Chapter III: Logic and the Doctrine of the Categories

[Sidenote: _The demand for a complete table of the categories._]

When the definition of the _a priori_ synthesis and of the category has been attained, it is usual to demand of logical Science (and this will be demanded also of our exposition) that it should say how many and of what sort are the categories, how they are connected among themselves, _i.e._ that it should draw up a _table_ of them.

[Sidenote: _A request extraneous to Logic. Logical and real categories._]

Logic, in our opinion, should reject this demand, the origin of which lies in the confusion between thought in general and thought as the science of thought. The categories are certainly affirmed in the individual judgment, but Logic, as the science of thought, does not undertake to formulate judgments which will say what are the predicable terms, the ultimate or pure concepts, the categories, with which reality is thought. Logic cannot claim to substitute itself for the other philosophic sciences and itself to solve all the problems which offer themselves to thought as to the nature of reality. Its scope is to define categories and to formulate judgments _only on that aspect of Reality, which is logical thought._ It is, therefore, under the obligation to face the question as to whether there be logical categories, supreme concepts or supreme predicables from the point of view of logic, and if there be, to indicate and to deduce them. It is not obliged to indicate and to deduce all the supreme predicables and categories.

[Sidenote: _The uniqueness of the logical category: the concept._]

Now we have already treated of the question as to the categories of Logic and have solved it, partly affirmatively, partly in the negative. That is to say, we have denied to Logic a multiplicity of categories, since the three fundamental categories, usually given as concept, judgment, and syllogism, have been revealed to be identical. The others, derived from formalist Logic and relating to classes of concepts, to forms of judgments and to figures of the syllogism (and even these three preceding, if they are taken as separable or distinguishable), have been shown to be empirical and arbitrary. Finally, those that were based upon the gnoseology of the pseudoconcepts have shown themselves to be extraneous to pure Logic. On the other hand, we have affirmed the category proper to Logic,--the unique category to which it gives rise. It has been defined as the pure concept, at once judgment of definition and individual judgment, the logical _a priori_ synthesis. Thus the enquiry can be looked upon as exhaustive as regards this part of the subject.

[Sidenote: _The other categories. No longer logical, but real. Systems of categories._]

A glance at the tables of categories that have appeared in the course of the history of philosophy, from that of Aristotle, which is the first, at least among the conspicuous, to that of Stuart Mill, or if it be preferred, to the Kategorienlehre of E. von Hartmann, which is the last, or among the last, shows at once that the other categories, which have been described as logical categories, can be reduced to verbal variants of this unique one of the pure concept, or belong to other aspects of the spirit and of reality, as distinct from that of logical thought. For if in the Aristotelian table the _ousia_ and the _poion,_ substance and quality, to some extent denote the subject and the predicate of the judgment, that is to say, the abstract elements of the _a priori_ synthesis: the _poson,_ on the other hand, appeals to the processes of enumeration and of measurement, the _pou_ and the _poté_ to the determination of space and time, the _poiein_ and the _paschein_ to the principles of practical activity, and so on. The Kantian table seems to refer, or to mean to refer, to logical thought; but that does not prevent the appearance in it of traces of the principles of mathematical, naturalistic, heuristic, and other processes. Furthermore, in the Kantian philosophy, the whole system of the categories is to be deduced, not from the transcendental Logic alone, but also from the transcendental Æsthetic (space and time), and from the Critique of Practical Reason and Judgment, which all lead to functions or forms, operating as spiritual syntheses and reappearing as categories in judgments. Finally, we must not neglect the Kantian metaphysical categories of Physics.

