Benedetto Croce’s What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel is a work of philosophical criticism: an attempt, by one of Italy’s leading idealists, to separate what remains valid in Hegel’s system from what has collapsed. Croce wrote it in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the book moves through eleven chapters plus a conclusion, from the dialectic of opposites through the Logic, art, history, and nature, to a final reckoning with Hegel’s dualism and his legacy.
“He who wishes truth to be generated without error wishes for the son without the father.”
Croce’s central claim is that Hegel’s genuine discovery — the concrete universal and the dialectic of opposites — survives every objection, while a single logical error, the extension of that dialectic to the relation of distincts, corrupts the system from within. The book is at once a defense and an autopsy: Croce calls himself in complete agreement with the principle of the synthesis of opposites, yet confesses that for years he felt a marked repugnance to the system, especially in its tripartite Encyclopaedia form, and still feels it on re-reading. His task is to point out the diseased part, “the unburied bones.”
How Croce Separates the Living Hegel from the Dead
The Translator’s and Author’s Framing
Douglas Ainslie’s translation opens with a note explaining a deliberate choice: he follows the Italian in dropping capitals for “idea,” “spirit,” and similar words, so that they are read as immanent rather than as transcendental things-in-themselves. He also defends his use of “gnoseology” over the paraphrase “theory of knowledge,” holding that a legitimate neologism which abbreviates expression serves philosophy better than a paraphrase that blurs its subtle qualifications. Croce’s own note, dated at Raiano in September 1912, records that the study first appeared in 1906 at Bari with an appendix on Hegelian bibliography, later enlarged in the German and French translations; for this reimpression he suppresses the bibliographical portion as extraneous, offering it to anyone willing to correct and update it, and adds elucidations answering censures and objections, preferring an objective re-treatment of disputed points to outright polemic. The contents list eleven chapters plus a conclusion, moving from the dialectic or synthesis of opposites through explanations on the history of the dialectic, the dialectic and the conception of reality, the nexus of distincts and the false application of the dialectic form, the metamorphosis of errors into particular concepts and degrees of truth (the structure of the Logic), the reverse metamorphosis of particular concepts into philosophical errors in Art and Language, History, and Nature, the construction of false sciences and the application of the dialectic to the individual and empirical, the dualism Hegel did not overcome, and finally the criticism and continuation of his thought.
Ainslie’s Introduction
Ainslie’s introduction, written before the war, sees no reason to soften its statements: twentieth-century Germany’s “madness and immoralism,” he holds, has nothing in common with her great writers of a hundred years before, and German thought declined with material prosperity and the aspiration for universal dominion. He praises Croce’s pellucid clarity against Hegel’s Himalayan severity, calling Croce the critic who unravels the system and supplies the clue of Ariadne. Croce, he reports, recommends reading Hegel “like a poet”—without undue attention to verbal form, seeking the inspiration amid the pedantries and formulae; the triads represent Hegel’s effort against Eleaticism and Nihilism, a superior Heracliticism. Croce exposes Hegel’s error of confusing distincts and opposites, with evil consequences including the death of art merged in philosophy. Hegel’s contempt for the practical versus the theoretic, his viewing the dialectic as temporal becoming, and his identification of the real and the rational led him to support the State and great men; his confusion of the ethical with the economic produced Nietzsche’s Superman. Ainslie touches the finite versus infinite progress figured in Tantalus, the God-man symbol, the identity of spirit and history and of philosophy and history, and notes Croce’s praise of Hegel study in Great Britain. He criticizes the dominance of empiricism, argues that socialism first existed theoretically in Hegel’s mind before filtering through Feuerbach and Marx to Sorel and the syndicalists, and that the French Revolution broke out first in Rousseau’s brain. His hope is that the book will lead English men of action to respect Hegel as a great practical force.
