Part 11

Owing to this new element, which the individual judgment contains, and the judgment of definition does not contain, we eventually find fully justified in the former that distinction between subject and predicate which verbal Logic in vain claims to discover in all judgments, including those of universal character (and even in simple propositions); so that it ends by attributing to that distinction, of which later we shall perceive the capital philosophical importance, a purely grammatical or verbal significance. Subject and predicate can be distinguished only in so far as the one is not and the other is universal, in so far as the one is not and the other is concept, that is to say, only in so far as the one is representation and the other concept. A particular or singular concept (for example, the will) is always also a universal concept; and therefore not adapted to function as a subject to which a predicate is applied; because that predicate, that universal, is already explicitly in the pretended subject itself which is net thinkable, save by means of that predicate. Only the representation can be truly subject; and only the concept can be predicate. This takes place plainly in the individual judgment, where the two elements are connected. "Peter is good," an individual judgment, implies the subject "Peter" and the predicate "good," the one not to be confounded with the other; whereas, in the definition "the will is the practical form of the spirit," "practical form" and "will" are identical.

When the attempt was made to define the judgment as differing both from the concept and from the definition, what was aimed at was the individual judgment. But, if this be so, then the definitions which conceive the judgment either as relation of representations or as relation of concepts (the subsumption of one concept under another, etc.), must be termed false, since it is henceforth clear that, as individual judgment, it must be conceived as a relation of representation and concept. On the other hand, some celebrated divisions of the judgment find their origin in the distinction made by us (which, we again repeat, is given at this point provisionally with the intention of seeking the definite formula further on), between the judgment of the concept and the judgment of the representation, between definition and individual judgment. In this way the analytic judgment, defined as that in which the concept of predicate was obtained from the subject, reveals itself as nothing but the definition, the identity of subject and predicate; the synthetic judgment, which adds to the subject something which was not there previously, is the individual judgment, logical thinking of the intuition, at first only intuited and not thought. We shall examine further on the true meaning and the definite formula of this distinction also.

To ignore the form of the individual judgment, and to recognize only that of the concept and of the definition, is an impossible position, though occasionally there appears a tendency in that direction. We perceive it, for instance, in those who seek for definitions of everything, and limit themselves to syllogizing, when there is certainly a case for thinking, but also one for looking, or for thinking while we look, and for looking while we think. This may be said truly to represent knowledge, that complete knowledge in which all anterior forms unite, and which is the result of all of them. To know is to know reality; and knowledge of reality is translated into representations, penetrated with thought. That famous intellectual intuition, which has sometimes been described as the faculty to which man aspires, but does not possess, and sometimes as a prodigious faculty, superior to knowledge itself, should be declared, with the full rigour of letter and concept, to be nothing but the individual judgment; which is, in truth, intellectual intuition or intuited intellection.

But the individual judgment can take another name, much better known and more familiar: perception; and perception, in its turn, should be called, synonymously, individual judgment, or at least perceptive judgment. Perception does not consist of opening the eyes, of offering the ear, and of unlocking any of the other senses, which are wont to be enumerated, nor, in general, of abandoning oneself to sensation. The world does not enter our spirit by these wide gates; but has itself announced, in order to be received with due honours. That good folk (and among the best of folk are to be counted many philosophers) think otherwise is in truth to be explained by their wonted neglect or lack of analysis and reflection.

And further, perception is not intuition, i.e., an impression theoretically fashioned, or that stage or moment of the spirit which is represented in an eminent degree by the poet, who intuites and does not know what he intuites, indeed does not know that he does not know (because the pertinent question has not arisen, and cannot arise, in him, as poet). To perceive means to apprehend a given fact as having this or that nature; and so means to think and to judge it. Not even the lightest impression, the smallest fact, the most insignificant object, is perceived by us, save in so far as it is thought.

Hence the supreme importance of the individual judgment, which is that which embraces all knowledge produced by us at every moment, by means of which we possess the world, by means of which a world exists.

In perceptive judgments also, are comprised those judgments which are called by some commemorative or historical, that is to say, those by which it is recognized that a given fact has occurred in the past. This recognition can never be founded upon anything other than present intuitions, intuitions, that is to say, of our present life, which contains the past in it, and persuades us of the veracity of a given piece of evidence, as now apprehended by us. And conversely, all perceptive judgments are, in some way, commemorative and historical, because the present, in the very act by which we hold it before our spirit, becomes a past, that is to say an object of memory and of history.

