Part 7

Certainly, the form in which the order of our discourse has led us to establish the characters of the concept--that of enumeration, the one character being connected with the other by means of an "also"--is, logically, a very crude form, and must be refined and corrected. Above all, if we have spoken of characters of the concept, we have done so in order to adhere to the usual mode of expression. The concept cannot have characters, in the plural, but character, that one character which is proper to it. What this is has been seen; the concept is concrete-universal two words which designate one thing only, and can also grammatically become one: "transcendental," or whatever other word be chosen from those already coined, or that may be coined for the occasion. The other determinations are not characters of the concept, but affirm its relations with the spiritual activity in general, of which it is a special form, and with the other special forms of this activity. In the first relation, the concept is spiritual; in relation with the æsthetic activity, it is cognitive or expressive, and enters into the general theoretic-expressive form; in relation with the practical activity, it is not, as concept, either useful or moral, but as a concrete act of the spirit it must be called useful and moral. The exposition of the characters of the concept, correctly thought, resolves itself into the compendious exposition of the whole Philosophy of spirit, in which the concept takes its place in its unique character, that is to say, in itself.

This declaration may save us from the accusation of having given an empirical exposition of the non-empirical Concept of the concept, and so committing an error for which logicians are justly reproved (for they have often believed themselves to possess the right of treating of Logic without logic; perhaps for the same reason that custodians of sacred places are wont, through over-familiarity, to fail in respect towards them). But it lays us open to censure very much more severe; which, if it ultimately prove to be inoffensive, is certainly very noisy and loquacious. The pretended characters of the concepts (it is said) are, by your own confession, nothing but its relations with the other forms of the spirit; and the one character proper to it is that of universality-concreteness, that is, of being itself, since the "concrete-universal" is synonymous with the concept, and vice versa. So it turns out that in spite of all your efforts, your concept of the concept becomes dissipated in a tautology. Give us a demonstration of what you affirm, or a definition which is not tautologous; then we shall be able to form some sort of an idea of your pure concept. Otherwise you may talk about it for ever, but for us it will always be like "Phœnician Araby" of Metastasian memory: "you say that it is; where it is, no one knows."

Beneath such dissatisfaction and the claim it implies, we find first of all a prejudice of scholastic origin concerning what is called demonstration. That is to say, it is imagined that demonstration is like an irresistible contrivance, which grasps the learner by the neck and drags him willy-nilly, whither he does not and the teacher does will to go, leaving him open-mouthed before the truth, which stands external to him, and before which he must, obtorto collo, bow himself. But such coercive demonstrations do not exist for any form of knowledge--indeed, for any form of spiritual life--nor is there a truth outside our spirit. Not that truth presupposes faith, as is often said, so that rationality is subordinated to some unknown form of irrationality; but truth is faith, trust in oneself, certainty of oneself, free development of one's inner powers. The light is in us; those sequences of sounds, which are the so-called demonstration, serve only as aids in discarding the veils and directing the gaze; but in themselves they have no power to open the eyes of those who obstinately wish to keep them closed. Faced with this sort of reluctance and rebellion, the pedagogues of the good old days had recourse, as we know, not to demonstrations, but to the stool of penitence and to the stick; so fully were they persuaded that the demonstration of truth requires good dispositions, i.e. requires those who are disposed to fall back upon themselves and to look into themselves. How can the beauty of the song of Farinata be demonstrated to one who denies it, and will neither appreciate the soul contained in that sublime poem, nor accomplish the work necessary to attain to the possibility of such an appreciation, nor will, on the other hand, humbly confess his own incapacity and lack of preparation,--how can we forcibly demonstrate to him that that song is beautiful? The critical wisdom of Francesco de Sanctis would be disarmed and impotent before such a situation. How can we demonstrate to one who deliberately refuses to believe in any authority or document, and breaks the tradition by which we are bound to the past, that Miltiades conquered at Marathon, or that Demosthenes strove all his life against the power of Macedonia? He will capriciously throw doubt on the pages of Herodotus and the orations of Demosthenes; and no reasoning will be able to repress that caprice. What more can be said? Even in arithmetic, for which calculating machines exist, compulsory demonstration is impossible. In vain you will lift two fingers of the hand, and then the third and the fourth, in order to demonstrate to one who does not wish for demonstration that two and two are four; he will reply that he is not convinced. And indeed he cannot be convinced, if he do not accomplish that inner spiritual synthesis by which twice two and four reveal themselves as two names of one and the same thing. Therefore, he who awaits a compelling demonstration of the existence of the pure concept, awaits in vain. For our part, we cannot give him anything but that which we are giving: a discourse, directed towards making clear the difficulties, and towards demonstrating how, by means of the pure concept, all problems concerning the life of the spirit are illuminated, and how, without it, we cannot understand anything.