[Sidenote: _The Hegelian system of the categories and other later systems._]

All this becomes clearer in the doctrine of Hegel, where the categories are not only those of logical thought or subjective thought, concept, judgment, syllogism; but also those of quality, quantity and measure, essence, phenomenon and reality, with their subforms and transitions, and those of the objective concept, mechanism, chemism, and teleology, and those of the Idea, life, knowing, and the absolute Idea. The Hegelian, Kuno Fischer, makes certain declarations in his _Logic_ to which it is expedient to give heed. Following the example of the master, he was induced to include knowing and willing among the categories; "It may at first sight seem strange (he says), that knowing and willing should appear here as logico-metaphysical concepts, as categories. Knowledge has need of categories; but is knowledge itself a category? Willing belongs to Psychology and Morality, not to Logic and Metaphysic. It seems, then, that the categories lose themselves now in Physics or Physiology, by means of concepts such as those of mechanism and organism, now in Psychology and Ethics, with the concepts of knowing and of willing. Objections of this sort have often been made. We have shown that the concept must be thought as object, and that the concept of object demands that of mechanism: the justification of the thing resides in this proof. Willing and knowing are indeed categories. If the test, by which we recognize the categories, consists in that they are valid, not only for certain objects, but for all, and in that they should express the universal nature of things, it is not difficult to see in what a profoundly significant way knowing and willing emerge triumphantly from such a test. They belong not only to what are called the faculties of the human spirit, but in truth to the _very conditions of the world._ If the world must be understood as end it must also be understood as willing; for the end without the willing is nothing. ... If knowing and willing were only a small human province of the world, they would certainly not be categories. Their concept would belong not to metaphysic, but to the anthropological sciences. Since they are, on the contrary, both of them cosmic principles, universal concepts, without which the concept of objects and of the world cannot be thoroughly thought and known, for that reason they necessarily have the value of categories. And since, in truth, they compose the concept of the world, they are the supreme categories."[1] This argument amounts to saying, that whenever a concept is truly universal (not restricted to this or that class of manifestations of reality and therefore empirical), whenever a concept is a pure concept, it is always a category. This thesis is most exact, but it amounts to excluding such a search from pure Logic, which does not give the concepts or concept of reality, but only the _concept of the concept._ The attempt of Hegel to embrace the totality of the categories was not understood and was abandoned at a later date, and a return was made in some sort to the categories of the theoretic and practical--theoretic spirit alone--(von Hartmann gives them in his fundamental tripartition of the categories into sensibility, reflective thought and speculative thought). But the tendency to totality reappeared, in an elementary form, in Stuart Mill, who opposed to the Aristotelian table his own, divided into the three classes of _sentiments_ (sensations, thoughts, emotions, volitions), of _substances_ (bodies and spirits), and of _attributes_ (quality, relation, quantity): a vertiginous regression to an infantile conception, which yet sought to embrace in its own way the whole of reality.

[Sidenote: _The logical order of the predicates or categories._]

The doctrine of the categories has been introduced and retained in Logic, not only because of the confusion between the thought of thought and thought in general, which has just been explained, but also because of another confusion, which must now be explained, as it has far deeper roots and far greater importance. It has been and may be argued in this way. It is true that the categories are nothing but simply the concepts of reality; but these concepts, acting as predicates, are presented in logic in a necessary order, which it is the task of logical Science to deduce. In determining reality by means of thought, we begin with a first predicate, for instance _being,_ judging that reality is. This judgment immediately shows itself insufficient, whence it becomes necessary to determine it with a second predicate and to judge that reality both is and is not, or is _becoming._ This predicate of becoming appears in its turn vague and abstract, and it becomes necessary to determine reality as _quality,_ then as _quantity, measure, essence, existence, mechanism, teleology, life, reflexion, will, idea,_ in short with all the predicates that exhaust the concept of reality.

[Sidenote: _Illusion as to the logical reality of this order._]

But we know that this order, this supposed succession, is illusory and is simply the product of abstract analysis. In the predicate to which verbal prominence is given, there is concentrated or understood every predicate, because in every judgment complete reality[2] is predicated of the subject. Moreover this is shown just by the observation, which reveals the insufficiency of an isolated and abstract predicate, and requires for sufficiency nothing less than the totality of the predicates, the full concept of the Real, of the Spirit or of the Idea. The concept of Reality, of Spirit or the Idea, can without doubt be developed, in its unity and in its distinctions; but (let us yet again repeat) logical Science has for its object, not the effective unity and distinction of the Real, but the _concept_ of unity and distinction..

