CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS
Fascism is the concrete way of considering any organisation or relation in the light of the aim for which it was created. Such a method sweeps away a good deal of claptrap rhetoric and a great many prejudices. What matters is the actual working of an organisation towards its aim, and not at all the exclusive interest of one of the two contracting parties. Obviously this is the practical application of one of the most famous propositions of the philosophy of Mind. It is just as obvious that after a first period of political system exclusively for gentlemen and by gentlemen, and a second period of a political system exclusively drawn for the benefit of the lower class, it was natural that any sane party should have tried a synthetic policy, above all in a country where the mentality is essentially realist.
The motto of Fascism is order and hierarchy. This is the necessary consequence of its taking into consideration always the aim and its actual realisation. If efficiency is to be ensured to any organisation from the family upward it is evident that every member of it must play his part in the way which is most likely to ensure efficiency. Yet this notion of discipline is a trifle more modern than it sounds, at least in Italy. Nothing can better illustrate it than the example of a football Captain and his men. The boy who acts as Captain, let us say John Smith, has no authority over his fellows, except when, ceasing to be John Smith, he is Captain of the team, and while they are actually playing, practising or arranging a game. His authority is not personal, it is actual to the sport interests of the team, or the school they represent, so that it is not demeaning to any of his team to accept the dictates of his authority. Indeed the boys’ commonsense is strong enough, in England at least, to make them realise an idea which they would comprehend with great difficulty in its speculative form. To them it is obvious that their Captain’s authority is as absolute as it is actual and impersonal. He is Captain as long as he is an actual value, as long as he is a factor of efficiency to the general play of his side. His authority does not diminish one whit of the players’ liberty, because the will of every single player is that his side should win, and such identity is that which makes the actual reality both of the team as an individual, or rather as a person, in the world of sport and of the single players as members of that team. The Captain is entrusted with the co-ordination of a number of wills, and their welding into one in his own person, so that each boy freely wants what all want. Divergencies are merely negative—as is constantly shown by the negative scoring of sides in which first-rate men play without this unification of their single wills.
Thus football comes to illustrate perfectly the most difficult of all the Gentilian notions instinctively acted upon by people who will never be able to read one line of Gentile’s works, the notion of liberty taken as actual identification of each single will which is liberty with the common will which is law. Again the boys’ commonsense would find it as ridiculous to argue over their Captain’s orders when playing, as to go on considering him as their superior when the game is over, or when they have detected among themselves a better Captain. Thereby they teach the world a deep truth, that is to say that no value can be considered as static, and that its realisation being dynamic and actual it cannot be achieved once for all, but is a continuous process of developing one’s own efficiency.
Hence the notion of discipline and liberty acted upon by boys playing football results in a conception of hierarchy which is also shared by Fascism, and is pregnant with so much social and political reformation that one cannot insist too much upon it. Nor can one abstract it from Gentile’s system, of which it is theoretically and practically the centre. In their organisation the boys certainly do not consider the team’s hierarchy as being definitely settled any more than Fascists would consider any one political constitution or method of governing as final, that is to say as perfect. To their young minds, full of freshness and elasticity, it would sound absurd not to be able to alter their arrangements and to modify their play in the best interests of the team. If a boy slackens in his practice his unfitness will soon betray the fact and his contribution to the positive scoring of the team will be thereby diminished. But with this new view of hierarchy which Fascism takes as being grounded on actual value, the most unstable of all living reality thereby destroying every notion of any permanent class or organisation—the contribution to international politics of Fascism as the immediate consequence of its national and political antecedents comes to an end.
Passing now to the exposition of the philosophical genealogy of Fascism it may be well to remember first that there are no such things as “national” philosophies, philosophy being the historical process of infinite Mind; secondly, that as a consequence of the oneness of such a process, there are no such things as brand new conceptions either in the most sublime of theoretical systems or in their practical realisation such as pedagogy or politics. Neither is there any such thing as an international system, and this ought to be sufficient to destroy any hope of internationalisation of mankind. Every great nation is a contributor to the life of Mind, and may be said to take in international politics a part which is proportioned to its theoretical contribution. Each school of thought takes the problems in the solution of which it displays the peculiarities which distinguish its genius from another school, either when this has given to it all the development of which its own genius was capable, or when it is developing it on unilateral lines.
In philosophy good examples of this are the obvious derivation of Bacon’s and Descartes’ problems from the Italian philosophers of the Renaissance, and the mutual influence of English empiricism and French rationalism; in politics the influence of England on France during the whole of the eighteenth century and of both countries on Italy during the nineteenth century. Looking at any history of philosophy or politics serves to illustrate the point. For one follows the living process through which theoretical notions are born one out of the other, and one realises the part played by the characteristics of each nation in the constructive play of historical forces. There could be no stronger evidence both of the intellectual interdependence of countries, and the absolute necessity of their political independence.
