Theory & History of HistoriographyCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Theory & History of Historiography
Croce, Benedetto
Historiography
But the real truth is that what results from the observations and
objections above exposed is not the illusion of the individual who
loves, who tries to complete his work, who sighs for peace, but rather
the illusion of him who believes that the individual is illuded: the
illusory is the illusion itself. And this illusion appears in the
phenomenology of the spirit as the result of the well-known abstractive
process, which breaks up unity in an arbitrary manner and in this case
separates the result from the process or actual acting, in which alone
the former is real; the accompaniment from the accompanied, which is
all one with the accompaniment, because there is not spirit and its
escort, but only the one spirit in its development, the single moments
of the process, of the continuity, which is their soul; and so on.
That illusion arises in the individual when he begins to reflect upon
himself, and at the beginning of that reflection, which is at the same
time a dialectical process. But in concrete reflection, or rather in
concrete consciousness, he discovers that there is no end that has not
been realized, as well as it could, in the process, in which it was
never an absolute end--that is to say, an abstract end, but both a
means and an end.
To return to the popular theory of Schopenhauer, only he who looks
upon men as animals, or worse than animals, can believe that love is a
process that leads only to the biological propagation of the species,
when every man knows that he fecundates his own soul above all prior
to the marriage couch, and that images and thoughts and projects and
actions are created before children and in addition to them. Certainly,
we are conscious of the moments of an action as it develops--that is
to say, of its passage and not of its totality seen in the light of
a new spiritual situation, such as we strive to obtain when, as we
say, we leave the tumult behind us and set ourselves to write our own
history. But there is no illusion, either now or then; neither now nor
then is there the abstract individual face to face with a Providence
who succeeds in deceiving him for beneficial ends, acting rather as
a doctor than as a serious educator, and treating the race of men as
though they were animals to train and make use of, instead of men to
educate--that is to say, develop.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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