Logic as the Science of the Pure ConceptCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept
Croce, Benedetto
Logic
On the other hand, there was in Socrates only the consciousness of
the universal still indefinite and vague; in Plato there appeared
for the first time the consciousness of the true character of the
universal, and so of its distinction from empirical universals; and
in Aristotle this enquiry gave important results. The problem of the
nature of the concept became, then and afterwards, interwoven with
that other problem of the transcendence or immanence of the concepts;
but since, notwithstanding many points of contact, the two problems
cannot be completely identified, they must not be confounded. Indeed,
the problem of the transcendence or immanence of the universals is
reducible to the more general problem of the relation between values
and facts, the ideal and the real, what ought to be and what is;
whereas the other, concerning the nature of the universals, centres
upon the distinction between universals that are truly logical, and
pseudological universals, and upon the greater or less admissibility
of one or the other or of both, and so upon their mode of relation.
The point of contact between the two problems lies in this, that where
pure and real universals are denied and only arbitrary and nominal
universals allowed to subsist, the question of the immanence or
transcendence of the universals also disappears. And as to the first
problem and the polemic of Aristotle against Plato concerning the
ideas, it has appeared to some critics (to Zeller and others) that
Aristotle misunderstood his master and invented an error that Plato
had never maintained, or attacked merely certain gross expositions of
doctrine which were current in some Platonic school. To others again
(to Lotze, for instance), it has seemed that Aristotle thought this
problem, at bottom, in the same way as Plato, who by placing the ideas
in a hyper-Uranian space, in a super-world or a super-heaven, thus
came to refuse to them that reality which Aristotle himself refused
to them and to consider them as _values,_ not as _beings;_ although
Greek linguistic usage prevented Plato from expressing the difference,
just as it prevented Aristotle from expressing the same thing, when it
led him to describe genera as "second substances" (δεύτεραι οὺσίαι).
However, as regards the first interpretation, it certainly seems to
us that it is impossible to raise doubts about such a document as
the testimony of Aristotle[4] by means of such frequently uncertain
documents as the Platonic dialogues. And as regards the second
interpretation, it seems to us that it does not so much purge Plato
of the vice of transcendence as convict his adversary also of sharing
that vice. On this point the opposition of Aristotle to his predecessor
does not coincide with that of modern nominalism and empiricism to
philosophic idealism, for the former sets in question the truth of the
concept itself. Aristotle denied this truth as little as Plato; indeed
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