Philosophy’s Own Logic
Croce’s first chapter holds that Hegel made philosophy itself an object of thought, elaborating a logic of philosophy—his true discovery. The aversion to such a logic strikes Croce as strange, since mathematics, natural science, historiography, art, economics, and ethics all have recognized methods, yet logic treatises ignore philosophy’s own discipline. Denial of the logic of philosophy follows naturally from denial of philosophy itself, but it is stranger still that philosophers lack consciousness of the necessity—some advocating the mathematical method, others the experimental (the laboratory, the clinic, an “empirical metaphysic”), others an individual fantastic philosophy producing itself like art, “from the compasses to the bistouri, and from that to the zither!” One observation suffices: philosophy, as reflective consciousness of art, history, mathematics, natural science, and practical and moral activity, cannot conform to the method of any one particular object. Understanding Hegel requires keeping this central problem in mind—the problem of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, and the Encyclopaedia. Croce faults histories of philosophy and monographs such as Kuno Fischer’s for merely summarizing Hegel’s divisions. Hegel’s philosophic thought is triple: the concept, which is not feeling, rapture, or intuition—distinguishing philosophy from mysticism and immediate knowledge, against which Hegel is ferociously satirical, insisting philosophy be “not esoteric but exoteric,” rational and intelligible; the universal, which is not the mere general representation of “house,” “horse,” “blue,” a custom Hegel calls barbaric, distinguishing philosophy from the empirical and natural sciences; and the concrete, which is comprehension in fulness rather than skeleton, distinguishing philosophy from mathematics, which commands its points of departure rather than justifying them, while philosophy admits no presupposition. Croce mentions minor doctrines—the resumption of the ontological argument against Kant, the critique of judgment as the connexion of subject and predicate (its true form being syllogism), the critique of concepts as compounds of marks, the critique of division into species and classes, the demonstration of the vanity of logical calculus—but sets them aside to concentrate on the problem of opposites. The concrete universal includes distinctions: fancy and intellect, for instance, are particular philosophic concepts, each passing into the other, fancy the foundation of intellect.
The Synthesis of Opposites
Philosophy can achieve what poetry achieves: rendering reality, though torn and rent with opposition, as one and undivided. The philosopher, like the poet, seeks truth and the concrete, rejecting arbitrary abstractions and mystic ecstasies; but philosophy knows the universal through thought, poetry the individual through intuition and imagination. Why, then, cannot the philosophic universal be, like aesthetic expression, difference and unity, discord and concord? Hegel’s Eureka is the solution: the opposites are not illusion, nor is unity; the opposites are opposed to one another but not to unity, for concrete unity is the synthesis of opposites—movement, development, not fixity. This rejects neither monism nor the dualism of opposites but justifies both as one-sided truths merged in a third. Unity holds opposition within itself; without opposition reality would not be development and life. The negative is also positive in so far as it is negative. The concrete universal expresses life and not the corpse of life.
Hegel calls the doctrine dialectic, rejecting “unity and coincidence of opposites” as stressing unity alone. The abstract elements are moments, from the lever; their relation to the synthesis is solution or overcoming (Aufheben)—the moments negated but preserved. The second term is negation, the third the negation of negation, absolute negativity which is absolute affirmation. The triad is a numerical convenience only; Hegel warns against extrinsic numerical symbolism—one single concept is thought, not three. Defining opposition requires the intellect, synthesis requires reason; the intellect is intrinsic to reason. Whoever cannot think opposites makes self-contradictory affirmations. In the first triad—being, nothing, becoming—being without nothing is indistinguishable from nothing; each term has meaning only through the other. Outside the synthesis the abstract terms pass into one another. Truth lies in the third, becoming, the first concrete concept.
The error of taking opposites outside the synthesis constantly reappears; the polemic against it is dialectic in its subjective or negative sense, not to be confused with the objective and positive sense, the logical doctrine of development. In negative dialectic the result is annulment, not synthesis; the intellect becomes derogatory—the abstract intellect, the eternal enemy of philosophic speculation—and reason fails its task, a subjective impotence of reason. The triad then gives place to a quatriad: two affirmations and two negations. The confusion between the negative and positive aspects produced the objection that if being and nothing are identical they cannot constitute becoming; the reply is that they are identical only when thought badly, as zero equals zero, whereas truly thought they are opposite and in conflict—two wrestlers who must lay hold of one another—and this conflict is becoming. A second objection holds that the concrete universal tacitly introduces sense or intuition; the reply is that sense and intuition mean the particular, individual, historical, while movement and development are universal, a thought, the concept adequate to reality. If logic means barren abstraction and intuition the speculative concept, the criticism reveals Hegel’s true glory—he destroyed false formal logic and gave the concept concreteness, called intuition when philosophy springs from divine Poetry.