[Sidenote: _The necessity of the order of the predicates, not founded in Logic in particular, but in the whole of Philosophy._]

The ordering of the variety of the predicates, their gradation according to their greater or less adequacy to reality, arises from the fact that disputes as to reality show themselves as one-sided affirmations of this or that predicate or group of predicates, coupled with the neglect or negation of others, which are not less indispensable. When, therefore, we attack such one-sidedness and affirm the complete indivisibility of the predicates, the single predicates, the objects of the one-sided affirmations, are scrutinized one after the other, in order to demonstrate their insufficiency, and for this very reason a certain order is given to them. This order is, without doubt, necessary, because the possibility of errors, or of one-sided thoughts, is a consequence of the distinctions, in which the unity of the Real lives, and which are necessary to it. But for this very reason the order must be sought, not in logical Science, but in the total conception of Reality. For instance, in researches concerning the ethical concept, only he who thinks, not the concept of the concept (logical science), but the concept of ethical activity (ethical science), will be able to determine what one-sided concepts are there possible and what is their order. Only he who thinks a whole philosophy will be able to determine how many and what and how connected are the one-sided and erroneous modes of philosophy. This cannot be found in the concept of the concept; or rather only those erroneous modes are there found which derive from a one-sided thinking of the concept of the concept. This we shall see in its place. The order of the categories in the sense indicated is certainly not subjective and arbitrary, as a didactic ordering of them would be, a _πρότερον prὸs ἡμᾶς_; it is a _πρότερον φύσει._ But since this first by nature is identical with the whole concept of Reality, it is not wholly contained in the concept of Logic.

[Sidenote: _False distinction of philosophy into two spheres, Metaphysic and Philosophy, rational philosophy and real philosophy, etc., due to the confusion between Logic and doctrine of the categories._]

If the confusion between Logic and the Doctrine of the Categories, or between the thinking of the logical category and the thinking of the other categories, had produced no other effect than that of introducing into books of Logic a method of treatment that exceeds their bounds, the evil would not be great. It would chiefly affect literary harmony and clarity of didactic exposition. But from that confusion there has sometimes as _rational Philosophy and real Philosophy,_ sometimes as _Gnoseology and Anthropology (or Cosmology,)_ sometimes as _Logic and System of Philosophy,_ and so on. The conception of Reality is thus twice described: once as part of Logic (the Doctrine of the Categories, Ontology, etc.); and again as effective or applied Philosophy. Philosophy is divided into a Prologue to Philosophy and Philosophy, or into Philosophy and a Conclusion to Philosophy. But Philosophy, although it is distinguishable into philosophies (for example, Æsthetic, Logic, Economic and Ethic), _is this distinction itself,_ or the unity immanent in it. It never gives rise to a duality of grades. It is never prologue, development and conclusion, being, at its every point, prologue, development and conclusion. As from empirical and formalist Logic arose the idea of a Logic which should not be philosophy, but an organ or instrument or rule or law for the rest of philosophy; so from the confusion of Logic with the Doctrine of the Categories has arisen the idea of a Logic, or Metaphysic, or general Philosophy, or whatever else it may be called, which should be _opposed to or above_ the rest of philosophy. But the Science of thought, Logic, is at once thought and effective philosophy; it is thought itself which in thinking the Real, thinks itself and places itself, as logical Science, in the place which belongs to it in the system of the Real.

[Sidenote: _Philosophy and pure logic: overcoming of the duality._]

It may seem that in this way thought and reality are again divided and a metaphysical dualism created. But the exact opposite is the truth. When Philosophy is distinguished into general and particular, into rational and real, into pure and applied, into Logic-metaphysic and into Philosophy of nature and of man, an irreparable breach is made, which can only be concealed or attenuated in a more or less ingenious manner. But when that doubleness of degree is destroyed (and thought thinking the real thereby thinks itself), and in the construction of Philosophy, the Philosophy of philosophy, namely Logic, is constructed, the dualism is for ever overcome. This thought is the thinking of the distinctions, which the real presents; but to think distinctions and to think unity is, as has been already demonstrated, the same thing.

[Footnote 1: _Logik,_ pp. 532-3.]

[Footnote 2: See above Sect. II. Chap. V.]

SECOND PART

PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY AND THE NATURAL AND MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES