Third Section — Unity of the Theoretical and the Practical
Double result; precedence of the theoretical over the practical and of the practical over the theoretical.
The study of the practical activity in its relations that we made in the first section has removed all doubt as to the thesis that the practical activity presupposes the theoretical, or that knowledge is the necessary precedent of volition and action.1 But the succeeding study of the practical activity in its dialectic having led to the result that the practical activity is reality itself in its immediacy, and that no other reality (or we may say other nature) is conceivable outside will-action, compels us also to affirm the opposite thesis, that the theoretic activity presupposes the practical, and that the will is the necessary precedent of knowledge.2 And it is a precedent, not indeed in the sense admitted from the beginning, of the necessary implication of the will in every theoretical act, as will to know, by means of the unity of the Spirit3 (for this will is subsidiary and not constitutive; but if it become constitutive it produces, as has been seen, wilfulness and the theoretical error4), but precisely in the sense of a constitutive will, without which no knowledge would be thinkable.
Knowledge, indeed, is knowledge of something: it is the remaking of a fact, an ideal recreation of a real creation. If there have not previously been a desire, an aspiration, a nostalgia, there cannot be poetry; if there have not been an impulse or a heroic deed, the epic cannot arise; if the sun do not illumine a landscape, or a soul invoke a ray of sunlight upon the countryside, the picture of a luminous landscape cannot exist. And if there be not a world of reality that generates a world of representations, Philosophy, which is the search for the universal, is not conceivable, nor History, the understanding of the individual.
Error of those who maintain the exclusive precedence of either.
The indubitability of this affirmation, which no force of sophistry can destroy, renders fallacious both the opposite theses, which have several times been variously proposed and maintained: the exclusive priority of the theoretic, and the exclusive priority of the practical.
Those who maintain them enter into so desperate a contest with reality, that in order to issue from it without too much dishonour, they are finally compelled to call in the aid of a third term, which is in turn either thought that is not thought, or will that is not will, or something grey that contains in itself thought and will, without being either the one or the other, nor the unity of that duality. On the one hand is postulated a Logos, a thought in se (one does not understand how this can ever think and be thought), and it is made to adopt the resolution (which one does not understand how it can ever adopt) of coming forth from itself and creating a nature, in order to be able to return finally to itself, by means of this alienation, and to be henceforth per se, that is to say, able to think and to will. The defect of this artificial construction, its mythological and religious origin, can be said to have been already revealed, in the comparison employed with reference to it by the author who maintained it (Hegel), to the effect that the Logos is God before the creation of the world: a God, that is to say, altogether unreal and absurd. On the other hand, the excogitation of a blind Will (Schelling, Schopenhauer) completely tallies with this Thought that does not think because it has not previously willed, and that does not truly will because it has not previously thought, and all of a sudden fashions for itself the instrument of knowledge, to succeed in surpassing itself in this alienation from itself, by means of liberation from willing obtained in the contemplation of the ideas and in asceticism. Here, too, we must repeat that the one error passes over and converts itself into the other, and this inevitable conversion causes the other secondary and hybrid forms of theory to have but slight interest, those in which the priority has been conceived as that of fancy, or feeling, or the unconscious, or the indifferentiated, and the like, all of which represent vain efforts to suppress one of the two fundamental forms of the spirit, or to derive them from a third, which consciousness does not reveal.
Problem of the unity of this duality.
This however does not mean that the demand to conceive the link of that duality, or the unity of the theoretical and the practical, manifested in all these erroneous attempts, is not legitimate. But in order to conceive this, it is necessary to insist above all upon the reality of this duality, of which is sought the connection and the unity.
Not the duality of opposites.
This connection cannot be the relation or synthesis of opposites. The theoretical is not the opposite of the practical, nor the practical the opposite of the theoretical: the opposite of the theoretical is error or the false, as the opposite of the practical is the volitional contradiction or evil. The theoretical, far from being negative, is positive, not less than the practical, and inversely. Neither form can therefore be in any way debased to a simple opposite. Opposition is intrinsic to the spirit and is to be found in each one of its forms: hence the general value of the spirit (activity against passivity, rationality and reality against irrationality and unreality, being against not-being) and that of its special forms (beautiful against ugly, true against false, useful against useless, good against evil). But precisely for this reason, it cannot constitute the character of one form in respect to the other: neither that of the true against the good, nor that of the beautiful against the useful, and so on.
