How Croce Became a Philosopher: To Logic From History by Way of Art

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PUBLISHED:

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

VOLUME 25, NUMBER 1, JANUARY 2008

PLEASE CONSULT PUBLICATION FOR CITATION

HOW CROCE BECAME A PHILOSOPHER: TO LOGIC FROM HISTORY BY WAY OF ART

Brian Copenhaver and Rebecca Copenhaver

I Introduction

In an essay published only recently, Bernard Williams wrote to remedy “the virtual

obliteration” of R.G. Collingwood from the memory of his fellow philosophers.

Although Williams was thinking of Oxford philosophy, the oblivion includes the larger

Anglophone world, and for reasons that Williams stated.1 Before Collingwood became

Gilbert Ryle’s predecessor as Oxford’s Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy,

he was already a distinguished archaeologist and historian – but of Roman Britain, not

philosophy. As Williams explained, Collingwood “was himself a historian, and

unusually – today, unthinkably – worked professionally in both philosophy and in ancient

history.” His Janus talent enabled Collingwood to study “the philosophy of history; the

history of philosophy; and the interpenetration, as he supposed, of the history of thought

and the study of metaphysics. All of this,” Williams pointed out, “was unusual. The

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philosophy of history, because practically no one studied it…. And the interpenetration

of the history of thought and metaphysics, because it was entirely original.”2

Williams noted something else remarkable about Collingwood: his Italian connections

with Guido de Ruggiero, Giovanni Gentile and Benedetto Croce.3 Like Collingwood, all

three Italians were historians; like him, they were also philosophers, in the Italian sense;

and one of them, Croce, is our subject here. From history in general, not just the history

of philosophy, both Croce and Collingwood felt a stimulus that seldom moves

philosophers now writing in English. Both also philosophized about art and about

philosophical method.4 But Croce took a path even more remote than Collingwood’s

from the Anglophone norm, and for that very reason it may be illuminating to retrace his

early steps. Since what is illuminating must also be intelligible, however, we will

examine some of Croce’s key conclusions in light of notions more familiar to analytic

philosophy, after we have described the strange itinerary of his early work.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and despite his eventual political

isolation under Mussolini’s Fascist regime, Croce dominated Italian intellectual culture –

and philosophy with it.5 He was born in 1866 to an upper-class family of Pescasseroli, in

the middle of the peninsula and halfway between Rome and Naples. An adolescent crisis

of faith turned him to history, drama and poetry: to the literary historian and critic,

Francesco De Sanctis; to the playwright, Silvio Pellico; and to the poet, Giosuè Carducci.

While still a liceo student, Croce attended university lectures given in Naples by his

father’s cousin, the pioneering Hegelian, Bertrando Spaventa, thus disobeying his mother,

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who enforced the family’s dislike of the renowned philosopher and his brother Silvio,

himself an important politician and journalist. Catastrophe struck in 1883 when an

earthquake killed Croce’s family and forced him to move to Rome, where he lived and

studied with cousin Silvio.

Rome for Croce was a nightmare of doubt, depression and suicidal impulses until he

enrolled in the University and heard Antonio Labriola lecturing on Johann Friedrich

Herbart’s moral philosophy, in which the young intellectual found a new compass. “I did

philosophy when I was driven by the need to reduce my suffering,” he wrote more than

thirty years later, “and to give some direction to my moral and mental life.” But Croce’s

attraction to Labriola was as much historical as philosophical in this period when he was

“entirely committed to research and scholarship.” Labriola was also the first prominent

Italian philosopher to embrace socialism and theorize about it: perhaps his historical

materialism would make sense of the mass of information that the young scholar had

been acquiring.6

In 1886, Croce moved back to Naples. Then he traveled for five years through Europe

while working methodically on the cultural and political history of that city, making its

story part of the annals of the new Italy, which had become a unified nation only in 1860.

Deep immersion in the records of local Neapolitan history made Croce distrust the

positivism revived by Pasquale Villari in the celebrated essays of 1891 that asked Is

History a Science?7 Although Croce needed history to make politics intelligible, he

could find nothing foundational, nothing responsive to scepticism or relativism, in the

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labor of assembling data. It was this practical disappointment that sent him back to

Labriola and Herbart, and then on to Vico, Windelband, Simmel, Dilthey and other

philosophers of history and historical method. The same research introduced him to the

many Germans who had written or were still writing about aesthetics – always a

provocation to positivists.

The product of Croce’s enormous diet of books was what seemed at the time to be a

philosophical detour from a career in history. “Then, after much hesitation and a series

of provisional solutions,” he tells us, “in February or March of 1893, having thought it

over intensely for a whole day, in the evening I drafted an essay that I titled ‘History

Brought Under the General Concept of Art.’ It was like a revelation of myself to me.”

He delivered his revelation to the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples on March 3, 1893.8

II History Brought Under Art

Croce begins by dividing all cultural production into two domains: science and art. If the

two are mutually exclusive, and if history is not one of them, it must be the other. But the

question framed by this distinction– “is history science or art?” – is vague and has led to

weak answers, the commonest being “that history is science and art all at once.” Only the

recent German thinkers who have philosophized about history have replied in a rigorous

way, maintaining that real history is strictly scientific and must always exclude art.

