment and satisfaction; ideas are now despotic masters, now smiling friends; the dominant idea is in turn that of justice, of benevolence, of enthusiasm, and so on. In the systems of Catholic Ethic are reflected political absolutism and semi-feudal economy; in those of Protestant Ethic, constitutionalism, liberalism, the industrial and capitalistic world; a strict probity, not indeed without utilitarianism, and a hardness of heart, not indeed without austerity. Modern Ethic is concerned with property, with the struggle of classes, with proletarianism and communism. These are all historical facts and as such most worthy of attention, but for that very reason they should be examined in all their force and value and not through the medium of the pale categories of a universal doctrine, which they disturb and falsify and by which they are very often disturbed and falsified. Whoever undertakes to write general treatises upon the passions, upon the virtues, and upon the other practical classes, will always show the signs of his time in the categories that he establishes, and the result will be at once banal and empirical, that is to say, badly empirical.

[Sidenote: _Second form: literary union of philosophy and empiria._]

But hitherto the chief ill has been that useless and tiresome books are written. Matters begin to look graver when an approach is attempted between philosophical theories and empirical classifications and they are united in one treatise, as the _general_ part and the _particular_ part, the _abstract_ and the _concrete_ part, the _theoretical_ and the _historical_ part. We do not wish to refuse recognition to an occasionally just sense of the intimate relations between philosophy and history as among the motives that lead to such unions, the first of which flows into the second, revives it and is by it in turn revived. But the history, to which philosophy applies the torch, is all history in its palpitating reality; it is history represented by all histories that historians have written and will write, and also by those that they have not written and will not write. The history offered by these empirical descriptions is only a very small part of history and (what is worse) abstract and mutilated. This would, however, be an injury of not too grave a nature, even at this point, provided the incongruity were limited to literary unfitness; in which case, it is true, would be added to inutility the ugliness of a union capricious and artificial, but fortunately extrinsic. But by means of that extrinsic approach, the way is opened to the attempt at an intrinsic approach, and thus to the third form of the undue invasion of practical description by philosophy, which constitutes the _morbus philosophico-empiricus_ in all its harm fulness.

[Sidenote: _Third form: attempt to place them in intimate connexion._]

The attempt at intrinsic approach takes place when empirical classes are placed in connection with the philosophical concepts or categories, with pure thought. Nearly all philosophers have fallen into this error, since it is very natural that they should not have wished to leave a _hiatus_ between the first and second parts of their books of Philosophy of the practical, between the general and particular parts, and that they should have striven to connect the one with the other by passing logically from the concepts of the first to those of the second. The mistake was indubitably increased owing to their small degree of clearness as to the logical nature of the two orders of concepts (concepts and pseudo-concepts), which is fundamentally diverse, and we shall not further insist upon this matter.

[Sidenote: _Science of the practical and Metaphysic: various significations._]

Rather let us note that sometimes there has been something rational in the minds of those who have required the Science of the practical or Ethic to be constructed independently of all Metaphysic. In truth, that programme of the independence of the Science of the practical or Ethic of Metaphysic has had various meanings that it will be well to enumerate briefly. The first meaning was that the Science of the practical, in so far as it was philosophy, should be independent of the _aggregate_ of the philosophical system (Metaphysic). In this case the claim was not acceptable, as we shall see, because it was at variance with the nature itself of philosophy, which is unity. The second meaning was that the Practical, as science, should be kept remote from every form of faith, or feeling or fancifulness (which has sometimes been called "Metaphysic"); and in this case the proposition was inexpugnable, however contestable may have seemed the opportuneity of the meaning given to that word. The third meaning was that the Science of the practical, in so far as it was descriptive, should stand by itself, in order to afford a base for philosophical induction. Use was here made of the erroneous idea, already rejected several times, of philosophy as an intensification of the psychological method, or as a carrying of it on. But in a fourth sense, it was desired finally to withdraw practical description from the perilous care of the philosophers, and it seems to us that with this fourth meaning was expressed a very just demand.

[Sidenote: _Damaging consequences of the invasions._]

What are, in fact, the consequences of the care that philosophers have bestowed upon practical description? We would not wish to use an over-coloured simile, but what happens is very much what would happen if a man were given a baby to suckle. He would press it violently against his dry and arid breast, incapable of nourishing, but well capable of tormenting it. Philosophy, when it approaches the empirical classes, will either begin to criticize their distinctions and abolish them, reducing several classes to one, and then reducing the reduced classes in their turn to a less number, until none are left at all and it finds itself in company with the universal philosophical principle alone, or alone with itself;--or it will contrive to preserve them as classes, deducing them philosophically, and will thus make them rigid and absolute, removing from them that elasticity and fluidity which they derive from their historical character, and converting them from useful classes that they were, into bad philosophemes, concepts contradictory in themselves.

