Part 10

If the standards of which the critics speak are, as is often the case, moral or intellectual ideals, it is clear that Croce's æsthetics does not question their validity, but only their application. There is a large number of literary critics, who are such only in name, and whose real interests are intellectual or moral, critics of thought and of the ethical life, and not of art. They use works of art as documents and undoubtedly works of art are, in the unity of the human spirit, documents of intellectual and moral life; but their error begins when they confuse the issues, and censure or praise the art of the past, or try to influence the art of the future, with criteria which are no longer intellectual or moral, but, because they have been transposed outside their legitimate sphere, intellectualistic and moralistic.

All other so-called standards are derived from the abstract ideas of literary genres and of rhetorical categories. It is easy to judge of a new tragedy if you know what a tragedy ought to be, if you have a catalogue of purely external characteristics which you may either find, or not find, in the new work that comes before you. This is, of course, the crudest form of rhetorical criticism; there is another which is not less frequent, but more subtle. The critic builds up an ideal of what art ought to be, not with abstract categories, and classifications transformed into arbitrary æsthetic precepts or standards, but through his predilection for one particular author, or for one particular epoch, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the Classics or the Romantics: every work of art which is different either in spirit or in form from those that have been chosen is condemned in proportion to its variation from the ideal. This form of criticism is often also vitiated by the intrusion of intellectualistic and moralistic errors, since an ideal which is a mere particular determination of the past assumed as a universal value is likely to be mere rhetoric of thought and morality as well as of art.

The only legitimate standard in æsthetic criticism is the æsthetic standard, that of beauty or expression, as against ugliness or non-expression. Our critical judgment is the reaction of our æsthetic personality in the presence of a work of art, as the moral judgment is the reaction of our moral personality in the presence of an action. Our knowledge of a work of art, of a concrete and individual intuition, as our knowledge of an action, approaches more or less to the ideal limit, according to the breadth of our experience and the depth of our understanding; but there exist no external criteria on which we can rest our judgment, no mechanical props which will support it. This theory of criticism, far from justifying a capricious and arbitrary subjectivism, requires from the critic a constant vigilance against that which is narrowly personal, capricious, and arbitrary in himself; a patient, unceasing effort in the labor of recapturing and recreating the material and spiritual circumstances from which the work of art originally sprang; and the quick sensitivity of the artist coupled with the wide understanding of the historian and the philosopher.

When æsthetic criticism is raised to this plane on which it coincides with the history of poetry, or of art, it transforms itself necessarily into a general criticism of life. What to the æsthetic consciousness appears as ugly or non-expressive, since in the world of history there are no negative facts, will not, when historically considered, appear as a negative value, but as a value of another order, as an intrusion of the logical or of the practical spirit in the work of the poet or of the artist. What in the Divine Comedy is not poetry is the outcome of philosophical or moral preoccupations which have not become art, have not fused themselves into a new, coherent intuition, and must be apprehended not as art, but as philosophy and morality. The allegory of the _Færie Queene_ is not art, but it is an expression of certain aspects of the Protestant spirit in the England of Elizabeth. In a poet like Byron, the presence of practical motives is felt all through his poetical production; and the critic cannot limit his work to tracting the gems, and to saying of all the rest: this is not poetry. He must tell us what it is, and only by telling what it is, he criticises it completely as poetry. It is impossible, in fact, to give to art its place, without assigning its place to all the other activities of life. The great æsthetic critic will also be a critic of philosophy, of morality, of politics; but, as Croce says of De Sanctis, the strength of his purely æsthetic consideration of art will also be the strength of his purely moral consideration of morality, of his purely logical consideration of philosophy, and so on. The forms or grades of the spirit, which the critic employs as categories for his judgment, are ideally distinct in the unity of the spirit, but cannot materially be separated from each other or from that unity without losing all their vitality. The distinction of æsthetic criticism from the other forms of criticism, of the history of poetry and the arts from the other kinds of history, is but an empirical one, pointing to the fact that the attention of the critic or historian is turned towards one aspect rather than another of the same indivisible reality.

V. THE PURE CONCEPT[1]

The function of logic in the system--The concept--Logical concepts and conceptual fictions--The pure concept as the unity of distinctions-- Singularity, particularity and universality--The dialectic process in Hegel and in Croce--Opposition, distinction and value--The expressiveness of the concept--Definition and individual judgment: their identity--Classification and numeration--The _a priori_ synthesis.

We have summarily examined in the three preceding chapters the theory of æsthetic, or intuitive, or individual, as distinct from logical, or conceptual, or universal, knowledge. We must now leave the æsthetic activity in the background as the mere antecedent of the logical one, and proceed to investigate the latter.

In a sense it may be said that the key to every system of philosophy is to be found in the either implicit or explicit solution given to certain logical problems and that only by understanding the logic of a philosopher can we be sure to give its true meaning and value to his thought. The reverse is, as a general rule, also true: any solution of a particular problem, any particular elaboration of the concept, when fully understood, will lead us back to the philosopher's logic, to his concept of the concept. The main points of Croce's logic could easily be deduced from his æsthetics; but an untrained mind might unwittingly transpose the whole æsthetic theory on a purely psychological plane, and involve it again in the errors and contradictions of which it aims at being a conclusive refutation. A study of Croce's logic will render such a shifting of the perspective impossible. It will show that a discussion of Croce's æsthetics has no meaning except on the logical plane on which Croce has put it, and that therefore any serious objection to it ought necessarily to imply either a revision of the logical premises, or a demonstration that the actual logical processes are not rigorously in accord with these premises. What is here said of Croce's æsthetics is valid also for Croce's economics or ethics, and the reason is obvious. Croce's _Logica_ is not a manual of logic, in a scholastic and formalistic sense: it is the exposition of his conception of the logical activity, and therefore the philosophy of his philosophy.

This method of approach to the logical problems, although unusual in our times, and antagonistic to the general tendencies of our culture, is not only, as its opponents assume, that of Kant and Hegel, but that of the whole tradition of European philosophy, beginning with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It was only in epochs of philosophical decadence that logic reduced itself to a mere formalism or instrumentalism, ism, to a doctrine of the means of thought, as opposed to its proper function, which is that of inquiring into the nature of thought, and therefore, since there is no way by which we can reach reality except through thought, into the nature of reality itself. To Croce, as before him to Hegel, the philosophical tradition is not a capricious sequel of unrelated speculations, but a series of connected efforts through which the human mind becomes progressively conscious of its own functions and structure. Nothing is more alien from him than that type of philosophical criticism, which exhausts itself in an attempt at reducing under a common denominator apparently similar solutions of problems, which in fact are profoundly different in their historical determination: but this consciousness of the historical factor in philosophy, far from breeding in him a sense of scepticism and of the relativity of truth, impels him to consider every effective thought as a necessary moment of truth, and to represent therefore the succession of effective thoughts, critically separated from what in the various concrete philosophies is merely postulated or imagined, as a perpetual integration of truth. This attitude explains why the immediate foundations of Croce's logic should be Kant's a priori synthesis and Hegel's dialectic, that is, the highest stages of the development of European thought before the positivistic anti-metaphysical reaction which swept away for a time, not the last traces of transcendental metaphysics only, but philosophy and logic itself; and why also, among all the recent critics of Kant and Hegel, Croce should be one of the keenest and sharpest. His sure grasp of fundamentals made it easy for him to demolish all that is artificial and unessential in their systems; as is particularly evident in the case of Hegel, who emerged from Croce's criticism as the discoverer of one great principle and at the same time the creator, through the misapplication of the same principle, of many a false science.

This return to the philosophical tradition, which between the end of the last and the beginning of this century, was not limited to Croce and to Italy only, was accompanied and indirectly favoured by the researches of pure scientists on the method of exact and natural sciences. The economic theory of the scientific concept, such as it appears especially in the works of Mach and Avenarius, and to an understanding of which Croce had been prepared by his own studies on Marxism, was probably the most efficient instrument in destroying from within the pseudo-scientific constructions of positivism. The scientists themselves, by defining the limits of scientific thought, proved the impossibility of building a philosophy which should be at the same time a synthesis of all particular sciences and a system of reality. The conclusions of this new scientific methodology are on the whole accepted by Croce, and the fact that they naturally fall into their proper place in his logic is the most valid justification of his method, to which the distinction between the concept of philosophy and the concepts of the sciences is essential.

