The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic. Benedetto Croce

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Название The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic
Автор произведения Benedetto Croce
Жанр Языкознание
Серия
Издательство Языкознание
Год выпуска 0
isbn 4064066232320



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sense that it alone constitutes the fact: every action diverges by necessity and by definition from succession or happening. If I return home every day by the usual road, my return home is every day new and different from that which might have been, imagined. This often amounts to a diversity of particulars which we may call of least importance, but which yet are not for that reason the less real. On the other hand, no action, however vain it be held (if it be action and not velleity of action and intrinsic contradiction, or by as much as it is action and not imagination and contradiction), passes without trace and without result.

      If any action could be rendered altogether vain, this same rendering vain would invade all other actions and no fact would happen.

      Action and foresight: critique.

      Confirmation of the inderivability of the value of action from its success.

      Explanation of apparently conflicting facts.

      On the other hand, certain commonplaces seem to be in opposition to the criterion itself: for example, that men are judged by success and that it matters little what we have willed and done, when the result is not satisfactory. There are also certain popular customs that make individuals responsible for what happens outside their own spheres of action, not to mention the well-known historical examples of unfortunate leaders crucified at Carthage and guillotined at Paris, for no other cause in reality than that of not having won the victory. And there is also the insistence of certain thinkers upon the necessity of never distinguishing the judgment of the act from that of the fact. But such insistence is nothing but a new aspect of the implacable struggle that it has been necessary to conduct against the morality of the mere intention and against the sophisms and the subterfuges that arise from it; an insistence that has expressed itself in paradoxical formulæ, as are also paradoxical the trivial remarks of ordinary life that have been mentioned. As to the customs and condemnations narrated by history, these were without doubt extraordinary expedients in desperate cases, in which people had placed themselves in such a position that it was impossible or most difficult to verify intentions and actions, and to distinguish misfortunes from betrayals; and as all expedients born of like situations sometimes hit the mark, that is to say, punish bad faith, so will others increase with irrationality the evil that they would have wished to diminish, since in those cases there has not been any bad faith to punish and to correct.

      THE PRACTICAL JUDGMENT, THE HISTORY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PRACTICAL

      With these last considerations, we are conducted to the theory of practical judgments, that is, to those judgments of which we have demonstrated the impossibility, when their precedence to the volitional act was asserted; but their conceivability as following it, indeed their necessity, is clear, by the intrinsic law of the Spirit; which consists in always preserving or in continually attaining to full possession of itself.

      Practical taste and judgment.

      But we must not confound the practical judgment with what has been called practical taste, or the immediate consciousness of value, or the feeling of the value of the volitional act. None can doubt that such a taste, consciousness, or