Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

Bergson and the new French philosophy.

In France, the same ideas or very similar are represented by a group of thinkers, who are called variously philosophers of contingency, of liberty, of intuition, or of action. Bergson, who is the chief of them, looks upon the concepts of the natural sciences in the same way as Mach, as symboles and étiquettes. Besides the extremely apposite applications that he has made of this principle to the analysis of time, of duration, of space, of movement, of liberty, of evolution, he has also the great merit of having broken his country's traditions of intellectualism and abstractionism, of giving to France for the first time that lively consciousness of the intuition, which she has always lacked, and of shaking her excessive reliance upon clear distinctions, upon well-turned concepts, upon classes, formulæ, and reasonings that proceed in a straight line, but run upon the surface of reality.[26]

Le Roy and others.

Le Roy, one of the followers of Bergson, has set himself to demonstrate, with many examples, that scientific laws only become rigorous when they are changed into conventions and depend upon vicious circles. The course of events is habitual and regular (if you like to say so), but it is not at all necessary. The great security of astronomical previsions is commonly praised; but that security is not always such in actual fact ("il y a des comètes qui ne reviennent pas"), and in any case it is always approximate. The rigorous necessity of which the natural sciences boast, is not known, but is rather postulated, and this postulation has merely the practical object of dominating single facts and of communicating with our neighbours ("parler le monde"). The law of gravity holds, but only when external forces do not disturb it. In this way it is well understood that it always holds. The conservation of energy avails only in closed systems; but closed systems are just those in which energy is conserved. A body left to itself persists in the state of repose; but this law is nothing but the definition of a body left to itself, and so on.[27] Poincaré boldly affirms the conventional character of the mathematical and physical sciences, as do Milhaud and several others. They have deduced it as a consequence of the impression aroused by the theories of higher geometry, which has contributed more or less successfully towards revealing the practical character of mathematics, which was formerly held to be the foundation or model of truth and certainty.

Reattachment to romantic ideas and advance made upon them.

All those criticisms directed against the sciences do not sound new to the ears of those Schelling, of Novalis, and of other romantics, and particularly with Hegel's marvellous criticism of the abstract (that is, empirical and mathematical) intellect. This runs through all his books, from the Phenomenology of the Spirit to the Science of Logic, and is enriched with examples in the observations to the paragraphs of the Philosophy of Nature. But if compared with that of Hegel, they are at the disadvantage of not being based upon powerful philosophical thought; they have, on the other hand, this superiority: that they do not present the characteristics observed in the sciences as errors which must be corrected, but define them as physiological, necessary, uncensurable characteristics, derived from the very function of the sciences, which is not theoretic, but practical and economic. In this way there is posited one of the premisses that are necessary for preventing the mixture of the economic method with the method of truth, of empirical and abstract concepts with pure theoretic forms, and thus for making impossible that speculative hybridism, which is expressed in philosophies of history and of nature, and which fashions an abstract reason to work out a dialectic of the naturalistic concepts, and even of the representations of history. And with the prevention of this error there is also prepared a more exact idea of the relation between pseudoconcepts and concepts and a better constitution of philosophic Logic.

Philosophy of pure experience, of intuition, of action, etc.; and its insufficiency.

But in order that this result should be obtained, the idea of the philosophic universal must be reawakened and strengthened, in conformity with its most perfect elaboration in the history of thought, at the hands of Hegel. The critics of the sciences are at present far from this mark. The term that is distinct from the empirical and abstract concepts, the knowledge of reality which is not falsified by practical ends and discovered beneath labels and formulae, is supplied, not by the pure concept, by reality thought in its concreteness, by philosophy which is history, but by pure sensation or intuition. Both Avenarius and Mach appeal to pure and primitive experience, that is, to experience free of thought and anterior to it. Bergson, with an artistic talent that is wanting to the two Germans, but following the same path, has proclaimed a new metaphysic, which proceeds in an opposite sense to that of symbolical knowledge and of generalizing and abstracting experience. He has defined the metaphysic which he desires, as a science qui prétend se passer des symboles, and therefore as "Science de l'expérience intégrale." This metaphysic would be the opposite of the Kantian ideal, of the mathematical universal, of the Platonism of the concepts, and would be founded upon intuition, the sole organ of the Absolute: "est relative la connaissance symbolique par concepts pré-existants qui va du fixe au mouvant, mais non pas la connaissance intuitive, qui s'installe dans le mouvement et adopte la vie même des choses. Cette intuition atteint l'absolu."[28] The conclusion is æstheticism, and sometimes something even less than æstheticism, namely mysticism, or action substituted for the concept. The criticism of the sciences thereby comes to mean the negation of knowledge and of truth. Hence the protest of Poincaré[29] against Le Roy, justified in its motive, but ineffective, because based upon the presuppositions of mathematics and physics. In others again, it becomes intermingled with the turbid waters of pragmatism, which is a little of everything, but, above all, chatter and emptiness.

The theory of values.

Finally, another of the thinkers that we have mentioned, Rickert (following Windelband), wishes to integrate naturalistic and abstract knowledge with the historical knowledge of individual reality. Being reasonably diffident as to the possibility of a metaphysic as an "experimental science" (such as Zeller was among the first to desire), he moves towards a general theory of values. This indeed is the form (imperfect because stained with transcendence) by means of which many in our day are approaching a philosophy as the science of the spirit (or of immanent value). But in the hands of Windelband and Rickert it is understood as a primacy of the practical reason, which is taken to govern the double series of the world of the sciences and the world of history. This doubtless represents progress, as compared with empiricism and positivism; but not as compared with the Hegelian Logic of the pure concept, which included in itself what is and what ought to be.