The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and EthicCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
The Philosophy of the Practical: Economic and Ethic
Croce, Benedetto
Economics; Ethics; Will
First of all, we can here give yet another meaning to the indeterminate
category of _feeling_ with its poles of pleasure and pain, for it is
clear that when feeling was distinguished from moral activity and set
at variance with it, we had in view nothing but the pure economic
activity. And in truth, of all the tendencies included in that concept
as sketched out, this of economicity seems on the whole to prevail
over the others, so much so that we shall henceforth be disposed to
give to the word "feeling" the name of economic activity. Thus it
was reasonably maintained, with implied reference to this meaning,
that pleasure and pain are _proper_ to feeling and _extraneous_ to
the other spiritual forms, and that they only act in the others as
_concomitants._ For if the theoretical forms give rise to the dialectic
of true and false, in so far as the practical spirit can be introduced
into them, it is clear that pleasure and pain come to those forms from
the practical spirit, with which the theoretic spirit is always in
unity. In the practical spirit too, the moral activity divides into
pleasure and pain, in so far as it has concrete or economic form; and
therefore in so far as it is economic, not in so far as it is moral.
Pleasure and pain belong to feeling alone, because they belong to the
economic activity alone, which is the practical in its general form,
involving of itself all the other forms, practical and theoretic.
[Sidenote: _Coincidence of duty with pleasure._]
When this has been established, pleasure or economic feeling or
economic activity as positive cannot be at strife with duty or with
the moral activity in its positivity, for the two terms coincide.
The divergence existed only when they were conceived, not in unity
and distinction, but in coordination. When we speak of a good action
accompanied with pain, we make an inexact statement, or better, we make
use of a mode of expression that must be understood, not literally,
but in its spirit. The good action, as such, always brings with it
satisfaction and pleasure, and the pain said to accompany it, either
shows that the action is not yet altogether good, because it has not
been willed with complete internal accord, or that a new practical
problem, still unsolved and therefore painful, lies beyond the
pleasurable moral action.
[Sidenote: _Critique of rigorism or asceticism._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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