Philosophy thus enters a dionysiac state, terrifying timid thinkers. Rosmini, aghast at the dialectic of being and not-being, asked what could move being to deny itself, charging Hegel with making being go mad. Hegel himself, in the Phenomenology, had described the true as the Bacchic delirium in which no component is not drunk, yet which is simple and transparent repose. Reality seems mad because it is life; philosophy seems mad because it breaks abstractions and lives that life in thought—a madness which is the highest wisdom. The truly mad are those mad with empty words of semi-philosophy. Another fear is that Hegel destroys the principle of identity and contradiction, citing his outbursts against it and his saying everything is self-contradictory. But Hegel does not deny the principle, or his theory would be both true and not true. Ordinary thought leaves reality divided and claims to justify its unthinkable contradictions by the principle of identity; Hegel disbelieves only in the fallacious use of the principle—the law of the abstract intellect—by thinkers who retain unity cancelling opposition or the reverse. Opposition is not a defect or subjective error but the true being of things; all things are contradictory and thought must think this. Opposition thought is opposition overcome, in virtue of the principle of identity. The difference between Hegel’s method and ordinary thought is like him who confronts and conquers an enemy versus him who closes his eyes and becomes his victim. Reality is a nexus of opposites, eternally generating itself; thought grasps unity in opposition. Hegel’s dialectic confirms and enriches preceding truths; the concrete universal is the true and complete principle of identity, absorbing the older principle into its own flesh and blood.
Explanations on the History of the Dialectic
Some historians took the problem of opposites as the whole of philosophy, narrating its history in place of philosophy’s. After Kant the task was to develop the a priori synthesis, create a new logic, and solve the problem of opposites by destroying the dualisms Kant left intact.
Error as Incentive, Not Truth
Croce grants that errors have often proved fruitful. The Eleatics’ claim that the absolute is simple being affirmed a partial truth—that the absolute is being—while erring in saying it is nothing but being. Cartesian and Spinozist parallelism fixed the real distinction of mind and body, thought and extension, even if it wrapped that distinction in a hasty metaphysics that made both attributes of one substance. Kant’s insoluble antinomies drove him to recognize their necessity, which became the basis of the dialectic; Schelling’s absolute as simple identity served as a bridge to unity in opposition; Plato’s transcendent Ideas made the Aristotelian concrete possible; Hume’s sceptical negation prepared Kant’s a priori synthesis. Yet Croce warns against turning these observations into a metaphor. What is progressive in a doctrine is its true affirmations, not its errors. In the Eleatic doctrine the truth is that the absolute is being; the error is that it is nothing but being. In parallelism the distinction is true; the false part is the metaphysical theory making the two terms attributes of substance. In Platonism the truth is the objective value assigned to the idea; the error separates ideas from real things into an unimaginable world. Error is the incentive to progress, the not-being, the necessary moment of development—but the synthesis of opposites does not change not-being into being or error into partial truth. Error as error is a hemisphere of darkness without history.
The Logic Taken by Assault
Hegel’s Logic, Croce says, is a strange science: obscure, rigorous in appearance, arbitrary in fact. Its problem is to examine definitions of the Absolute and demonstrate the truth of the philosophy of spirit or idea, and it reviews Oriental Emanationism, Buddhism, Pythagoreanism, Eleaticism, Heracliteanism, Democritus’s Atomism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, the Pantheists, Sceptics, Gnostics, Christianity, Saint Anselm, Scholasticism, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Jacobi, Herder. Croce distinguishes two modes of polemic: the history of philosophy, chronological and individual, and philosophy itself as the whole system, citing Bacon’s verum index sui et falsi. Hegel, like Aristotle, magnificently criticized errors; Taine compared the Logic to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. But Hegel attempted a third mode, treating errors as distinct concepts or categories to be deduced—applying the method proper to truth to non-truth. His beginning with pure being was arbitrary, unjustifiable as the only beginning; the Phenomenology and Logic follow a course recalling a philosophic romance, Emile or the Irishman’s journey. The sequel is arbitrary: determinate being (Daseyn) should arise from becoming as not-becoming, yet Hegel says it corresponds to pure being. Some critics read the Logic as one fundamental triad with inserted triads, making the necessary ascent illusory. The content approximates sometimes a history of philosophy (Parmenides, Heraclitus, Democritus; Descartes, Spinoza, Kant; the critique of Aristotelian analytic and Leibnizian monadology) and sometimes a philosophy of spirit (the gnoseology of arithmetic, the theory of natural sciences, the logic of concept, judgment, syllogism, mechanism, chemism, teleology, life, will, the “Beautiful” united to “Life” in the Propaedeutic of 1808–1812). The arrangement injures the content but does not condemn the book; Croce advises taking it “by assault from all sides” rather than entering by the sham door of pure being.
