Knowing the World as History

As we have seen, Nietzsche seemed first to suggest that because the world is only empty becoming, it is radically open to whatever form human beings impose on it. Our particular world rests on a dominant understanding of the past that is simply the particular fiction, or "lie," that has resulted so far from

[29] See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power , trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), 277 (no. 513), for Nietzsche's insistence that "the powerful" create the laws and categories. For Croce's repeated emphasis on world-historical modesty, see "Frammenti di etica," 151–153; Carattere , 209–210; and Discorsi di varia filosofia , 1:297 (1942). See also Roberts, Benedetto Croce , pp. 216–220, on the humility and pluralism that informed Croce's recasting of liberalism.

[30] Nietzsche, Will to Power , 267 (no. 481), 367 (no. 689).

generally hidden human purposes. Even as he accented the scope for radical "genealogical" inquiry, Nietzsche suggested that in writing my particular history I am simply imposing my particular fiction, serving my wider effort to make possible a particular mode of life.

Questions about detachment and objectivity have bedeviled historians off and on for more than a century, but the wider eclipse of metaphysics has recently deepened their bite. As noted above, Croce was one of the first to confront this set of issues in a radically antipositivist way. Indeed, his approach was so radical that he seemed extreme and threatening to some contemporaries.^[31]

Although accents and terminology have differed, Croce was squarely on the side of those from Nietzsche to Derrida who have sought to conceive an alternative to the long-standing assumption that language represents an independently existing reality. Indeed, his starting point was more explicitly aestheticist than Nietzsche's. In his Aesthetic (1902), the book that made him famous, Croce adapted insights from Vico and German romanticism to posit a radically antipositivist view of the world, based on imaginative language as the cutting edge of the growing spirit. Worlds come to be in language, which is inherently poetic and creative.^[32] And for Croce, as much as for Nietzsche, historical questioning is a moment in a process of world-making that stems ultimately from the will of individuals to make the world a certain way.

In reacting against positivism, Croce was as eager as Nietzsche to jettison the ideal of a determinate historical truth to a fixed past. There is no historical "thing-in-itself," he insisted, no past "as it actually happened" that might be discovered and rendered once and for all.^[33] What the past was, and is, is not fixed or given, but, just as for Nietzsche, endlessly open and thus endlessly slipping, shifting. What it was depends on what it becomes, and what it has become so far is what it is for us. In that sense, there is no "past" but only the history that is generated as we make some present sense of the documents available to us at present—and of the present resultant of all previous attempts to forge some particular understanding. As Croce put it in 1939, we "interrogate the past in order to make of it the basis for present action, and the past that was thought in this way was never finished and stable, but always in movement and change, and it is inseparable from our present, which, too, is restless

[31] See, for example, A. F. Pollard, "An Apology for Historical Research," History 7 (October 1922): 161–177, which seeks to defend empirical historiography against the explicitly Crocean position of Ernest Barker in "History and Philosophy," History 7 (July 1922): 81–91. Troubled by the apparent extravagance of Croce's formulations, Pollard misconstrued Croce's thrust, which was not to undercut the autonomy of history, as Pollard worried, but to make new sense of it.

[32] Croce sought to be provocative, insisting, for example, that two identical words do not exist, that each word is a work of art, that "language is perpetual creation." See Croce, Estetica , 16–17, 60, 164.

[33] Benedetto Croce, "Contributo alla critica di me stesso," in Etica e politica , 350; Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia , 43–48; and La storia come pensiero e come azione , 122.

and does not subside in achieving solutions but rather indefatigably poses new problems that will give rise to new solutions."^[34]

Such emphases seem at first to undermine any notion that historical questioning can, or needs to, get at truth. But though historical knowing for Croce can only be partial, interested, and provisional, he still insisted that what results from genuine historical inquiry is a particular truth, as opposed to some imaginative or useful fiction. Those who emphasized fiction, even "metaphor," remained under the shadow of metaphysics, with its image of representing a world already there. They were not radical enough to see what "truth" might mean in a postmetaphysical mode. But how could historical knowledge be possible when the world to be known is forever growing out from under us and when we ourselves, as would-be historical knowers, are historically specific and finite?

