Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

We have in this way opened a path for the solution of the second question enunciated, which concerns the character to be assigned to the existentializing act of the judgment. Does this consist of an act of thought, that is to say, of the application of a predicate to a subject; or is it an original act of an altogether peculiar nature, which does not find its parallel in the other acts of thought? In short, is existence a predicate, or is it not? The answer, already implicitly contained in the foregoing explanations, affirms that existence in the individual judgment is a predicate. And we say "in the individual judgment" because in the judgment of definition it is not predicate, for the reason already expounded, that in that judgment there is no distinction between subject and predicate, and that in it existence coincides with essence.

Critique of existentiality as position and faith.

The traditional reply is, on the other hand, that existence, in the judgment of existence, is not a predicate, but a knowledge sui generis, sometimes called a knowledge of position, sometimes an act of belief, or faith; two determinations, which are reducible to a single one. Because, if being is conceived as external to the human spirit, and knowledge as separable from its object, so much so that the object could be without being known, it is evident that the existence of the object becomes a position, or something placed before the spirit, given to the spirit, extraneous to it, which the spirit would never appropriate to itself unless it were courageously to swallow the bitter mouthful with an irrational act of faith. But all the philosophy which we are now developing demonstrates that there is nothing external to the spirit, and therefore there are no positions opposed to it. These very conceptions of something external, mechanical, natural, have shown themselves to be conceptions, not of external positions, but of positions of the spirit itself, which creates the so-called external, because it suits it to do so, as it suits it to annul this creation, when it is no longer of use. On the other hand, it has never been possible to discover in the circle of the spirit that mysterious and unqualifiable faculty called faith, which is said to be an intuition that intuites the universal, or a thinking of the universal, without the logical process of thought. All that has been called faith has revealed itself step by step as an act of knowledge or of will, as a theoretic or as a practical form of the spirit.

There is therefore no doubt that existence, if it be something that is affirmed or denied, cannot be anything but a predicate; it can only be asked what sort of predicate it is, that is to say, what is the precise content or concept of existence, and this has already been indicated or at least sketched in the preceding explications. Objections have been made to the conceptual and predicative character of existence, such as that which maintains that if it were a predicate it would be necessary in the judgment "A is" to be able to think the two terms—A and existence—separately, whereas in the thought of A, A is already existentialized. But these objections show themselves to be sophistical; because outside the judgment A is not thinkable, but only representable, and therefore without existentiality, which predicate it only acquires in the act of judgment.

Absurd consequences of those doctrines.

For the rest, the difficulties that befall those who conceive existentiality in the individual judgment as something sui generis, are illustrated by the theory to which they find themselves led, of a double kind of judgment, the existential and the categorical, without their being able to justify this duality. This is at bottom the most apparent manifestation of their more or less unconscious metaphysical dualism, which assumes an object external to the spirit, and makes the spirit apprehend it with an act of faith and afterwards reason about it with an act of thought. Why not always continue with an act of faith? Or why not also extend the act of thought to the initial judgment? We have either to continue upon the same path, or to change it altogether—this is the dilemma which imposes itself here.

The predicate of existence as not sufficing to constitute a judgment.

But in rejecting the double form of the individual judgment, the one existential, the other categorical, and in resolving both into the single form, which is the categorical by making existence a predicate among predicates, we must also explain for what reason (in reply to the third of the questions into which we have divided the treatment of existentiality) we now say that the predicate of existence does not suffice to constitute the judgment. How can it fail to suffice? If I say that "Peter is," or that "The Ægean is," have I not before me a perfect judgment? and is it not simply a judgment of existence? But here, too, we must repeat: cave; beware of the deceptions of verbalism; think of things, not of words. The judgments adduced as an example are so little judgments of existence that in them we speak of the "Ægean" and of "Peter," and since we speak of them, it is clear that we know that the Ægean, for example, is a sea, and what a sea is, and so on; that Peter is a man, and a man made in this or that way, an Italian and not a Bushman, thirty years old and not a month, and so on. The merely representative element cannot be found in the judgment by fixing it in a word, which, in so far as it forms part of the judgment, is, like all the rest, penetrated with logical character; and when we say that "Peter" is the subject and is representation, and "existing" is the predicate, we speak in a general sort of way and almost symbolically. If we are looking for the formula of the merely existential judgment in relation to a representation, that is, of a judgment which leaves the representation free from all other predicate save that of existence, such a formula could only be "Something is." But upon mature consideration this formula would no longer be an individual judgment, since every logical transfiguration of the individual and every individual determination of the universal would not have been excluded: it would correspond neither more nor less than to a judgment of definition which asserts that "something" (something in general, indeterminate) "is" or that "reality is."

The predicate of judgment as the totality of the concept.

But our theory concerning the indispensability of other predicates in constituting the judgment is not to be understood as an affirmation of the necessity that any other predicate of any sort should be added to the predicate of existence, nor even that all the others possible should be added to it. In the first case, we shall always have an unjustifiable duality of predicates: that of existence and that necessary for essentializing and completing the judgment; in the second, duality would certainly be avoided, since to constitute the judgment all the predicates would be necessary, without their distinction into a double order, and all would be qualitative predicates; but there would remain the idea of a successive addition of predicates. Granted this idea, it is impossible ever to understand what those acts would be, by which the first, or also the second, or also the third predicate, and so on, should be attributed, without yet attaining in such attributions the full totality of truth. They are representations no longer; and not yet judgments: they are then something insufficient and one-sided, whose existence could not be admitted save arbitrarily (as in Psychology), and which, therefore, would be inadmissible in Philosophy. It therefore only remains to conclude that in the judgment, all possible predicates are given in one act alone; that is, that the subject is predicated as existence, and for this very reason determined in a particular way; determined in a particular way, and for this very reason, as existence.