Art Reduced to a Philosophical Error
A second consequence follows: confusing error with particular truth, Hegel deprived himself of recognizing the autonomy of art, history, and the natural sciences. His aesthetic is animated with artistic feeling and dignifies art, but its fundamental concept is erroneous. He never reaches the region of intuition, pure fancy, language—art as subject without predicate—starting instead from a sensible certainty already mingled with reflexion. Language becomes an organized contradiction, the work of “productive” memory producing “signs”; Hegel holds that language always expresses the universal, not the individual (“this piece of paper”). Croce counters with solum individuum effabile: language is essentially poetry and art. Hegel’s time made art a mode of apprehending the Absolute (Kant’s third Critique, Schiller, Schelling, later Schopenhauer); Hegel makes it a form of religion, the religion of beauty, inferior to revealed religion and philosophy. Art is distinct from philosophy only through imperfection, hence practically reduced to a philosophical error; when philosophy is complete, art must die—a grandiose paradox Croce defends against the interpretation of eternal death and rebirth, since Hegel means an actual historical death.
The Cold Intellectualist and the Missing Philosophy of Language
Hegel’s system, whose twin principles of the concrete concept and the dialectic are “frankly aesthetic” in inspiration, has nonetheless appeared a “cold intellectualism” irreconcilable to artistic consciousness. He is better called the adversary of classificatory and naturalistic logic than of Aristotelian formal logic; he limited himself to revealing that logic’s inadequacy as a principle for philosophy. Hegel himself says Aristotle is the author of the intellectual logic, whose forms concern only relations of finites, so the true cannot be conceived in them. But classification is not the most characteristic element of Aristotelian logic—the Baconian inductive logic also classifies; its characteristic is syllogistic verbalism, confusing logical thought with speech. Hegel could not criticize this error because he lacked a valid philosophy of language. He tries to distinguish proposition from logical judgment (e.g. “it is hot” becomes a judgment when it answers doubt about the affirmation’s truth) but cannot give good reasons; the exact distinction is that the pure proposition is speech itself, language as pure aesthetic fact, containing no logic though it is the necessary vehicle of logical thought. Hegel retains the tripartition of concept, judgment and syllogism, and even defines new classes of judgments and syllogisms.
History Denied Its Own Autonomy
Failure to understand art’s autonomy also prevented Hegel from understanding historiography, since he transformed particular concepts into philosophical errors. Psychologically, his idea of religion as an imaginative, imperfect form of philosophy probably prepared the way. History presupposes philosophical thought but, like art, finds its material in the intuitive element; it is always narration, never theory and system, though theory and system underlie it. Historical judgments (“Caesar was killed,” “Alaric devastated Rome,” “Dante composed the Comedy”) consist of intuitive elements as subject and logical elements as predicate. Every progress of philosophic thought translates into progress of historical knowledge, but resolving historical affirmations into abstract philosophic affirmations is vain. History can give rise to empirical conceptual science (sociology) or to philosophy, but is not absorbed by either. A “philosophy of history” as history of a second degree is a contradiction in terms—it annuls history, since the philosophic history would be true history and the historians’ history revealed as error. Historians reasonably rebel, as a painter or musician would if told to consign his completed work to philosophers to raise it “to the second power.” Hegel negated the history of historians, dividing philosophy into pure or formal philosophy (logic and metaphysics) and applied or concrete philosophy (nature and spirit, including philosophy of history), adopting the Scholastic division into rational and real. In his lectures he distinguishes original and reflective historiography (general, pragmatic, critical, conceptual) from philosophic historiography, claiming for the latter an a priori construction—a history already complete needing only names and dates. “The one thought” philosophy brings to history is that reason rules the world. World history is progress in the consciousness of liberty; its degrees are national spirits (Volksgeister), each people representing one degree. Before seeking facts Hegel knows what they must be; in the History of Philosophy he knows a priori that the history of philosophy and the system of philosophy are identical, the first phases of Hellenic thought being the first categories of metaphysic in the same order.
The Superfluous Mass of Facts
Hegel declares respect for actual fact (“we must take history as it is, and proceed historically and empirically”), but such declarations cannot save the a priori scheme: if accident and individuality are extraneous to philosophy, there can be no a priori philosophy of history. Disciples who kept both speculative and philological methods saved neither; method is intrinsic to activity, so duplicity of methods means duplicity of activity. Hegel sometimes softens his claim (the order of the idea and of concepts produced in time is the same “in the Whole,” im Ganzen), and his reservation that the last philosophy is the most developed “only if it be truly a philosophy” is tautological. Error is contradiction, shown by Hegel’s involuntary contradictions. He defines philosophy of history as “the thinking contemplation of history,” implying ordinary history is unthought or imperfect thought, and shows antipathy to professional historians. Only facts representing the movement of spirit or the history of the State are valuable; particular facts are “a superfluous mass” that oppresses and obscures worthy objects—hence handing such representations to romances, Walter Scott for instance. This is the pernicious distinction between historical and non-historical, essential and unessential facts, reappearing in Eduard Gans (who said the discipline should demonstrate the necessity only of great epochs and groups, leaving the rest to narrative history) and down to an Italian Hegelian who held documents necessary to establish Campanella’s prisons and tortures but not the historical meaning of his thought, deducible a priori from the Renaissance, the Catholic Church, Luther’s reforms and the Council of Trent. Croce argues such distinctions reject all facts: if Napoleon’s stomach cancer is contingent, so are the 18th Brumaire and Waterloo; reality has neither kernel nor shell. The distinction is relative—changing the theme makes superfluous facts necessary. Hegel hands non-historical facts to romance, a provisional form philosophy dissipates—showing history’s evil fate: the philosophy that vindicated res gestae could not recognize historia rerum gestarum. “Famished for history, nourished on history,” Hegel’s philosophy advocated fasting; from his school came both great historians and the most petulant depreciators of history.
