scrupulously, because, if they did, they would not be pseudoconcepts,
but concepts; not imitations, but the very reality which they imitate.
An actor who, pretending on the stage to kill his rival in love,
really did so, would no longer be an actor, but a practical man and an
assassin. If, therefore, with regard to the representations, and when
preparing to form pseudoconcepts, we should think representations with
that universality which is also the concreteness proper to the true
concept, and with that transcendence which is also immanence (and is
therefore called _transcendentalism),_ we should form true concepts.
This, indeed, often happens, as we can see in certain treatises which
mean to be empirical and arbitrary, and from which, _currente rota,
non urceus, sed amphora exit._ Their authors, led by a profound and
irrepressible philosophic sense, gradually and almost unconsciously
abandon their initial purpose, and give true and proper concepts in
place of the promised pseudoconcepts: they are philosophers, disguised
as empiricists. In order to create pseudoconcepts, we must therefore
begin by arbitrarily dividing into two the one supreme necessity of
logic, immanent transcendence, or concrete universality, and form
pseudoconcepts, which are _concrete_ without being _universal,_
or _universal_ without being _concrete._ There is no other way of
falsifying the concept; whoever wishes to falsify it so completely as
to render the imitation unrecognizable, does not falsify, but produces
it; he does not remain outside, but permits himself to be caught in its
coils; he does not invent a practical attitude, but thinks. That one
mode is therefore specified in two particular modes, of which examples
have already been given in our analysis of the pseudoconcepts of the
house, the cat, the rose, which are concrete without being universal;
and of the triangle and of free motion, which are universal without
being concrete. There is nothing left to do, therefore, but to baptize
them; selecting some of the many names that are applied, and often
applied, sometimes to the one, sometimes to the other of the two forms,
or indifferently to both, and giving to each of them a particular name,
which will be constant in this treatise. We shall then call the first,
that is to say, those which are concrete and not universal, _empirical_
pseudoconcepts; and the second, or those which are universal and not
concrete, _abstract_ pseudoconcepts; or, taking as understood for
brevity's sake, the general denomination (pseudo), _empirical concepts_
and _abstract concepts._
[Sidenote: _The other characteristics of the pure concept._]
Thus, of the three characteristics of the concept which we have
exhibited, the second and the third constitute, as we can now see, one
only, which is stated in a double form, solely in order to deny and
to combat these two one-sided forms which we have called empirical
and abstract concepts. But, on the other hand, it is easy to see that
the characteristics of the concept are not exhausted in the two that
remain, namely, in expressivity or cognizability, and in transcendence
or concrete universality. Others can reasonably be added, such as
_spirituality, utility, morality,_ but we shall not dwell upon these,
because either they belong to the general assumption of Logic, that
is, to the fundamental concept of Philosophy as the science of spirit,
or they are more conveniently made clear in the other parts of this
Philosophy. The concept has the character of spirituality and not of
mechanism, because reality is spiritual, not mechanical; and for this
reason we have to reject every mechanical or associationist theory
of Logic, just as we have to reject similar doctrines in Æsthetic,
in Economic and in Ethic. A special discussion of these views seems
superfluous, because they are discussed and negated, that is to say,
surpassed, in every line of our treatise. The concept has the character
of utility, because, if the theoretic form of the spirit be distinct
from the practical, it is not less true, by the law of the unity of
the spirit, that to think is also an act of the will, and therefore,
like every act of the will, it is teleological, not antiteleological;
useful, not useless. And, finally, it has the character of morality,
because its utility is not merely individual, but, on the contrary,
is subordinated to and absorbed in the moral activity of the spirit;
so that to think, that is, to seek and find the true, is also to
collaborate in progress, in the elevation of Humanity and Reality, it
is the denial and overcoming of oneself as a single individual, and
the service of God.
