Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

Nor shall we pay attention to the other controversy, as to whether concepts are values or facts, whether they operate only as norms or also as effective forces of the real; because the division between values and facts, between norms and effective existence (between Gelten and Sein, as it is expressed in German terminology), is itself surpassed and unified, implicitly and explicitly, in all our philosophy. If the concept or thought has value, it can have value only because it is; if the norm of thought operate as a norm, that implies that it is thought itself, its own norm, a constitutive element of reality. There is not to be found in any form of spiritual life any value which is not also reality—not in art, where there is no other beauty than art itself; nor in morality, where no other goodness is known than action itself directed to the universal; nor in the life of thought. The concept has value, because it is; and is, because it has value.

Realism and nominalism.

But the greater part of these dissensions, which have existed for centuries and are yet living, rests on the confusion between concepts and pseudoconcepts, and the consequent pretension to define the concept by denying one or other of these two forms. This is the origin of the two opposite schools of realists and nominalists, which are also called in our times rationalists and empiricists (arbitrarists, conventionalists, hedonists). The realists maintain that concepts are real: that they correspond to reality; the nominalists, that they are simple names to designate representations and groups of representations, or, as is now said, tickets and labels placed upon things in order to recognize and find them again. In the former case, no elaboration of representations higher than the universalizing act of the concept is possible; in the latter, the only possible operation is that which has already been described—mutilation, reduction and fiction, directed to practical ends.

Critique of both.

The consequence of these one-sided affirmations has been that the realists have defined as concepts, and therefore as having a universal character, all sorts of rough pseudoconcepts; not only the horse, the artichoke and the mountain, but also, logically, the table, the bed, the seat, the glass, and so on; and they have exposed themselves from the earliest beginnings of philosophy to the sarcastic and irresistible objection that the horse exists, but not horsiness, the table, but not tabularity. This conceptualization of pseudoconcepts is the error of which they have really been guilty, not that of conferring empirical reality on the concepts by placing them as single things alongside of other things, an extravagance which it is doubtful if any man of moderate sense has ever seriously committed. The realists who rendered the concepts real in this sense at the same time rendered them unreal, that is to say, single and contingent, and in need of being surpassed by true concepts. The nominalists, on the other hand, considered as arbitrary and mere names all the presuppositions of their mental life—being and becoming, quality and final cause, goodness and beauty, the true and the false, the Spirit and God. Without being aware of it, they have fallen into inextricable contradictions and into logical scepticism.

True realism.

It is henceforth clear that this secular dispute cannot be decided in favour of one or other of the contending parties, for both are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny, that is, both are right and wrong. The two forms of spiritual products, of which each of those schools in its affirmations emphasizes only one, both actually exist; the one is not in antithesis to the other, as the rational is to the irrational. The true doctrine of the concept is realism, which does not deny nominalism, but puts it in its place, and establishes with it loyal and unequivocal relations.

Solution of other difficulties concerning the genesis of concepts.

By establishing such relations we emerge from the vicious circle, which has given such trouble to certain logicians, who have striven to explain the genesis of the concepts in terms of nominalism, but were afterwards, when probing their doctrine to the bottom, compelled to admit the necessity of the concepts as a foundation for the genesis of the concepts. They believed that they had got out of the difficulty by distinguishing two orders of concepts, primary and secondary, formative models and formations according to models; and they thus reproduced, in the semblance of a solution, the problem still unsolved. In different words, others admitted the same embarrassment. They attempted to obtain the concepts from experience, but recognized at the same time that all experience presupposes an ideal anticipation. Or they declared that the concept fixes the essential characters of things, and, at the same time, that the essential characters of things are indispensable for fixing the concept. Or, finally, they based the formation of concepts upon categories, which, enumerated and understood as they understood them, were by no means categories and functions, but concepts. Primary concepts, formative models, ideal anticipations, essential concepts, concept-categories, and the like, are nothing but verbal variants of the pure concepts; the necessary presupposition, as we know, for the impure concepts or pseudoconcepts.

Disputes arising from neglect of the distinction between empirical and abstract concepts.