But another prejudice, perhaps yet more tenacious than the first, accompanies this extravagant idea about demonstration. Accustomed as men are to move among things, to see, to hear, to touch them, while hardly or only fugitively reflecting upon the spiritual processes which produce that vision, hearing and touching; when they come to treat of a philosophic question, and to conceive a concept (and especially when it is necessary to conceive precisely the concept of the concept), they do not know how to refrain from demanding just that which they have been obliged to renounce in their new search, and which they have already renounced, owing to the very fact of their having entered into it: the representative element, something that they can see, hear and touch. It is almost as though a novice, on entering a monastery, and having just pronounced the solemn vow of chastity, should ask, as his first request upon taking possession of his cell, for the woman who is to be his companion in that life. He will be answered that in such a place his spouse cannot be anything but an ideal spouse, holy Religion or holy Mother Church.

All philosophers have been compelled to protest against the request, which they have had addressed to them, for an impossible external demonstration and for something representative in a field where representation has been surpassed. "In our system (said Fichte) we must ourselves lay the foundation of our own philosophy, and consequently that system must seem to be without foundation to one who is incapable of accomplishing that act. But he may be assured beforehand that he will never find a foundation elsewhere, if he do not lay such an one for himself, or remain not satisfied with it. It is fitting that our philosophy should proclaim this in a loud voice, in order that it may be spared the pretence of demonstrating to mankind from without what they must create in themselves." Schelling appropriately compared philosophic obtuseness with æsthetic obtuseness: "There are two only ways out of common reality. Poetry, which transports you into an ideal world, and Philosophy, which makes the real world disappear altogether from our sight. One does not see why the sense for Philosophy should be more generally diffused than that for Poetry." And Hegel, giving explanations which precisely meet the present case, says: "What is called the incomprehensibility of Philosophy, arises, in part, from an incapacity (in itself only a lack of habit) to think abstractly, that is to say, to hold pure thoughts firmly before the spirit and to move in them. In our ordinary consciousness, thoughts are clothed in and united with ordinary sensible and spiritual matter; and in our rethinking, reflecting and reasoning we mingle sentiments, intuitions and representations with thoughts: in every proposition whose content is entirely sensible (for example: this leaf is green) there are already mingled categories, such as being and individuality. But it is quite another thing to take as our object thoughts by themselves, without any admixture. The other reason for its incomprehensibility is the impatience which demands to have before it as representation that which in consciousness appears only as thought and concept. And we hear people say that they do not know what there is to think in a concept, which is already apprehended; whereas in a concept there is nothing to be thought but the concept itself. But the meaning of this saying is just that they want a familiar and ordinary representation. It seems to consciousness as if, with the removal from it of the representation, the ground had been removed which was its firm and habitual support. When transported into the pure region of the concepts, it no longer knows what world it is in. For this reason, those writers, preachers and orators are esteemed marvels of comprehensibility who offer their readers or hearers things which they already know thoroughly, things which are familiar to them and which are self-evident."

