Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

It would be vain to seek the correction of Hegel among those thinkers that were his contemporaries, for they were all, though in various degrees, inferior to him. None of them had attained, through Kant, to the height attained by Hegel. Dwelling on a lower level, they could certainly refuse to recognize him and vituperate him, but they could never collaborate with and beyond him, in the progress of truth. Herbart held those concepts to which the particular sciences give rise to be contradictory, but he claimed to surpass the contradiction by means of an elaboration of the concepts (Bearbeitung der Begriffe), conducted in the very method of the old Logic, that is, of the Logic of the empirical sciences. Schleiermacher renounced the attempt to reach the unity of the speculative and the empirical, of Ethic and Physics, that is, the realization of the pure idea of knowledge; and he substituted for that ideal, which for him was unattainable, criticism, a form of worldly wisdom; that is to say, of philosophy (Weltweisheit) which gave access to theology and to religious feeling.[19] Schopenhauer accepted the distinction between concept and idea, the first abstract and artificial, the second concrete and real; but so slight was his understanding of the idea (which he called the Platonic idea) that he confused it with the concept of natural species,[20] that is to say, precisely with one of the most artificial and arbitrary of empirical concepts. Finally, Schelling, who had been a precursor of Hegel in his youth and had collaborated with him, not only failed to improve his logic of the intuition in his second philosophical period, but he abandoned even this embryonic form of the concrete concept, and gave himself over as a prey to the will and to irrationality. In his positive philosophy the old adversary of Jacobi made a bad combination of the alogism of Jacobi with the Hegelian idea of development and with mythologism, as in metaphysic he had anticipated the blind will of Schopenhauer.[21]

Later positivism and psychologism.

The ensuing period, both in Germany and in the whole of Europe, had little philosophical interest. It was marked by the reappearance of a form of naturalism and of Empiricism, in part justified by the abuse of the dialectic, which had sometimes, in the hands of Hegel's disciples, seemed altogether mad. But this recrudescence was in every way very poor in thought and inadequate to previous history. With this Empiricism is associated the deplorable Logic of John Stuart Mill, one of those books which do least honour to the human spirit. That less than mediocre reasoner did not even succeed in producing a Logic of the natural sciences. He became involved in contradictions and tautologies, talking, for instance, of experience, which criticises itself and imposes its own limits upon itself, and of the principle of causality, as a law which affirms the existence of a law that there shall be a law. Still less had he any notion of what it is to philosophize, maintaining that in order to make progress in the moral and philosophical sciences it is necessary to apply to them the method of the physical sciences. Nothing is more puerile than his nominalism, which gives language a logical character, and then pretends that language must be logically reformed. Logical science was altogether lost in the evolutionism or physiologism of Spencer, and in the psychologism which had and still has many followers in Germany, in France, and in England, not less than in Italy. The state in which the Logic of philosophy is found in such an environment can be inferred from the fact that even mathematical Logic fared ill there, since there have not been wanting those who have dared to conceive a psychology of arithmetic. Finally, as a healthy corrective of psychologism, the danger of which to the old Logic had already been noted by Kant,[22] there came the revival of the Aristotelian, and even of the scholastic Logic, in which there yet lived, though in erroneous forms, the idea of the universal which had been discovered by the Greek philosophers.

Eclectics. Lotze.

Other thinkers have not abandoned all contact with classical German philosophy; but, in comparison with the thoughts of Kant and of Kant's great pupils, they seem like children. They try to lift the weapons of the Titans, and either they do not move them at all or they let them fall from their hands, wounding themselves with them, but failing to grip them. The thoughts of Schelling and of Hegel indeed were discredited, but not touched; and those of Kant were touched, but ill-treated. In the most esteemed Logics of this description, such as those of Sigwart and of Wundt, the capital distinction between pure concepts and representative concepts, between universalia and generalia, has no prominence at all. Sigwart is obliged to complete the knowledge obtained from naturalistic and mathematical procedure by faith and by a gradual elevation to the idea of God. Wundt, who does not attribute to philosophy a method which is proper to it and different from that of the other forms of knowledge, conceives the final result of metaphysical thought as the position of a perpetual hypothesis. In the Logic of Lotze, who combated Hegelianism and revived transcendentalism and theism, there is just a luminous streak, a faint trace, of the idealist philosophy. Lotze understands that it is impossible to form (empirical) concepts by simply cancelling the varying parts of representations and preserving the constant parts, and recognizes that the formation of concepts presupposes the concept: the universal is made with the universal. He strives to issue from this circle by positing a primary universal, not formed by the method of the others, but such that thought finds it in itself. This primary universal has nothing particular and representative; and only by means of it is it possible to combine heterogeneous and to differentiate homogeneous elements, and to form the ideas of size, of more or less, of one and of many and such like, with which the second universals of the synthesis are afterwards constructed.[23]

