Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

Intrinsic impossibility of formal Logic.

From the fact that in the verbal form all distinctions (pure concepts, and empirical and abstract concepts, distinct concepts and opposite concepts) are indistinguishable, and on the other hand all identities, such as that of concept, definition and demonstration, appear differentiated or capable of differentiation, we can deduce the impossibility of constructing logical Science by means of an analysis of the verbal form. The condemnation of all formal Logic is thus pronounced.

Its nature.

This Logic has been variously called Aristotelian, peripatetic, scholastic, after its authors and historical representatives; syllogistic, from the doctrine that forms its principal content; formal, from its pretensions to philosophic purity; empirical, by those who tried to drive it back to its place; and although this last name is correct, it would be better to call it formal, and still better, verbal, to indicate of what the empiricism to which it is desired to allude, chiefly consists. Indeed, if empiricism be marked by its limiting itself to single representations, regrouping them in types and arranging them in classes, there is no doubt that that method of treatment is empirical, which takes the logical function, not in the eternal peculiarity of its character as thought of the universal, but only in its various particular translations or manifestations, in which it acquires contingent characteristics. Since these contingent characteristics come to it, in the first place, from the verbal form, it can well be called verbalism. Owing to its verbalism, too, it has happened, that over and above the grammars of individual languages, there has been conceived as existing a general, rational and logical Grammar; and this hybrid science, which is no longer grammar and arose from logical assumptions, has developed in such a way as to be indistinguishable from empirical or verbal Logic.

Its partial justification.

Certainly, as mere empiricism, this so-called Logic could not be condemned. And Hegel was not wrong in remarking that if people are interested in establishing that there are sixty species of parrots and one hundred and thirty-seven of veronica, it is not clear why it should be of less interest to establish the various forms of the judgment and of the syllogism. That discipline has its utility as mere empiricism, and it may be useful to any one to employ in certain cases the terminology in which an affirmation is characterized as positive or as merely negative, as particular or as universal, as a judgment that awaits reasoning and demonstration, as an immediate inference, enthymeme or sorites, as a conclusive or an inconclusive, or as a correct or an incorrect syllogism, and so on. It is also comprehensible how, as mere empiricism, it assumed a normative character, and was translated into rules; rules, which are valid within their own sphere, neither more nor less than are all empirical rules.

Its error.

But it does not limit itself to acting simply as an empirical description, nor even as a simple technique; it usurps a much more lofty office. Just as Rhetoric and Grammar, innocent and useful so long as they limit themselves to the functions of convenient grouping and convenient terminology, become false and harmful when they assume the attitude of sciences of absolute values, and must then be resolved into, and replaced by Æsthetic; so empirical or verbal Logic becomes transformed into error when it claims to give the laws of thought, or the thought of thought, which cannot be other than the concept of the concept. It is not, then, formal, as it boasts itself to be, because the only logical form is the universal, and this alone is the object of logical investigation; but it is falsely formal, since it relies upon contingencies, and must, therefore, be called formalist. We reject it here exclusively in its formalist aspect; that is to say, in so far as it is a complex of empirical distinctions that wish to pass as rational and usurp the place of true rationality.

Its traditional constitution.

Several of such empirical distinctions, such as the distinction between thought and principle of thought, truth and reason of truth, judgments and syllogisms, and such-like, have been recorded and criticized; we shall proceed to mention others, when suitable opportunities occur. Here it will be well to refer to the general physiognomy and structure of that Logic, as it was embodied for centuries in the schools and still persists in treatises.