Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

Logic, in our opinion, should reject this demand, the origin of which lies in the confusion between thought in general and thought as the science of thought. The categories are certainly affirmed in the individual judgment, but Logic, as the science of thought, does not undertake to formulate judgments which will say what are the predicable terms, the ultimate or pure concepts, the categories, with which reality is thought. Logic cannot claim to substitute itself for the other philosophic sciences and itself to solve all the problems which offer themselves to thought as to the nature of reality. Its scope is to define categories and to formulate judgments only on that aspect of Reality, which is logical thought. It is, therefore, under the obligation to face the question as to whether there be logical categories, supreme concepts or supreme predicables from the point of view of logic, and if there be, to indicate and to deduce them. It is not obliged to indicate and to deduce all the supreme predicables and categories.

The uniqueness of the logical category: the concept.

Now we have already treated of the question as to the categories of Logic and have solved it, partly affirmatively, partly in the negative. That is to say, we have denied to Logic a multiplicity of categories, since the three fundamental categories, usually given as concept, judgment, and syllogism, have been revealed to be identical. The others, derived from formalist Logic and relating to classes of concepts, to forms of judgments and to figures of the syllogism (and even these three preceding, if they are taken as separable or distinguishable), have been shown to be empirical and arbitrary. Finally, those that were based upon the gnoseology of the pseudoconcepts have shown themselves to be extraneous to pure Logic. On the other hand, we have affirmed the category proper to Logic,—the unique category to which it gives rise. It has been defined as the pure concept, at once judgment of definition and individual judgment, the logical a priori synthesis. Thus the enquiry can be looked upon as exhaustive as regards this part of the subject.

The other categories. No longer logical, but real. Systems of categories.

A glance at the tables of categories that have appeared in the course of the history of philosophy, from that of Aristotle, which is the first, at least among the conspicuous, to that of Stuart Mill, or if it be preferred, to the Kategorienlehre of E. von Hartmann, which is the last, or among the last, shows at once that the other categories, which have been described as logical categories, can be reduced to verbal variants of this unique one of the pure concept, or belong to other aspects of the spirit and of reality, as distinct from that of logical thought. For if in the Aristotelian table the ousia and the poion, substance and quality, to some extent denote the subject and the predicate of the judgment, that is to say, the abstract elements of the a priori synthesis: the poson, on the other hand, appeals to the processes of enumeration and of measurement, the pou and the poté to the determination of space and time, the poiein and the paschein to the principles of practical activity, and so on. The Kantian table seems to refer, or to mean to refer, to logical thought; but that does not prevent the appearance in it of traces of the principles of mathematical, naturalistic, heuristic, and other processes. Furthermore, in the Kantian philosophy, the whole system of the categories is to be deduced, not from the transcendental Logic alone, but also from the transcendental Æsthetic (space and time), and from the Critique of Practical Reason and Judgment, which all lead to functions or forms, operating as spiritual syntheses and reappearing as categories in judgments. Finally, we must not neglect the Kantian metaphysical categories of Physics.

The Hegelian system of the categories and other later systems.

All this becomes clearer in the doctrine of Hegel, where the categories are not only those of logical thought or subjective thought, concept, judgment, syllogism; but also those of quality, quantity and measure, essence, phenomenon and reality, with their subforms and transitions, and those of the objective concept, mechanism, chemism, and teleology, and those of the Idea, life, knowing, and the absolute Idea. The Hegelian, Kuno Fischer, makes certain declarations in his Logic to which it is expedient to give heed. Following the example of the master, he was induced to include knowing and willing among the categories; "It may at first sight seem strange (he says), that knowing and willing should appear here as logico-metaphysical concepts, as categories. Knowledge has need of categories; but is knowledge itself a category? Willing belongs to Psychology and Morality, not to Logic and Metaphysic. It seems, then, that the categories lose themselves now in Physics or Physiology, by means of concepts such as those of mechanism and organism, now in Psychology and Ethics, with the concepts of knowing and of willing. Objections of this sort have often been made. We have shown that the concept must be thought as object, and that the concept of object demands that of mechanism: the justification of the thing resides in this proof. Willing and knowing are indeed categories. If the test, by which we recognize the categories, consists in that they are valid, not only for certain objects, but for all, and in that they should express the universal nature of things, it is not difficult to see in what a profoundly significant way knowing and willing emerge triumphantly from such a test. They belong not only to what are called the faculties of the human spirit, but in truth to the very conditions of the world. If the world must be understood as end it must also be understood as willing; for the end without the willing is nothing. ... If knowing and willing were only a small human province of the world, they would certainly not be categories. Their concept would belong not to metaphysic, but to the anthropological sciences. Since they are, on the contrary, both of them cosmic principles, universal concepts, without which the concept of objects and of the world cannot be thoroughly thought and known, for that reason they necessarily have the value of categories. And since, in truth, they compose the concept of the world, they are the supreme categories."[1] This argument amounts to saying, that whenever a concept is truly universal (not restricted to this or that class of manifestations of reality and therefore empirical), whenever a concept is a pure concept, it is always a category. This thesis is most exact, but it amounts to excluding such a search from pure Logic, which does not give the concepts or concept of reality, but only the concept of the concept. The attempt of Hegel to embrace the totality of the categories was not understood and was abandoned at a later date, and a return was made in some sort to the categories of the theoretic and practical—theoretic spirit alone—(von Hartmann gives them in his fundamental tripartition of the categories into sensibility, reflective thought and speculative thought). But the tendency to totality reappeared, in an elementary form, in Stuart Mill, who opposed to the Aristotelian table his own, divided into the three classes of sentiments (sensations, thoughts, emotions, volitions), of substances (bodies and spirits), and of attributes (quality, relation, quantity): a vertiginous regression to an infantile conception, which yet sought to embrace in its own way the whole of reality.

The logical order of the predicates or categories.

The doctrine of the categories has been introduced and retained in Logic, not only because of the confusion between the thought of thought and thought in general, which has just been explained, but also because of another confusion, which must now be explained, as it has far deeper roots and far greater importance. It has been and may be argued in this way. It is true that the categories are nothing but simply the concepts of reality; but these concepts, acting as predicates, are presented in logic in a necessary order, which it is the task of logical Science to deduce. In determining reality by means of thought, we begin with a first predicate, for instance being, judging that reality is. This judgment immediately shows itself insufficient, whence it becomes necessary to determine it with a second predicate and to judge that reality both is and is not, or is becoming. This predicate of becoming appears in its turn vague and abstract, and it becomes necessary to determine reality as quality, then as quantity, measure, essence, existence, mechanism, teleology, life, reflexion, will, idea, in short with all the predicates that exhaust the concept of reality.

Illusion as to the logical reality of this order.