[Sidenote: _The origin of the multiplicity and unity of character of
the concept._]
Certainly, the form in which the order of our discourse has led us to
establish the characters of the concept--that of enumeration, the one
character being connected with the other by means of an "also"--is,
logically, a very crude form, and must be refined and corrected. Above
all, if we have spoken of _characters_ of the concept, we have done so
in order to adhere to the usual mode of expression. The concept cannot
have characters, in the plural, but _character,_ that one character
which is proper to it. What this is has been seen; the concept is
concrete-universal two words which designate one thing only, and can
also grammatically become one: "transcendental," or whatever other word
be chosen from those already coined, or that may be coined for the
occasion. The other determinations are not _characters_ of the concept,
but affirm its _relations_ with the spiritual activity in general,
of which it is a special form, and with the other special forms of
this activity. In the first relation, the concept is spiritual; in
relation with the æsthetic activity, it is cognitive or expressive,
and enters into the general theoretic-expressive form; in relation
with the practical activity, it is not, as concept, either useful or
moral, but as a concrete act of the spirit it must be called useful
and moral. The exposition of the characters of the concept, correctly
thought, resolves itself into the compendious exposition of the whole
Philosophy of spirit, in which the concept takes its place in its
unique character, that is to say, in itself.
[Sidenote: _Objections relating to the unreality of the pure concept
and to the impossibility of demonstrating it._]
This declaration may save us from the accusation of having given an
empirical exposition of the non-empirical _Concept of the concept,_ and
so committing an error for which logicians are justly reproved (for
they have often believed themselves to possess the right of treating
of Logic without logic; perhaps for the same reason that custodians of
sacred places are wont, through over-familiarity, to fail in respect
towards them). But it lays us open to censure very much more severe;
which, if it ultimately prove to be inoffensive, is certainly very
noisy and loquacious. The pretended characters of the concepts (it
is said) are, by your own confession, nothing but its relations with
the other forms of the spirit; and the one character proper to it is
that of universality-concreteness, that is, of being itself, since the
"concrete-universal" is synonymous with the concept, and _vice versa._
So it turns out that in spite of all your efforts, your concept of the
concept becomes dissipated in a tautology. Give us a demonstration
of what you affirm, or a definition which is not tautologous; then
we shall be able to form some sort of an idea of your pure concept.
Otherwise you may talk about it for ever, but for us it will always be
like "Phœnician Araby" of Metastasian memory: "you say _that it is;
where it is,_ no one knows."
[Sidenote: _Prejudice relating to the nature of demonstration._]
Beneath such dissatisfaction and the claim it implies, we find first
of all a prejudice of scholastic origin concerning what is called
_demonstration._ That is to say, it is imagined that demonstration
is like an irresistible contrivance, which grasps the learner by the
neck and drags him willy-nilly, whither he does not and the teacher
does will to go, leaving him open-mouthed before the truth, which
stands external to him, and before which he must, _obtorto collo,_ bow
himself. But such coercive demonstrations do not exist for any form
of knowledge--indeed, for any form of spiritual life--nor is there a
truth outside our spirit. Not that truth presupposes _faith,_ as is
often said, so that rationality is subordinated to some unknown form of
irrationality; but _truth is faith,_ trust in oneself, certainty of
oneself, free development of one's inner powers. The light is in us;
those sequences of sounds, which are the so-called demonstration, serve
only as aids in discarding the veils and directing the gaze; but in
themselves they have no power to open the eyes of those who obstinately
wish to keep them closed. Faced with this sort of reluctance and
rebellion, the pedagogues of the good old days had recourse, as we
know, not to demonstrations, but to the stool of penitence and to the
stick; so fully were they persuaded that the demonstration of truth
requires good dispositions, _i.e._ requires those who are disposed to
fall back upon themselves and to look into themselves. How can the
beauty of the song of Farinata be demonstrated to one who denies it,
and will neither appreciate the soul contained in that sublime poem,
nor accomplish the work necessary to attain to the possibility of such
an appreciation, nor will, on the other hand, humbly confess his own
incapacity and lack of preparation,--how can we forcibly demonstrate
to him that that song is beautiful? The critical wisdom of Francesco
de Sanctis would be disarmed and impotent before such a situation.
How can we demonstrate to one who deliberately refuses to believe
in any authority or document, and breaks the tradition by which
we are bound to the past, that Miltiades conquered at Marathon, or
that Demosthenes strove all his life against the power of Macedonia?
