Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept

by Benedetto Croce

The intuitive faculty in historical exposition. Similarity of history and art.

The intuitive faculty, indispensable in research, is not less indispensable in historical exposition; since it is necessary to intuite the actual fact, not in a fugitive and sketchy manner, but so firmly as to be able to express it and to fix it in words, in such a way as to transmit its genuine life to others. Hence the specially artistic character that must be possessed by true historians. Here they resemble pure artists, painting pictures, as they do, composing poems and writing tragic dialogues. Certainly, every thought, even that of the most abstruse philosopher and mathematician, becomes concrete in artistic form. But the historian (in the somewhat empirical sense of the word) approximates much more nearly to those who express pure intuitions, since he gives literary preference to the subject over the predicate. This has been generally recognized both by historians, who have freely presented themselves as bards of their race invoking the Muse who represents History upon Parnassus, while there is there no representative of Philosophy, Mathematics, or Science; and by theorists, who have constantly debated the question as to whether history is art. It seems indeed to be art, when the predicate or logical element is so well concealed that hardly any attention is paid to it.

Difference between history and art. The predicate or logical element in history.

I say hardly; because if no attention whatever be paid to it, if literary emphasis become logical mutilation, art will remain, but history will have gone. A book of history will no longer merely resemble a poem or romance, but will be a poem or a romance. What is it that, from the point of view of intuition, distinguishes an imaginative vision and an historical narrative? If we open the Divine Comedy or the Rime of Petrarch and read: "In the middle pathway of our life, I found myself in a dark forest ...," or, "I raised my thought to where she whom I seek was and find not upon earth ..."; and if we open Livy's History, at the place where he recounts the battle of Cannae, and read: "Consules satis exploratis itineribus sequentes Poenum, ut ventum ad Cannas est, ubi in conspecta Poenum habebant, bina, castra communiunt," nothing at first seems changed; both are narratives. Yet everything is changed. If we read Livy as we read Dante or Petrarch, the battle of Cannae in the same way as the voyage of Dante to the Inferno, or the passage of the spirit of Petrarch to the third heaven, Livy is no longer Livy, but a story book. In like manner, if we read a book of stories, as, for example, the Kings of France or the Guerin Meschino, in the same way as they are read by the uneducated man of the people, who seeks history in them, the story book becomes transformed into a historical book, although of a kind that must be criticized and refuted when a higher degree of culture has been attained. This suffices to show the importance of that predicate, which is sometimes left to be understood in the words, but whose effective presence transforms the pure intuition into the individual judgment and makes history of a poem.

Vain attempts to eliminate it.

The necessity of the logical element has been several times denied, and it has been affirmed that the historian must let things speak for themselves and put into them nothing of his own. This fine phrase may have some reference to a-certain truth, as we shall see. But if it is understood as the exclusion of the logical element in favour of pure intuition (and worse still, if it intends to exclude also the category of intuition, for in that case we have simple muteness), it proclaims the death of history. Without the logical element it is not possible to say that even the smallest, the most ordinary fact, belonging to our individual and everyday life, has occurred; as, for instance, that I rose this morning at eight o'clock and took luncheon at twelve. For (to give no other reasons) these historical propositions imply the concept of existence or actuality and the correlative concept of non-existence or possibility, since in affirming them I also deny that I only dreamed of rising at eight or of taking luncheon at twelve. All will agree that we cannot speak of a historical fact if we do not know that it is a fact, that is to say, something that has happened; even stories become the object of history, in so far as their existence as stories is attributed to them. A story, told without knowing or deciding whether it be or be not a story, is poetry; perceived and told as a story, it is mythography, that is to say, history; the author of the Iliad or the author of the Niebelungen is not Adalbert Kuhn, Jacob Grimm or Max Müller.

Extension of historical predicates beyond that of mere existence.

But the criterion of existentiality does not itself suffice, as some believe, for the effectual constitution of historical narrative. For what sort of narrative should we have, if we merely said that something had happened, without saying what had happened? That something has happened and does happen at every instant, is not, as we know, the content of historical narrative, because it is the affirmation that being is, or that becoming is. What has been said of the individual judgment, namely, that it is constituted by all the predicates together, that is, of the whole concept, and not by the predicate of existence alone, torn from the others, must also be said of historical narrative. It is truly complete and therefore realized, when the intuition, which supplied it with the rough material, is completely penetrated by the concept, in its universality, particularity and singularity. That the consuls, after having sufficiently explored the routes, followed the Carthaginian, entered Cannae, and seeing themselves face to face with the army of Hannibal, pitched and fortified their camp (as runs Livy's narrative), implies a crowd of concepts, equal in number to the historical affirmations collected in that sentence. No one ignorant as to what is man, war, army, pursuit, route, camp, fortification, dream, reality, love, hatred, fatherland, and so on, is capable of thinking such a sentence as this. And the obscurity of one of those concepts is sufficient to make it impossible to form the narrative as a whole, just as any one who does not understand the meaning of the word castra is not in a position to understand what forms the argument of Livy's narrative. If the sources are changed, the historical narrative changes; but this latter changes no less, if our convictions as to the concepts are changed. The same matter is differently arranged and gives rise to different histories, if it is narrated by a savage or a cultured European, by an anarchist or a conservative, by a protestant or a catholic, by the me of this moment or the same me of ten years hence. Given that all have the same documents before them, each one reads in them a different happening.

Alleged insuperable variation in judging and presenting historical facts, and consequent claim for a history without judgments.

But the fact here stated seems to lead straight to despair as to the fate of history, or at least as to its fate, so long as it is bound to the logical element, to convictions about the concepts. When it is observed that the same facts are narrated in the most different way; that what for some is the work of God is for others the work of the Devil; that what for some is the manifestation of spiritual forces is for others the product of material movements of the brain, according as it is well or ill-nourished; that to some the good of life lies in every explosion and revolt, while to others it lies only in regular work under the tutelage of laws rigorously observed and made to be observed,—we arrive at the conclusion of historical scepticism, namely, that history as usually narrated is nothing but a story woven from such a state of degeneration seems to be a return to the pure and simple reproduction of the document, or at least to the pure intuition, which introduces no element of judgment, or of what is called subjective. But this salvation is only a figure of speech, for pure intuition is poetry and not history, and to return to it is equivalent to abolishing history. This, however, is clearly impossible, for the human race has always narrated its doings, and none of us can dispense with establishing at every instant how things have happened, what has really happened, and in what actual or historical conditions he finds himself.