Croce made such a splash in Italy during the first decade of the century because he appealed to young, avant-garde intellectuals who, like their contemporaries elsewhere, were discovering Nietzsche at the same time. Croce and Nietzsche seemed to point in the same direction, away from positivist determinism and toward the scope for human beings, as free and creative "artists," to shape the world anew. At first, then, these young intellectuals thought they could have Croce and Nietzsche. But by 1910 they had grown disillusioned with Croce, who seemed to take back with the second hand what he had given with the first. As he worked beyond the Aesthetic to his more fully developed Logic and Philosophy of the Practical of 1908, Croce began insisting on the terms of his moderate alternative, partly to head off what he felt was the tendency toward irrational excess in the responses of his erstwhile followers. Rather than conceive life, the self, or the world as "literature," radically open to human aesthetic will, Croce was a spoilsport who imposed a kind of mundane discipline, on two levels.

First, we must respond to the particular world that has resulted from history so far, so that whatever we do, if it is to become real at all, will grow in a continuous way on what has already resulted. In a sense, we do remake the world by means of creative language, but in Croce's hands the scope for inventing new worlds by redescribing the past proved not to have all the heady consequences it first seemed to. We are not able to reinvent the world afresh simply by redescribing the old one, or by inventing a new language; we cannot leap out of our particular history or tradition. A particular world has resulted—and continually results—from the interaction of the creative responses of each of us. And we can only go on doing what we have always done, responding to that particular world, thereby adding to a continuous history, or coming to be.

[34] Croce, Carattere , 100; see also p. 213, as well as Croce, Logica , 171–172; and Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia , 306–307. Compare the similarly antipositivistic argument of Peter Munz in The Shapes of Time: A New Look at the Philosophy of History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 204–205, 220–221, 226, 230–231.

So though we are always engaged in inventing a new language, it is a mundane and collective process, bound up with our response to the world that has resulted from the interaction of earlier responses. We may be as willful, as radical, as we like—and then see what happens.

Second, because we must respond to a world with a particular shape, we are well advised to know that world in a cognitive way, by using our heads, and this necessarily requires disciplined—though hardly disinterested—historical inquiry. Such knowing enhances our chance to connect with the world, so that we might help mold the next moment.

Although there is an irreducible aesthetic or creative element in our initial response to the world, Croce insisted that a distinguishable cognitive faculty comes into play when we seek to understand, which entails knowing the world as history. We misconstrue our cultural possibilities if, with our new sense that language is creative, we fail to grasp the ongoing point of that distinction. In one sense, Croce simply took for granted Vico's principle that we can know what we have made—the human world as opposed to nature, which only God can genuinely know. Knowing the world as history is one of the attributes of the spirit, one of the things human beings do, and "truth" is simply what happens when we approach the world in a certain way. For Croce, much as for Heidegger and Gadamer a bit later, human beings are open to the happening of truth. Indeed, human being must be understood as the opening for the happening of truth.

But knowing is only one of the things we do, and Croce was not claiming that any single work of history provides unvarnished truth or knowledge. Historical inquirers are themselves finite, individuated historical actors, with particular concerns and commitments; they operate in the practical as well as in the cognitive mode when they produce their histories, which are always partial and "interested." So how do we know if any particular historical account is true or not? Indeed, why should we seek truth in the first place, when we might seek power or some practical advantage? At issue is how the act of knowing and the capacity for truth relate to the practical side of the human spirit—and through it to the world of action.

Just as the knowing or theoretical side of what human beings do can be divided, in a rough-and-ready way, between the aesthetic and the cognitive, the practical side can be divided into the ethical and the useful. For Croce these are the four things human beings do, the four attributes of the spirit, and each of them is at work in historiography. Croce initially emphasized the distinction among these four categories, partly in opposition to utilitarianism, Marxism, and pragmatism, with their various reductionist tendencies. But the four categories were related as well, and Croce tried out various ways of conveying that relationship without ever finding a completely satisfactory solution. In his earlier works, he posited a circular relationship, but he gradually began featuring interconnections among the four categories, even assigning privilege to the

ethical by the 1920s.^[35] This made it clearer that the scope for knowing and truth is bound up with action, our mode of practical involvement with the world. But from the start, Croce had emphasized that practical considerations—both the useful and the ethical—are at work in the construction of any historical account.