Not duality of finite and infinite.
Nor can the connection be thought as are thought the subdivisions of the theoretic and the practical forms, or according to the relations of individual to universal, of finite to infinite, the first of which terms conditions the second, but is conditioned by it only in an implicit manner. Of the two theoretical forms (and we shall see further on that the forms of the practical are also two), the æsthetic precedes the logical and is autonomous: a song, a story, a statue, do not express any concept; but the philosophy that gives the concept, is at the same time fancy, expression, word: the prose of the philosopher is his song. The æsthetic form is the knowledge of the individual; the logical that of the universal, which is also individual. But this relation that arises within the theoretic, as within the practical form, cannot be transported to the relation of the two forms without logical incoherence: the subdivision, so to speak, is not the division. Thought is not the finite in respect of willing, which is the infinite; nor is the will the finite in respect of thought, which is the infinite. Thought and will are both of them at once finite and infinite, individual and universal. He who passes from action to thought, does not limit his own being by becoming finite; nor does he limit it by passing from thought to action; or better, in both cases he makes himself finite to attain to the infinite; poet to open to himself the way to the thought of the eternally true; man of action, that he may dedicate his work to the eternal good.
Perfect analogy of the two forms, theoretic and practical.
The two forms, theoretical and practical, both positive, both a connection of finite and infinite, correspond in everything, as has already appeared from our exposition, in which the appeal to the one from the problems of the other has always aided a better penetration of the nature of such problems and the finding of their solution. Thus in both there is genius and creation (geniuses of art and of thought, and geniuses of action); in both, reproduction and judgment take place in the same way (æsthetic taste, practical taste; history of art and history of philosophy, history of actions); in both arise representative concepts and empirical rules. The analogy will be better illustrated by what is to follow, when will be demonstrated the correspondence between art and economic, logical thought and ethicity, historical discrimination and ethical discrimination, empirical concepts and laws of action, and so on.
Not a parallelism, but a circle.
If this analogy exclude the possibility of the two forms being unequal, it must not, on the other hand, be perverted with the object of conceiving them parallel, as would perhaps be pleasing to the parallelists of spirit and nature, soul and body; this is an expedient that is certainly easy, but certainly not satisfying. They are not parallel, but are on the contrary bound, the one to the other, in such a way that the one proceeds from the other. From the æsthetic apprehension of reality, from philosophical reflection upon it, from historical reconstruction, which is its result, is obtained that knowledge of the actual situation, on which alone is formed and can be formed the volitional and practical synthesis, the new action. And this new action is in its turn the material of the new æsthetic figuration, of the new philosophical reflection, of the new historical reconstruction. In short, knowledge and will, theory and practice, are not two parallels, but two lines, such that the head of the one is joined to the tail of the other; or, if a geometric symbol also be desired, such that they constitute, not a parallelism, but a circle.
The circle of Reality: thought and being, subject and object.
They constitute therefore the circle of reality and of life, which is duality-unity of thought and being, of subject and object, in such a way that to think the subject is the same as to think the subject of an object, and to think an object is the same as to think the object of a subject. In truth, it sometimes seems strange and almost impossible that such hard and difficult questions should have arisen as to the objectivity of knowledge, and as to whether thought attains to being, or whether there be a being beyond thought. Thought is such, precisely because it affirms being, and being is such, precisely because it is generated by a thought. It is only when we remember that in those questions were included others of a very difficult and intricate nature, concerning divine transcendency and the content of the concept of nature (gnoseological questions, which it is the glory of modern philosophy to have asked and solved);—it is only then that we understand how the relation of thought and being, of knowing and of willing, has also become obscure. Kant was forced to come to a stop before the mystery of reality, because he had not altogether conquered transcendency, nor altogether surpassed the false conception of nature as ens, given by the naturalists. It revealed itself to him, not as a circle, but as an assemblage of lines diverging or joining to infinity. Hegel made two of will and nature, owing to the insufficiency of his gnoseological theory relating to the natural sciences, and was led to posit a Philosophy of nature in opposition to a Philosophy of the spirit, thus permitting to exist a form of non-mediate dualism, after he had destroyed so many, or making it mediate in the artificial manner to which we have referred. The shadows of that gnoseology having been dispersed, the relation between theory and practice, subject and object, appears in full light; and the answer becomes very simple to the question as to how, when everything is unconvertible relation of condition and conditioned, thought and being are reciprocally condition and conditioned, and as to how the vicious circle is avoided. The criticism of vicious circles includes in itself and affirms the idea of a circularity that is not vicious; thought and being are not a succession of two finites, but an absolute relation, that is, the Absolute itself. To express ourselves mythologically, if the creation of the world be the passage from chaos to cosmos, from not-being to being, this passage does not begin either with the theoretic or with the practical, with the subject, or with the object, but with the Absolute, which is the absolute relation of the two terms. In the beginning was neither the Word nor the Act; but the Word of the Act and the Act of the Word.
