The function of logic in the system--The concept--Logical concepts and
conceptual fictions--The pure concept as the unity of distinctions--
Singularity, particularity and universality--The dialectic process
in Hegel and in Croce--Opposition, distinction and value--The
expressiveness of the concept--Definition and individual judgment:
their identity--Classification and numeration--The _a priori_ synthesis.
We have summarily examined in the three preceding chapters the theory
of æsthetic, or intuitive, or individual, as distinct from logical, or
conceptual, or universal, knowledge. We must now leave the æsthetic
activity in the background as the mere antecedent of the logical one,
and proceed to investigate the latter.
In a sense it may be said that the key to every system of philosophy
is to be found in the either implicit or explicit solution given to
certain logical problems and that only by understanding the logic of a
philosopher can we be sure to give its true meaning and value to his
thought. The reverse is, as a general rule, also true: any solution of
a particular problem, any particular elaboration of the concept, when
fully understood, will lead us back to the philosopher's logic, to his
concept of the concept. The main points of Croce's logic could easily
be deduced from his æsthetics; but an untrained mind might unwittingly
transpose the whole æsthetic theory on a purely psychological plane,
and involve it again in the errors and contradictions of which it
aims at being a conclusive refutation. A study of Croce's logic will
render such a shifting of the perspective impossible. It will show
that a discussion of Croce's æsthetics has no meaning except on the
logical plane on which Croce has put it, and that therefore any serious
objection to it ought necessarily to imply either a revision of the
logical premises, or a demonstration that the actual logical processes
are not rigorously in accord with these premises. What is here said
of Croce's æsthetics is valid also for Croce's economics or ethics,
and the reason is obvious. Croce's _Logica_ is not a manual of logic,
in a scholastic and formalistic sense: it is the exposition of his
conception of the logical activity, and therefore the philosophy of his
philosophy.
This method of approach to the logical problems, although unusual in
our times, and antagonistic to the general tendencies of our culture,
is not only, as its opponents assume, that of Kant and Hegel, but that
of the whole tradition of European philosophy, beginning with Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle. It was only in epochs of philosophical decadence
that logic reduced itself to a mere formalism or instrumentalism,
ism, to a doctrine of the means of thought, as opposed to its proper
function, which is that of inquiring into the nature of thought, and
therefore, since there is no way by which we can reach reality except
through thought, into the nature of reality itself. To Croce, as
before him to Hegel, the philosophical tradition is not a capricious
sequel of unrelated speculations, but a series of connected efforts
through which the human mind becomes progressively conscious of its
own functions and structure. Nothing is more alien from him than that
type of philosophical criticism, which exhausts itself in an attempt
at reducing under a common denominator apparently similar solutions of
problems, which in fact are profoundly different in their historical
determination: but this consciousness of the historical factor in
philosophy, far from breeding in him a sense of scepticism and of the
relativity of truth, impels him to consider every effective thought as
a necessary moment of truth, and to represent therefore the succession
of effective thoughts, critically separated from what in the various
concrete philosophies is merely postulated or imagined, as a perpetual
integration of truth. This attitude explains why the immediate
foundations of Croce's logic should be Kant's a priori synthesis and
Hegel's dialectic, that is, the highest stages of the development of
European thought before the positivistic anti-metaphysical reaction
which swept away for a time, not the last traces of transcendental
metaphysics only, but philosophy and logic itself; and why also, among
all the recent critics of Kant and Hegel, Croce should be one of the
keenest and sharpest. His sure grasp of fundamentals made it easy
for him to demolish all that is artificial and unessential in their
systems; as is particularly evident in the case of Hegel, who emerged
from Croce's criticism as the discoverer of one great principle and
at the same time the creator, through the misapplication of the same
principle, of many a false science.