We need not point to the object of logic, or concept, as we did in a former chapter to the object of æsthetics, or intuition. The writing of this book implies a belief in its existence, and we could take practically any page of it as an example of what we mean by concept, or logical knowledge. We shall not therefore pause to confute logical scepticism, except by repeating the old argument that it is impossible to deny the existence of the concept except through the formulation of a concept. Such affirmations as that there is no other knowledge than the æsthetic one, or the one which is given by the ineffable intuition of the mystic, or by practical fictions, are in their turn neither æsthetic knowledge nor mystical intuitions, nor practical fictions, but affirmations, however contradictory in themselves, of a universal value and of an absolute character, that is, concepts. Through them, it is possible immediately to distinguish the logical form of knowledge, as represented by such affirmations, from the æsthetic or representative one, from the sentimental or practical state of mind of the mystic, and from those concepts which are mere empirical fictions. It is evident, in this last instance, that the theory of the fiction cannot be a new fiction, but must belong to an activity of a different kind, the logical activity, whose value is truth.

Of those three forms of logical scepticism, æstheticism, mysticism, and empiricism, the third one leads us to the distinction between the logical concept and the scientific concepts, or fictions. The logical or pure concept is beyond all individual representations, and must therefore not contain any particular representative element; but, on the other hand, being the universal as opposed to the individuality of representations, it must refer to all and each of them. If we think, for instance, of the concepts of beauty, truth, quality, development, and such like, it will be impossible for us to represent or imagine a sufficiently large fragment of reality that will exhaust them, or such an infinitesimal one as will not admit them. This is what is meant by saying that the concept is at the same time universal and concrete, or, in other words, that it is transcendent in respect to every single representation, and yet immanent in all of them. A third characteristic of the pure concept, besides those of universality and concreteness, is that of expressivity: being a product of knowledge, it must be expressed and spoken, and cannot be a dumb act of the mind, such as practical acts are.

The conceptual fictions, or, as Croce called them on account of their non-theoretical character, the pseudo-concepts differ from the pure concept in being either concrete and representative but not universal, or universal without any possible reference to individual representations, that is, without concreteness. The first class is that of empirical concepts, which contain some objects or fragments of reality, but not the whole of reality: such as the concepts of house, cat, rose. The second is that of abstract concepts, which contain no object or fragment of reality: such as those of triangle in geometry or of free movement in physics. The first are real, but not rigorous, the second rigorous, but unreal. Neither the ones nor the others can be considered as mistaken concepts or errors, since after having criticised them from a logical point of view, we still continue to use them for what they are; nor as imperfect concepts, and preparatory to the perfect ones, since their formation presupposes the existence of the perfect and rigorous ones: it would be impossible to conceive the house, the rose, the triangle, before conceiving quantity, quality, existence, and other pure concepts. It is true that in the actual development of thought, conceptual fictions have again and again given birth to true concepts; but in that case they have lost their intrinsic nature, and have assumed the characters of the genuine logical activity. In order to understand the proper function or nature of the conceptual fictions, it is necessary to fix our attention on the moment of their formation, which is practical and not logical. Their justification lies in their practical end and in their usefulness: they are instruments by the help of which we can recall with a single word vast groups of representations, or which indicate in a single word what kind of operation is required in order to find certain representations. The act of forming intellectual fictions is neither an act of knowledge nor of not-knowledge; logically, it is neither rational nor irrational (true or untrue); its rationality is of another order, practical and not logical. The activity which produces pure concepts, and that which produces empirical or abstract concepts, have been called respectively Reason and Abstract Intellect, or Intuition and Intellect; to which terminology Croce objects that the word intellect is certainly inappropriate to a non-theoretical activity. Croce himself is in no need of a new name for it, since he considers it one with the general practical activity, will or action.

The definition that we have given of the pure concept seems to clash against an insuperable difficulty arising from the multiplicity of concepts. If the concept is an elaboration of reality as a universal, how can we admit the existence of more than one concept? Beauty and truth are both concrete universals, and yet they are not the same universal: they have the same logical form, but they denote different aspects of reality. If this variety of the concepts, that is, of the aspects of reality, were insuperable, we should fall from the irreducible multiplicity of representations into a not less irreductible multiplicity of concepts, which would in the end justify a new logical scepticism and take us back to a mystical solution of the problem of the unity of reality. The passage from the multiple universals to the true universal would be logically impossible, and to be performed only by the help of some sort of mystical intuition.