He will capriciously throw doubt on the pages of Herodotus and the
orations of Demosthenes; and no reasoning will be able to repress
that caprice. What more can be said? Even in arithmetic, for which
calculating machines exist, compulsory demonstration is impossible.
In vain you will lift two fingers of the hand, and then the third
and the fourth, in order to demonstrate to one who does not wish for
demonstration that two and two are four; he will reply that he is not
convinced. And indeed he cannot be convinced, if he do not accomplish
that inner spiritual synthesis by which twice two and four reveal
themselves as two names of one and the same thing. Therefore, he
who awaits a compelling demonstration of the existence of the pure
concept, awaits in vain. For our part, we cannot give him anything
but that which we are giving: a discourse, directed towards making
clear the difficulties, and towards demonstrating how, by means of
the pure concept, all problems concerning the life of the spirit are
illuminated, and how, without it, we cannot understand anything.
[Sidenote: _Prejudice concerning the representability of the concept._]
But another prejudice, perhaps yet more tenacious than the first,
accompanies this extravagant idea about demonstration. Accustomed as
men are to move among things, to see, to hear, to touch them, while
hardly or only fugitively reflecting upon the spiritual processes which
produce that vision, hearing and touching; when they come to treat of a
philosophic question, and to conceive a concept (and especially when it
is necessary to conceive precisely the concept of the concept), they do
not know how to refrain from demanding just that which they have been
obliged to renounce in their new search, and which they have already
renounced, owing to the very fact of their having entered into it: the
representative element, something that they can see, hear and touch. It
is almost as though a novice, on entering a monastery, and having just
pronounced the solemn vow of chastity, should ask, as his first request
upon taking possession of his cell, for the woman who is to be his
companion in that life. He will be answered that in such a place his
spouse cannot be anything but an ideal spouse, holy Religion or holy
Mother Church.
[Sidenote: _Protests of the philosophers against this prejudice._]
All philosophers have been compelled to protest against the request,
which they have had addressed to them, for an impossible external
demonstration and for something representative in a field where
representation has been surpassed. "In our system (said Fichte) we
must _ourselves_ lay the _foundation_ of our own philosophy, and
consequently that system must seem to be without foundation to one
who is incapable of accomplishing that act. But he may be assured
beforehand that he will never find a foundation elsewhere, if he do
not lay such an one for himself, or remain not satisfied with it.
It is fitting that our philosophy should proclaim this in a loud
voice, in order that it may be spared the pretence of demonstrating
to mankind from _without_ what they must create in themselves."[1]
Schelling appropriately compared philosophic obtuseness with æsthetic
obtuseness: "There are two only ways out of common reality. Poetry,
which transports you into an ideal world, and Philosophy, which makes
_the real world disappear altogether from our sight._ One does not see
why the sense for Philosophy should be more generally diffused than
that for Poetry."[2] And Hegel, giving explanations which precisely
meet the present case, says: "What is called the _incomprehensibility_
of Philosophy, arises, in part, from an incapacity (in itself only
a lack of habit) to think abstractly, that is to say, to hold pure
thoughts firmly before the spirit and to move in them. In our ordinary
consciousness, thoughts are clothed in and united with ordinary
sensible and spiritual matter; and in our rethinking, reflecting and
reasoning we mingle sentiments, intuitions and representations with
thoughts: in every proposition whose content is entirely sensible (for
example: this leaf is green) there are already mingled categories,
such as being and individuality. But it is quite another thing to
take as our object thoughts by themselves, without any admixture.
The other reason for its incomprehensibility is the impatience which
demands to have before it as representation that which in consciousness
appears only as thought and concept. And we hear people say that they
do not know what there is _to think_ in a concept, which is already
apprehended; whereas _in a concept there is nothing to be thought
but the concept itself._ But the meaning of this saying is just that
they want a familiar and ordinary _representation._ It seems to
consciousness as if, with the removal from it of the representation,
the ground had been removed which was its firm and habitual support.
