Concept

CONCEPT. - Etymologically from concipere, cum-capere, to conceive, to comprehend, the c. is the intellectual expression of reality in thought, the idea that the mind realizes by thinking, or even thought itself as act. The expressive value of the term, already unstable in common language, is further divided and at the same time amplified in philosophical language, in relation to the historical systems of gnoseological and metaphysical evaluation of thought.

Against the relativism of the Sophists, who defended the impossibility of a universal and objectively valid science, Socrates affirms that such a science is possible by way of an element of knowledge in which the multiple and relative individual representations are unified into a universal representation: this is the c., the λόγος, expression of what the thing is, object and term of science, which it is possible to reach, particularly in moral matters, through a method of inductive analysis and segregation, exercised upon the ground of natural and common thought. Plato, firm in Socrates' anti-Sophistic affirmation that science cannot rest upon mutable opinions, and persuaded that the material world is wholly immersed in contingency and relativity, seeks the foundation and object of science in the stable world of ideas, or intelligible forms of reality, which our mind reaches by means of the c., through a process of pure reminiscence (ἀνάμνησις), occasioned by the sensible experience of the material world (Theaet., 201 ff.; Phaed., 72 ff.).

The doctrine of the c., initiated by Socrates, accentuated but also already dispersed in Platonic idealism, is by Aristotle brought back and systematized within the lines of a sound metaphysical realism: it is true that the object of science is the universal and the intelligible, but this is not to be sought in the world of separate ideas, unreal and fantastic, but rather within individual reality itself, in its immutable essence, realized by the specific determination of form. The c. is precisely the intellective representation of the essence or quidditas of things, actualized in the mind by virtue of the active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός), and is in its noetic content universal, immutable, eternal, like the forms and essences (De anima, I, 1, 402 a 6; II, 1, 412 a 1-6; Met., I, 1, 981 a 15; ibid., X, 1, 1059 b 26).

The Aristotelian spiritualistic equilibrium and the Platonic idealism are together abandoned by the Epicurean and Stoic school, where the c. is lowered to the level of sensible impressions, crudely interpreted according to the theory of Democritus (v.): from sensible impressions the universal c. is born, which at bottom is nothing but the persistence of the same impressions and of their combined elements (cf. Cicero, Acad., II, 10; for Epicurus v. Diag. Laer., X, 32). In medieval Scholasticism the c. in the specific sense is the term of the first apprehension (v.) of the intellect, the verbum mentis, and as such is opposed to judgment as its element. Of particular importance are the c. or general ideas (universals), expression of the generic or specific unity of individual realities ("similitudo rei intellectae quantum ad essentiam": C. Gent., IV, 11, ed. Marietti, p. 436; Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ, q. 85, a. 1, ad 1); and the fervor of disputes that arose concerning their value is well known, from which were born and still endure the systematic interpretations of nominalism, conceptualism, realism.

New theories of the c. appear in modern philosophy in function of the various gnoseologies and metaphysics. In empiricism (v.) the c. as abstract and universal representation of knowledge is a further derivative of sensation which it essentially does not transcend: a residue of sensible images (Condillac); a product of reflection (Locke); an association of images (Hume, Mill, Spencer). In Kant c. is in general that by which an object is thought. And to think is to perceive in synthetic unity the manifold of sensible representations, according to the original and a priori forms of thought. Kant then divides the c. into pure and empirical: pure c. are the a priori forms of the perceptive spontaneity of the intellect, according to which it thinks every object (categories); empirical c., the forms of thought including a content of sensation, and which therefore are possible only a posteriori. The pure c., outside the intuitions of sensibility, are in themselves empty; and since intuitions are purely phenomenal, it follows that the c., formal elements of the a priori synthesis in which all our thought and judgment consists, invest only phenomena and cannot refer to the thing in itself (noumenon), impenetrable to human intellective knowledge (Critica della ragion pura, Ital. trans. by G. Gentile and G. Lombardo-Radice, reprint 2nd ed., Bari 1940, p. 91 ff.). In Hegel, reality having been identified with the logical development of spirit, the c. is elevated to the supreme dignity of absolute metaphysical positing, as realization of being and of substance in its dialectical becoming. Indeed solely through the c. in its perennial triadic cycle of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, does being posit itself in itself and for itself, in the absolute universality and unity of the I, which precisely in the logical expressions of itself gives consistency to universal reality (Scienza della logica, III, Ital. trans. by A. Moni, Bari 1925, p. 9 ff.; Enciclopedia, §§ 160 ff., Ital. trans. by B. Croce, Bari 1923, p. 142 ff.). For this reason Hegel calls the c. "the truth of substance," "the very essence of the thing," "nothing other than the I, that is, pure self-consciousness." A conception taken up and developed in the Italian neo-Hegelianism of Croce and Gentile. In Gentile, reality having been identified with thought in act, "in such a way that the real sphere coincides with the sphere of the concept," one arrives at the positing of reality as self-concept, or conceptus sui: the multiplicity of c. under which reality appears to us is nothing but exterior and apparent, and a pure abstract objectification of spirit; the true and concrete c. is one alone: that of the Subject, center of all things, which unfolds in the multiplicity of its positive moments, and in conceiving itself conceives everything, positing the real (Sistema di logica, 3rd ed., I, Florence 1940, ch. 7; II, ch. 6; Teoria gen. dello spirito, 5th ed., Florence 1938, ch. 16).

It is clear that these evaluations, grandiose if you will, of the concept, are worth as much as the metaphysical systems that govern them. And both Hegelianism and actualism, as absolute philosophical systems, lack solid consistency. A theory of the concept that lays claim to objectivity must be constructed in harmony with the data of experience, and must develop in the direction suggested, indeed commanded, by them. Now experience, while it affirms on the one hand the purity of conceptual thought which transcends into a sphere of absolute validity the relativity of empirical knowledge, attests on the other hand its dependence on that same sensible knowledge in which, directly or indirectly, every bit of our intellectual knowing sinks its roots. The becoming of human knowledge certainly does not reveal itself to the individual consciousness (the only one given in experience) as a free expansion of the transcendental creative unity, however understood, but rather as a gradual and laborious adaptation of thought to the reality with which it must measure itself and whose contents of value it strives to penetrate. The concept is precisely the intellectual expression of these contents. And these would not even be called such if they were not in some way immanent in the reality given to us in sensible experience, of which they constitute the radical intelligible structure and where thought intuits them or, which is the same thing, whence it abstracts them with the gaze of its spirituality. And since these contents are multiple and of gradual intelligible purity, one may retain, though in a wholly different sense, the Kantian division, calling pure those concepts that express a universal intelligible value (being, cause, substance, etc.), empirical those concepts that express, generalized, the essential or quidditative aspects, both substantial and accidental, of empirical reality (sensitivity, animal, plant, color, etc.).

The theory of the concept that has been indicated thus comes to oppose itself, in its essential lines, not only to idealism and empiricism, but also to other conceptions that lower to a level of pure occasionality the function of sensible knowledge in the genesis of the concept: to innatism, for which ideas, at least in part, are given a priori with the spirit; to ontologism, which derives our concepts from a first intuition of pure intelligibility, God; and finally also to mysticism and Bergsonian intuitionism, for which knowledge of the inner structure of reality is not proper to conceptual thought, but is realized through a vital intuitive contact of the soul with things.

As for the logical position of the concept, the tendency today prevails to absorb it into the judgment. Considering the concept in its psychological origin, it is true that it is formed in thought only through an implicit judgment: the concept in fact expresses, in a more or less high degree of metaphysical interiority, what the thing is; and thought does not think what a thing is except through a judgment. But the concept can also be considered in its abstract objectivity (conceptus obiectivus according to the Scholastics), and then it is a representative unity that can well be considered distinct from the judgment of which it is an element and term (v. CONOSCENZA; LOGICA; UNIVERSALI).

Ugo Viglino