Benedetto Croce
From IDIH
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Croce, Benedetto
sex: m; b. Feb 25, 1866 in Pescasseroli, L'Aquila, Italy – d. Nov 20, 1952 in Naples, Italy; country/nation/culture: Italian; field of study: history of culture, history of philosophy, history of literature; ref.: ThTC; contrib.: Marco Sgarbi
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[edit] Main Works
- La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell'arte, 1893
- La critica letteraria, 1895
- Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, 1900
- Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale, 1902
- Riduzione della filosofia del diritto alla filosofia dell'economia, 1907
- La logica come scienza del concetto puro, 1909
- Filosofia della pratica. Economia ed etica, 1909
- La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, 1911
- Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del Seicento, 1911
- Saggio sullo Hegel, 1913
- La letteratura della nuova Italia, 1914-1940
- Zur Teorie und Geschichte der Historiographie, 1915
- La Spagna nella vita italiana durante la Rinascenza, 1917
- La poesia di Dante, 1921
- Poesia e non poesia: note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimonono, 1923
- Storia del Regno di Napoli, 1925
- Storia d'Italia dal 1871 a 1915, 1928
- Aesthetica in nuce, 1928
- Storia dell'età barocca in Italia, 1929
- Storia d'Europa nel secolo XIX, 1932
- Poesia popolare e poesia d'arte: studi sulla poesia italiana dal Tre al Cinquecento, 1933
- Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento, 1945
- La letteratura italiana del Settecento, 1949
[edit] Biography
Benedetto Croce was born in a wealthy family loyal to the Bourbons. His father Pasquale, cousin of the brothers Silvio and Bertrando Spaventa, was a big landowner. At the age of nine, Benedetto entered the college of the Barnabites in Naples, where he was given an excellent education. During his adolescence, he read much of Francesco De Sanctis and Giosué Carducci and composed his first writings. In 1883, an earthquake having caused the death of his parents, Croce moved with his brother to Rome in the house of Silvio Spaventa. Croce went to law school, his interests, however, were focused on Antonio Labriola's moral philosophy courses. In 1886, Croce came back to Naples, where he wrote on history (Croce remained a lifelong private scholar and never taught at any school). Giambattista Vico's Scienza Nuova, opened up for him philosophy. In Vico's wake, he wrote La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell'arte, in which he sketched his first aesthetics. Under the influence of Labriola he wrote the five essays collected in Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica. In 1896, Croce met Giovanni Gentile, with whom he co-founded the journal La Critica, published by Laterza. From 1902 to 1917, Croce wrote his masterpieces and established himself as the most influential Italian philosopher. In 1914, he broke with Gentile because of the latter's interventionism in the First World War, although they kept working together until Gentile reformed public education for the Mussolini government. Croce himself timidly sympathized with Fascism at the beginning, after Giacomo Matteotti's assassination in 1925, however, he wrote the Manifesto of anti-fascist intellectuals and went then in inner exile. After Second World War, he became the cultural referee of the liberal party and was active in politics as a senator until his dead in 1952.
[edit] Characterization
Croce calls his own philosophy “absolute historicism,” meaning thus that life and reality are nothing more than history. Croce shares most of Hegel's positions against intellectualism, the ought-to-be that is not, the ideal that is not real. Hegel's main contribution to philosophy, says Croce, is having brought to the light that human being is itself history. He criticizes Hegelian dialectic, however, for confusing the various degrees of the spirit with the opposites that pertain to every degree. Spirit takes up two fundamental forms: theoretical and practical. Art and philosophy, the cognition respectively of the particular and the universal, constitute the theoretical form. Economy and ethics, the volition respectively of the particular and the universal, constitute the practical form. Each degrees influences the following one without being conditioned. The life of spirit is therefore developed in a circular way. Croce wrote a number of books on aesthetics: La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell'arte (1893), Tesi fondamentali di un'estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale (1900), Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale (1902), Il carattere lirico dell'intuizione artistica (1907), Breviario di Estetica (1913) e La poesia (1936). Feeling is the principle of the art, according to Croce, and it ignores logic, utility and morals. Art is artistic expression. An artist elaborates feelings into a synthesis of intuition and expression. Artistic expression does not coincide with technical expression. Technical expression is determined by pragmatic elements, while artistic expression is determined by the particular intuition of the concept. Artistic errors are generated from the confusion of various forms of spirit that mix among them their characters. Language, as fundamental artistic expression coincides with poetry. This identification does not permit any communion of poetry with the other arts. Logic is the successive degree of spirit, the science of the pure concept, which is either universal or concrete. The concept is the only logical category of science. Croce criticizes all non-philosophical sciences in as far as they delve into only one aspect of the concept. Mathematical sciences, e.g., consider universality without concreteness, while natural sciences consider the concreteness without universality. Many sciences are therefore based on pseudo-concepts. They have therefore no cognitive value, but only a practical value that is finalized to the simplification of the exposition. History is the only science capable of considering the spirit's universal logical element with the concrete particular. Philosophy coincides thus with history. Croce deals with the practical forms of spirit in Riduzione della filosofia del diritto alla filosofia dell'economia (1907), Frammenti di etica (1922) e Elementi di politica (1924). To economics and ethics belong everything that is neither poetic expression nor historical knowledge. The principle of practical activity is volition in as far as it is based on theoretical knowledge. The economical forms of spirit deals with the law and the institutions. Political institutions are not moral, they precede morals and are independent from it. Political institutions are the actions of individuals and are expressed in terms of force, authority and freedom. The moral principle is not material and does not coincide, in opposition to Hegel, with any political institution. Morals is the volition of the universal, i.e, the spirit as the only authentic reality by means of which moral individuals consciously act on behalf of the spirit itself.