Nature Mummified in Abstract Classes
Understanding the natural and mathematical disciplines was harder. From the Renaissance, experimental and mathematical science continually enlarged, and what lacks history is “nature in the naturalistic sense”—nature “contracted and mummified in abstract classes and concepts”
The dialectic of opposites, as Croce presents it, is not a denial of identity and contradiction but a deeper confirmation of them. Hegel disbelieves only in the fallacious use of the principle of identity — the “law of the abstract intellect” by which ordinary thought keeps unity and opposition apart, cancelling one or the other. Opposition is not a defect or a subjective error; it is the true being of things, and thought must think it. The difference between Hegel’s method and ordinary thought is like the difference between the man who confronts and conquers an enemy and the man who closes his eyes and becomes his victim. Reality is a nexus of opposites, eternally generating itself, and the concrete universal is the true and complete principle of identity, absorbing the older principle “into its own flesh and blood.”
Croce’s Hegel is not the cold intellectualist his critics describe. The system’s twin principles, the concrete concept and the dialectic, are “frankly aesthetic” in inspiration; philosophy enters a dionysiac state, terrifying timid thinkers, and Hegel himself described the true as “the Bacchic delirium” in which no component is not drunk, yet which is “simple and transparent repose.” Reality seems mad because it is life; philosophy seems mad because it breaks abstractions and lives that life in thought — “a madness which is the highest wisdom.” Croce recommends reading Hegel “like a poet,” seeking his inspiration amid pedantries and formulae, and he treats the triads as numerical convenience only: one single concept is thought, not three.
The error Croce uncovers is the confusion of distincts with opposites. The philosophical concept is the synthesis of distincts just as it is the synthesis of opposites; the forms of spirit — economic, scientific, moral, aesthetic activity — are at once unity and distinction, a connexion or rhythm that ordinary classification cannot explain. Hegel saw this clearly and never ceased combating the importation of empirical classification into philosophy. But he then applied the dialectic of opposites to the connexion of distincts, treating errors as distinct concepts or categories to be deduced, and so attempted a third mode of polemic beyond the history of philosophy and philosophy itself: applying the method proper to truth to non-truth. From this “transmutation of errors into truths” flow the consequences Croce traces through art, history, and nature — the death of art when philosophy is complete, the a priori construction of history that consigns inconvenient facts to romance, the philosophy of nature that treats exact sciences as semi-philosophy and then invokes “the impotence of Nature” when facts refuse the scheme.
Croce’s diagnosis of the school’s failure is as unsparing as his diagnosis of the master. The best of the Hegelians — Kuno Fischer, Spaventa, Stirling — reconducted Hegel to Kant; the adversaries, from Schopenhauer and Herbart to Rosmini and Janet, failed equally; and the generation after 1848 produced barbaric adversaries hating philosophy itself. The right and left wings of the school, theistic and materialist, are neither decidable as more faithful, since the dualism Hegel failed to overcome — the critical point being the transition from idea to nature — explains the split. Croce’s own program is stated plainly: preserve the concrete universal, the dialectic of opposites, and the doctrine of degrees; refute panlogism; recognize the autonomy of spirit’s forms; resolve philosophy into philosophy of spirit.
The book’s significance lies in that program. Croce was not content to refute Hegel or to repeat him; he set out to continue him, and he saw the critical revision as more likely to come from England, where Stirling had already declared that no man has thoroughly understood Kant except Hegel, than from Germany. Italy, he notes, never forgot Hegel, uniting him with Bruno and Vico — and the comparison of Vico and Hegel runs through the book as a kind of proof that the dialectic of opposites, the cunning of reason, and the historicity of thought were not German inventions but discoveries of the human mind, meditated in Naples a century before the Phenomenology of Spirit. It almost seems, Croce writes, as if the Italian Catholic philosopher’s soul migrated into the German thinker, more mature and self-conscious.