[Sidenote: _1a. Dissolution of the empirical concepts._]

Both these consequences have occurred, for the books of philosophers are full of examples, now of destruction, now of corruption of the empirical classes of the Practical. The treatment of the doctrine of the virtues or of so-called natural rights affords examples of destruction. Striving to distinguish courage from prudence, or justice from benevolence, or on the other hand, egotism from wickedness, they ended by recognizing that true courage is prudence, true prudence courage; that benevolence is justice, justice benevolence; that egotism is wickedness, wickedness egotism, and so on. In this way, all the virtues became one, the virtue of being virtuous, the will for the good, duty. In like manner, by giving philosophical form to the natural rights of life, of liberty, of culture, of property, and so on, they ended by recognizing that all rights merge in one single right, which is that of existence; which latter, indeed, is not a right, but a fact. The passions were reduced from seventy or eighty classes to six or seven fundamental, but these six or seven were in their turn reduced to two only, pleasure and pain, and of these two; it was finally discovered that they constituted one only--life, which is pleasure and pain together. But virtues, rights, passions, possess value in practical description only in so far as they are multiplicity--their value is always plural, never singular. To reduce them to a single class signifies to annul them, as to blow upon a candle signifies to extinguish it and to remain in darkness; darkness is to be understood as without empirical light. Now the philosopher should certainly destroy empirical ideas, but only in so far as they present themselves as philosophical distinctions, that is, in so far as they are empirico philosophical: and in that case it suffices him to show that they are empirical, without pretending to annul them in their own domain also: _debellare superbos,_ but _parcere subjectis;_ that is, he should spare strangers who remain quietly in their own house.

[Sidenote: _Examples: war and peace, property and communism, and the like._]

It might seem desirable to pass in review all these empirical distinctions and questions which the philosophers have thought that they had satisfactorily solved, when they had, on the contrary, passed beyond them. But the theme is inexhaustible, and we cannot here give even a rich selection, comprising the most frequent and important cases. We must limit ourselves to brief mention.--People discuss every day: whether war be an evil, and if it be possible to abolish it; if community of goods should take the place of private property; if rational government be that of liberty or of authority, of democracy or aristocracy, of anarchism or state organization; whether the State should be in the Church or the Church in the State, or side by side and independent; if freedom of thought should be admitted or restrained; if instruction should be free or undertaken by the State; and other similar problems. Now behold the philosopher applying himself to the study of these ideas. Having tested them, he is astonished that people can find in them opposing terms, and make them argument for dispute. In truth (he says), war is intrinsic to reality, and peace is peace in so far as by making an end of one war it prepares another; as Socrates demonstrated in the _Phaedo,_ when, scratching his leg in the place where it had been pressed by the chain, he realized that he could not have experienced that pleasure had he not previously experienced the pain. Nor is property different from communism: the individual declares himself by an individual taking possession of things and becoming their owner; but by so doing he enters into relations and into communion with other individuals, and does business with them. And liberty excludes subjection the less, since _sub lege libertas;_ nor does aristocracy exclude democracy, since the true aristocrat is the bearer of those universal values that are the substance of democracy; hence the more we are aristocratic the more we are democratic, and inversely. Nor does anarchism exclude State organization, because a collection of men, however free we suppose it to be, must nevertheless govern itself according to some laws, and these laws are the State. Then, the ideal State, being the best government of men for their perfectionment, both material and spiritual, accomplishes the work of the Church itself, which is neither above, nor below, nor beside the State, because it is the State. Thus in like manner, no one can grant or abolish freedom of thought, since thought is by definition freedom, and the restraint is thought itself, because liberty coincides with necessity. And finally State instruction cannot but correspond with rational demands, and the free instruction of citizens, if it be really so and not arbitrary and capricious, will be the same as that of the State, or will be changed into the instruction of the State.