When transported into the pure region of the concepts, it no longer
knows _what world it is in._ For this reason, those writers, preachers
and orators are esteemed marvels of _comprehensibility_ who offer their
readers or hearers things which they already know thoroughly, things
which are familiar to them and which are self-evident."[3]
[Sidenote: _Reason for their perpetual recurrence._]
Thus have all philosophers protested, and thus will all protest still,
from age to age, because that intolerance, that immobility, that
recalcitrance before the very painful effort of having to abandon
the world of sense (though but for a single instant, and in order
to reconquer and to possess it more completely) will perpetually be
renewed. They are the birth-pangs of the Concept, to escape which no
plans for virginity and no manœuvres to procure abortion are of any
avail. They must be endured, because that law of the Concept ("thou
shalt bring forth in suffering") is also a law of life.
[Footnote 1: _System de Sittenlehre_ (in _Sämmtl. Werke_), iv. p. 26.]
[Footnote 2: _Idealismo transcendentale,_ trad. Losacco, p. 19.]
[Footnote 3: _Encyclopædia,_ Croce's translation, § 3, Observations.]
IV
DISPUTES AS TO THE NATURE OF THE CONCEPT
[Sidenote: _Disputes of materialistic origin._]
Disputes as to the nature of the concept have sometimes had their
origin (notably in the recent period of philosophic barbarism,
which "renews the fear of thought," whence we have with difficulty
emerged) in materialistic, mechanical and naturalistic prejudices.
Therefore, as already mentioned, discussion has arisen as to whether
the concept should be considered logical or psychological, as the
product of synthesis or of association, or of individual or hereditary
association. But these are controversies which, for the reasons we gave
before, we shall not spend time in illustrating.
[Sidenote: _The concept as value._]
Nor shall we pay attention to the other controversy, as to whether
concepts are _values or facts,_ whether they operate only as _norms_ or
also as _effective forces_ of the real; because the division between
values and facts, between norms and effective existence (between
_Gelten_ and _Sein,_ as it is expressed in German terminology), is
itself surpassed and unified, implicitly and explicitly, in all our
philosophy. If the concept or thought has value, it can have value
only because it _is;_ if the norm of thought operate as a norm, that
implies that it is thought itself, its own norm, a constitutive element
of reality. There is not to be found in any form of spiritual life any
value which is not also reality--not in art, where there is no other
beauty than art itself; nor in morality, where no other goodness is
known than action itself directed to the universal; nor in the life of
thought. The concept has value, because it is; and is, because it has
value.
[Sidenote: _Realism and nominalism._]
But the greater part of these dissensions, which have existed for
centuries and are yet living, rests on the confusion between concepts
and pseudoconcepts, and the consequent pretension to define the concept
by denying one or other of these two forms. This is the origin of
the two opposite schools of _realists_ and _nominalists,_ which are
also called in our times rationalists and empiricists (arbitrarists,
conventionalists, hedonists). The realists maintain that concepts
are real: that they correspond to reality; the nominalists, that
they are simple names to designate representations and groups of
representations, or, as is now said, tickets and labels placed upon
things in order to recognize and find them again. In the former case,
no elaboration of representations higher than the universalizing act
of the concept is possible; in the latter, the only possible operation
is that which has already been described--mutilation, reduction and
fiction, directed to practical ends.
[Sidenote: _Critique of both._]
The consequence of these one-sided affirmations has been that the
realists have defined as concepts, and therefore as having a universal
character, all sorts of rough pseudoconcepts; not only the horse, the
artichoke and the mountain, but also, logically, the table, the bed,
the seat, the glass, and so on; and they have exposed themselves from
the earliest beginnings of philosophy to the sarcastic and irresistible
objection that the horse exists, but not horsiness, the table, but not
tabularity. This conceptualization of pseudoconcepts is the error of
which they have really been guilty, not that of conferring empirical
reality on the concepts by placing them as single things alongside
of other things, an extravagance which it is doubtful if any man of
moderate sense has ever seriously committed. The realists who rendered
the concepts real in this sense at the same time rendered them unreal,
that is to say, single and contingent, and in need of being surpassed
by true concepts. The nominalists, on the other hand, considered as
arbitrary and mere names all the presuppositions of their mental
life--being and becoming, quality and final cause, goodness and beauty,
the true and the false, the Spirit and God. Without being aware of it,
they have fallen into inextricable contradictions and into logical
scepticism.
