SOURCE: "Benedetto Croce as a Foil to R. G. Collingwood," in The Formative Years of R. G. Collingwood, Martinus Nijhoff, 1967, pp. 68-80.

[In the following excerpt, Johnston focuses on the philosophical career of Benedetto Croce in relation to Collingwood's development as a philosopher]

(1) CROCE AND COLLINGWOOD: A COMPARISON

Benedetto Croce is the contemporary thinker whom early Collingwood most resembles. As we shall see, this is true especially of Croce's writings from 1901 to 1910. Whether the resemblance is owing to Croce's direct influence upon Collingwood or to Vico's influence upon both Croce and Collingwood is one of those problems of affiliation which are so elusive in the case of Collingwood (and also of Croce). That Collingwood felt a certain affinity with Croce is abundantly clear. In 1921, for example, Collingwood wrote to Croce:

This I say because some things in the paper look like the observations of a hostile critic, and I should like you to know that that is very far from being the character they were intended to bear. I have no time to write about work to which I feel hostile: I only write about the people whom I most closely agree with.

As one reads Speculum Mentis (1924), the language, the type of distinctions used, and the categories accepted as ultimate remind one of Croce's works written between 1901 and 1910. Although Collingwood seldom cites any explicit sources for his ideas, he does indicate a wide familiarity with Croce's works. In The Idea of History, the fifteen pages on Croce (written probably in 1936) show a profound grasp of Croce's development and are among the best brief treatments of the Italian philosopher.

On the other hand, if one were guided solely by Collingwood's interpretations of Croce, one would get a very onesided view of the Neapolitan's achievements. This is due partly to a habit which Collingwood shares to some extent with Croce, namely a reluctance to cite specific sources for his ideas and interpretations. In a letter of April 20, 1938 to Croce, Collingwood explains his reluctance to use footnotes and to cite authorities as being "in accordance with a method of writing which I inherit from a long line of English philosophers …' Like Croce in the historical portions of his Estetica, Logica, Pratica, and Storiografìa, Collingwood seldom writes any work which offers a conspectus of a man's whole thought. Rather in articles and books like The Idea of History, he selects those themes which fit a general scheme which he is developing. Although there can be no doubt that Collingwood could have written a brilliant monograph on Croce, and especially on Croce's relationship to Vico, he chose to write portions of The Idea of History instead. In fact, Collingwood's only extensive monograph on a single thinker is the essay Ruskin's Philosophy.

In contrast to this, Croce wrote a large quantity of monographs, both in his early "philological" period (1888-1894) and throughout his career. Not a few of Croce's critics and admirers have pointed out to what extent he was the complete bibliophile and erudito. A study has even been made of the books in his personal library. As Luigi Salvatorelli puts it:

To read old records, to leaf through pages of an archive, to go in search of the unpublished fact, of the quaint detail, patiently to reconstruct a chronology of events, a curriculum vitae, a family genealogy, was for Croce an inborn vocation, an exquisite pleasure, from his early youth to his advanced old age.

Croce himself testifies to his love for books from his earliest days, and pleads that at least up to 1915 this penchant disqualified him to be a man of action.

Unlike Croce, Collingwood never ventured into literary criticism, political history, or the narrative history of modern Europe. In Collingwood, a similar breadth of interests was taken up by pursuit of the arts. Collingwood painted, drew Roman inscriptions, and played music, activities which so far as I know were remote from Croce's interests. Indeed, Collingwood's oft-repeated insistence that no man can write an aesthetic without having practiced one or preferably more of the arts is quite absent from Croce. As Collingwood says:

Looking at pictures and reading books about them qualifies nobody for discussing the philosophy of art. For that, one must spend much time and trouble in the actual practice of the arts, or at least one of them, and learn to reflect on the experience so gained.

Croce may have had more varied research interests, but Collingwood engaged in a greater variety of artistic pursuits.

