The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and EthicCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic
Croce, Benedetto
Economics; Ethics; Will
comparison instituted is rather an analogy than a comparison, for that
which happens in the practical sphere happens in that of poetry and in
all the other spheres of the spiritual activity. The Spirit is freedom,
and in order to be so, not in the abstract, but in the concrete, it
must also be necessity.
[Sidenote: _Critique of determinism and of arbitrarism._]
This indissoluble connection of necessity and liberty confutes both the
partial theories which dispute the field in the problem of freedom:
the _deterministic_ theory and that of _free will._ The determinists
do not see in the volitional act anything but the actual situation;
the followers of the theory of free will see nothing but the moment of
freedom. These conceive a volition that is as it were a duplication,
triplication, quadruplication of the given fact, and so on to the
infinite; those a volition that bursts forth from nothing, or rains
down from above and then inserts itself, no one knows how, into the
course of the real. Both exaggerate, and since exaggerations are called
in science errors in sense, both err, and being one-sided are proved
false. But since, on the other hand, it is a quality of errors opposed
to one another, to become identified and to pass, the one into the
other, it is given to us to assist at a like spectacle in this case
also, and to see the determinists change into arbitrarists and the
believers in free will into determinists. The first, in fact, passing
from cause to cause, abandon the concept of cause at the end of the
chain, as though (to use the expression of Schopenhauer), they were
dismissing the hired carriage, made use of during the day for their own
affairs, and return to free will. The others, being unable to justify
freedom in the world of reality and of experience, justify it in a
transcendental way, as the effect of a divine cause, which excludes
free will, and excludes it also when it concedes it; for by the very
fact of conceding, it determines, limits, and produces it.
[Sidenote: _General form of this antithesis: materialism and
mysticism._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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