On the other hand, it would be erroneous to divide individual judgments, as has often been attempted, into judgments of fact and judgments of value, claiming that the judgment, "Peter is a man," is of a different nature from: "Peter is good." Every judgment of fact, in so far as it attributes a predicate to a subject, gives to it a value, declaring it to participate in the universal or in a determination of the universal. And conversely, every judgment of value, in so far as it attributes a value, cannot attribute other than the universal or a determination of the universal, since outside the universal there is no value. Even judgments of negative form, such as: "Peter is not good," or "is not-good," or: "Peter is bad," are attributes of universality and of value; because, as we know, theoretically they do not affirm anything other than that Peter has a spiritual determination different from goodness (for example, that he is utilitarian, not yet moral). Certainly, in judgments such as these which we have selected as examples, there is mingled (this too has been noted; and at this point it suffices to recall it) the expression of an ought to be, which, in this case, is revealed in the negative formula adopted; but the expression of an ought to be or of a desire is not a judgment either of fact or of value; indeed, it is not a judgment at all; it is a mere proposition, a logos semanticos, not apophanticos, an optative or desiderative formula, a lyricism of the spirit directed to the future.

There is no other cognitive fact to know, beyond perception or individual judgment. In this, the ultimate and the most perfect of cognitive facts, the circle of knowledge is completed. Obscure sensibility, having become clear intuition, and then having made itself thought of the universal, in the individual judgment is logically thought, and is, henceforward, knowledge of fact or of event, that is, of effectual reality. The individual judgment, or perception, is fully adequate to reality.

But precisely because perception is the completion of knowledge, it must be placed not at the beginning, but at the end of cognitive life. To place it at the beginning, as mere sensibility, and to derive from it the concepts, either as the effect of psychological mechanism, or by an arbitrary act of will, is the error of sensationalists and empiricists. To conceive it as judgment, and nevertheless to place it at the beginning, and to deduce from it the concepts by further elaboration, is the error of rationalists and intellectualists. Against these, it must be firmly maintained that the first moment of knowledge is intuitive and not perceptive; and that the concepts do not originate from the intellectual act of perception, but enter the act itself as constituents. To begin with perception, understood as perceptive judgment, is to begin at the end, that is to say, with the most highly complex. Perception is thus the sole problem of gnoseology; but only because it is the whole problem, which contains in itself all the others. And it also is, if you like, the first form of the cognitive spirit, but not because it is the most simple, but precisely because it is the last; and the last, being also the whole, can also in an absolute sense be called first.

Certainly, the misunderstanding of the sensationalists and the opposing error of the rationalists contain an element of truth, since both are really concepts, which are developed from perception and presuppose it. But, on the other hand, they are not true and proper concepts, but pseudoconcepts, as we have already defined them, and these, being developed from perception, give rise, in their turn, to pseudojudgments. We shall treat of this further on; and thereby explain the genesis of the misunderstanding, that is to say, the erroneous theory will be overcome as misunderstanding and determined as truth. In this difference between individual judgments and individual pseudojudgments, between perceptions and pseudoperceptions, will also clearly be found another of the motives (and perhaps the most profound), which have divided judgments into judgments of fact and judgments of value.

It is also easy to understand that, as there are individual judgments, so there are also individual syllogisms; or rather, that since it is not possible to distinguish between judgments and syllogisms in philosophical Logic, for they constitute one indivisible whole, so it is not possible to distinguish individual syllogisms from individual judgments, or it is only possible to do so verbally. "Caius is dead," is indeed the conclusion of a syllogism; since it is not possible to affirm that he is mortal without some reason: for example, because he is a man, an animal, or a finite being. Thus, the syllogism: "Men are mortal, Caius is a man; therefore, Caius is mortal," is only verbally different from "Caius is mortal." We do not say that the difference of words is nothing; there is always a spiritual difference, even when, instead of saying, "Caius is mortal," we say, "He, whom I call Caius, is mortal," or when the same thought is expressed in Latin or German. But being here occupied with Logic, we declare that there is none, because, indeed, there is none, in point of difference of logical act, both forms being the realization of logical reasoning alone.

THE INDIVIDUAL JUDGMENT AND THE PREDICATE OF EXISTENCE

Subject and predicate are indistinguishable in the judgment of definition, and distinguishable and distinct in the individual judgment; but the act of distinction (which is also union) between subject and predicate, representation and concept, is again, in the individual judgment, the same as the act of distinction and union, by means of which, in the judgment of definition, the concept is defined. In both cases thought makes essential what it thinks. In this respect there is no difference between the two forms of judgment, which we have analysed and have hitherto kept distinct for reasons of analysis. One identical act of thought distinguishes both from mere representation, in which there is wanting the "is" (logical and not verbal)--that "is," which belongs to the judgment of definition and to the individual judgment, and which in the second of these more properly assumes the name of coptila, because it unites two distinct elements, the one representative, the other logical. Here, too, of course, we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by verbalism. The essentialization, the copula, thought, cannot be made to consist of a word, which, abstracted from the whole, becomes a simple sound, and as sound can assume any other signification. In mere representation there can also be found the "is," or what, verbally and grammatically, is called copula, but there it has no value whatever as act of thought.