Seeking to influence the culture's self-understanding, historians order their material in the way that makes their argument as convincing as possible. More generally, a desire to make the story interesting, or aesthetically pleasing, or morally edifying, or readily publishable, may affect the final form of the historical account. In each such case, the component of the practical that seeks "utility" has been at work. Partly because of such considerations, then, any actual work of history will be not pure historical truth but a messy mixture. Indeed, Croce could have accepted much of White's argument that the various ways of forming a coherent, convincing story from a given set of facts reflect characteristic rhetorical strategies that stem, in part, from the will of the inquirer.^[36] But even though any actual history will have practical elements, it will also, if it is genuine history, contain a component of truth, and thus there are cognitive criteria for distinguishing among historical accounts.

The scope for truth, too, is bound up with the practical—its ethical side, our care for what the world becomes. Croce insisted that genuine historical inquiry, as opposed to a bloodless antiquarianism, is not disinterested but stems from some contemporary concern. Indeed, "all history is contemporary history," because it is some such concern that leads the present inquirer to pose some particular historical question and thereby to forge some particular connection with what went before.^[37]

In explicit contrast to Ranke, who seemed engaged, as Croce put it, in the fine art of embalming a corpse, Croce understood the focus of history to be not some past moment apprehended for its own sake, then fixed once and for all, but some process, one of the endless ways the present has resulted from the past. Each of the endless succession of present moments is a new vantage point from which the historical inquirer illuminates, even constitutes, one of the infinite array of such processes.^[38] So rather than render the past "thing in itself," each historical inquiry participates with others in the ongoing happening or coming to be of some particular historical understanding. Our collective act of establishing some particular understanding is itself part of the ongoing process; the historical account is part of the history it studies.

[35] See, for example, Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia , 311; Croce, Carattere , 114–116, 223–225; and Croce, Filosofia e storiografia , 169–170 (1947), for the notion that historical inquiry is moral when it is genuinely open to truth.

[36] See especially Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia , 29–30.

[37] See ibid., 4–7, 10–12, 16, 99–106, for the overall argument. See also Croce, Cultura e vita morale , 265 (1924); and Croce, La storia come pensiero e come azione , 11–12.

[38] For Croce's critique of Ranke, see La storia come pensiero e come azione , 65–67, 73–88. See also Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia , 304–305.

Whereas for Hegel we discover the privileged content of history after making it, for Croce there is no a priori form to history determining a privileged content. But the reaction against Hegel does not undermine any scope for differentiation and articulation, so that everything in history is simply valuable "for its own sake." A particular, unstable hierarchy of significance endlessly results as we ask the particular historical questions we do, based on our contemporary concerns, and as we interact in an effort to persuade others of our answers. At every moment we decide what is privileged anew.

Because historical inquiry is immersed in an endless process, Croce was the first to admit that historical knowledge lacks what long had seemed the defining attributes of historical truth. But for two crucial reasons, this need not yield the giddy playfulness or the anxious vertigo it might initially seem to. The first reason concerns our practical need for truth to make our way in the world. The second concerns the process of interaction, or unacknowledged collaboration, from which truth results.

Croce sought explicitly to turn the tables on pragmatism by insisting that truth is possible precisely because of the practical stakes of our inquiries.^[39] In asking historical questions, we try to illuminate the present in its historical genesis, because we are caught up in practical situations in which we want to act effectively. We cannot say just anything as we construct our historical account, because our present has resulted from a past that has been a particular way and not some other way. Insofar as we genuinely seek to learn, we open ourselves to truth. The outcome, however, can only be a partial, provisional truth, not the definitive truth we long thought we needed—and thought we got by copying a stable, finished past.