[Sidenote: _Other examples._]

Passing to other orders of fact that are less political, but are also argument for practical discussions, we shall refer to the so-called conflicts between duty or interest, as symbolized in the legendary Titus Manlius, when offered the alternative _aut reipublicae aut sui suorumque obliviscendi_;--or to the so-called question of the two moralities, private and public, in support of which the not legendary Camillo Cavour said in 1860, that if he had done in his private interest what he had done for Italy, he would have deserved the galleys;--or we can refer to questions of classification, and ask whether the kind of man who is socially harmless should be placed side by side with the criminal;--or to those others, famous in Casuistic, relating to capital punishment, homicide, suicide, lies, whether and when they should be permitted, and other similar questions. Here, too, the philosopher will smilingly observe that duties and interests can never be in conflict, because in every given case duty is always one only, and interest is always one only, that of the given case;--he will deny that there is one public and one private morality, because in man, the private person and the citizen, family relations, or those of friendship, and those of political life, are inseparable and indistinguishable;--that every man is bad and good, inoffensive and criminal, and that in the so-called criminal there must also be the non-criminal, if he be given the name of man;--that every punishment is a punishment of death, that is, it causes something to die, and that it is impossible to find a clear distinction between shutting a man up in prison and thus taking from him a more or less large slice of physical life, and taking it from him altogether by hanging or shooting him;--that homicide, as such, is so little a crime that in war it is a duty to commit it;--that a lie, which is silence as to what one knows, is in itself so innocent that no one in the world, save a foolish prater, tells all he knows, and that if it be admitted that one can and should be silent, that is to say, let others be deceived by our silence (though this is eloquent), there is no reason for not admitting that we can also betray them with speech (often less eloquent), as is done with children in order to send them to bed, and with sick persons in order to comfort them;--that, finally, culpable suicide is not the material act of depriving oneself of physical life (a thing done without incurring blame, and indeed with praise and glory, by those who sacrifice themselves for others in war, in epidemics, in dangers of all sorts, and by every one who consumes his own vital strength in a worthy cause), but the killing of the moral life in oneself.

[Sidenote: _Misunderstanding on the part of philosophers._]

In all these answers to questions, we have not made our imaginary philosopher commit any blunder; we have indeed put into his mouth things that we believe to be all of them most true and irrefutable, because we believe them ourselves. And we hold that it is necessary to profess them against those who arbitrarily make questions philosophical whose terms are not philosophical. But when the philosopher offers those solutions to the empirical disputants, he behaves like him who, hearing a speech in a language of which he knows little, makes a reply that is in itself most reasonable, but without relation to the previous speech. The empiricist, if he have studied philosophy, will be able to reply, as did King Theodore, worn with misery, in the old _opéra bouffe_ of the Abbé Casti, to him who recalls to him the miseries suffered by Marius, Themistocles, and Darius:--

Good my son, I know them well,
For I have heard these tales before;
But just at present, truth to tell,
'Tis money interests me more.

[Sidenote: _Historical significance of the aforesaid questions._]

Money, that is, ready money to spend in definite situations historically given, in order to find one's way in them; for all those questions are without universal signification, but have arisen from political and individual problems, to which they do and must belong. Certainly they are insoluble in the abstract, and this is the defect, or rather the nature of empirical questions, which, if they admitted of rigorous solution, would not be any longer empirical. Therefore it is a foolish thing to discuss them philosophically, as is seen in the conspicuous example of certain casuistical enquiries (the homicide of the unjust aggressor, the lie, incest, etc.) which have been treated by nearly all philosophers and have been dragged about for centuries in discussions on Ethic, although every century has left them at the same point as they were in the one preceding.

But if it be not possible to solve, we can at least _state_ them in abstract terms, in the same way as drill and the sham-fight are abstract, though certainly of use when the battle is really fought. We can and we should bear in mind these abstract solutions, in order that we may be the better able to solve a series of concrete cases, which are not identical, certainly, because identical cases do not exist, but more or less similar, and therefore require solutions that are more or less similar.--Can war be done away with? This question refers not to the elimination' of the category "war," but to the possibility or the reverse of avoiding in the twentieth century and in European countries that empirical war which is waged with cannons and cruisers, that costs milliards when it is not waged, and tens of milliards when it is waged, and out of which the conqueror comes conquered. It is well understood that some form of war will always continue, because war is inherent to life.--Can private property be done away with? This does not mean to ask if it be possible to prevent man from taking possession of things, of his food, or of the material that he requires for dress, or from inhabiting a house; but whether it be possible to alter, to the advantage of mankind, the proportion that now obtains between production with private capital and production with collective capital, giving the preference to the latter.