This return to the philosophical tradition, which between the end
of the last and the beginning of this century, was not limited to
Croce and to Italy only, was accompanied and indirectly favoured by
the researches of pure scientists on the method of exact and natural
sciences. The economic theory of the scientific concept, such as it
appears especially in the works of Mach and Avenarius, and to an
understanding of which Croce had been prepared by his own studies on
Marxism, was probably the most efficient instrument in destroying
from within the pseudo-scientific constructions of positivism. The
scientists themselves, by defining the limits of scientific thought,
proved the impossibility of building a philosophy which should be at
the same time a synthesis of all particular sciences and a system of
reality. The conclusions of this new scientific methodology are on the
whole accepted by Croce, and the fact that they naturally fall into
their proper place in his logic is the most valid justification of his
method, to which the distinction between the concept of philosophy and
the concepts of the sciences is essential.
We need not point to the object of logic, or concept, as we did in a
former chapter to the object of æsthetics, or intuition. The writing
of this book implies a belief in its existence, and we could take
practically any page of it as an example of what we mean by concept,
or logical knowledge. We shall not therefore pause to confute logical
scepticism, except by repeating the old argument that it is impossible
to deny the existence of the concept except through the formulation of
a concept. Such affirmations as that there is no other knowledge than
the æsthetic one, or the one which is given by the ineffable intuition
of the mystic, or by practical fictions, are in their turn neither
æsthetic knowledge nor mystical intuitions, nor practical fictions, but
affirmations, however contradictory in themselves, of a universal value
and of an absolute character, that is, concepts. Through them, it is
possible immediately to distinguish the logical form of knowledge, as
represented by such affirmations, from the æsthetic or representative
one, from the sentimental or practical state of mind of the mystic, and
from those concepts which are mere empirical fictions. It is evident,
in this last instance, that the theory of the fiction cannot be a
new fiction, but must belong to an activity of a different kind, the
logical activity, whose value is truth.
Of those three forms of logical scepticism, æstheticism, mysticism,
and empiricism, the third one leads us to the distinction between the
logical concept and the scientific concepts, or fictions. The logical
or pure concept is beyond all individual representations, and must
therefore not contain any particular representative element; but, on
the other hand, being the universal as opposed to the individuality of
representations, it must refer to all and each of them. If we think,
for instance, of the concepts of beauty, truth, quality, development,
and such like, it will be impossible for us to represent or imagine a
sufficiently large fragment of reality that will exhaust them, or such
an infinitesimal one as will not admit them. This is what is meant by
saying that the concept is at the same time universal and concrete,
or, in other words, that it is transcendent in respect to every single
representation, and yet immanent in all of them. A third characteristic
of the pure concept, besides those of universality and concreteness,
is that of expressivity: being a product of knowledge, it must be
expressed and spoken, and cannot be a dumb act of the mind, such as
practical acts are.
The conceptual fictions, or, as Croce called them on account of
their non-theoretical character, the pseudo-concepts differ from the
pure concept in being either concrete and representative but not
universal, or universal without any possible reference to individual
representations, that is, without concreteness. The first class is
that of empirical concepts, which contain some objects or fragments
of reality, but not the whole of reality: such as the concepts of
house, cat, rose. The second is that of abstract concepts, which
contain no object or fragment of reality: such as those of triangle
in geometry or of free movement in physics. The first are real, but
not rigorous, the second rigorous, but unreal. Neither the ones nor
the others can be considered as mistaken concepts or errors, since
after having criticised them from a logical point of view, we still
continue to use them for what they are; nor as imperfect concepts, and
preparatory to the perfect ones, since their formation presupposes the
existence of the perfect and rigorous ones: it would be impossible to
conceive the house, the rose, the triangle, before conceiving quantity,
quality, existence, and other pure concepts. It is true that in the
actual development of thought, conceptual fictions have again and
again given birth to true concepts; but in that case they have lost
their intrinsic nature, and have assumed the characters of the genuine
logical activity. In order to understand the proper function or nature
of the conceptual fictions, it is necessary to fix our attention on the
moment of their formation, which is practical and not logical. Their
justification lies in their practical end and in their usefulness: they
are instruments by the help of which we can recall with a single word
vast groups of representations, or which indicate in a single word what
kind of operation is required in order to find certain representations.