It is this important difference which suggests that Croce's influence on Collingwood may have been less profound than a comparison of their works would suggest. Although Collingwood may have borrowed much terminology from Croce, as well as from Vico and Gentile, the Englishman's basic inspiration came from elsewhere. Enough has already been said about Ruskin to indicate that he was the chief source of R. G. Collingwood's aims and inspirations. Collingwood used the philosophical terminology of the Italians to import precision to the formulation of problems which Ruskin's example had pressed upon him. This, I believe, is why Collingwood could express great sympathy with Croce, and yet feel that he was not a disciple of the Italian. He was not a disciple, because his inspiration came from another source, but he was pursuing an enterprise similar to part at least of Croce's.

(2) CROCE VERSUS MICHAEL OAKESHOTT AS A FOIL TO COLLINGWOOD

Besides Croce, the other contemporary who most resembles early Collingwood is Michael Oakeshott (1901-). After studying at Cambridge University, in 1933 Oakeshott published Experience and Its Modes, a work which discusses history, science, and practical activity as "modes" of experience. According to Oakeshott, experience in its pure form is grasped only by philosophy.

It is significant that in The Idea of History Collingwood devotes nine pages to the discussion of this work. Not only does he praise Oakeshott as "the high-water mark of English thought upon history," but he accords to only three other thinkers an equally lengthy treatment in The Idea of History. These three thinkers are Kant, Hegel, and Croce. As we shall see, Hegel and Croce are Collingwood's two chief predecessors in delineating forms of experience, and there is reason to believe that Oakeshott is his principal successor.

Like Collingwood, Oakeshott is chary about acknowledging intellectual debts, using even fewer footnotes than Collingwood. In the Introduction to Experience and Its Modes, he says merely that he has received the most help from Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes and from F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality. Although Oakeshott does not mention Collingwood, E. W. F. Tomlin is of the opinion that Speculum Mentis exercised considerable influence over Experience and Its Modes. A comparison of the two works reveals striking similarities both in general conception and detailed exposition. It is just possible that Experience and Its Modes is the only major work in philosophy to have been profoundly influenced by Speculum Mentis.

It seems better, however, to expound Collingwood's early thought around Croce and Ruskin rather than around Oakeshott, and this for two reasons. First, generally it is preferable in intellectual history to interpret a thinker in the light of his predecessors rather than of his successors. Too often successors have a vested interest in how the thought of their precursors is to be construed. And they tend to stress those elements in a precursor which reinforce their own point-of-view, as in the classic cases of the followers of Hegel and of Marx. Indeed, one of the most useful correctives for the pleas pro domo of a thinker's followers is to examine his predecessors. In our case, then, Collingwood would make a plausible point of departure for study of Oakeshott, but the road runs less easily the other way. Second, because at this writing Oakeshott is still living there is the chance that he may develop further in his thinking. He has already evolved enormously since he published Experience and Its Modes in 1933, and his work after 1945 shows less evidence of affinity with Collingwood than does his earlier writing. Rather than introduce problems of interpreting a contemporary, it seems preferable to omit Oakeshott from further discussion.

(3) CROCE'S EARLY CAREER (1866-1900)

Benedetto Croce was born February 25, 1866, of an old, well-to-do Neapolitan family. In politics his father was conservative, preserving loyalty to the ousted Bourbon monarchy and never reconciled to the Kingdom of Italy. Croce relates in his Autobiography that his family never discussed politics so that he grew up in an intellectual atmosphere barren of political issues. The same is true of R. G. Collingwood.

Croce's parents owned a vast library, and Croce's remotest memory of his father pictures him shut up in his study. At an early age Croce himself became a bibliophile, so that at the age of six or seven he was enthralled by book-stores and by the vision of the past which they afforded.

Although Croce's parents were devout Roman Catholics, who sent their eldest son to be educated by nuns and Jesuits, Croce soon underwent a religious crisis, which he strove to conceal from his family. Gradually he outgrew his religious beliefs, with the result that in his later philosophy of culture he accords religion scant place. Herein he differs significantly from Collingwood, who all his life regarded religion as a necessary, even indispensable component of culture.

A further difference from Collingwood is that in 1883 at age seventeen Croce suffered a cataclysmic loss of his family. Both his parents and his only sister were killed in the earthquake of Casamicciola. Only a brother survived. This blow caused young Croce several years of nervous depression, and it may have contributed to the relatively late age of thirty-five at which he found his vocation as philosopher. Collingwood, on the other hand, found his vocation as early as age twenty.

From 1883 to 1886 Croce stayed in Rome befriended and adopted by his father's former protégé, and later rival, Silvio Spaventa. Here the orphan received his first exposure to political life, since Spaventa's guests included many politicians. Croce enrolled in the Faculty of Law, without completing the course. In fact, he who was to become one of his country's most learned men, never took a university degree! At Rome came Croce's first experience of formal philosophy in the lectures of Antonio Labriola (1843-1904). In his Autobiography, Croce reports that his Pratica, written almost twenty years later, derives from musings on Labriola's Lectures on ethics delivered in 1884-1885.

In 1886, Croce returned to Naples to the life of an independent scholar. For six years, he devoted himself to research in archives and church libraries of his native city. He wrote several books on Neapolitan history, notably on the Revolution of 1799. In many ways, these six years of archival research, scarcely interrupted by mundane concerns, were to exert decisive influence on Croce. As his original calling in life, archival research held him in its spell during the formative period of his early twenties. Only later, in an effort to broaden his horizon beyond antiquarian research, did Croce embark upon the philosophy of history. Croce's later identification of history and philosophy seems but an articulation of the motive which had animated him in the archives.

Croce's first major undertaking in the philosophy of history was a series of articles on Marxism written between 1895 and 1900. Here again it was Labriola who inspired the young Neapolitan to engage in philosophy. Croce's approach to Marx is characteristic of much of his later thought. As a self-educated man, Croce possessed a remarkable capacity for learning from scratch the fundamentals of a subject. As a result, he could not help seeing economics as part of a larger whole which embraced history and philosophy. Already he was wondering about the relationship of economics to other "modes of operation" of the mind. Croce's interest in Marxism at this important stage in his career marks a further difference from Collingwood. The latter never had a profound interest in Marx, nor more than a passing interest in economics. In the guise of "utilitarian action," Croce, on the other hand, was to elevate economics into one of four basic modes of experience.

Above all what Croce retained from his involvement with Marxism was a commitment to

the essential assertion of historicism: "Men themselves make history, but they do it in a particular given environment based on pre-existent, real conditions.…'

It would be a mistake, however, to believe that at the turn of the century Croce's chief concern was with history, or with its claims to be all-pervasive. This young scholar of Neapolitan antiquities had another enthusiasm, which played an equally decisive role in his development: the theory of art or, as he, following German tradition, called it, aesthetic.

Unlike Collingwood, Croce was not an avid practitioner of any of the arts. He did not paint or compose or even, so far as we know, write verses. His approach to art was strictly that of the connoisseur, the cabinet scholar. What distinguished him from the mere art critic was his interest in, and appreciation of, all forms of artistic expression: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and above all, literature. He tells us in An Autobiography that he first came to appreciate painting in the churches where he accompanied his mother as a boy: the pictures and tombs fascinated him and helped to arouse in him interest in the past. Echoes of Ruskin!

Croce's philosophy of culture began to take shape when around 1900 he turned from Marxism to aesthetics. About that time, he abandoned any further effort to exert political influence. Rather he set himself the task of trying to spell out the chief "modes of operation" of the mind or spirit. It is this "philosophy of spirit" which Croce evolved over the next ten years which is of special importance for the study of Collingwood.

(4) CROCE'S PHILOSOPHY OF CULTURE (1901-1915)

Between 1902 and 1912 Croce published a series of works which expound his conception of the spheres of experience. The best-known of these books are the Estetica (1st ed. 1902), the Logica (1st ed. 1905), and the Pratica (1st ed. 1909). The difficulty of tracing Croce's development is compounded by the fact that he revised each of these works several times and that for each work, at least one of the revisions included alteration of major themes. For our purpose it will be sufficient merely to sketch Croce's vision of the spheres of experience.