The solution of this difficulty has already been hinted at in the discussion of the relations between intuition and concept, and between knowledge and will. The theory of the successive grades of reality, in their progressive implication, is the true form of the concept. Croce affirms the unity of reality, as a consequence of the unity of the concept, of the form through which only reality is known. But if we suppress the distinction, the unity that we reach is an empty and ineffable one: a whole is a whole only inasmuch as it has parts, as it _is_ parts; a unity can be thought only through its distinctions. Therefore the unity and the distinctions are both necessary to the concept: the distinctions are not something outside the concept, but the concept itself, which is a unity of distinctions. The mind or spirit is one, but it is impossible to think of it as a pure and simple unity, outside of the forms in which it realizes itself, and of these forms in their necessary relations. Which is but a more comprehensive way of saying what we have already said speaking of one of those forms in particular, the æsthetic one, that it is impossible to conceive any of them except by determining its relations with the others.

It is necessary, however, not to convert these distinctions of the concept into abstractions: by approximation, and for a practical purpose, we can speak of a given action as a theoretical or practical one, an economic or moral one. In fact, in every fragment of reality we find the universal, and therefore all the forms of the universal. But on the other hand it is impossible to think any concrete datum, and to recognize it as an affirmation of the spirit as a whole, unless we distinguish each of its aspects in the most rigorous fashion. We shall then have a criticism of art and poetry, from the æsthetic point of view; or of philosophy, from the logical one; and a moral judgment which takes into account only the individual moral initiative. The distinctions of the concept are then used as directing principles of thought, but not, in the way empirical concepts are used, as criteria for a classification of objects; nor, again, as characteristics of epochs of actual historical development, which in the end reduce themselves to types of material classification.

Croce's theory of the unity and distinctions of the concept coincides with the old division of concepts into universal, particular, and singular ones. The true logical definition is reached only by determining the singularity of a distinction in relation with the other distinctions (particularity), and with the whole (universality). For instance, the concept of beauty is intuition (singularity), knowledge (particularity), and finally spirit or mind (universality). The symbol corresponding to this peculiar relation is not that of a fine or succession, but of a circle: there is not a first and a last term of the series, a beginning and an end, but a perpetual revolution, in which every distinction in turn may appear as the beginning and the end of the series. Art or philosophy, knowledge or action, may be postulated with equal reason as the end of the spirit: the true end, however, is not any of the particular forms, but only the spirit or mind or reality as a whole.

Readers who are familiar with Hegelian logic will at once perceive the difference between Croce's and Hegel's treatment of logical distinctions. There is no attempt on the part of Croce to apply to them the dialectic process, which pervades the whole of Hegel's philosophy, and which is retained by Croce only in its legitimate sphere which is not that of distinctions but of oppositions. The dialectic process, of which the remote ancestor is Plato, and the more immediate forbears those Renaissance philosophers, Cusanus and Bruno, who more or less obscurely affirmed the _principium coincidentiæ oppositorum_, only with Hegel reaches its rigorous logical expression. The most famous instance of its application is to be found in Hegel's formula of the opposition of being and non-being, and of their unity in the becoming: the pure being is identical with the pure non-being, or, to say the same thing in different words, we cannot think the one without the other, and we do actually think the one and the other when we think the actual reality, which is neither being nor non-being, but becoming. Being and non-being are a true couple of opposites, as ideal and real, positive and negative, value and non-value, activity and passivity, and so on. By the application of the dialectic process, all these couples are shown to be not couples of concepts, but single concepts, each couple containing the affirmation and the negation of a single concept. Croce's criticism of Hegel is founded on an interpretation of the dialectic process as logically valid for such couples only, and inapplicable to the distinctions of the concept, or to empirical and abstract concepts; and this criticism, while emphasizing the importance of Hegel's main contribution to philosophical thought, sweeps away at one stroke all that in his philosophy has generally been considered as most distinctly Hegelian both by his followers and by his adversaries.