Critique of the theories as to the primacy of theoretical or of practical reason.
It is well to state again that in consequence of the relation and correlation established, all the questions as to the primacy of thought or will, of the contemplative or active life, and speaking more empirically, of the thinker or the man of action, disappear. To pose such problems is as though one were to ask which of the two semicircles of a circle has precedence. Similar questions, always insoluble or badly solved, have their origin in internal obscurity as to the fundamental correlation. When man has attained to the summit of knowledge (a summit that is certainly not Art; nor, strictly speaking, Philosophy, but History, the knowledge of the concrete real, that is, the actuality of philosophy), when he has completely penetrated the actual situation, can he perhaps stop at this point and say hic manebimus optime? Can he arrest life which is raging and demanding to be continued? And if he succeed in suspending it for an instant in thought, why has he suspended, if not to continue it? Knowledge is not an end, but an instrument of life: knowledge that did not serve life would be superfluous and harmful.—On the other hand, when a man has willed and has thrown himself into action, when he has produced another piece of life, can he blindly continue to produce life for ever? Would not blindness impede the production itself? Therefore he must rise from life to knowing, if he wish to look in the face the product that he has lived, and surpass it with thought, for which life is now means and instrument. Knowledge serves life and life serves knowledge; the contemplative life, if it do not wish to become insipid ease, must lead to activity, and that activity, if it do not wish to become an irrational and sterile tumult, must lead to contemplation. Reality, in specifying aptitudes, has formed men of thought and men of action, or of prevailing thought or prevailing action, these not superior to those, for they are collaborators.—Thus the discussions as to whether human progress be moral or intellectual, or whether the propelling force be the practical and economic activity, or philosophy, or religion (Buckle, Kidd, etc.), are shown to be vain.
New pragmatism: life conditioning Philosophy.
It is rather to be considered that from this bond between theory and practice is obtained a pragmatism of a new sort, of which the pragmatists have never thought, or at least have not been able to distinguish from the others and to give it value. If Life condition Thought, we have in this the apodictic demonstration of the always historically conditioned form of every thought; not only of Art, which is always the art of a time, of a soul, of a moment; but also of Philosophy which can solve only those problems presented by Life. Every philosophy reflects and cannot but reflect the preoccupations, as they are called, of a definite historical moment; and this, not in the quality of its solutions (in which case it would be and is indeed bad philosophy), but in the quality of its problems. Thus it is at once contingent and eternal, mortal and immortal, extratemporal and living only in time and history.
Deductive confirmation of the two forms and deductive exclusion of the third feeling.
Finally, with the establishment of the duality-unity of the theoretical and the practical, we have demonstrated that which at the beginning of the exposition had only been asserted and presupposed: namely, why a practical form of the spirit must be placed beside the theoretical,5 and why there is no third form beyond these, whether it be called feeling or by any other name.6 The theoretical form postulates the practical, because the subject postulates the object; but the spirit does not postulate a third form intermediate between the two, or unity of the two, because it is itself precisely mediator and unity of itself, subject-object.
Notes
1 Section I.
2 Section II.
3 Section I. c. 3.
4 Section I. c. 4.
5 Section I. c. 1.
6 Section I. c. 2.
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