Science seeks knowledge, art seeks pleasure, and the truly scientific historian will never

confuse the two quests.9

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The notions actually in play are three, however – art, science and history – and Croce

suspects that the experts on history think too narrowly about art and too broadly about

science. Their double error makes them devalue the more popular view, “that history

shares the nature of art.” After all, more than many other disciplines, history is tied to art

– especially to literary art.10 Meditating on his own experience of reading and writing

history, the young mandarin will side with the common folk to refute the German

professors. He will also refute – by snubbing him – Villari, an esteemed Italian historian

and a patriarch of positivism. Although the form of Croce’s question best known to

Italians of the day – Is History a Science? – was the title of Villari’s recent lectures,

Croce takes this formulation to have missed the point by failing to ask about art. He

names Villari only in two footnotes, dismissing him as obtuse and irrelevant.11

A different error confounds other critics who discuss art but suppose that it aims at

pleasure, when its real goal is “producing the Beautiful.” Reaching that lofty goal

requires knowing what the word ‘beautiful’ means. “Heaven save me,” Croce wails,

“from getting into the endless and subtle disquisitions … of aesthetic science,” and then

he plunges into those very disputes on four fronts, against the sensualist who reduces

beauty to pleasure; the rationalist who mistakes it for the True and the Good; the

formalist who detects it in formal relations of pleasure; and the idealist who sees it as the

Idea manifesting itself sensibly.12

Croce is confident that Kant has already put his first two opponents out of action. He

simply decrees that sensualism is French or English pseudo-philosophy, but in passing he

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makes a substantive, prophetic and yet muffled point against rationalism: that the

Beautiful cannot be the same as the True and the Good because among all three items,

“the highest idealities of the human spirit,” the relations that obtain are of distinction, not

identity. Although a footnote tells us that this “triad has become a bit ridiculous,” a cheap

target for “windy philosophers,” it was good enough to hold Croce’s attention for more

than half-a-century, which was long enough for the trio to evolve into a quartet.13 This is

how he described his conception in 1948, four years before he died:

Over the centuries, and as if by consensus of the nations, the highest values, the forms

or categories of reality and the Spirit, were gathered into the triad of the True, the

Good and the Beautiful, which to me seemed integral with a fourth term, the Useful

or the Economic or the Vital or whatever else it should be called.14

Ultimately, among Croce’s four forms of the Spirit, two will be theoretical and two will

be practical, each with its own science.

Aesthetics

Beautiful

Logic

True

Theory

Ethics

Good

Economics

Useful

Practice

Just as ethics and economics will be his practical sciences of the Good and the Useful, so

will logic and aesthetics be his theoretical sciences of the True and the Beautiful.15 But in

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1893, when Croce had yet to make his name by reducing history to art and thereby

confuting the positivists, these grand systematic thoughts were still to come.

Aesthetics was the first of the four sciences to which Croce would give full expression,

and it was aesthetics that would make him famous, first in his Aesthetics as a Science of

Expression and General Linguistics of 1902, preceded by the “Fundamental Theses of an

Aesthetics” of 1900, a sketch prepared for the same home-town academy that published

his “History Brought Under the Concept of Art.”16 Despite its protests against aesthetic

theorizing, that early essay on history and art put Croce on the path to his mature work as

a philosopher, a path that led through art and aesthetics. Naturally, he wanted to clear the

ground and eliminate competitors, the easiest marks being the sensualists and rationalists,

leaving more time for the formalists and idealists.

Croce identifies formalism with followers of Herbart who tried to extend his moral

psychology into a full-blooded aesthetics, and no doubt it was Croce’s teacher Labriola

who taught him to respect Herbart. Croce saw the aesthetics of Herbart’s students as a

mere anomaly, however, contrived and unproductive. Herbart’s rigor and his insights

into the “simplest aesthetic facts” had given him a plausible basis for formalism: although

the primitive elements of music, for example – individual tones – have no aesthetic value

in themselves, such values emerge in their relations to other tones, relations that can be

formalized. But when left to his disciples, according to Croce, Herbart’s promising

starting-points led only to blind alleys.17

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After the demise of sensualism, rationalism and formalism, Hegelian idealism ruled the

day in aesthetics, and Croce took his bearings on aesthetic idealism from the German

Aesthetics of Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), best known for his Philosophy of the

Unconscious, a post-Kantian and Hegelian response to Schopenhauer’s pessimism:

although a blind dynamism drives the world and makes it wretched, Hartman allowed

that beauty, unlike pleasure, may be a remedy.18 Noting that idealism treats “the

Beautiful as the expression of some thing, which in Hegelian terminology is called an

idea,” Croce insisted that this cannot be just the psychological experience of expression

and must be the expression of a content – of a meaning. Formalism is vacuous because

forms without content are empty, and idealism would also be vacuous if – per impossibile

– the idea were detached from its content.19 Objects of aesthetic judgment are beautiful

as tokens of a type – manifestations of an idea or members of a kind – though it is always

the token which is beautiful.

Judging an object to be ugly or beautiful assigns it to a category, so that the Iago who is

repulsive as a moral agent can also be seductive as a dramatic character. But the ideas

that Shakespeare made manifest in his alluring Iagos and Calibans, according to Croce,

are not natural kinds, whose members would be natural individuals with particular

contents. “The ideal – the content that we want to see represented – is simply reality in

general, … [giving rise to] the distinction which, though not at all abstruse, is not easy to

express,” though at this point Croce does not try to express any distinction at all. Instead,

having introduced the notion of representation in the framework of aesthetic idealism, he

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uses it to make a crucial point about history: if art is “a representation of reality, … most

of the reasons … for denying that history is a product of art disappear.”20

Having located the link between history and art in representation, Croce still needs to

answer the critics who would weaken that bond by confining it to the trivial task of

writing good prose, which is possible for prose of any kind, not just the historical.