The key conception, which Croce first enunciated in the Estetica of 1904, is that experience is divided into two spheres: theoretical activity and practical activity. Each of these has two layers, a higher and a lower. In the case of theoretical activity, the lower layer is called aesthetic, and the higher layer is called logic. In the case of practical activity, the lower layer is called economic, and the higher layer is called morality. As one may infer from their titles, the Estetica and Logica deal respectively with the two layers of theoretical activity, while the Pratica deals in one volume with the two layers of practical activity.

Philosophy is defined as the activity which characterizes the other activities, describing the proper sphere of each. Philosophy does not have a sphere of its own, apart from its boundary-making function. This, however, is a large task, so large in fact that Croce can consider all three volumes as contributions to philosophy. These three volumes comprise the trilogy of Filosofia dello Spirito: Philosophy of the Spirit.

Croce assigns a curious place to religion in his philosophy of culture. Whereas he sees art and science as distinct forms of experience, religion he subsumes under morality as a species of practical activity. Croce does not consider religion to be an autonomous form of experience.

Croce's discussion of the forms of experience goes beyond the first three volumes of the Filosofìa dello Spirito. Three other works written between 1905 and 1916 are of special importance for Croce's conception of the spheres of experience. The first of these is the Saggio sullo Hegel (1906). In this work, Croce advances a notion which is crucial to his critique of Hegel and which will serve as the basis for the total revision of the Logica in its second edition of 1909. This notion is the distinction between two types of opposition: opposites and what Croce calls "distincts.' Opposites are concepts which exclude each other, like hot and cold. Distincts are concepts, which though contrary, yet imply each other, like one and many or body and spirit. To use Collingwood's terms, the distincts are "distinct but not separate.' Croce contends that Hegel erred in constructing his dialectic because he treated all forms of opposition as opposites. This led him to forced conclusions about the relationship of concepts which are really distincts. Hegel failed to see, says Croce, that the one and the many comprise a single whole, just as do the spirit and body. This notion of concepts which form distinct yet inseparable parts of a larger whole comprises the basic logical doctrine of Collingwood's Speculum Mentis.

A second work by Croce which analyses and evaluates another thinker is his Filosofia di Giambattista Vico (1911). This book marks a shift in Croce's attitude toward the place of history in his schema of the spheres of experience. In the Pratica (1909), history was regarded as the study of practical activity at both its levels: economic activity and morality. Philosophy, on the other hand, was seen as the activity which characterizes these and the other spheres of experience. As such, philosophy is not identifiable with any one of them, and it comes closest not to history, but to logic. In the Filosofia di Giambattista Vico, however, Croce endorses Vico's view that history is co-extensive with philosophy and that philosophy is best studied as a branch of history, that is an expression of the spirit in past epochs.

Since 1912, the learned world has linked with Croce's name the thesis that philosophy resolves without remainder into history. A corollary of this view holds that history expands to include the study of all other forms of thought. Croce states this "historicism" openly for the first time in the Teoria e Storia della Storiografìa (1917). Given the relative lateness (1911) with which Croce states the thesis of the convertibility of history and philosophy, it is surprising that it should be almost unanimously regarded as the hallmark of his contribution to philosophy. When critics speak of Collingwood's debt to Croce, they usually have in mind their joint espousal of this thesis.

In actuality Croce's greater significance for the early Collingwood lies in Croce's effort from 1902 to 1912 to describe the four spheres of experience. Croce's conception of theoretical and practical spheres, which are divided respectively into aesthetic and logic and into economic and morality, has tended to be forgotten in the wake of his later so-called "historicism.' But at least for Croce's friend and colleague, Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944), the effort to spell out the characteristics of the spheres of experience was a far greater inspiration than the historicism. Likewise, what Croce meant for the early Collingwood was to serve above all as an example of how to go about describing the spheres of experience.

Collingwood was, to be sure, severely critical of what he called the "rigid and abstract formalism" of the schema of four forms of experience offered in the Filosofia dello Spirito. But Collingwood made that remark in the same year (1923) as he was writing Speculum Mentis, in which he tries to improve upon Croce's doctrine of the four forms of experience. This stricture came shortly after Collingwood had confided in a letter to Croce that he had written his article, "Croce's Philosophy of History" (1921), not on:

the hundred points on which I agree with your view of history but … on the hundred and first where I find myself differing from you.…

In particular, the point on which Collingwood agreed with Croce was that history could best be characterized by comparing it with art, religion, science, and philosophy. This is what Collingwood was to attempt in Speculum Mentis. In some ways, that work continues Croce's Philosophy of the Spirit. Collingwood has made many modifications, he elevates religion to the status of a form of experience, and he demotes economics and morality. Nevertheless, if one searches the annals of early twentieth century philosophy for a figure who preceded Collingwood in the enterprise of describing forms of experience, Croce looms largest. Gentile, to be sure, had made some modifications in Croce's thesis which Collingwood adopted, and of course Hegel lies behind the whole undertaking. But it was Croce who resurrected this approach in the twentieth century, and that is his supreme contribution to the work of the early Collingwood.

(5) CROCE'S INTRODUCTION INTO ENGLAND (1907-1920)

The two men who introduced Croce into England, Douglas Ainslie and J. A. Smith, were of unequal philosophic talent. Douglas Ainslie (1865-1948) was an amateur aesthetician, a disciple of Walter Pater (1839-1894), who stumbled upon Croce's Estetica in 1907. As he himself says, he believed that in Croce he had discovered a new world of philosophic insight, which he wished to bring to English readers. The result was a series of translations of Croce's major works in the field of philosophy of culture. The Aesthetic appeared first (in 1909), The Philosophy of the Practical in 1913, What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel in 1915, and the Logic in 1917.

Ainslie did not attempt to write even a short interpretation of Croce's thought. His contribution was solely as a translator, and his work in this capacity has received scathing criticism. It has become a commonplace of Croce-studies that the Ainslie translations are not to be relied upon, and if used at all, must be followed in the original text. Yet this judgement is excessively harsh, due perhaps to the fact that those who can read philosophical Italian well enough to judge Ainslie's work are few in number and may be inclined to exaggerate the importance of that attainment.

A more balanced verdict on Ainslie's translations may be found in two reviews of them written by Bernard Bosanquet (1848-1923) in 1914 and 1918. Bonsanquet, who was patrician enough not to preen himself on his knowledge of Italian, found that Ainslie did slip into inaccuracies and occasionally into mistranslations. The chief fault he found in the fact that Ainslie "did not appreciate the inconvenience of expressions that lack precision in a logical treatise.' Nevertheless, although Bosanquet recommended that those who could, should consult the Italian in conjunction with Ainslie's rendering of it, he found the bulk of Ainslie's work serviceable and a genuine help to the English-speaking reader. He did not feel that Croce had been betrayed by his translator.

Besides Ainslie, the other man chiefly instrumental in bringing Croce to the attention of the philosophical public in England was John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), almost invariably known as J. A. Smith. Smith was Collingwood's predecessor in the chair of the Waynflete Professorship of Metaphysical Philosophy, which he held from 1909 to 1934. Although a brilliantly gifted polymath, who reminds one a bit of Collingwood in the breadth of his intellectual and research interests (ranging from fine points of Aristotle Scholarship to the philosophy of mathematics), Smith differed from Collingwood in that he was never able to write anything longer than an article or a book review. Collingwood mentions in his Autobiography that he pleaded with Smith to put his ideas on paper in a systematic form, but to no avail. Collingwood saw in Smith's literary paralysis a sign of the senescence of Oxford idealism.

However that may be, it was Smith who first introduced the Oxford community to the ideas of Croce. Smith relates in his brief philosophical autobiography that he discovered Croce while vacationing at Naples, prior to returning to Oxford to take up his duties as Waynflete Professor. In Naples in 1910, Smith noticed that books by a man named Croce were displayed prominently on bookstands all over the city. Finally he decided to investigate who this Croce was, and he became so enthralled by the Italian's thought that he made his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford an exposition of portions of the Estetica and Pratica.