Thus have all philosophers protested, and thus will all protest still, from age to age, because that intolerance, that immobility, that recalcitrance before the very painful effort of having to abandon the world of sense (though but for a single instant, and in order to reconquer and to possess it more completely) will perpetually be renewed. They are the birth-pangs of the Concept, to escape which no plans for virginity and no manœuvres to procure abortion are of any avail. They must be endured, because that law of the Concept ("thou shalt bring forth in suffering") is also a law of life.

DISPUTES AS TO THE NATURE OF THE CONCEPT

Disputes as to the nature of the concept have sometimes had their origin (notably in the recent period of philosophic barbarism, which "renews the fear of thought," whence we have with difficulty emerged) in materialistic, mechanical and naturalistic prejudices. Therefore, as already mentioned, discussion has arisen as to whether the concept should be considered logical or psychological, as the product of synthesis or of association, or of individual or hereditary association. But these are controversies which, for the reasons we gave before, we shall not spend time in illustrating.

Nor shall we pay attention to the other controversy, as to whether concepts are values or facts, whether they operate only as norms or also as effective forces of the real; because the division between values and facts, between norms and effective existence (between Gelten and Sein, as it is expressed in German terminology), is itself surpassed and unified, implicitly and explicitly, in all our philosophy. If the concept or thought has value, it can have value only because it is; if the norm of thought operate as a norm, that implies that it is thought itself, its own norm, a constitutive element of reality. There is not to be found in any form of spiritual life any value which is not also reality--not in art, where there is no other beauty than art itself; nor in morality, where no other goodness is known than action itself directed to the universal; nor in the life of thought. The concept has value, because it is; and is, because it has value.

But the greater part of these dissensions, which have existed for centuries and are yet living, rests on the confusion between concepts and pseudoconcepts, and the consequent pretension to define the concept by denying one or other of these two forms. This is the origin of the two opposite schools of realists and nominalists, which are also called in our times rationalists and empiricists (arbitrarists, conventionalists, hedonists). The realists maintain that concepts are real: that they correspond to reality; the nominalists, that they are simple names to designate representations and groups of representations, or, as is now said, tickets and labels placed upon things in order to recognize and find them again. In the former case, no elaboration of representations higher than the universalizing act of the concept is possible; in the latter, the only possible operation is that which has already been described--mutilation, reduction and fiction, directed to practical ends.

The consequence of these one-sided affirmations has been that the realists have defined as concepts, and therefore as having a universal character, all sorts of rough pseudoconcepts; not only the horse, the artichoke and the mountain, but also, logically, the table, the bed, the seat, the glass, and so on; and they have exposed themselves from the earliest beginnings of philosophy to the sarcastic and irresistible objection that the horse exists, but not horsiness, the table, but not tabularity. This conceptualization of pseudoconcepts is the error of which they have really been guilty, not that of conferring empirical reality on the concepts by placing them as single things alongside of other things, an extravagance which it is doubtful if any man of moderate sense has ever seriously committed. The realists who rendered the concepts real in this sense at the same time rendered them unreal, that is to say, single and contingent, and in need of being surpassed by true concepts. The nominalists, on the other hand, considered as arbitrary and mere names all the presuppositions of their mental life--being and becoming, quality and final cause, goodness and beauty, the true and the false, the Spirit and God. Without being aware of it, they have fallen into inextricable contradictions and into logical scepticism.

It is henceforth clear that this secular dispute cannot be decided in favour of one or other of the contending parties, for both are right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny, that is, both are right and wrong. The two forms of spiritual products, of which each of those schools in its affirmations emphasizes only one, both actually exist; the one is not in antithesis to the other, as the rational is to the irrational. The true doctrine of the concept is realism, which does not deny nominalism, but puts it in its place, and establishes with it loyal and unequivocal relations.

