Logic as the Science of the Pure ConceptCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept
Croce, Benedetto
Logic
But our theory concerning the indispensability of other predicates in
constituting the judgment is not to be understood as an affirmation
of the necessity that any _other_ predicate of any sort should be
_added_ to the predicate of existence, nor even that _all the others
possible_ should be added to it. In the first case, we shall always
have an unjustifiable duality of predicates: that of existence and
that necessary for essentializing and completing the judgment; in
the second, duality would certainly be avoided, since to constitute
the judgment all the predicates would be necessary, without their
distinction into a double order, and all would be qualitative
predicates; but there would remain the idea of a successive addition
of predicates. Granted this idea, it is impossible ever to understand
what those acts would be, by which the first, or also the second, or
also the third predicate, and so on, should be attributed, without
yet attaining in such attributions the full totality of truth. They
are representations no longer; and not yet judgments: they are then
something insufficient and one-sided, whose existence could not be
admitted save arbitrarily (as in Psychology), and which, therefore,
would be inadmissible in Philosophy. It therefore only remains to
conclude that in the judgment, all possible predicates are _given in
one act_ alone; that is, that the subject is predicated as existence,
and for this very reason determined in a particular way; determined in
a particular way, and for this very reason, as existence.
In other words, the concept which is predicated in the individual
judgment is not and cannot be a fœtus or a sketch of a concept; but is
the whole concept, in its indivisible unity, as universal, particular
and singular. And if existence seem to be a first predicate, the reason
lies perhaps in this, that the concept of existence as actuality and
action, and in its distinction from mere possibility, is perhaps the
fundamental concept of the real, although on the other hand it is not
truly thinkable save as determined in the particular forms of reality;
hence that first predicate is first only in so far as it contains the
last, that is to say, is neither last nor first, but the whole. To
explain these statements is in any case, as has been said, the task of
the whole of Philosophy, not of Logic alone, which here, as elsewhere,
must rest satisfied with demonstrating the point that most closely
concerns it; that is to say, the impossibility of separating from one
another in the judgment, the predicates necessary for the determination
of the reality of the fact, the absence of any one of which renders the
judgment itself impossible.
[Footnote 1: See the _Philosophy of the Practical,_ pt. i. sect. ii.
ch. 6.]
VI
THE INDIVIDUAL PSEUDOCONCEPTS. CLASSIFICATION AND ENUMERATION
[Sidenote: _Individual pseudojudgments._]
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