Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

Concealed historical value of the a priori synthesis.

Yet Kant is the true, though unconscious creator of the new Logic of history. To him belongs the merit, not only of having shown the importance of the historical judgment, but also of having given the formula of the identity of philosophy and history in the a priori synthesis. The logical revolution effected by Kant consists in this: that he perceives and proclaims that to know is not to think the concept abstractly, but to think the concept in the intuition, and that consequently to think is to judge. The theory of the judgment takes the place of that of the concept and is truly the theory of the concept, in so far as it becomes concrete. What does it matter that he is not aware of all this and that instead of referring the logical a priori synthesis to history, he refers it to the sciences, constituting it an instrument not of history, but of the sciences; and that instead of exhausting knowledge in the a priori synthesis, he leaves outside of it true knowledge as an unattainable, or theoretically unattainable ideal? What does it matter that when confronted with the problem of the judgment of existence, he solves it like Gaunilo and withdraws existence from thought, removing from it the character of predicate and of concept and making of it a position or an imposition ab extra? What does it matter that his history is without historical developments and wanting even in knowledge of the history of philosophy, and that in the parts of the so-called system that he has developed (for example, in the doctrine of virtue and of rights) there reigns the most squalid crowd of abstractions and of anti-historical determinations? What does it matter that we find the man of the eighteenth century on every page of his book, and that he was absolutely without sympathy for the tendencies of thought of the Hamanns and of they Herders? There always remains the fact that the a priori synthesis carried in itself even that which its discoverer ignored or denied.

The theory of history in Hegel.

It would be preferable to say that all Kant's failures in recognition and all his lacunæ are certainly of importance, just because they provided his followers with a new problem, and generated by way of contrariety the philosophy of Schelling and the historical philosophy of Hegel. Not even in Hegel is there to be found the elaboration of the doctrine of the individual judgment, nor is its identity with that of the concept explicitly recognized. But in Hegel not only do we find ourselves in the full historical atmosphere (suffice it to recall his histories of art, of religion, of philosophy and of the general development of the human race, which are still the most profound and the most stimulating writings upon history that exist); but these historical elucidations are all connected with the fundamental thought of his Logic: the concept is immanent and is divided in itself in the judgment, of which the general formula is that the individual is the universal, the subject is the predicate, every judgment is a judgment of the universal, and the universal is the dialectic of opposites. For this reason also, we find in the works of Hegel a historical method far in advance of all his predecessors and also (save in a few points) of his successors. He maintained, with much vigour, the necessity of the interpretative and rational element in history; and to those who demanded that a historian should be disinterested, in the same way as a magistrate who judges a case, he replied that since the magistrate has nevertheless his interest, that for the right, so has the historian also his interest, namely that for truth.[10]

W. von Humboldt.

Hegel's defect in relation to history (as was Vico's before him but on a larger scale) was the philosophist error, which led him to the design of a philosophy of history, rising above history properly so-called. The psychological explanations of this strange duplication, together with its philosophic motives, have already been adduced.[11] Wilhelm von Humboldt certainly alluded to Hegel and intended to oppose him in this respect in his discourse concerning the office of the historian (1820). Here the method of the writer of history was likened to that of the artist. Fancy is as necessary to the historian as to the poet, Humboldt said, not in the sense of free fancy, but as the gift of reconstruction and of association. History, like art, seeks the true form of events, the pure and concrete form of real facts. But whereas art hardly touches the fugitive manifestations of the real, in order to rise above all reality, history attaches itself to those manifestations and becomes totally immersed in them. The ideas which the historian elaborates are not introduced by him into history, but discovered in reality itself, of which they constitute the essence. They are the outcome of the fulness of events, not of an extrinsic addition, as in what is called philosophic or theological history (Philosophy of history). Certainly, universal history is not intelligible without a world-order (eine Weltregierung). But the historian possesses no instrument which enables him directly to examine this design, and every effort in which he attempts to reach it, makes him fall into empty and arbitrary teleologism. He must, on the contrary, proceed by deducing it from facts examined in their individuality; for the end of history can only be the realization of the idea, which humanity must represent from all sides and in all the different modes in which finite form can ever be united with the idea. The course of events can only be interrupted when idea and form are no longer able to interpenetrate one another.[12] The protest was justified, not indeed against the fundamental doctrine of Hegel, but rather against one of its particular aberrations. But the protest was inferior in the determinateness of its concepts to the philosophy which it opposed. Even in the healthy tendency of the Hegelian doctrine, ideas should not be introduced but discovered in history. And if it sometimes seemed that the Philosophy of history introduced them from without, this happened because in that case true ideas were not employed and the concreteness of the fact was not respected.

F. Brentano.

The theory of the individual judgment has made no progress in the Logics of the nineteenth century, save for certain timely explanations concerning the existential character of the judgment given by Brentano and his school. Brentano, who is an Anti-Kantian, considers the period inaugurated by Kant to be that of a new philosophical decadence. Yet notwithstanding his sympathy for mediæval scholasticism and for modern psychologism, he has too much philosophic acumen to remain fixed in the one or to lose himself in the other. Thus the tripartition of the forms of the spirit, maintained by him,[13] beneath the external appearance of a renovated Cartesianism, bears traces of the abhorred criticism, romanticism and idealism. The first form, the pure representation, answers to the æsthetic moment; the second, the judgment, is the primitive logical form answering to the Kantian a priori synthesis; and love and hatred, the third form, which contains will and feeling, is not without precedent among the Post-Kantians themselves. He reasonably criticizes the various more or less mechanical theories, which treat the judgment as a connection of representations or a subsumption of concepts, and defends the idiogenetic against allogenetic theories. But when he tries to prove that the judgment "A is" cannot be resolved into "A" and "is" (that is, into A and existence), because the concept of existence is found in the judgment and does not precede it, he goes beyond the mark. For the concept of existence certainly does not precede, but neither does it follow the judgment: it is contemporaneous; that is to say, it exists only in the judgment, like the category in the a priori synthesis. And he goes beyond the mark again, when he makes existentiality the character of the judgment, whereas existentiality is only one of the categories and consequently, if it be indispensable for the constitution of the judgment, it is not sufficient for any judgment, since for every judgment there is necessary the inner determination of the judgment as essence and as existence. For the rest, this is easily seen in the theories of his school, which end by establishing a double degree or form of judgment, thus creating a duality that cannot be maintained.[14] In any case, in the researches of Brentano and his followers, there is affirmed the need for a complete doctrine of the judgment and of its relation (which in our opinion is one of identity) with the doctrine of the concept. The theories of values and of judgments of values already mentioned, in their investigation of the universal or valuative element, express the same need from another point of view; although none of them discovers, by recalling the Kantian-Hegelian tradition, that values are immanent in single facts, and that consequently judgments of value, as judgments, are the same as individual judgments.

Controversies concerning the nature of history.

Enquiries concerning the character of history may assist the constitution of a theory of individual judgments. These enquiries have never enjoyed so much favour as in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Naturalism or positivism has provided the incentive to such enquiries, for it brought into being the problem: "whether history is or is not a (natural) science," by its attempt to violate and pervert history by raising it (as they said, and it must have sounded ironical) to the rank of a science, that is to say, of a naturalistic science. There were two answers to the problem: (1) that history is a science sui generis (not natural); (2) that it is, not a science, but an art, a particular form of art, the representation of the real.