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero Pulsanda tellus

is a proposition which possesses the "is," but in this case it has merely the value of a sign, not of an act of thought, for that phrase of old Horace is nothing but the expression of a hortatory motion. The word, too, can be suppressed, but we do not thereby suppress the act of thought. The exclamation "beautiful!" uttered before a picture may be an individual judgment, having as subject the representation of the picture, and as predicate the æsthetic universal, which is called beautiful, in which the copula (and here, also, the subject) is verbally understood, but logically existent, and therefore always also capable of verbal reintegration. On the other hand, this reintegration cannot be effected when it is a case of a mere representation or an expression of a state of the soul; because, in that case, there would be, not a reintegration, but an integration, that is to say, it would carry out that act of thought, and produce that individual judgment which was not present before.

Thus, in asking a last question concerning the individual judgment, that is to say, whether it be always existential, we must, as always, transfer the enquiry from verbal to logical analysis, and not waste time with speculations as to words or fragments of propositions, arbitrarily torn from their context, and therefore insignificant and equivocal. The dispute has been most keen in relation to what are called propositions without a subject, such as "It rains" and the like. But, although we do not intend to negate the results, obtained or obtainable from these disputes, we cannot accept the position which they imply and which renders it possible to agitate and to discuss the problem to infinity and therefore makes it insoluble. "It is raining" said with a smile of satisfaction means: "Thank heaven, it is raining"; with a feeling of disappointment: "Bother the rain for preventing my taking a walk"; in reply to some one asking what is the noise audible on the window-panes: "The audible sound is the sound of rain"; to contradict some one who says the weather is fine: "You are stating a falsehood and have not given yourself the trouble of observing; it is raining"; or it is the correction of an historical error. And so on. It is therefore waste of breath to dispute as to the logical nature of that proposition if its precise signification be not determined; and when it is truly determined (for the propositions we have substituted, taken abstractly, can also appear to have many senses and give rise to misunderstandings), we have quite abandoned the materiality of verbalism and passed to the thinking of spiritual acts, taken in themselves.

The question of existentiality in the act of judgment has been strangely confused, owing both to this verbalism and to the failure to keep distinct the judgment of definition and the individual judgment, and even the concept and the pseudoconcept. The question as to existence has been asked, as if it were the same in the case of a judgment of definition, like: "The Idea is," and in the case of an individual judgment like "Peter is." But in the first case, as we already know, existence coincides with essence, and that judgment only says that the Idea is thought, and therefore is; whereas the second not only says that Peter is representable, and therefore is, but that he exists; Peter might be representable and not exist; the griffin is representable and does not exist. Pseudoconcepts have also been incorrectly adduced as examples of judgment of definition in such statements as: "The triangle is thinkable, but does not possess existence," or: "The genus mammifer is thinkable, but does not exist as single animals"; for in this case it should have been said that "triangle" and "mammifer" are not thought at all, but are constructed, and therefore have neither essence nor existence. For us, then, the question of existentiality cannot arise, either for the pure judgment of definition, which is a concept and has existence as a concept, that is to say, essence; nor for the definitive judgment of the pseudoconcepts, which is not even thought; but arises only for the individual judgment, into which there enters as a constituent a representative element, that is to say, something individual and finite. Essence does not coincide with existence in the individual and finite; indeed its definition is just this: the inadequacy of existence to essence. Therefore the individual changes at every instant, and although being at every instant the universal, yet it is adequate to it only at infinity.

Having limited the question to the individual judgment, for which alone it has meaning, we can opportunely divide it into three particular questions: (i.) Does the individual judgment always imply that the subject of the judgment is existent? (ii.) What is the character of existentiality? (iii.) Does this character suffice to construct that judgment?

Beginning with the first, we believe that without doubt the answer is affirmative and that adherence should be given to those who have discovered and persistently defended the necessity of the existential character, thus contributing in no small degree to the progress of logical science. Whether what is represented exist or not, is doubtless indifferent to the intuitive man, to the poet or artist, simply because he does not leave the circle of representation. But it is not indifferent to the logical man, since he forms an individual judgment. He cannot judge of what does not exist.