The act of forming intellectual fictions is neither an act of knowledge
nor of not-knowledge; logically, it is neither rational nor irrational
(true or untrue); its rationality is of another order, practical and
not logical. The activity which produces pure concepts, and that which
produces empirical or abstract concepts, have been called respectively
Reason and Abstract Intellect, or Intuition and Intellect; to which
terminology Croce objects that the word intellect is certainly
inappropriate to a non-theoretical activity. Croce himself is in no
need of a new name for it, since he considers it one with the general
practical activity, will or action.
The definition that we have given of the pure concept seems to clash
against an insuperable difficulty arising from the multiplicity of
concepts. If the concept is an elaboration of reality as a universal,
how can we admit the existence of more than one concept? Beauty
and truth are both concrete universals, and yet they are not the
same universal: they have the same logical form, but they denote
different aspects of reality. If this variety of the concepts, that
is, of the aspects of reality, were insuperable, we should fall from
the irreducible multiplicity of representations into a not less
irreductible multiplicity of concepts, which would in the end justify
a new logical scepticism and take us back to a mystical solution of
the problem of the unity of reality. The passage from the multiple
universals to the true universal would be logically impossible, and to
be performed only by the help of some sort of mystical intuition.
The solution of this difficulty has already been hinted at in the
discussion of the relations between intuition and concept, and between
knowledge and will. The theory of the successive grades of reality,
in their progressive implication, is the true form of the concept.
Croce affirms the unity of reality, as a consequence of the unity of
the concept, of the form through which only reality is known. But if
we suppress the distinction, the unity that we reach is an empty and
ineffable one: a whole is a whole only inasmuch as it has parts, as
it _is_ parts; a unity can be thought only through its distinctions.
Therefore the unity and the distinctions are both necessary to the
concept: the distinctions are not something outside the concept, but
the concept itself, which is a unity of distinctions. The mind or
spirit is one, but it is impossible to think of it as a pure and simple
unity, outside of the forms in which it realizes itself, and of these
forms in their necessary relations. Which is but a more comprehensive
way of saying what we have already said speaking of one of those forms
in particular, the æsthetic one, that it is impossible to conceive any
of them except by determining its relations with the others.
It is necessary, however, not to convert these distinctions of the
concept into abstractions: by approximation, and for a practical
purpose, we can speak of a given action as a theoretical or practical
one, an economic or moral one. In fact, in every fragment of reality
we find the universal, and therefore all the forms of the universal.
But on the other hand it is impossible to think any concrete datum,
and to recognize it as an affirmation of the spirit as a whole, unless
we distinguish each of its aspects in the most rigorous fashion. We
shall then have a criticism of art and poetry, from the æsthetic point
of view; or of philosophy, from the logical one; and a moral judgment
which takes into account only the individual moral initiative. The
distinctions of the concept are then used as directing principles of
thought, but not, in the way empirical concepts are used, as criteria
for a classification of objects; nor, again, as characteristics of
epochs of actual historical development, which in the end reduce
themselves to types of material classification.
Croce's theory of the unity and distinctions of the concept coincides
with the old division of concepts into universal, particular, and
singular ones. The true logical definition is reached only by
determining the singularity of a distinction in relation with the other
distinctions (particularity), and with the whole (universality). For
instance, the concept of beauty is intuition (singularity), knowledge
(particularity), and finally spirit or mind (universality). The
symbol corresponding to this peculiar relation is not that of a fine
or succession, but of a circle: there is not a first and a last term
of the series, a beginning and an end, but a perpetual revolution,
in which every distinction in turn may appear as the beginning and
the end of the series. Art or philosophy, knowledge or action, may be
postulated with equal reason as the end of the spirit: the true end,
however, is not any of the particular forms, but only the spirit or
mind or reality as a whole.
Readers who are familiar with Hegelian logic will at once perceive
the difference between Croce's and Hegel's treatment of logical
distinctions. There is no attempt on the part of Croce to apply to them
the dialectic process, which pervades the whole of Hegel's philosophy,
and which is retained by Croce only in its legitimate sphere which is
not that of distinctions but of oppositions. The dialectic process, of
which the remote ancestor is Plato, and the more immediate forbears
those Renaissance philosophers, Cusanus and Bruno, who more or less
obscurely affirmed the _principium coincidentiæ oppositorum_, only
with Hegel reaches its rigorous logical expression. The most famous
instance of its application is to be found in Hegel's formula of the
opposition of being and non-being, and of their unity in the becoming:
the pure being is identical with the pure non-being, or, to say the
same thing in different words, we cannot think the one without the
other, and we do actually think the one and the other when we think the
actual reality, which is neither being nor non-being, but becoming.
