Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

[III]

THE CHARACTERISTICS AND THE CHARACTER OF THE CONCEPT

The characteristics of the pure concept, or simply, concept, may be gathered from what has previously been said.

Expressivity.

The concept has the character of expressivity; that is to say, it is a cognitive product, and, therefore, expressed or spoken, not a mute act of the spirit, as is a practical act. If we wish to submit the effective possession of a concept to a first test, we can employ the experiment which was advised on a previous occasion:—whoever asserts that he possesses a concept, should be invited to expound it in words, and with other means of expression (graphic symbols and the like). If he refuse to do so, and say that his concept is so profound that words cannot avail to render it, we can be sure, either that he is under the illusion of possessing a concept, when he possesses only turbid fancies and morsels of ideas; or that he has a presentiment of the profound concept, that it is in process of formation, and will be, but is not yet, possessed. Each of us knows that when he finds himself in the meditative depth of the internal battle, of that true agony (because it is the death of one life and the birth of another), which is the discovery of a concept, he can certainly talk of the state of his soul, of his hopes and fears, of the rays that enlighten and of the shadows that invade him; but he cannot yet communicate his concept, which is not as yet, because it is not yet expressible.

Universality.

If this character of expressivity be common to the concept and to the representation, its universality is peculiar to the concept; that is to say, its transcendence in relation to the single representations, so that no single representation and no number of them can be equivalent to the concept. There is no middle term between the individual and the universal: either there is the single or there is the whole, into which that single enters with all the singles. A concept which has been proved not universal, is, by that very fact, confuted as a concept. Our philosophical confutations do not proceed otherwise. Sociology, for instance, asserts the concept of Society, as a rigorous concept and principle of science; and the criticism of Sociology proves that the concept of society is not universal, but individual, and is related to the groupings of certain beings which representation has placed before the sociologist, and which he has arbitrarily isolated from other complexes of beings that representation also placed or could place before him. The theory of tragedy postulates the concept of the tragic, and from it deduces certain necessary essentials of tragedy; and the criticism of literary classes demonstrates that the tragic is not a concept, but a roughly defined group of artistic representations, which have certain external likenesses in common; and, therefore, that it cannot serve as foundation for any theory. On the other hand, to establish a universality, which at first was wanting, is the glory of truly scientific thought; hence we give the name of discoverers to those who bring to light connections of representations or of representative groups, or of concepts, which had previously been separate; that is to say, who universalize them. Thus, it was thought at one time that will and action were distinct concepts; and it was a step in progress to identify them by the creation of the truly universal concept of the will, which is also action. Thus, too, it was held that expression in language was a different thing from expression in art; and it was an advance to universalize the expression of art by extending it to language; or that of language by extending it to art.

Concreteness.

Not less proper to the concept is the other character of concreteness, which means that if the concept be universal and transcendent in relation to the single representation, it is yet immanent in the single, and therefore in all representations. The concept is the universal in relation to the representations, and is not exhausted in any one of them; but since the world of knowledge is the world of representations, the concept, if it were not in the representations, would not be anywhere: it would be in another world, which cannot be thought, and therefore is not. Its transcendence, therefore, is also immanence; like that truly literary language that Dante desired, which, in relation to the speech of the different parts of Italy, in qualibet redolet civitate nec cubat in ulla. If it is proved of a concept that it is inapplicable to reality, and therefore is not concrete, it is thereby confuted as a true and proper concept. It is said to be an abstraction, it is not reality; it does not possess concreteness. In this way, for example, has been confuted the concept of spirit as different from nature (abstract spiritualism); or of the good, as a model placed above the real world; or of atoms, as the components of reality; or of the dimensions of space, or of various quantities of pleasure and pain, and the like. All these are things not found in any part of the real, since there is neither a reality that is merely natural and external to spirit, nor an ideal world outside the real world; nor a space of one or of two dimensions; nor a pleasure or pain that is homogeneous with another, and therefore greater or less than another; and for this reason all these things do not result from concrete thinking and are not concepts.