Theory & History of HistoriographyCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Theory & History of Historiography
Croce, Benedetto
Historiography
This last form of eclecticism and the open attempts to renew romantic
idealism more or less completely, as well as romantic methods of
historiography, have become more frequent since modern consciousness
has withdrawn itself from positivism and has declared its bankruptcy.
But all this is of importance rather as a symptom of a real advance in
thought. And the new modern philosophies of intuition and philosophy
of values must be looked upon rather as symptoms than as representing
progress in thought (I mean in general, and not in the particular
thoughts and theories which often form a real contribution). The former
of these, however, while it correctly criticizes science as an economic
construction useless for true knowledge, then proceeds to shut itself
up in immediate consciousness, a sort of mysticism, where historical
dialectic finds itself submerged and suffocated; and the latter,
placing the conception of value as guardian of the spirit in opposition
to the conceptions of science like "a philosophical _cave canem_" (as
our imaginative Tari would have said), leaves open a dualism, which
stands in the way of the unity of history and of thought as history.
When we look around us, therefore, we do not discover that _new
philosophy_ which shall lay the foundations and at the same time afford
justification for the new historiography by solving the antithesis
between imaginative romanticism and materialistic positivism. And it
is clear that we are not even able to discuss such a philosophy as a
_demand,_ because the demand for a particular philosophy is itself the
thinking of that particular philosophy, and therefore is not a demand
but an actuality. Hence the dilemma either of saying nothing about it,
and in this case of not speaking even of positivism as a period that
has been closed and superseded, or of speaking of the new philosophy as
of something that lives and exists, precisely because it does live and
exist. And since to renounce talking of it has been rendered impossible
by the very criticism chat we have devoted to it, nothing remains save
to recognize that philosophy as something that exists, not as something
to be invoked. Only we must not _look around us_ in order to see where
it is, but return to _ourselves_ and have recourse to the thought
that has animated this historical sketch of historiography and to all
the historical explanations that have preceded it. In the philosophy
that we have delineated, reality is affirmed to be spirit, not such
that it is above the world or wanders about the world, but such as
coincides with the world; and nature has been shown as a moment and a
product of this spirit itself, and therefore the dualism (at least that
which has troubled thought from Thales to Spencer) is superseded, and
transcendency of all sorts, whether materialistic or theological in its
origin, has also been superseded with it. Spirit, which is the world,
is the spirit which develops, and is therefore both one and diverse, an
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