History is no more an art than any other scientific study expressed in artful words.

Written well or written badly, history is a science, the historians insist, forcing Croce to

ask what a science is.21

Science is not just data or information. Science generalizes data to form concepts. But if

history is a science, what are its distinctively historical concepts? Croce excludes the

concept of development because it belongs to the philosophy of history, not to history.

He then turns to Schopenhauer’s famous distinction between coordination and

subordination, echoed by Burckhardt and others. Science, whose proper object is the

type rather than the token, subordinates individuals under concepts. History, whose

proper object is the token, coordinates individuals in narratives without subordinating

them, which shows that history is not science.22

Croce preferred the psychological variant of Schopenhauer’s point proposed by Moritz

Lazarus (1824-1903), who had also learned from Herbart. Science wants its general laws

to cover all the facts, valuing each fact only insofar as it instantiates a law. Hence,

science abstracts general concepts from particular facts, while history condenses facts

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into concrete representations, searching the facts not for laws but for coherent ensembles

(narratives, for example) of particulars. History wants to tell the whole story, but that

story is nothing general. “I agree entirely with these observations,” Croce declares;

“history has only a single function: to tell the facts…. History narrates.”23

To accept the arguments of Schopenhauer and Lazarus and still call history a science, but

a science unlike other sciences, a descriptive science, is an evasion, Croce charges, noting

that the best novels are full of such descriptive science. But he does not want to

surrender to Schopenhauer’s pessimism or end with other counsels of despair or folly:

such as that the history that cannot be science is therefore useless.24

Is poetry useless because it is not science? Surely not. Croce also takes hope from what

he calls a “philosophy of history,” hastening then to distinguish it from the enterprise –

“that alleged rhythm of ideas” – that had made Hegel famous before he became

notorious. The original version of Croce’s essay is clearer on what the hoped-for

philosophy isn’t than on what it is. Later expansions give only a little help: it is a study

“of problems suggested by the critical examination of history and historical writing, such

as those related to the cognitive development of the historical fact, to the real elements of

history and to the meaning and value of the course of history.” In any case, even if such

an undertaking could become science, history cannot.25

“Now if history is not science, … what is it?” Having put this question to himself, Croce

tries to answer by naming the only two operations of which he deems the human mind

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capable: scientific understanding of what a thing is and artistic imagining of how it

appears. The same item can be an object of both operations: the playwright’s Macbeth,

for example, stands before an audience, while the criminologist’s Macbeth stands before

a court. The scientist explains the murderer’s crimes by bringing them under the abstract

concepts of her science; the playwright represents the same crimes in her concrete art.26

Understood psychologically, representation is the double process of condensation (less

distilled from more) and substitution (one standing for many), a process well known to

historians: think only of Gibbon and his very long story of decline and fall. Think also of

a David painting a Marat or of a Rodin turning the Burghers of Calais into bronze,

evidences of history’s kinship to more arts than the literary ones. Although the modes of

expression – prose, painting, sculpture – that history uses are not distinctive to it, history

has a distinctive content, though discovering it is not a task for aesthetics.27

Since science is better known than history or art, perhaps we should look to science first

for the sort of thing that a content might be. The content of science is everything that

exists, brought under concepts. As for the art that includes history, the failures of

sensualism, rationalism and formalism tell us not to look for its content in pleasure or in

truth and goodness or in form. What remains is idealism and the idea, as studied in

Hegel’s aesthetics, where content is said to be prior to any aesthetic process and also “not

irrelevant.” But surely content is, in some sense, irrelevant to the aesthetic process since

the artist can apply her procedures to many contents. Croce therefore asks “what is it to

which it [content] is not irrelevant?”28

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After this crescendo of questioning, the answer falls flat. We learn (from yet another

German professor) that “aesthetic content is what is of interest, … the whole world of

human interest,” so that the wider the interest, the greater the aesthetic value of the

content, revealing the sense – a very broad sense – in which content is not irrelevant to

aesthetic value. Indeed, content can be graded aesthetically on a scale descending from

the whole human race through classes, nations and religions (no mention of genders or

races) down to individuals. Hence, “the content of art is reality in general,” but differing

interests in various sectors of reality will vary by time, place, perspective and

circumstance, which may rescue Croce from the bathos of his conclusion. Despite the

ultimate generality – analogous to but distinct from the universality of scientific concepts

– of its content, art as actually expressed is tragedy or comedy, landscape or portrait,

temple or forum, which are names not of forms, according to Croce, but of different

contents.29

After Croce shows how various works of art – including works of history – are

distinguished by various contents responding to various interests, we can see at last how

“the product of history is distinguished from other products of art” and, as an unspoken

corollary, how works of history are members of that same family of artistic productions.

What is of distinctly historical interest is not the possible content of poems, paintings,

novels or plays, but the real or actual content of the past. In the way that the actual

belongs to the possible – as the part of the possible that gets realized – so does history

belong to art. But the boundary between the actual and the merely possible also separates

the content of history from the contents of other arts.30

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Croce can now propose a definition of history: “that type of artistic production which

takes what has really happened as the object of its representation.” This definition

establishes the historian’s obligation to exclude the merely imaginary, which for the

historian is a species of the false that all art must abjure. Just as every good artist

carefully observes the world in order to produce honest art, so the historian undertakes

her labors of research, criticism and understanding for a cognate reason. The written

record of her labors, often self-addressed or addressed only to other historians, is

immense, unlike the much smaller mass of finished narratives. The historian’s research

is not history, Croce maintains, for the same reasons that the artist’s notebook is not art.