Although Nietzsche himself did not develop them, his practice as a genealogical historian offered scope for the distinctions that Croce took care to specify. Nietzsche's interpretation of the emergence of our Judeo-Christian moral tradition was passionate and deeply interested, intended to illuminate aspects of present experience in order to foster a different mode of life. But in delving into that history, Nietzsche sought genuinely to learn something about the bizarre course of things that had resulted in this actual present, with its particular hang-ups and neuroses. He proved a powerful historian precisely because his present purposes demanded not an utterly fanciful and capricious creation but his particular true reading of the coming to be of our particular world.

When Croce addressed the relationship between our ethical capacity and historical inquiry, his first concern was to head off the sort of moralism that obstructs learning and truth. Thus he distinguished genuine history from moralistic history, or "oratory," intended to exemplify prior moral principles or to support a prior political stance. At the same time, Croce insisted that historical

[39] Croce, Carattere , 176. See also Roberts, Benedetto Croce , 153–154.

understanding is useful only in a preliminary way: it prepares action but cannot determine it—cannot specify a particular course of action. In this sense, the practical and the ethical side of the practical remain autonomous. But Croce also recognized that it is ultimately the ethical dimension of human being that leads us to relate to the world in such a way that truth becomes possible. Insofar as, to adapt Heidegger's category, we care about the world, we seek genuinely to learn about it so that we can better affect what it becomes.^[40] It is this openness in inquiry that yields truth as opposed to entertainment or propaganda, willful fantasy or edifying fiction. Genuine historical inquiry serves the happening of truth because it is itself a moral act.

Any such premium on truth may appear prim and old-fashioned, even limiting and authoritarian, when compared to the recent, loosely Nietzschean emphasis on fiction and metaphor, which seems to invite openness and creativity. But Croce came back to the question of truth, and the distinction between historical knowing and fiction, partly because he had sidestepped the dualism of language and reality that had led us to posit "metaphor" in the first place. From a Crocean perspective, those playing up metaphor have not fully escaped the metaphysical notion of an independent, extralinguistic reality; language seems ever more fundamentally metaphorical as its capacity to mirror or represent that reality directly becomes increasingly doubtful. Croce's postmetaphysical conception has no place even for the shadow of that independent world; no hidden residue of a thing-in-itself remains. So language for Croce is not metaphorical, standing in indirect relationship with an independent reality, but more radically and fundamentally creative. And much of his effort was to show how that creativity meshes with the scope for truth in a postmetaphysical world.

Croce understood that though truth remains possible, we may sometimes prefer edification, for example, even in our approach to the stuff of history. As noted above, an array of practical interests, other than the need for truth, may inform any particular historical account. However, historical understanding in the overall culture stems not simply from the efforts of isolated individual inquirers but from a process of interaction. Individual historians may be as willfully creative as they choose, but their impact will depend on the capacity of their work to persuade others, who are seeking to make sense of some actual situation. At every moment, the resultant of the totality of historical questioning is an unstable composite, inviting further questioning and revision. Truth happens as a continuous process through the unacknowledged collaboration of the universe of historical inquirers.

[40] Croce, Teoria e storia della storiografia , 311; Croce, Filosofia e storiografia , 169–170 (1947); and Croce, Carattere , 223–225. See also Roberts, Benedetto Croce , 283–285, on the complex relationship between ethical concerns and the scope for truth. Croce recognized that an element of "oratory," even political polemic, will inform every historical account; see, for example, Benedetto Croce, Indagini su Hegel e schiarimenti filosofici (Bari: Laterza, 1967), 125 (1949). Much of Croce's own historical writing betrays such an oratorical element.

In positing a middle ground, Croce was seeking to show that the departure from metaphysics did not have to yield the relativism that threatened to undermine any confidence in historical truth. Relativism afflicts us, Croce insisted, only if we assume our aim is to apprehend a stable thing-in-itself back there in the past, then find that we never manage to fix things once and for all.^[41] As we come to understand historical truth as particular and provisional, happening through an ongoing interaction among historical accounts, the conditions for relativism simply dissolve.

However, questions remain about the quality of the process of interaction through which historical truth may happen. Before addressing those questions, we must probe more deeply Croce's account of the world of action, especially his way of conceiving action as history-making. It is on that level that his divergence from Nietzsche is most dramatic.