By establishing such relations we emerge from the vicious circle, which has given such trouble to certain logicians, who have striven to explain the genesis of the concepts in terms of nominalism, but were afterwards, when probing their doctrine to the bottom, compelled to admit the necessity of the concepts as a foundation for the genesis of the concepts. They believed that they had got out of the difficulty by distinguishing two orders of concepts, primary and secondary, formative models and formations according to models; and they thus reproduced, in the semblance of a solution, the problem still unsolved. In different words, others admitted the same embarrassment. They attempted to obtain the concepts from experience, but recognized at the same time that all experience presupposes an ideal anticipation. Or they declared that the concept fixes the essential characters of things, and, at the same time, that the essential characters of things are indispensable for fixing the concept. Or, finally, they based the formation of concepts upon categories, which, enumerated and understood as they understood them, were by no means categories and functions, but concepts. Primary concepts, formative models, ideal anticipations, essential concepts, concept-categories, and the like, are nothing but verbal variants of the pure concepts; the necessary presupposition, as we know, for the impure concepts or pseudoconcepts.

Other disputes, far enough apart in significance and nature, concerning the nature of the concept, acquire a more precise meaning when referred to our subdivision of pseudoconcepts into empirical or representative, and abstract. Thereby we can understand why it has been asked if the concepts are concrete or abstract, general or universal, contingent or necessary, approximate or rigorous; if they are obtained a posteriori or a priori, by induction or deduction, by synthesis or analysis, and so on. This series of disputes likewise cannot be settled, save by admitting that both contending parties are right and wrong, and demonstrating that pseudoconcepts (which are alone here in discussion) are constructed by analysis, and by deduction are a priori, and have the characters of abstractness, rigorousness, universality and necessity, if it be a question of abstract pseudoconcepts, that is to say, of empty fictions, outside experience; while, on the other hand, they are constructed by synthesis, and by induction are a posteriori, and have the characters of concreteness, approximation, mere generality and contingency, if they be empirical or representative pseudoconcepts, that is to say, groups of representations, which do not go beyond representation and experience. Indeed, from this last point of view, no error was made in denying any difference between the (representative) concept and the general representation. It is false that this latter is the result of psychical mechanism or association, and the former of psychical purpose, because there is nothing mechanical in the spirit; and the general representation, if it is a product of the spirit, is as teleological as the other, indeed is absolutely one with the other. It obeys, like it, the law of economy, or, as we have shown, the practical ends of convenience and utility.

But these last disputes have crossed with that which we first examined between realism and nominalism, and have sometimes taken on the same meaning. This must be kept in mind, to serve as a guide in the dense forest. Is the concept a priori or a posteriori, universal or general, necessary or contingent? These questions and others like them were sometimes understood as equivalent to the question: is it real or nominal, truth or fiction?

Certain problems of Logic, not yet solved in a satisfactory manner, arise from the failure to make clear the confusion between concepts and pseudoconcepts, and between empirical and abstract concepts. Is it or is it not true that every concept must have an individual representation, taken from its own sphere, as a necessary support? Are concepts of things possible, or is there a special concept corresponding to every thing? Is a concept of the individual possible? These three questions may be answered in the affirmative, in the negative, and in the affirmative-negative, according as they are referred to the empirical concept, the abstract concept, or the pure concept.

For, if we consider the first question, we must resolutely deny that the abstract concept has any need of a particular representation as its necessary support. The geometric triangle, as such, is neither white nor black, nor of any given size; if the representation of a particular triangle unites itself to it, geometry discards it. But we must just as resolutely affirm than an empirical or representative concept has always an image to support it; the concept of a cat needs the image of a cat, and every book on zoology is accompanied with illustrations. The image may be varied, but never suppressed; and it may be varied only within certain limits, because, if these be exceeded, the concept itself loses its form and is dissipated. Thus, for the concept of the cat, we could frame a representation of a white or black or red cat, or a small or big one; but if scarlet colour or the size of an elephant be attributed to the cat, which serves as symbol of the fiction, the concept must be changed. That concept has at its command the images of cats, upon which it has been formed, which, as we know, are always finite in number. Finally, with reference to the pure concept, it must be said that every image and no image is in turn a symbol of it; as every blade of grass (as Vanini said) represents God, and a number of images, however great it be, does not suffice to represent Him.