The only real history is narrative, and fully finished narratives are very few.31

Like the ideal of all art, the ideal of history is hard to achieve – very hard, in fact, seeing

that non-historical art is less vulnerable to accidents of survival and other external

circumstances. Facing their special obstacles, historians are right to condemn the misuse

of non-historical art in history – the substitution of the possible for the real – but there are

no grounds for supposing that history practiced as art must sacrifice rigor or accuracy.

“The corporation of historians” has nothing to fear, according to Croce, from his project

of “bringing history under the general concept of art.”32

III Logic, Metaphysics and the Concept

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Nonetheless, if Croce really means to bring history under art, and if aesthetics is the

philosophy of art, then historians might well ask how Croce expects them to philosophize

distinctively about their craft. A full answer can come only from the higher-order inquiry

that Croce called the Philosophy of Spirit, the first of whose four parts would appear in

the Aesthetics of 1902. The whole colossal project is barely visible in the earlier essay,

where Croce mentions “the highest idealities of the human spirit” or forms of the Spirit.33

After finishing the Aesthetics, Croce moved on to the Logic that he needed to clarify the

character and relations of those forms, the logic that explicates the Concept as the Spirit’s

activity. Croce’s logic, in other words, like Hegel’s logic, is more metaphysical than

what Anglophone philosophers now call ‘logic.’ And Croce found that he needed such a

logic by thinking of history as a kind of art.

In Logic as a Science of the Pure Concept (1908), the second part of his Philosophy of

Spirit, Croce examines Spirit’s two most basic forms: the theoretical and the practical.34

He divides the theoretical form into intuition and concept, a division parallel to individual

and universal. But this is where dividing stops: the forms of intuition and concept are

each indivisible into further forms. The form of intuition, based as it is on the concept of

individuality, divides into no further types or concepts, but rather into tokens or

particulars. The form of concept, based on the concept of the universal, also divides into

no further concepts, but into the various token objects thought by way of concepts.35

Croce then describes a problem that any theory of concepts – what he calls ‘logic’ – must

face: the problem of the manifold or multiplicity of concepts. “Why will there not be as

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many concepts as there are representations,” he asks, “an infinity of them?” To see why

this a problem, we must understand the difference between concepts and representations

on which he insists.36

Consider a particular tiger. We can represent it with any number of representations: a

photograph, a charcoal sketch, an image recalled from memory and so on. Each such

representation is itself a particular. Now consider the class of all tigers. On a standard

empiricist account, we can use any particular representation to represent the tiger class.

The empiricist thereby avoids universals and reduces concepts to particular

representations used to refer universally, an account that also explains the sharing of

concepts. That you use one representation for tigers while I use another causes no

trouble; what we share is the use to which each of us puts our different representations.

The empiricist lets a multiplicity of particular representations stand in for a small set of

shared concepts denoting universals.

But a problem arises. Particular representations are both too indeterminate and too

determinate to do the job. The sketch, for example, omits many features that an

individual tiger must have to qualify as a member of its class: being warm-blooded,

viviparous, and so on. And yet the same sketch shows a definite number of stripes, a

number that will not help us put a tiger in its class. The sketch is also at best

uninformative and at worst misleading about the colors of normal members of the tiger

class. In short, particular representations fail at what the empiricist account asks of them

because their particularity ill suits them to that task: only concepts will do. Concepts,

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unlike particular representations, speak to features that particular representations cannot

capture – essential properties and relations of synonymy, for example – and they are

silent on idiosyncratic features that particular representations cannot exclude.37

It is partly the simplicity of concepts that equips them to do what representations, which

are always complex, cannot do. The simplest concepts are atomic; they are not

themselves complexes of concepts. And complex concepts are composed either of

atomic concepts; or of complex concepts themselves composed of atomic concepts; or of

both. A theory that admits both the atomic and the complex kinds can account for the

number, variety and novelty of concepts by reference to a small number of atomic

concepts under rules of combination. Croce’s objection applies to conceptual atomists,

those who regard all concepts as atomic and deny that any are complex. The atomist

needs enough atomic concepts to cover the number, variety and novelty of all our

experiences – ad infinitum. Croce therefore asks “who could ever say that the concepts

discovered and listed were all the concepts? If there are ten of them, why could there not

be twenty, a hundred, or a hundred thousand, if we took a closer look?”38

Another response to the manifold of experience is the type of atomism (or monism) that

simply denies any multiplicity of concepts and deploys just one – a single, simple, unified

concept. But this solution has its own fatal flaw, according to Croce. Regarding reality

as organic and unified, he agrees that what we think about reality will be prey to

scepticism unless it too has an organic unity. But if this unity is absolute simplicity, he

argues, “the unity obtained thereby is an empty unity.” In fact, the very notion of unity is

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incompatible with absolute simplicity: unity is just the unification of distinct elements,

something not simple but composite.39

Unity cannot not be absolutely simple, then, because it needs what Croce calls distinti –

‘distincts.’ This technical term, for which there is no good English word, is at the heart

of Croce’s logic, where it will be defined (see below) by contrast with the term oppositi,

‘opposites’ in English. Just as an organism depends metaphysically on the physical and

functional operations of the organs that compose it, so too any real and organic unity will

depend metaphysically on the parts that articulate (compose) it. The concept by which

we can think about a unified reality is also a unity, and as such is itself articulated by

distinctions on which the concept depends metaphysically in order to be the concept that

it is.