Being and non-being are a true couple of opposites, as ideal and real,
positive and negative, value and non-value, activity and passivity,
and so on. By the application of the dialectic process, all these
couples are shown to be not couples of concepts, but single concepts,
each couple containing the affirmation and the negation of a single
concept. Croce's criticism of Hegel is founded on an interpretation of
the dialectic process as logically valid for such couples only, and
inapplicable to the distinctions of the concept, or to empirical and
abstract concepts; and this criticism, while emphasizing the importance
of Hegel's main contribution to philosophical thought, sweeps away at
one stroke all that in his philosophy has generally been considered as
most distinctly Hegelian both by his followers and by his adversaries.
Croce's interest in such couples of opposites as those that we have
mentioned is very far from being as keen as Hegel's. Their dialectic
solution into single concepts is implicit in every phase of Croce's
philosophy. This can best be seen in the constant interchange of such
words as spirit and reality; each of them, when taken by itself, a
pure, formal spirit, and a pure, material reality, are meaningless,
while, once they have been correlated, both indicate the same concept,
the spirit perpetually realizing itself in the concreteness of life:
a formula which contains the whole of Croce's immanentism. But within
the distinctions of the concept, the dialectic process is constantly
applied by Croce to such oppositions as those of good and evil, true
and false, beautiful and ugly, which are nothing but the double
aspect, affirmative and negative, respectively, of the concepts of
goodness, and truth, and beauty. We need only recall what we have said
of Croce's conception of æsthetic value, and of value in general.
The dialectic process is the logical structure of Croce's concept of
value. The positive element of each concept is the only real one, and
a negative judgment of value is not a purely logical judgment, but
a statement to which is added the expression of a desire or of an
exigency. If we say: A is immoral, we mean: A follows his own immediate
pleasure (a logical statement), and also: A ought to follow a higher
end (the expression of a desire). A positive judgment of value, on the
other hand, coincides entirely with a logical judgment, or a statement
of fact. The opposition of value to fact is of the same kind as that
of spirit to reality; verbal and apparent and not logical and real.
The underlying reality of the opposition can be grasped only through
the distinction; what in the opposition is a negative and therefore a
mere abstraction can never be anything but a positive value of another
order, a distinct form of activity. The action that we have judged
as morally evil, if it is an action at all, belongs to the economic
order, is economically rational, directed towards a particular end
which confers on it its particular value; and the same applies to
all the other categories of reality, in which error and evil cannot
be introduced except by the substitution of one form for the other.
It is impossible to distinguish a concept from its opposite as two
concepts; but when a distinction is introduced, the opposition loses
its negative character, and identifies itself with a distinct but
positive value. Error and evil as such are never present except in the
act that transcends them, in the conscience that, realizing itself in a
higher sphere, turns against them and condemns them. It is superfluous
to point to the importance that this process lends to the distinctions
themselves, which are now seen at last not as mere logical instruments,
but as the actual differentiations of reality, the necessary conditions
of all life and progress.
The concept does not exist outside its verbal expression, but the
relation between logical thought and language, because of the purely
æsthetic or intuitive nature of language, is not of the rigorous
character which is postulated by the Aristotelian logician, and, in
more recent times, by the student of symbolic logic, who both assume
language to be an essentially logical function. It would be impossible
for Croce to fall into that extreme of idealism which is the common
vice of the verbal realist, for whom propositions, judgments, or
syllogisms have a kind of absolute reality of their own, independent
of the mind that thinks them. It may seem paradoxical to assert that
nowhere is Croce's realism more apparent than in his treatment of the
verbal forms of the concept; and yet his criticism of the old logical
principles and forms, running parallel to that of the rhetorical
categories and genres in the field of æsthetics, allows him to reach
the actual workings of the logical activity with much greater intimacy
than is possible through any kind of formalistic logic.