And so on, for it would be tiresome to continue to state the historical problems that are grouped beneath each of the recorded formulæ, which indeed are easily to be found. Thus when we absolutely forbid the telling of lies, as indecorous and degrading, as that which severs the ties of human community and of reciprocal faith, as the vice (said Herbart) that has the special faculty of stirring up against it all the five moral ideas--justice, benevolence, equity, perfection, and internal liberty--the intention is to forbid what is usually called lying; but it is certainly not intended to institute a speculative enquiry as to the relation between knowing and making known, between the theoretic act of thought and the practical act of its communication to other individuals. Thus again, the prohibition of suicide has in view suicide through egoism, which is the most frequent form, and it is therefore useless to identify this with the universal relation between death and life, and with the proposition that life is preserved by means of death. Thus too, finally, the conception of the delinquent has been a beneficent rectification of common prejudices relating to the efficacy of certain laws and penalties applied to certain classes of individuals who are led to crime as though through unrestrainable natural tendency. For the rest, the wisdom of life teaches us usually to take individuals as we find them, with their virtues and vices, and without claiming to set them violently right, and to remake them from top to bottom. We should rather adapt them in the best way possible for our own ends, or for those of society. This does not, however, imply that they are fixed beings, and that each of those classes is heterogeneous in respect of the others. If, with the help of a foolish positivist philosophy, we make of the idea of the delinquent something necessary, a natural being, as it is called, confounding naturalistic with natural and incorrectly hypostasizing gnoseological procedure, then, and then alone, are we right in reacting and in denying.

[Sidenote: _2a. False deduction of the empirical from the philosophical._]

And yet those solutions of philosophers, who think that they are solving empirical questions by annulling or ignoring them, do not yet represent the worst that happens when philosophy usurps the function of empiria. Such misunderstanding, such hardness of hearing, may be proof of a spirit so energetically directed to universale that it is unable to see anything else, and may even for that reason possess some sympathetic quality. The worst of the worst is the entering upon empirical questions, not in order to annul, but to take sides in them and to solve them philosophically.

[Sidenote: _Affirmations relating to the contingent changed into philosophemes._]

This cannot be done, save by supporting empirical concepts with rigorous and philosophical concepts, confounding the one with the other by a trick of thought, and sometimes of words, making use of synonyms and homonyms, and pronouncing in the name of philosophy arbitrary solutions suggested only by caprice or self-interest. This is the complete corruption, alike of philosophy and of empiria. Not satisfied with making practical classes follow philosophical concepts of the practical, it is then sought to deduce the former from the latter, and behold them now deriving virtues and duties from the universal concept of practical moral activity, by means of the divisions of internal and external, of part and whole, of individual and society. These are concepts of relations, not susceptible of division, and therefore incapable of serving as base for empirical divisions. Or they have recourse to the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which is the universal concrete itself, constituting unity, and therefore incapable of serving as basis for division. Or they will deduce the moral virtues according to the three faculties, as virtues of representation, feeling and thought, or according to the two of the will and the intellect, as dianoetic and ethical virtues; as though the base of the division of the _practical_ could be that of _theoretical_ and _practical._ Empirical concepts become in this way all false, whereas, in their real nature, they are neither false nor true.

There is no thesis, however absurd, which cannot be defended with such a method. All know that there are aristocratic and democratic philosophers, libertarian and authoritarian, anarchical and organicist, socialistic and anti-socialistic, bellicose and pacific, feminist and antifeminist; and there are others who maintain the right to lie, the right to suicide, the right to prostitution, the right to incest, to making of themselves caterers for the scaffold, the right to the penalty of death. These solutions can be morally and politically justified in certain definite and particular cases. There are other solutions rationally unjustifiable in the individual case and put forward only through passion, wickedness, or prejudice, but in both hypotheses, they are outside philosophy and within it so false as to be odious, as that is odious which is maintained, not by means of intrinsic reason, but by imposition altogether extrinsic and external.

[Sidenote: _Reason of the rebellion against rules._]

Such hatefulness explains the rebellion against moral rules and concepts that has often taken place. This, together with that against literary classes and rules and others of the same sort, forms part of the vast movement of rebellion against empirical or empiricized philosophy. In truth, when those rules and ideas are taken by themselves, no rebellion is possible, because they do not exert any pressure and obey the orders of the man who has made them. But it happens otherwise, when they become rigid and philosophical, and as is said, absolute, claiming to substitute themselves as such for philosophy and to provide a base for judgments. In addition to this, from the enforced union of philosophemes with rules, has arisen the false idea of philosophizing about the practical (about an Ethic, for example), which showed itself to be _practical,_ or, as is said, _normative._

[Sidenote: _Limits between philosophy and empiria._]

Philosophy, by taking part in empirical questions, ruins both itself and them, because it loses the serenity, the dignity, and the utility that are intrinsic to it. In like manner, the empirical disciplines ruin themselves and philosophy when they claim to philosophize with their classes, which are not categories, with their pseudo-concepts, which are not concepts, with their _generalia,_ which are not _universalia._ Here too, safety lies in distinction: the observation of distinction alone makes possible beneficent co-operation.