Because Croce recognizes that his notion of distinction and his use of ‘distincts’ is non-

standard, he warns us not to take his words in the standard way. His point is not that the

components of a unity, were there nothing unifying them, would be logically or

metaphysically distinct – in the usual sense of ‘distinct.’ What Croce has in mind is a

unity exhausted by logical and metaphysical entailments among its components, which,

while they are ‘distincts’ in his sense of the word, are not distinct from one another, or

from the unity that they constitute, in the standard sense of ‘distinct.’40

Distincts (like opposites) are plural in number, but that does not mean that we can

classify them as numerically finite or infinite. When we speak of a numerical series as

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finite or infinite, according to Croce, we do not have in mind that its members stand to

one another as distincts. In particular, they are not related by the mutual entailments that

unify distincts. Concepts that are distincts constitute a unity or a whole just because they

are not distinct in the standard way. To regard concepts both as distincts and as

numerically finite or infinite would be a category-mistake about relations. Relations

among distinct concepts belong to a category of relation not well characterized by

number. Speaking of such concepts, Croce explains that “their arrangement is necessary

because they imply one another reciprocally, meaning that we definitely do not apply the

determination of finite number to them because number is entirely incapable of

expressing such a relation.”41

Croce’s theory is a concept holism.42 Distinct concepts are individuated, in part, by the

positions that they occupy in a logical space – positions relative to positions occupied by

other distinct concepts that, jointly with them, entail the unity composed of all distinct

concepts. Whether a distinct concept is singular, universal or particular depends on the

level of analysis of the relations that it enters into. As the sole occupant of the place it

occupies in logical space, a distinct concept is regarded as a universal concept. As

having a determinate relation with some one other concept, it is regarded as particular.

And as exhausted by its position in logical space – such that nothing over and above that

position makes it the concept that it is – it is regarded as singular. Universality,

particularity and singularity thus arise at different levels of analysis rather than as

differences among distinct concepts themselves.43

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These three levels of analysis give Croce’s logic its account of definition. To define a

concept completely is to make it explicit at all three levels of analysis: we must analyze a

distinct concept in terms of (i) its unique relation to the whole unity of distinct concepts

(universality); (ii) its individual relations to other distinct concepts (particularity); and

(iii) the position in logical space that exhausts it (singularity). A complete definition of a

concept, one that analyzes the concept at all three levels, would give a full account of the

nature of the concept.44

From the claim that distinct concepts are universal, particular and singular all at once,

Croce derives his key distinction between universal and abstract concepts. Abstract

concepts, he claims, are not pure logical concepts; they are a species of what he calls

pseudo-concepts – artifacts of treating distinct concepts in a way inconsistent with

conceptual holism, as though they were individuated by something other than their

positions and relations in logical space. That something other might be an internal

structure or a method of verification or necessary and sufficient conditions and so on.45

Nonetheless, Croce recognizes that viewing concepts in terms of such features can be

useful, so long as we do not confuse that utility with genuine logical analysis. We can

treat concepts as identical, for example, by ignoring their holistic environment and seeing

them as individuated by their extensions. On such a treatment, TRIANGLE and

TRILATERAL will be the same concept. So too, by ignoring the holism of distinct

concepts, we can speak of concepts as simple and complex, primitive and derivative,

abstract and empirical and so on – useful fictions, perhaps. Although a non-holistic

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treatment of concepts is not real logical analysis, it might produce a useful taxonomy, for

example, by placing concepts in a classification for heuristic purposes. Abstract concepts

make up such classifications: taxonomically, we can regard the concepts of scalene,

isosceles and equilateral triangles as three species of the genus triangle, taken abstractly.

But such a taxonomy can only ever describe, for heuristic purposes; it cannot analyze

concepts logically or fully explain their nature.46

As already mentioned, the complement of distincts in Croce’s logic is opposites, which

can never be identified with or reduced to distincts. Recall, for example, that two forms

of the Spirit are the theoretical and the practical, whose concepts are indeed distinct, in

Croce’s sense. The Spirit depends metaphysically on each and on both together for its

organic unity. But the concepts of the theoretical and practical are not opposites. The

opposite of practical activity is practical inactivity, not theoretical activity.

If we were deceived by pseudo-concepts, we might be tempted to regard opposites or

contraries of concepts as genuine concepts that form a unity of their own, mirroring the

unity of distinct concepts. On such a view, BEAUTY, TRUTH and UTILITY would be

distinct concepts in a unity organically dependent upon them, while UGLINESS, FALSITY,

and USELESSNESS would be opposite or contrary but also distinct concepts in a mirroring

unity dependent upon them, in just the same way that the mirrored unity depends upon

BEAUTY, TRUTH and UTILITY.47

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But treating opposites as distincts forming their own mirroring unities is heuristically

fruitless at the level of pseudo-logic and incorrect at the level of genuine logic. At the

level of pseudo-logic, to use Croce’s example, no useful taxonomy would deploy the

opposites living and dead to divide the genus dog into two species, living dogs and dead

dogs, or the opposites moral and immoral to divide the genus moral person into two

species, moral and immoral persons. Even at the level of pseudo-concepts, opposites are

not usefully treated as real items requiring inclusion in a classificatory system.48

For the purpose of genuine logical analysis, however, BEAUTY, TRUTH and UTILITY are

authentically distinct concepts individuated by their positions and relations in the organic

unity of logical space. But UGLINESS, FALSITY, and USELESSNESS do not belong to this or

any other unity: they are not real. Indeed, because they are not real, UGLINESS, FALSITY,

and USELESSNESS cannot be members of this unity.