It has been incorrectly objected that the logical judgment always remains the same, whether I have a hundred dollars in my pocket or only in my imagination; that a mountain of gold is a subject of judgment, although hitherto at least no one has found one in any part of the earth; that Pamela is a virtuous woman (whatever Barretti may have written to the contrary), although she has never lived elsewhere than in the imagination of Richardson and of Goldoni. No predicate whatsoever can be attributed to a hundred dollars, to a mountain of gold, and to a Pamela which do not exist; and if it be said that those hundred dollars are exactly divisible by two or by five; or that that mountain of gold, imagined as of a certain base and height, is measurable in terms of cubic metres, and has a value of so many millions or milliards on the market; or that Pamela is worthy of esteem and of reward; it must be noted that neither the hundred imagined dollars, nor the imagined mountain, nor the imagined Pamela are judged with these judgments, but that the judgments define simply the arithmetical concepts of number, prime number and divisibility, or the geometrical concepts of the cube, and the economic concepts of gold as merchandise, or the moral concepts of virtue, esteem and reward. No judgment whatever has been given as to those non-existent facts, because where there is nothing the king (in this case, thought) loses his rights.

It will be replied that we talk at every moment about these non-existent things, and consequently judge them. But here care must be taken not to confuse absolute with relative non-existence, which latter is non-existent only in name. The absolutely non-existent is what is excluded from the judgment, implicitly in the affirmative formula, explicitly in the negative formula. To him who speaks of the mountain of gold, of the possession of a hundred dollars, and of Pamela as existing realities, we reply by denying these existences, that is to say, by denying them in an absolute manner; and of those negated existences it is not possible to judge, or even to talk, precisely because they are altogether negated. Here, in fact, we are speaking of the individual judgment, which excludes its contradictory from itself, as, for that matter, is also the case with the judgment of definition. But in that absolute affirmation and negation there is also made, explicitly or implicitly, a relative affirmation or negation; as when we say, in the examples given: "The mountain of gold, the hundred dollars, Pamela, do not exist," we say at the same time: "There do exist phantasms, products of the fancy or of the imagination, of a mountain of gold, of a hundred dollars, and of a virtuous Pamela." Now the mountain, the dollars, and Pamela are, as such, not the absolutely non-existent, but certain facts, subjects of judgment, of which the predicate is expressed by the word "non-existent," which in this case is equivalent to "existing as phantasms." The absolutely non-existent is the contradictory, true and proper nothingness; the relatively non-existent (which is precisely that of the individual judgment) is an existence, different from that which the same individual judgment affirms.

Certainly relative non-existence, and the whole content of the concept of existence in general, would require more minute analysis; from which it would perhaps be seen that the so-called non-existent resolves itself into certain categories of practical facts; and thus designates sometimes arbitrary constructions, made by combining images for amusement or with some other intention; sometimes, on the contrary, the desires, which accompany every volitional act and are the infinite possibilities of the real. And it would also be seen that non-existence in the second sense, or the desires, which have been represented by art, are not in its circle in any way distinguished from effective volitions and actions; since, in order to distinguish them, it would be necessary that art should possess a philosophy of the will, however summary, whereas art is without any philosophy. This examination would lead us, however, not only outside the problem now before us, but also outside Logic, to another part of Philosophy, which, although closely related to Logic (as Logic to it), must be the object of special treatment if we do not wish to produce mental confusion by offering everything at once. This was the defect, for example, of G. B. Vico, who put all books into one book, the whole book into a chapter, and frequently his whole philosophy and history into a page or a period. The present writer, though proud to call himself a Vichian, does not propose to imitate the didactic obtuseness of that man of genius.

Suffice it to have made clear, as concerns the problem which now occupies us, that every individual judgment implies the existence of what is spoken of, or of the fact given in the representation, even when this fact consists of an act of imagination, that this act may be recognized as such and as such existentialized. It assumes a concept of reality, which divides into effective reality and possible reality, into existence and non-existence, or mere representability. Some modern investigators of what is called the theory of values (students who fluctuate between psychology and philosophy, and between an antiquated philosophy and one that has the future before it) have maintained that a judgment of value cannot be pronounced when we are not dealing with an existing thing. Since for us a judgment of value is equivalent to any individual judgment, we must accept their thesis; freeing it from the embarrassment in which it finds itself in regard to unreal images (which yet give rise, as they themselves confess, to such judgments of value as the æsthetic) by observing that in that case there is the effectuality, the reality, or, in short, the existence of images, which have the ineffectual or non-existent as their content.

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.

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.

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.