Besides his philosophical treatises, Croce left a monumental opus as an historian of art and literature.
[edit] Method
Croce's main identification of philosophy and history influences all his historiographical methodology. The reference work on methodology of history is Zur Teorie und Geschichte der Historiographie. Every history is contemporary history, for history is the unity of life and thought. Every thought is historical, for thought has already been and every history has already thought. Contemporaneity is an intrinsic character of every history, for history is thought, a synthetic unity with life. Only an interest resulting from present life can move the inquiry of an historical event; and contemporary history can be defined really history only if it answers the demands of the present. History is always constructed on documents, for without reference to documents it would remained unproved. As testimonies, documents are simple data or simple facts, they are the statement of the historian's living interest. The difference between history and chronicle is based on the historian's spiritual attitude and not on the selection of historical or non-historical events. Events are historical, for they are thought and nothing exists outside of thought. A non-historical event would not be thought and therefore would not be existing. History is living history, while chronicle is dead history, and after all it is not longer history. Contemporary history as an act of thought is opposed to chronicle as an act of volition. Every history becomes chronicle when it is not more thought, but only remembered. History separate from the alive document is chronicle and it is no more a spiritual action, but just a complex of sounds and empty words. Even if recombined and reordered, chronicles remain empty narrations. Restored, reproduced documents remain always and solely dumb things. Philological history is a simple compilation, often useful, but always deprived of historical thought, for truth does lie in itself but in the extrinsic authority of the documents. Croce criticizes not only the historical form of chronicles, but also poetic pseudo-history. If history is the history of spirit, and if the spirit is the only conceivable value, it follows that history is always history of values. The determining value, however, is not the artistic feeling expressed by poetry, which is neither life nor thought. It is not an error to write poetic pseudo-history, it is an error to pretend to write history instead of poems or narrations. In fact, poetry is a subject that is spiritually inferior to history. Not all history, however, can be universal history if it does not regard a concrete action or event and claims instead to construct empty narrations out of a number of elements. History must not to universal history, but it must be history of the universal. History is thought, therefore it is thought of the universal in its concreteness always determined in the particular. History is expression of judgments, it is synthesis of the individual and the universal. The individual is the subject of the judgment and the universal is the predicate. According to Croce, however, the true subject of history is the predicate, because the judgment determines the way to characterize the universal. Before the Second World War, Croce excludes from his historical methodology the moral evaluation of events. Historians must not apply moral qualifications to events or human beings. Historical consciousness, as thought, is logical and not practical consciousness. The lived history is thought in consciousness, and in thought disappears the antithesis of volition and feeling. In history there are no bad or good events, all events are good if they are conceived in the light of the concept. The history is never executioner, it justifies always. It could be executioner only by becoming unjust, i.e, when it confuses thought with life or the judgment of thought with the attractions and the repulsions of feeling. The task of history instead, according to Croce, lies in setting man free from the oppressive weight of the past. Philosophy is a necessary moment of the methodology of history, i.e., it is the clarification of the constituent categories of the historical judgments.
[edit] Impact
It is impossible to overestimate the influence of Croce's philosophy in twentieth-century Italian culture. Croce gave decisive guidelines for every field of studies, from the exact sciences to the humanities. After the publication of Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Historiographie, Croce became a reference for German historians such as Alexander Fraenkel and Ernst Troeltsch. Between 1920 and 1940 grew up a new generation of scholars directly inspired to Croce's methodology, among them historians such as Federico Chabod, Sebastiano Maturi, Arnaldo Momigliano and Adolfo Omodeo, as well as literary critics such as Luigi Citanna, Francesco Flora, Luigi Russo and Natalino Sapegno. Thanks to the mediation of Karl Vossler, Croce influenced German scholars such as Erich Auerbach, Rudolf Borchardt, Eugen Lerch, Karl-Julius Schlosser and Leo Spitzer. The hegemony of Croce in Italy was assured by his editing a number of collections for the publisher Laterza.