In like manner, as regards the second question, it must be answered that the empirical concept is nothing but a concept of things, or a grouping of a certain number of things beneath one or other of them, which functions as a type; that the abstract concept is by definition, the not-thing, incapable of representation; and that the pure concept is a concept of every thing and of no thing. And as regards the third, we must answer that the abstract concept is altogether repugnant to individuality; the pure concept alights upon every individual, only to leave it again, and in so far as it thinks all individual things, it renders them all, in a certain way, concepts, and in so far as it surpasses them, it denies them as such; while the empirical concept can be the concept of the individual. Because if in reality, the individual be the situation of the universal spirit at a determinate instant, empirically considered the individual becomes something isolated, cut off from the rest and shut up in itself, so that it is possible to attribute to it a certain constancy in relation to the occurrences of the life it lives; so that that life assumes almost the position of the individual determinations of a concept. Socrates is the life of Socrates, inseparable from all the life of the time in which he developed; but empirically and usefully we can construct the concept of a Socrates a controversialist, an educator, endowed with imperturbable calm, of which the Socrates who ate and drank and wore clothes, and lived during such and such occurrences, is the incarnation. Thus we can form pseudoconcepts of individuals as well as of things, or, to express it in terms that are the fashion, we can form Platonic ideas of them.

It is also well to note that to adduce the reasons, the laws, the causes of things and of reality, is equivalent to establishing concepts, and since the word "concepts" has been applied in turn to pure and to empirical and abstract concepts, laws and causes have been alternately described as truths and as fictions. It belongs to the discussion of terminology to remark that in general the word "reason" has been used only for researches into pure and abstract concepts, "cause" for empirical concepts, and "laws" almost equally for all three, but perhaps a little more for empirical and abstract than for pure concepts. But to the confusion of these three forms of spiritual products is to be attributed the fact that there have been discussions, as, for instance, whether there be concepts of laws in addition to concepts of things, the issue of which was at bottom the desire to ascertain whether there exist abstract and pure concepts, in addition to empirical concepts.

The profound diversity of the concepts and of the pseudoconcepts suggested (at the time when it was customary to represent the forms or grades of the spirit as faculties) the distinction between two logical faculties, which were called Intellect (or, also, abstract Intellect), and Reason. The first of these formed what we now call pseudoconcepts; the second, pure concepts.

But the proper character of neither of the two faculties was realized by those who postulated them; they fell into the error, which we have already had occasion to criticize, of conceiving the Intellect as a form of knowledge, which either lives in the false, or is limited to preparing the material for the superior faculty, to which it supplies a first imperfect sketch of the concept. But the faculty required for this should be, not of a theoretical nature, but of a practical. It is a terminological question of slight interest, whether the name "Intellect" should be retained for the production of pseudoconcepts, or whether the purely theoretic meaning, which it first had, should be restored to it, and it should thus be made synonymous with "Reason." It can only be observed that it will be very difficult to remove henceforth from "Intellect," from "intellectual formations," and from "intellectualism," the suspicion and discredit cast upon them by the great philosophic history of the first half of the nineteenth century; so much so, that only where a rather popular style is employed, can Intellect and Reason be used promiscuously.

With greater truth, Reason was considered as unifying what the Intellect had divided, and therefore as unifying abstraction and concreteness, deduction and induction, analysis and synthesis. With greater truth, although complete exactness would have demanded here, not so much that to Reason should be given the power of unifying what has been unduly divided, as that to the Intellect, that is to say, to the practical faculty, should be given the power of dividing extrinsically what for Reason is never divided: a power which the Intellect, as a practical faculty, possesses and exercises, not in a pathological, but in a physiological way.

