Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

The rebellions which the school (in the wide sense of the word, from the Peripatetic to the modern) continued to arouse in regard to these doctrines might seem to be of greater interest than this labour of embroidering and carving. But since there has been a time during which every protest, and indeed, every insult levelled against the philosopher of Stagira seemed a sign of original thought, of spiritual freedom and of secure progress, it is well to repeat that an indispensable condition for surpassing the Aristotelian Logic was a new Philosophy of language. Such a condition was altogether wanting in the past and is partly wanting now. It is therefore not surprising that when those rebellions are closely examined, we discover in the midst of secondary and superficial disagreement something quite different from what was expected; not the radical negation, but the substantial acceptance, explicit or understood, of the principles of formalist Logic.

Such is the case with the rebellions of the humanists, Ciceronians and rhetoricians, which took place in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of Lorenzo Valla, of Rudolph Agricola, of Luigi Vives, of Mario Nizolio, of Peter Ramus. The motive power with all of them was abhorrence for the heavy scholastic armour. Culture, leaving the cloisters, spread itself abroad in life; philosophy began to be written in the common tongue, and for this reason men sought forms of exposition that were rapid, easy and clear or eloquent and oratorical. But under these new forms the direction of logical thought remained unchanged. Ramus, for example, who applied to Aristotle the elegant terms of fatuus impostor, chamæleon somnians et stertens, and so forth, ended by claiming that he alone had understood his true thought, and showed by the reforms of it that he proposed (among which was the suggestion that the third figure of the syllogism should pass to the first place) that he, too, was still revolving in the narrow circle of formalism.[4]

The opposition of naturalism.

Even the opposition of naturalism to the Aristotelian Logic did not strike it to the heart, but wished to replace and more often to accompany one form of empiricism with another: the rules of the syllogism with the precepts of induction, the sophistical refutations with the determination of the four idols that preoccupy men's minds. Bacon never dreamed of denying to syllogistic the value of true doctrine. He believed, however, that it had already been sufficiently studied and developed, that it lacked nothing, and even possessed something superfluous, whereas there was still wanting a criterion of invention and of induction, which was of fundamental importance for syllogistic itself. In making the inventory of knowledge (he writes) it is to be observed that we find ourselves almost in the conditions of a man who inherits an estate, in the inventory of which there is noted: "ready money, none" ("numeratae pecuniae, nihil").[5] Hence he raised his voice against the abuse of disputations and of reasoning as to matters of fact; the subtlety of the syllogism is always conquered by that of nature.[6] The syllogism consists of propositions, propositions of words, and words are the counters of concepts; but if the concepts are confused or wrongly abstracted, the syllogistic consequences deduced from them are without any sort of security. Hence the necessity of beginning with induction: "spes est una in inciuctione vera."[7] Bacon's position (which was therefore not anti-formalist, but only an addition or complement to formalism) has been renewed, word for word, in all inductive Logics, up to that of the English school of the nineteenth century, and to ours of to-day. Stuart Mill's book expresses the combination of the two empiricisms, syllogistic and inductive, in its very title: "A system of Logic, ratiocinative and inductive, being a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of Scientific investigation."

Labour of simplification in the eighteenth century. Kant.

In the eighteenth century, while Leibnitz sought an amplification and perfecting of syllogistic in the logical calculus, and some followed him who did not, however, attain to true effectiveness in the history of culture,[8] formalist Logic fell always more and more into discredit, not only as Logica utens, but also as docens, that is to say, as theory.

Hence the moderate tendency, to which Kant adhered, which consists of preserving that Logic, while seeking to correct, and, in particular, to simplify it. For example, Kant undertook to demonstrate the "false subtlety of the four figures of the syllogism," and at the same time rendered traditional Logic yet more formalist by withdrawing from it all examination of the synthesis and the categories, which he referred to his new transcendental Logic. Traditional Logic, which he respected and held to be substantially perfect, constituted (he said) a canon of the intellect and of reason, but only in the formal aspect of their employment, whatever be the content to which it is applied. Its only criterion is the agreement or non-agreement of any knowledge with the general and formal laws of the intellect and of reason; a conditio sine qua non of every truth, but a conditio which is only negative.[9]

Refutation of formalist Logic. Hegel; Schleiermacher.

Hegel, on the contrary, opposed tradition. He understood the character of formalist Logic marvellously well: this "empirical Logic, a bizarre science, which is an irrational knowledge of the rational, and sets the bad example of not following its own doctrines. Indeed it assumes the licence of doing the opposite of what its rules prescribe, when it neglects to deduce the concepts and to demonstrate its affirmations."[10] In so far as it was empirical it was intellectualist, and presented the determinations of reason in an abstract and atomic manner in combining them mechanically. The new concept of the concept, originated by Hegel, creates from itself its own theories and allows the old formalist theories to disappear as dead and dry remains. The forms of thought are henceforth the very forms of the real; the Idea is the unity of concept and representation, because it is the universal itself, big with the individual. Things are realized judgments, and the syllogism is the Idea which identifies itself with its own reality. This at bottom amounts to saying that thought fully dominates reality, because it is not an extrinsic addition or an interposed means, but Reality itself, which makes itself thought, because it is thought. Other philosophers, too, contemporaries and adversaries of Hegel, rejected formalist Logic, and among these was Schleiermacher.[11] He made the logical forms of the concept and of the judgment correspond to the two forms of reality, being and doing, finding corresponding analogies in space, a dividing of being, and in time, a dividing of doing. The concept and the judgment mutually presuppose one another, and give rise to a circle, which is so only when considered temporally; since at the point of indifference, of fusion, of indistinction the two make one.[12] Schleiermacher differed from Hegel (who attains in thought the unity of the real) in being obliged to withdraw the syllogism from the number of the essential forms of thought, because (he says), "if the syllogism were a true form, a being of its own should correspond to it, and this is not found to be the case."[13]

Its partial persistence owing to insufficient ideas as to language.