The relation of theoretical and practical life ought no longer to be one of exclusive opposition. Pragmatism has done something towards the simplification of it and the oncoming idealism is achieving it in a way that may be said radical. In the history of the last three centuries, however, we see philosophy considering thought and action as the two terms of an irreducible dualism; yet such dualism must not be considered a product of the perverseness of modern thought. Ovid has left us a verse which settles the point even for people unfamiliar with pagan philosophy. It is only the deliberate application of a given system which may follow after its conception, but the spontaneous conformation of political reality to the actual life of the mind is generally simultaneous with the conception of the theories of which it is the practical expression. A good illustration of the point can be had from Germany. Lévy Bruhl has sketched the parallel development of German philosophy and national consciousness in a work which is not as famous as it deserves. After Hegel’s death, when his system has given birth to its two political offsprings, the statolatry of Imperialism and the myth of Marx’s Communism, the maximum force of expansion is on the verge of being reached by Germany and the country is not far from becoming the prey of national fanaticism, which is as blinding as the religious fanaticism that appears in the history of all churches when, having exhausted the force of expansion that is dependent on the immediacy of their faith, they want to go on expanding artificially through arbitrary force.
Few legacies of the first centuries of modern thought have been as harmful as the divorce between the two manifestations of human activity. It was, however, inevitable. Faith in the positive teaching of the Church was the first snare into which early thinkers fell; for it is not exact to say that they professed the existence of two truths merely to escape danger. They firmly believed it. Most of them were good Catholics, and as sure in their scientific maturity as in the days of their childhood that the Church was right. On the other hand they were sure of the result of their observations and experiments. They were sure in both cases, and so they simply inferred the co-existence of two truths. Nowadays, it sounds childish and the reciprocal limitation of the two truths would be obvious to any modern student, but in those days the problem had not received the light that it has received since; and they were perfectly in earnest. The philosophers followed suit for two obvious reasons; science was still for a very long time identified with philosophy, and the sixteenth century thinkers, when they were faced by the dilemma of being heretics or of discarding their passionate researches, took to considering religion as belonging to the practical manifestation of mind whilst scientific and philosophic researches were its theoretical activity. One more step and religion was to be identified as the enemy of science.
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When Europe emerged from what has been called the Dark Ages of obscurantism—in antithesis to the age of light to which belonged the writers who thus labelled an epoch, which was dark and obscure to them merely because they knew very little about it—intellectual life was so full of buoyancy that men fretted at the tethers of a school of thought which they could disregard after having come to such efficiency under its discipline that they felt like boys coming intellectually of age. Scholasticism having patronised Aristotle as “The Philosopher,” Plato was for the first time opposed to him, then Neo-platonism; then modern “national” schools of thought arose at the breaking up of the intellectual world. For a United Intellectual States of Europe existed during the Middle Ages; and the biographies of St. Anselm and St. Thomas tell us eloquently how, in their centuries, a man could pass from country to country to follow his studies with the greatest simplicity. At the time of St. Anselm, nationality could not be traced in a man’s works. By the time Roger Bacon wrote the differences had developed, and it is not impossible to find his character as a sturdy Briton standing out distinctly in his works. Such national tendencies expressed themselves only in matters of little moment, and it is a fact that the wonderful correspondence which passed between scholars kept the humanism of each country in touch with that of all others; it is none the less obvious that there were essential differences between the character it gradually assumed in various countries, a character and an attitude that may be identified as the initial stage of the various European mentalities.
The best proof of this is to be had in the essential and irreducible differences manifest in the conclusions to which Italian, English and French philosophy came on the very same problem, which they found on the threshold of modern civilisation. Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon and René Descartes treated the same question when their respective countries emerged from the later Middle Ages with their respective schools coming to light from scholasticism through humanism. The problem of knowledge faced them in this dawn of modern intellectual life; and the same passionate reaction against Aristotelianism and scholasticism compelled their researches to take the same bent. Yet they came to widely different conclusions and the differences hold good even to-day as characteristic of Italian, English and French mentalities.
Bruno, whose metaphysic is wonderfully synthetic and pregnant with a lyricism the echo of which runs through the work of Vico, faces the problem of truth, of scientific truth according to him, in order to find theoretical ground to reject the authority of antiquity considered by his forerunners as the well of all worldly wisdom. A conception known to that same antiquity but very uncommonly acted upon takes hold of his mind. Truly old age must be wiser than youth, but antiquity is, compared to his age, the nursery age of mankind, and a fairly good student of the sixteenth century knows far more than Aristotle, because he may know, if he chooses, all that Aristotle knew, and all that has come afterwards to the knowledge of men. Each generation brings its stone to the constructive activity of man’s experience. Hence the idea he expressed _veritas filia temporis_. Thus he proclaims that which will be the motto of every true Italian thinker; reality is essentially and above all, Historical Reality.