[Sidenote: _True realism._]
It is henceforth clear that this secular dispute cannot be decided in
favour of one or other of the contending parties, for both are right in
what they affirm and wrong in what they deny, that is, both are right
and wrong. The two forms of spiritual products, of which each of those
schools in its affirmations emphasizes only one, both actually exist;
the one is not in antithesis to the other, as the rational is to the
irrational. The true doctrine of the concept is realism, which does
not deny nominalism, but puts it in its place, and establishes with it
loyal and unequivocal relations.
[Sidenote: _Solution of other difficulties concerning the genesis of
concepts._]
By establishing such relations we emerge from the vicious circle,
which has given such trouble to certain logicians, who have striven
to explain the genesis of the concepts in terms of nominalism, but
were afterwards, when probing their doctrine to the bottom, compelled
to admit the _necessity of the concepts_ as a _foundation_ for the
_genesis of the concepts._ They believed that they had got out of
the difficulty by distinguishing two orders of concepts, primary and
secondary, formative models and formations according to models; and
they thus reproduced, in the semblance of a solution, the problem still
unsolved. In different words, others admitted the same embarrassment.
They attempted to obtain the concepts from _experience,_ but
recognized at the same time that all experience presupposes an _ideal
anticipation._ Or they declared that the concept fixes the _essential_
characters of things, and, at the same time, that the essential
characters of things are indispensable for fixing the _concept._ Or,
finally, they based the formation of concepts upon _categories,_ which,
enumerated and understood as they understood them, were by no means
categories and functions, but _concepts._ Primary concepts, formative
models, ideal anticipations, essential concepts, concept-categories,
and the like, are nothing but verbal variants of the pure concepts;
the necessary presupposition, as we know, for the impure concepts or
pseudoconcepts.
[Sidenote: _Disputes arising from neglect of the distinction between
empirical and abstract concepts._]
Other disputes, far enough apart in significance and nature, concerning
the nature of the concept, acquire a more precise meaning when
referred to our subdivision of pseudoconcepts into _empirical_ or
_representative,_ and _abstract._ Thereby we can understand why it
has been asked if the concepts are _concrete_ or _abstract, general_
or _universal, contingent_ or _necessary, approximate_ or _rigorous;_
if they are obtained _a posteriori_ or _a priori,_ by _induction_ or
_deduction,_ by _synthesis_ or _analysis,_ and so on. This series
of disputes likewise cannot be settled, save by admitting that both
contending parties are right and wrong, and demonstrating that
pseudoconcepts (which are alone here in discussion) are constructed
by analysis, and by deduction are _a priori,_ and have the characters
of abstractness, rigorousness, universality and necessity, if it be
a question of _abstract_ pseudoconcepts, that is to say, of empty
fictions, outside experience; while, on the other hand, they are
constructed by synthesis, and by induction are _a posteriori,_ and have
the characters of concreteness, approximation, mere generality and
contingency, if they be empirical or _representative_ pseudoconcepts,
that is to say, groups of representations, which do not go beyond
representation and experience. Indeed, from this last point of view, no
error was made in denying any difference between the (representative)
_concept_ and the _general representation._ It is false that this
latter is the result of psychical mechanism or association, and the
former of psychical purpose, because there is nothing mechanical in
the spirit; and the general representation, if it is a product of the
spirit, is as teleological as the other, indeed is absolutely one with
the other. It obeys, like it, the law of _economy,_ or, as we have
shown, the practical ends of convenience and utility.
[Sidenote: _Crossing of the various disputes._]
But these last disputes have crossed with that which we first examined
between realism and nominalism, and have sometimes taken on the same
meaning. This must be kept in mind, to serve as a guide in the dense
forest. Is the concept _a priori_ or _a posteriori,_ universal or
general, necessary or contingent? These questions and others like them
were sometimes understood as equivalent to the question: is it real or
nominal, truth or fiction?
[Sidenote: _Other logical disputes._]