New gnoseology of Science. The Economic theory of the scientific concept.

While students of philosophy, although manifesting some doubt and dissatisfaction, allowed themselves to be intimidated by naturalism (dazzled, like the public, with technical applications, or confounded by the applause of the public), a tendency has become more and more accentuated during the last decades, which seems to us to offer great assistance to Logic and philosophy in general, if it is understood how to adapt it to its true end. It has not had any single centre of diffusion, but has arisen, almost contemporaneously, in several places, becoming at once diffused everywhere, like something that has happened at the right time. Several of its founders and promoters are mathematicians, physicists, and naturalists. From the very fact of their having begun to reflect upon their activity, these men have certainly ceased to be mere specialists, notwithstanding their protests to the contrary. Yet they obtain considerable strength from their specialism, finding in it a guide and a curb to prevent their losing sight in their gnoseological enquiry of the actual procedure of naturalistic constructions, which are its origin. The formula of this tendency is the recognition of the practical or economic character of the mathematical, physical, and natural sciences.

Avenarius, Mach.

The empirocriticism of Avenarius considers science to be a simple description of the forms of experience, and conceptual procedure to be the instrument that alters pure and primitive experience (pure intuition or pure perception) for the purpose of simplifying it. Ernest Mach has developed and popularized these views, for as a student of mechanics he had reached the same conclusions by his own path and in his own way. The physical sciences (he says), not less than zoology and botany, have as their sole foundation the description of natural facts in which there are never identical cases. Identical cases are created by means of the schematic imitation that we make of reality; and here toe lies the origin of the mutual dependence that appears in the character of facts. To this therefore he restricts the significance of the principle of causality, for which (in order to avoid fancifulness and mythologicism) it would be opportune to substitute the concept of function. Bodies or things are abbreviated intellectual symbols of groups of sensations; symbols, that is to say, which have no existence outside our intellect. They are cards, like those which dealers attach to boxes and which have no value except in so far as there are goods of value inside the box. In this economic schematicism lies the strength, but also the weakness, of science; for in the presentation of facts science always sacrifices something of their individuality and real appearance, and does not seek exactness in another way save when obliged to do so, by the requirements of a definite moment. Hence the incongruity between experience and science. Since they are developed upon parallel lines, they can reduce to some extent the interval that separates them, but they can never annul it by becoming coincident with one another.[24]

Rickert, in his book on the Limits of the Naturalistic Concepts, maintains similar ideas, though with different cultural assumptions. The concept, which is the result of the labour of the sciences, is nothing but a means to a scientific end. The world of bodies and of souls is infinite in space and time. It is not possible to represent it in every individual part, by reason of its variety, which is not only extensive but also intensive: intuition is inexhaustible. The naturalistic concept is directed to surpassing this infinity of intuitions. It effects this by determining its own extension and comprehension, and by formulating its being in a series of judgments. Thus, in order to conquer intuition altogether, the natural sciences tend to substitute for concepts of tilings concepts of relations free from all intuitive elements. But the ultimate concept must always of necessity be a concept of things (though of things sui generis, immutable, indivisible, perfectly equal among themselves, expressible in negative judgments); and besides, they find everywhere insuperable barriers in the historical or descriptive element, which surrounds them all and is ineliminable. This naturalistic procedure can be applied and is indeed applied, not only to the science of bodies, but also to that of souls, to psychology and sociology; and Rickert opportunely insists (as did Hegel in his time) upon the possibility of empirical sciences of what is called the spiritual world; or (as he says) the word "nature," as used in this connection, means not a reality, but a particular point of view from which reality is observed, in order to reach the end of conceptual simplification.[25]