It is difficult to estimate the extent of Smith's influence on his contemporaries. He was renowned among undergraduates for his prowess as an interpreter of Aristotle, and candidates for "Greats" found him an inspiration in this portion of their preparation. One gathers that his lectures on Croce and Gentile created little stir. As always, Collingwood is chary of admitting to having been influenced, and he refers to Smith simply as "my friend.' There is no way to tell whether it was Smith, or someone else, who first set Collingwood to reading Croce. Collingwood had already taught himself Italian at Rugby, so that he could read Dante. In any event, he must have made Croce's acquaintance while still an undergraduate because in 1913 there appeared Collingwood's first venture of any sort into print, a translation of Croce's The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico.

As we have seen, the Italian text of this work had been published just two years before, and it marks something of a turning point in Croce's development. It is regrettable that we have no record of how Collingwood made the acquaintance of this work or of who induced him to undertake the translation. The latter appeared without any preface or introduction, save a brief "Translator's Note.'

There is still a third figure at Oxford who may have had a share in introducing the young Collingwood to the Italian philosopher. This is Collingwood's undergraduate tutor at University College, E. F. Carritt (1878-), who at this writing is still living and remains possibly the last survivor in philosophy of his generation at Oxford.

In An Autobiography, however, Collingwood paints a rather unflattering portrait of Carritt as "another prominent member of the 'realist' school.' By the "realist" school, Collingwood means notably Cook Wilson (1849-1915) and "his followers," H. A. Prichard (1871-1947) and H. W. B. Joseph (1867-1943). Collingwood credits Carritt with having introduced him to the "realist" logic which was supplanting the idealism of T. H. Green (1836-1882) and F. H. Bradley (1846-1924) at Oxford. It was the Lockean epistemology of the "realists" which was to dominate Oxford philosophy during Collingwood's entire tenure there, isolating him from his colleagues in philosophy. On the other hand, he professes gratitude to Carritt for having given him sound foundation in this philosophy. It was from this realist foundation that he was to move on to develop his own approach, which in his view was neither "realist" nor "idealist":

At that time [the 1920's], any one opposing the "realists" was automatically classified as an "idealist", which meant a belated survivor of Green's school. There was no ready-made class into which you could put a philosopher who, after a thorough training in "realism", had revolted against it and arrived at conclusions quite unlike anything the school of Green had taught.

During Collingwood's time as an undergraduate, Carritt was preparing a book entitled The Theory of Beauty. It contains a lengthy chapter on the aesthetic of Benedetto Croce. This suggests that Collingwood may have had opportunities to discuss Croce with his tutor. But if Carritt did help introduce Collingwood to Croce, the younger man did not wish to remember it in his Autobiography. One cannot be entirely convinced by this omission, however, because as an undergraduate Collingwood was not so opposed to the school of Cook Wilson and E. F. Carritt as he later became.

Carritt too is not so critical of Croce's aesthetic as Collingwood's labels might lead one to expect. Carritt devotes to Croce as lengthy a treatment as he accords to any other aesthetician, and he praises him as a man of great philosophical talent. In particular, he esteems Croce for discarding all discussion of the problem of genres in art, a problem which Carritt believes is a useless leftover from the eighteenth century. On the other hand, Carritt criticizes Croce's identification of intuition with expression, the same identification which Collingwood was to make in his concept of art as imagination. Carritt also criticizes Croce's identification of expression with beauty and his definition of ugliness as non-expression.

Whatever part Carritt may have had in introducing Croce to Collingwood, there can be little doubt that Carritt influenced Collingwood's views on aesthetics. Later the younger man termed Carritt's The Theory of Beauty "the best general introduction to the subject in English," and much of Carritt's terminology reappears in Collingwood's writings on aesthetics. Nevertheless, while Carritt may have shaped the language in which Collingwood reflected on art, it was Croce who influenced the way Collingwood approached the relationship of art to other forms of experience.