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 an act. The expressive value of the term, already unstable in ordinary language, is further divided and at the same time amplified in philosophical language, in relation to historical systems for the gnoseological and metaphysical evaluation of thought.
Against the relativism of the Sophists, who defended the impossibility of a universally and objectively valid science, Socrates affirms that such a science is possible by virtue of an element of knowledge in which the multiple and relative individual representations are unified in a universal representation: this is the c., the λόγος, an expression of what the thing is, the object and goal of science, which can be attained, particularly in moral matters, through a method of analysis and inductive segregation, exercised upon the basis of natural and common thought. Plato, adhering to Socrates’ anti-sophistic affirmation that science cannot rest upon changeable opinions, and convinced 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 recollection (ἀνάμνησις), occasioned by the sensible experience of the material world (Theaet., 201 ff.; Phaed., 72 ff.).
The doctrine of the c., initiated by Socrates and intensified, but also already dispersed, in Platonic idealism, is brought back by Aristotle 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 these are not to be sought in the world of separate ideas, unreal and fantastic, but within individual reality itself, in its immutable essence, realized by the specific determination of form. The c. is precisely the intellectual representation of the essence or quidditas of things, actualized in the mind by virtue of the active intellect (νοῦς ποιητικός), and in its noetic content it is universal, immutable, and eternal, like 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 equilibrium between Aristotelian spiritualism and Platonic idealism is abandoned together by the Epicurean and Stoic schools, where the c. is lowered to the level of sensible impressions, crudely interpreted Democritus (v.): from sensible impressions arises the universal c., which ultimately is nothing but the persistence of those impressions themselves 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 intellect’apprehension (v.), the verbum mentis, and as such is opposed to judgment as its element. Particular importance is attached to the c., or general ideas (universals), expressions 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 the disputes that arose concerning their value is well known, giving rise to—and still sustaining—the systematic interpretations of nominalism, conceptualism, and realism.
New theories of the c. appear in modern philosophy as a function of its various gnoseologies and metaphysics. In empiricism (v.), the c. as an abstract and universal representation of knowledge is a further derivative of sensation, which it does not essentially transcend: a residue of sensible images (Condillac); a product of reflection (Locke); an association of images (Hume, Mill, Spencer). In Kant, c. in general is that by which an object is thought. And to think is to perceive the manifold of sensible representations in synthetic unity, according to the original and a priori forms of thought. Kant therefore di-
vides c. into pure and empirical: pure c. are the a priori forms of the intellect’s perceptive spontaneity, according to which it thinks every object (categories); empirical c., the forms of thought containing a content of sensation, and which are therefore possible only a posteriori. Pure c., apart from the intuitions of sensibility, are in themselves empty; and since intuitions are purely phenomenal, it follows that c., the formal elements of the a priori synthesis in which all our thought and judgment consist, concern only phenomena and cannot refer to the thing in itself (noumenon), which is impenetrable to human intellectual knowledge (Critica della ragion pura, Italian trans. by G. Gentile and G. Lombardo-Radice, repr. of 2nd ed., Bari 1940, p. 91 ff.). In Hegel, having identified reality with the logical development of spirit, the c. is elevated to the supreme dignity of an absolute metaphysical position, as the realization of being and substance in its dialectical becoming. Indeed, it is solely through the c., in its perpetual triadic cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, that being posits itself in 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, Italian trans. by A. Moni, Bari 1925, p. 9 ff.; Enciclopedia, §§ 160 ff., Italian 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». This conception was taken up and developed in the Italian neo-Hegelianism of Croce and Gentile. In Gentile, having identified reality with thought in act, «so that the real sphere coincides with the sphere of the concept», one arrives at the positing of reality as autoconcept, or conceptus sui: the multiplicity of c. under which reality appears to us is merely outward and apparent, and the pure abstract objectification of spirit; the true and concrete c. is one alone: that of the Subject, the center of all things, which unfolds in the multiplicity of its positive moments, and, by conceiving itself, conceives everything, positing the real (Sistema di logica, 3rd ed., I, Florence 1940, chap. 7; II, chap. 6; Teoria gen. dello spirito, 5th ed., Florence 1938, chap. 16).
It is clear that these evaluations, grandiose, if one wishes, of the concept are worth no more than the metaphysical systems that govern them. And both Hegelianism and actualism, as absolute philosophical systems, lack secure consistency. A theory of the concept that lays claim to objectivity must be constructed in harmony with the data of experience and unfold in the direction suggested, indeed commanded, by them. Now experience, while affirming on the one hand the purity of conceptual thought, which transcends the relativity of empirical knowledge in a sphere of absolute validity, attests on the other hand to its dependence upon that same sensory knowledge in which, directly or indirectly, all our intellectual knowledge is rooted. The becoming of human knowledge certainly does not reveal itself to individual consciousness (the only consciousness given in experience) as a free expansion of the transcendental creative unity, however understood, but rather as a gradual and laborious adjustment 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. Indeed, they could not even be called such if they were not in some way immanent in the reality given to us in sensory experience, of which they constitute the radical intelligible structure and in which thought intuits them—or, what amounts to the same thing, from which it abstracts them with the gaze of its spirituality. And since these contents are multiple and possess varying degrees of intelligible purity, Kant’s division may be retained, though in an entirely different sense: pure concepts are those that express a universal intelligible value (being, cause, substance, etc.), while empirical concepts are those that express, in generalized form, the essential or quidditative aspects—both substantial and accidental—of empirical reality (sensibility, animal, plant, color, etc.).
The theory of the concept outlined above thus stands opposed not only to idealism and empiricism, but also, in its essential lines, to other conceptions that reduce the function of sensory knowledge in the genesis of the concept to a level of pure occasionality: to innatism, according to 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, according to which knowledge of the inner structure of reality is not proper to conceptual thought, but is achieved through a vital intuitive contact of the soul with things.
As regards the logical position of the concept, the prevailing tendency today is to absorb it into the judgment. Considering the concept in its psychological genesis, it is true that it is formed in thought only through an implicit judgment: the concept in fact expresses, with a greater or lesser degree of metaphysical interiority, what a thing is; and thought does not think what a thing is except through a judgment. But the concept may also be considered in its abstract objectivity (conceptus obiectivus, according to scholasticism), and then it is a representative unity that may properly be regarded as distinct from the judgment of which it is an element and term (v. CONOSCENZA; LOGICA; UNIVERSALISTI).