For example, if we specify individuation conditions for BEAUTY and TRUTH, we find that

two such conditions are that BEAUTY negates or rules out UGLINESS and that GOOD

likewise negates EVIL. Strictly (logically) speaking, there are no evil deeds or false

thoughts. When we speak in this looser way, we use abstract pseudo-concepts. If you act

and your act is not good, it does not follow that you have done evil; there is no distinct

concept, EVIL, that characterizes your deed logically; rather, your act was useful, or

differently characterizable by a real, distinct concept like UTILITY. In other words, the

deed that we loosely call ‘evil’ is characterized logically by distinct concepts that are part

of the same unity in which GOOD also plays an irreducible logical role.49

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“The person who commits an evil action,” Croce explains,

if he is really doing something, surely does not commit an evil action but performs an

act useful to him. The person who would think the false thought, if he is

accomplishing anything real, does not think the false thought – indeed does not think

at all – but rather goes on living and providing for his own comfort, or generally for

the benefit that presses on him at that instant. Thus we see that opposites, when taken

as distinct moments, are no longer opposed, but now distinct.50

Croce’s doctrine that the opposites of distinct concepts are not themselves distinct

concepts will play a crucial role in his criticism of Hegelian logic, which he regards as

violating this rule. Hegel’s dialectic is committed, he argues, to opposition-in-unity – a

single unity including distinct concepts which are also opposites.51 Croce regards this as

a straightforward logical contradiction. He claims, for example, that BEAUTY negates –

rules out – UGLINESS. Now recall that what makes a distinct concept distinct is its

location and its relations in a logical space unified by BEAUTY along with all other

distinct concepts, like TRUTH and UTILITY. In that case, a unity that includes the concept

BEAUTY cannot include any concept which, like UGLINESS, is ruled out by BEAUTY.52

Nonetheless, and on Croce’s view, there is a sense in which opposites of distinct concepts

are themselves distinct concepts, in addition to the sense, just described, in which they

are not. If the opposite of GOOD is EVIL, then that abstract pseudo-concept, EVIL, is not a

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distinct concept. But if, with Croce, we regard USEFUL – or another concept within the

unity where GOOD necessarily occupies its logical place – as the opposite of GOOD, then

the opposite of GOOD is a distinct concept.

Recall that complete logical analysis of a concept requires making it explicit at all three

levels of analysis: (i) the position in logical space that exhausts it conceptually; (ii) its

unique relation to the whole unity of distinct concepts; and (iii) its individual relations to

other distinct concepts. Thinking is just making concepts explicit in this way. But for

purely heuristic purposes, says Croce, we can capture the notion of thinking by appealing

to a law that he calls “the principle of identity and contradiction … that A is A (unity)

and A is not B (distinction).”53 Since Croce wants this law (Lc) to capture his theory of

unity in distinction, we should read its central connective (“and”) not as a conjunction but

as a logical conditional. “A is not B” is a necessary condition of “A is A” in that A’s

identity with A requires A and B to be distinct in Croce’s sense of ‘distinct.’ But Croce

warns that his law is just heuristic; it does not really govern thinking. At best, it helps us

find a description of thinking.

Croce contrasts his own law of identity and contradiction (Lc), which is fine as far as it

goes, with a different law (Ld) that expresses the doctrine of opposition in unity that he

rejects. One might think that Croce’s law (Lc), ‘A is A entails that A is not B,’ is

equivalent to Lo, “A is A alone and definitely not not-A, its opposite, as well.” Yet,

Croce insists, it is not just that the two laws are not equivalent: Lo is actually “a

perversion of the principle of identity and contradiction.”54

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Resisting that perversion, some thinkers – Croce is thinking of Hegel – have proposed yet

another, dialectical principle (Ld): “A is at the same time not-A.” While Croce agrees

that Lo must be resisted, resistance by way of Ld, by the dialectical claim that everything

is contradicted in itself, only obscures the theory of unity in distinction and nullifies the

key doctrine that opposites of distinct concepts are not themselves distinct. Because the

unity of distincts is holistic, the infinity of relations among distincts is a closed system of

mutual logical and metaphysical entailments. By contrast, if we adopt Ld, “the eternal

law of opposition,” we are committed to Hegel’s “bad infinity,” an open infinite series:

“it would be necessary for the thinking that negates the intuition to be negated in turn,

and for the negation to be negated again and so on to infinity.”55

Finally, although the dialectical principle (Ld) is more destructive of Croce’s aims than

the principle of identity and contradiction (Lc), he regards even the latter as a mere device

for expressing an activity – thinking – whose nature just cannot be adequately expressed

by principles. Thinking is not governed by rules or laws; it does not represent truths or

facts; it is not representation. Rather, thinking is making truths explicit by conceiving of

them in their singularity, universality and particularity.56

IV Conclusion

The book in which Croce tried to work these problems out, his Logic of 1908, quickly

found a skilled translator, Douglas Ainslie, who turned it into English within a decade.57

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The same is true of many of his major philosophical works, which have had enormous

influence, and not just in Italy: in fact, a new English version of the Aesthetics, replacing

Ainslie’s 1909 text, appeared in 1992, and Amazon will take you to other titles by Croce

still in print in English.58 Meanwhile, a new edizione nazionale of Croce’s complete

works is underway in Italy, giving readers a clearer path through the vast jungle of his

publications, and this editorial effort is grounded in a robust exegetical and critical

literature in Italian.59 Since Croce is Italy’s greatest philosopher after Vico, the new

attention now being paid to him in Italy is well deserved, and it ought to enlarge his

audience in the Anglophone world as well.