The incomplete survey of the so-called Intellect, the theoretic character of which was preserved, though in a depreciatory sense, issued in the result that finally to Reason itself was attributed a character, no longer theoretic, or rather, more than theoretic. Knowledge, presenting itself in the form of Intellect, seemed inadequate to truth; to attain to which there intervened Reason, or speculative procedure, the synthesis of theory and practice, a knowledge which is action, and an action which is knowledge. Sometimes, Reason itself, thus transfigured, seemed insufficient, owing to the presence of ratiocinative processes, which came to it from the Intellect, and were absorbed by it; and the supreme faculty of truth was conceived, not as logical reasoning, but as intuition; an intuition differing from the purely artistic and revealing the genuine truth, an organ of the absolute, intellectual Intuition. It was urged against intellectual intuition that it created irresponsibility in the field of truth, and made lawful every individual caprice. But a similar objection could be brought against Reason, which is superior to knowledge, and is the synthesis of theory and practice: while, on the other hand, it cannot be denied, both of intellectual Intuition and of Reason, that on the whole they affirmed or tended to affirm the rights of the pure Concept, as opposed to empirical and abstract concepts.

For our part, we have no need to lower the cognitive activity beneath the level of truth, by attributing to it an intellectualiste and arbitrary function; nor, on the other hand (in order to supplement knowledge and intellect thus pauperized), to exalt Reason above itself. Thought (call it Intellect, or Reason, or what you will) is always thought; and it always thinks with pure concepts, never with pseudoconcepts. And since there is not another thought beneath thought, so there is not another thought superior to it. The difficulties which led to these conclusions have been completely explained, when we have distinguished concepts from pseudoconcepts, and demonstrated the heterogeneity which exists between these two forms of spiritual products.

CRITIQUE OF THE DIVISIONS OF THE CONCEPTS AND THEORY OF DISTINCTION AND DEFINITION

Precisely because they are heterogeneous formations, pure concepts and pseudoconcepts do not constitute divisions of the generic concept of the concept. To assume that they did, would be a horrible confusion of terms, not far different (to use Spinoza's example) from that of the division of the dog into animal dog and constellation dog; though poets used at one time to talk of the celestial dog also, as "barking and biting," when the sun implacably burned the fields.

And seeing that our point of view is philosophic, we can take no account of another division of the concept, which had great fame and authority in the past: that into obscure, confused, clear and distinct concepts and the like, or of the degrees of perfection to which the concept attains. Such a division can retain at the most but an empirical and approximate value, and under this aspect it will be difficult altogether to renounce it in ordinary discourse; but it has no logical and philosophic value whatever. The concept is what is truly concept, the perfect concept, not at all the encumbered or wandering tendency toward it. Yet that division had great historical importance. By means of it, indeed, the attempt was made to differentiate the concept, under the name of clear and distinct thought, from the intuition, which was clear but confused thought, and both of these from sensation, impression, or emotion, which was called obscure. This was attempted, but without success; the problem was set but not solved; for the solution was only attained when it was seen that, in this case, it was not a question of three degrees of thought, as absolute logic claimed, but of three forms of the spirit: of thought or distinction, of intuition ox clearness; and of the practical activity, obscurity or naturality.

Logically, the concept does not give rise to distinctions, for there are not several forms of concept, but one only. This is a perfectly analogous result in Logic to that which we reached in Æsthetic, when we established the uniqueness of intuition or expression, and the non-existence of special modes or classes of expressions (except in the empirical sense, in which we can always establish as many classes as we wish). In distinguishing the forms of the spirit, the two principal forms, theoretic and practical, having been divided, and the theoretic having been subdivided into intuition and concept, there is no place for a further subdivision of the theoretic forms, since intuition and concept are each of them indivisible forms. The reason for this indivisibility cannot be clearly understood, save by the complete development of the Philosophy of the spirit; and it is only to be remarked here in passing, that the division of intuition and concept has as its foundation the distinction between individual and universal. And since in this distinction there is no medium quid nor an ulterius, a third or fourth intermediate form, so there is no subdivision; since we pass from the concept of individuality to single individuality, which is not a concept, and from the concept of the concept to the single act of thought, which is no longer the simple definition of logical thinking, but effective logical thinking itself.