The logical judgment, or concept, appears in two main forms: the
definition, and the individual judgment. In the definition, the
subject is one with the predicate, both being universal; in the
individual judgment, the subject is an individual, the predicate a
universal. "The intuition is the æsthetic form of the spirit," is a
definition; "The _Divine Comedy_ is poetry," is an individual judgment.
The individual judgment is one with the perception, or perceptive
judgment, with the historical judgment, and, for the reason given
before, with the positive judgment of value; it is the last and most
perfect form of knowledge. But the distinction between the definition
and the individual judgment is not an ultimate and irreducible one.
The concrete logical act is always an individual judgment, that is,
the affirmation of the unity of the individual and the universal in
relation to a particular subject; and every definition is an individual
judgment inasmuch as it cannot be but the solution of a particular
problem, individually and historically determined. The particular
problem, the group of facts, from which a particular definition
arises, is the individual subject of which the definition predicates
the concept. This identification of the definition and the individual
judgment disposes of the familiar distinctions of formal and material
truths, of truths of reason and of fact, and of analytical and
synthetical judgments; which all are reduced to mere abstractions,
partial aspects of the only logical act, consisting in the thinking of
the pure concept, as a concrete universal.
The practical imitations of the concept, or pseudo-concepts, also may
appear in the double form of definitions and individual judgments.
From the empirical concepts we can form empirical judgments, which
consist in the inclusion of an individual subject within a class or
type, and therefore can also be called classificatory judgments. From
the abstract concepts, the passage to the individual subject cannot be
effected without the intervention of an empirical concept, that is,
without a previous reduction of the individual subjects to classes and
types: this reduction enables us to form empirico-abstract judgments,
or judgments of numeration and mensuration. The function of these
judgments is, as that of the concepts with which they are related, not
theoretical, but practical: to classify or to enumerate is not the same
as to understand, though they are both essential operations of the
human mind. The corresponding judgments are therefore called by Croce
pseudo-judgments, or practical imitations of the individual judgment.
The reduction of the pure concept to the individual judgment is the
fundamental innovation of Croce's logic. It entirely disposes of any
form of transcendental thought, of an Absolute or a Universal as
some beyond and above reality, and therefore of the last remnants
of metaphysics in philosophy. It means, translated into terms of
common language, that there is no thought outside the thinking of
individual minds, individually, that is, historically determined; and,
conversely, that there is no reality outside the reality of thought,
since the postulation of an external reality is nothing but one more
act of thought. In the light of this doctrine, the relation between
the intuition and the concept, between æsthetic and logical knowledge,
can be restated by saying that while the intuition is the autonomous,
creative mental act, by which the individual is known as individual,
the concept is the autonomous, creative mental act, by which the
individual is known as universal, that is, not simply known, but
understood. Since Kant, an autonomous creative act of the human mind
has received in modern philosophy the name of _a priori_ synthesis, a
synthesis which cannot be resolved into its components, or material
elements, because its form, and therefore its true being, cannot be
traced in them, but is imposed on them by the mind. Croce's intuition
is an æsthetic _a priori_ synthesis, through which the obscure psychic
material rises to the light of consciousness; his concept, a logical
_a priori_ synthesis, in which the intuition is no longer form, but
matter, subject to a new form which is judgment and reason. The _a
priori_ synthesis is thus employed by Croce as the peculiar dialectic
process of the distinctions of the concept, the rigorous logical form
of the double-grade relation between the individual and the universal,
between intuition and concept, between knowledge and action, and, as we
shall see in his philosophy of the practical, between the economic and
the ethical will. It is, however, not a mere logical form, or rather,
it is a logical form, because it is the actual process of the spirit,
which cannot either know or act except by forming a priori syntheses
(æsthetic or logical, economic or ethical), that is, by constantly
re-creating itself and its own reality and values.
[Footnote 1: See _Logica_, part i, "Il concetto puro," etc., pp.
1-170.]