Although few Anglo-American philosophers will have found themselves setting any

course like Croce’s path to logic – or even to metaphysics – by way of history and

aesthetics, we hope that our contemporaries might see how approaches well known to

them – looking at Croce’s logic as a concept holism, for example – can illuminate this

great but remote monument of Italian philosophy and make what is strange in it more

accessible. This, we hope, is in the spirit of another remark by Bernard Williams,

alluding to Nietzsche, about giving “a philosophical point to writing historically about

philosophy. That point is … to be found in … the past philosophy’s being untimely, and

helping to make strange what is familiar in our own assumptions.”60

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1Bernard Williams “An Essay on Collingwood,” in The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of

Philosophy, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 341, though the number

of Collingwood’s books in print suggests that someone, perhaps not philosophers, still reads them; see

Robin George Collingwood The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958);

Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); The New Leviathan: On Man, Society and

Civilization, ed. D. Boucher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); The Idea of History, with

Lectures 1926-28, ed. W. J. Van Der Dussen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); The Principles of

History and Other Writings in Philosophy of History, ed. W.H. Dray and W.J. Van Der Dussen (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2001); An Essay on Metaphysics, ed. R. Martin (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2002); The Idea of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); An Essay on Philosophical

Method, ed. J. Connelly and G. D’Oro (New York: Oxford University Press). For recent work on

Collingwood, see David Boucher, The Social and Political Thought of R. G. Collingwood, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989); Gary Browning, Rethinking R. G. Collingwood, (New York: Palgrave,

2004); Giuseppina D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (New York: Routledge, 2002);

William H. Dray, History as Re-enactment: R. G. Collingwood’s Idea of History (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1996); Stein Helgeby, Action as History: The Historical Thought of R.G. Collingwood

(Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2004); Lionel Rubinoff, Collingwood and the Reform of Metaphysics: A Study

in the Philosophy of Mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970); W.J. Van der Dussen, History as a

Science: The Philosophy of R.G. Collingwood (New York: Springer, 2002). All translations from Italian

and other languages are ours unless otherwise noted.

2Williams, “Collingwood,” pp. 341-2.

3For De Ruggiero and Gentile see Gennaro Sasso, “Ricordo di Guido de Ruggiero,” in Filosofia e

idealismo, IV: Paralipomeni (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2000), pp. 199-214 and Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile:

Una biografia (Florence: Giunti, 1995); for Croce, below, n. 5.

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4Collingwood, Principles of Art; Philosophical Method; Croce, “Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della

filosofia di Hegel,” in Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia della filosofia, ed. A. Savorelli

(Naples: Bibliopolis, 2006), I, 11-29; and below, nn. 8, 16.

5The literature in Italian on Croce’s life and thought is abundant; for some recent works, see Emilio Agazzi,

Il Giovane Croce e il marxismo (Torino: Einaudi. 1962); Sasso, Filosofia e idealismo, I: Benedetto Croce

(Naples: Biblipolis, 1994); Paolo Bonetti, Introduzione a Croce (Bari: Laterza, 2001), Giuseppe Galasso,

Croce e lo spirito del suo tempo (Bari: Laterza), 2002); Salvatore Cingari, Benedetto Croce e la crisi della

civiltà europea (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003).

6Croce, Contributo alla critica di me stesso, ed. G. Galasso (Milan: Adelphi, 2000), pp. 26-7; An

Autobiography, translated from the Italian by R.G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) is

Collingwood’s translation of this autobiography. For Herbart and Labriola, see Renato Petoello,

Introduzione a Herbart (Bari: Laterza, 1988) and Stefano Poggi, Introduzione a Labriola (Bari: Laterza,

1981).

7Pasquale Villari, Teoria e filosofia della storia, ed. M. Martirano (Rome: Riuniti, 1999); La Storia è una

scienza? ed. M. Martirano (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1999); Antonio Santucci, ): “Positivismo e

cultura positivistica: problemi vecchi e nuovi,” in Eredi del Positivismo: Ricerche sulla filosofia italiana

fra ’800 e ’900 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996).

8Croce, Contributo, p. 31; the original version of the essay, followed here, is Croce, “La Storia ridotta sotto

il concetto generale dell’arte,” Atti della Accademia Pontaniana, 23 (1893), 1-32; the final revision appears

in Croce, Primi Saggi (3rd ed.; Bari: Laterza, 1951).

9Croce “Storia,”, pp. 1-2; Ernst Bernheim, Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (Leipzig: Duncker und

Humblot) (1889); Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik: historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Peter Leyh

(Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 1977); Heinrich Ullmann, “Über die wissenschaftliche

Geschichtsdarstellung,” Historische Zeitschrift, 4 (1885), 42-54.