In England, Bacon, starting on the same errand, through his researches, was induced also to consider more and more that the regard of man for the authority of tradition is one of the greatest obstacles to the progress of science, and that servile veneration for Aristotle is, above all, to be condemned as paralysing the initiative of modern thinkers. Learning is not to be considered as the work of antiquity, as a work already done; it is instead an arduous task still to be accomplished and the first step on the way towards its accomplishment must be the rejection of the old logic and its syllogism. Man must trust to his personal experience, the immediate experience of his senses. Nothing could be more anti-historical in its consequences than this assertion, the unilateralness of which would be astonishing from a man who felt the whole of historical and social world as a pulsing reality, if it was not justified by the intellectual antecedents of the English national consciousness coming to realise its own personality just at the time in which Bacon thought and wrote. He could not very well be expected to see the condition of his own experience in the experience of his forerunners, in the age in which self-assertion was the successful motto of every great man flourishing in England. The abstraction thus made of all the historical past conditioning of man’s experience was balanced for the time being by his own historical and political sense and by the love of life as a whole so strong in Elizabethan days. Yet henceforth reality in the eyes of any true Briton was to be _Empirical Reality_.
A French thinker faces the same problem. René Descartes at first sight is everything that Bacon is not; whilst the English philosopher is a mixture of recklessness and worldly wisdom, anxious to enjoy everything that power and wealth can beget, and drink to the dregs the cup of life, the French metaphysician recoils from the cares of power and the noisy turmoil of society. A longer consideration, specially from a more philosophic point of view, reveals affinities that were going to tell on their theories. Both lack the youthful enthusiasm common to German and Italian thinkers, and both give shape to their theories with a cautious prudence that marks them as men of the world. Their conclusions betray their divergencies and affinities much better than any analysis of their life and character could; for Descartes certitude is reached by way of induction when in the silence of meditation he comes to his famous statement _Cogito, ergo sum_. The touchstone of certitude is identified with the actual consciousness of man in the act of thinking. If I think surely I am; but of the rest, that is to say of the knowledge of the exterior world I have no control, and traditional science is communicated to me and was originally obtained through the senses just as my actual objective knowledge, therefore it cannot be accepted as certain. Aristotle and all the traditional fetishism come to nought. The _tabula rasa_ is implied as definitely in this as in Bacon’s work; in both cases man must begin his work from the foundation and put to the test of his own experience, empirical in one case, rational in the other, the legacies of his predecessors. The difference however implied in the terms empirical and rational is fundamental and the pedagogy and politics grounded on English philosophy whilst laying down rules and formulas inferred from systematic theories, will always be susceptible of being tempered by a direct call to experience and commonsense. The rationality of French philosophy does not allow of such adaptation. To this day the cogency for good or bad which is characteristic of French theories is the consequence of their perfect deduction from a first principle; hence the radicalness that mars some of their practical application. With the exception of men greatly influenced by foreign philosophy, the French thinkers all took reality as being Rational Reality; and all their systems were bound to be radical in their applications.
In their rationalism or empiricism, France and England threw overboard the past that loomed indeed rather oppressive, and in so doing they assert man, in his individual determination, as the ground of all reality. It is perfectly allowable to consider that the two schools were bound to stimulate and temper each other. The atom, the monad at the basis of their system is always man, but at the outset the unilateralism of Bacon’s gnoseology, a method based so to speak exclusively on sense knowledge, called for the mathematical and deductive method of Descartes in order to display all that it held virtually of scientific progress. On the other hand the French deductive method, although admitting the inference and resorting to it in its research of first principles, stood in sore need of a well-balanced recognition of the part played by sense perception in human knowledge. This will be specially obvious in the political consequences of the two theories. For both had their political system, in which their common character prevailed, inasmuch as the seventeenth century was for France and England the century of metaphysics whilst the eighteenth drew the conclusions of their premises, seeing to the application or realisation of all that was fertile as a suggestion of a renovating process to be undergone by society.
Bruno’s historical reality was left in a corner, for it could not have been integrated in our system to which it was then contradictory, and still less in the political conditions that were to be the outcome of our theories, since it was consonant with them only as far as the individual was the basis of his reality as well as of ours. His individual is, however, neither rational, nor empirical; he is historical, and this implies that he cannot be considered bereft either of his roots in the past nor of his projection on the future. Nothing therein tends to diminish man; on the contrary everything adheres to him, dilating his personality right into infinity. But this notion of man was far too difficult to be realised even theoretically in the sixteenth century, and the arduous task of the French and English schools was to pave the way for the German and modern Italian thinkers and provide them with a starting-point to reach the heights from which the relation of the transcendental and empirical selves can be detected, and the historical notion of man realised in the light of such a conception. In Bruno it is not, however, a mere intuition although it is realised only as far as the conception of science and its historical development are concerned. The practical realisation of this notion implied a new conception of tradition and authority, which, far from being shaken to pieces, are in it invested with a new and nearly sacred character. Antithetic thereby to Protestantism, it knocked no less against the transcendent reality of God as understood then by decadent scholasticism and by most Catholics.