10Croce “Storia,”, pp. 2-4.

11Croce “Storia,”, pp. 4, 18; above, n. 7.


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14Croce, “Filosofia e sua logica,” in Filosofia e storiografia, ed. Stefano Maschietti (Naples: Bibliopolis,

2005), p. 24.

15Galasso, Croce, pp. 150-7.

16Croce, “Tesi fondamentali di un’estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale,” Atti della

Accademia Pontaniana, 30 (1900), 1-118; Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale

(Milan: 1902); Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. D. Ainslie (New York:

Noonday, 1956).

17Croce “Storia,”, pp. 6-7; Robert Zimmermann, Geschichte der Aesthetik als philosophischer Wissenschaft

(Vienna: Braumüller, 1858); “Zur Reform der Aesthetik als exacter Wissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für exacte

Philosophie, 2 (1862-3), 309-58; 4 (1864), 199-206; Josef W. Nahlowsky, “Aesthetisch-kritisch

Streifzüge,” Zeitschrift für exacte Philosophie, 3 (1863), 384-440, 4 (1863), 26-63; above, n. 6.

18Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten (Berlin: Duncker, 1878); Ausgewählte Werke, III:

Aesthetik, 1: Die deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant; IV: Aesthetik, 2: Philosophie des Schönen (Leipzig:

Friedrich, 1886).



21Croce “Storia,”, p. 11.

22Croce “Storia,”, pp. 11-12; Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt as Wille und Vorstellung (3rd ed.; Leipzig:

Brockhaus, 1859), II, 500-1 (3.38); Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,

1979), p. 32.

23Croce “Storia,”, pp. 12-13; Moritz Lazarus, Über die Ideen in der Geschichte: Rectoratsrede am 14

November 1863 in der Aula der Hochschule zu Bern (Berlin: Dümmler, 1865).

24Croce “Storia,”, pp. 13-15, criticizing the scientism and pessimism in Henry Buckle, History of

Civilization in England (London: Parker; 1857); Melchiorre Delfico, Pensieri sulla storia e su la incertezza

ed inutilità della medesima (3rd ed.; Naples: Agnello Nobile, 1814), Wilhelm Wundt, “Über Ziele und

Wege der Völkerpsychologie,” Philosophische Studien 4 (1888); and Ludwig Gumplovicz, Der

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Rassenkampf: Sociologische Untersuchungen (Innsbruck: Wagner’schen Universität-Buchhandlung, 1883)

while siding with Georg Simmel, Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie: Eine erkenntnistheoretische

Studie (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot) (1892).

25Croce “Storia,”, p. 15; cf. Primi saggi, pp. 21-2.

26Croce “Storia,”, p. 16.

27Croce “Storia,”, pp. 17-21, citing Lazarus, Rectoratsrede, on condensation and substitution and then

criticizing Droysen, Historik; Schopenhauer, Welt; and William Lecky, History of the Rise and Influence of

the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (London: Longman, 1865).


29Croce “Storia,”, pp. 23-4; Karl Köstlin, Aesthetik (Tübingen: 1869), pp. 53-62 (1.2.2).




33Above, nn. 13-15.

34Croce, Logica come scienza del concetto puro (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1996), of which Logic as the Science

of the Pure Concept, trans. D. Ainslie (London: MacMillan, 1917) is an English translation of the original

edition of 1908.

35Croce, Logica, pp. 72-3.

36Croce, Logica, p. 74.

37The example of the tiger is adapted from Dennett, Daniel (1969): Content and Consciousness (London:

Routledge). The problem arises most clearly in the case of images, but as Dennett notes, it arises equally

well for cases in which the representation has propositional form. For example, both the classical theory of

concepts and the prototype and exemplar theories of concepts face this problem. For an overview of

theories of concepts, see Laurence, Stephen and Margolis, Eric (1999): “Concepts and Cognitive Science,”

in Concepts: Core Readings, ed. Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 3-81.



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42The two main contemporary proponents of concept holism are Quine, (Quine, W.V.O. (1951), "Two

dogmas of empiricism", Philosophical Review, 60, 20-43) and Davidson, (Davidson, Donald (1984),

Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon). For a discussion and criticism of concept

holism, see Fodor, Jerry and Ernest Lepore (1992), Holism: A Shopper’s Guide (Oxford: Blackwell).















57Above, n. 34.

58Croce (1992).

59Croce, Logica; “Filosofia e sua logica”; and “Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel,” in

Saggio sullo Hegel seguito da altri scritti di storia della filosofia, ed. A. Savorelli (Naples: Bibliopolis,

2006), I, 11-145 are from the new edizione nazionale; for the immense literature on Croce, see the

bibliographies in Sasso, Idealismo; Bonetti, Croce; Galasso, Croce; and Cingari, Croce.

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60“David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” the first of Nietzsche’s “untimely” (unzeitgemässe) essays

that date to 1873-6, bears as much on Williams’s point as the second, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of

History for Life.” The latter, despite its remarkable anticipations of his own 1893 essay, Croce seems not

to have known. Nietzsche calls his second essay “untimely, because I am here attempting to look afresh at

something of which our time is rightly proud … as being … a defect”: Williams, ): “Descartes and the

Historiography of Philosophy,” in The Sense of the Past, pp. 261, 263; Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely

Meditations, ed. D. Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.

vii, xliv-vii, 55-60.

How Croce Became a Philosopher: To Logic From History by Way of Art

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