About the Work
Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic is a work of systematic philosophy devoted to a single question pursued with uncommon tenacity: what is art, and what kind of knowledge does it give us? The book is not a treatise on how to make or judge particular works; it is an inquiry into the place of the aesthetic within the whole life of the mind. Croce treats art as a form of knowledge in its own right—distinct from logic, from science, from morality, and from mere pleasure—and he builds his case by clearing away, one by one, the theories that have confused it with something else. The result is a book that is at once constructive and polemical: it erects a compact theory of expression and then uses that theory as a blade against a long tradition of aesthetic error.
“The greatest historical erudition may accompany a taste in part gross or defective, a lumbering imagination, or, as it is generally phrased, a cold, hard heart, closed to art.”
The English reader encounters the work through Douglas Ainslie’s translation, which presents a close rendering of the complete Theory of Aesthetic together with, by the author’s consent, an abbreviation of the historical portion of the original. The volume is dedicated by Croce to the memory of his parents, Pasquale and Luisa Sipari, and of his sister Maria. Its contents comprise an Introduction by the translator, a Theory in eighteen chapters, a Historical Summary, and an Appendix. The Theory moves from the elementary identification of intuition with expression through the relations of art to philosophy, history, and logic, then through the distinction between theoretic and practical activity, and on to the critique of rhetoric, the analysis of aesthetic feelings, the beautiful and the ugly, and the errors that arise from confusing the physical with the aesthetic. It closes with the activity of externalization—technique and the theory of the arts—with taste and the reproduction of art, with the history of literature and art, and finally with the identity of linguistic and aesthetic. The Historical Summary surveys aesthetic ideas from Graeco-Roman antiquity through the Middle Age and Renaissance, the seventeenth century, Cartesianism, Leibnitzianism, Baumgarten’s “Aesthetic,” Vico, eighteenth-century doctrines, Kant, the Aesthetic of Idealism with Schiller and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Herbart, Schleiermacher, the philosophy of language with Humboldt and Steinthal, French, English, and Italian aesthetic in the first half of the nineteenth century, De Sanctis, the aesthetic of the epigoni, positivism and aesthetic naturalism, aesthetic psychologism and other recent tendencies, and a glance at the history of particular doctrines. The Appendix translates Croce’s lecture on Pure Intuition and the lyrical nature of art, delivered before the International Congress of Philosophy at Heidelberg.
The book belongs to the intellectual world of early-twentieth-century Italy, and its author to Naples. Croce was born in the Abruzzi, in the Province of Aquila, in 1866, but he is described as essentially a Neapolitan, rarely long absent from the city. He owned and edited La Critica, the journal whose pages first drew his translator toward him, and it is through that journal that Ainslie presents him: a philosopher who sits on royal commissions yet has taken no university degree, who dislikes academic affectation, who works an average of ten hours a day, and who holds that “truth is democratic.” The Aesthetic had already reached its third Italian edition by the time of the translation, and translations into French, German, and Czech were under way—evidence that the book had become, in Ainslie’s phrase, a new America in the kingdom of the spirit, a country that would bear its explorer’s name.
Context
The translator’s Introduction gives the book a vivid personal setting. Ainslie confesses that he had been haunted by the problem of art all his youth. At Oxford he heard Walter Pater speak and read The Renaissance, which seemed to solve the riddle of the Sphinx but did not, delighting him only with the pure pleasure of poetry and subtle thought in an Enchanted Garden. Oscar Wilde, the most brilliant talker of his time, flashed wit like Mercutio’s rapier, but his works will be searched in vain for definite aesthetic truth. Swinburne and Whistler yielded only the exquisite pleasure of the moment. Among the dead he studied Spencer, Arnold, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Guyau; he conversed with Anatole France, “the modern Rousseau,” whose irony and eloquence may cause the eventual destruction of his society. The conclusion he reached was that the solution of the problem of Aesthetic is not in the gift of the Muses.
What changed his mind was La Critica. Looking over its pages, he became aware of a mind above the ordinary level of literary criticism; profound studies of Carducci, d’Annunzio, and Pascoli led him to devote several days to the journal, and he wrote to the philosopher who owned and edited it. Invited to Naples, he made his way past the coral-vendors’ shops around the Rione de la Bellezza and along the over-crowded Toledo to old Naples, climbing the lofty stone steps of the palazzo where the philosopher dwells, feeling as though he had stumbled into the eighteenth century and were calling on Giambattista Vico. After inspection by a young man who appeared to be a secretary, he was admitted first to a small room and then to a larger one lined with barred and numbered bookcases. A door opened on his left and a rather short, thick-set man greeted him, pronouncing his name with a slight foreign accent. After brief formulae of politeness in French, they conversed in Italian.
The intellectual context Ainslie sketches is one of provincial isolation and neglected riches. Italian thought, he says, has been too long neglected in Great Britain. Croce’s method is always historical; his object in approaching a work of art is to classify the spirit of its author as expressed in that work. Only two things need be considered in criticizing a book: its peculiarity—how it is singular and differentiated from other works—and its degree of purity, the extent to which the author kept free from considerations alien to the work’s perfection as expression, as lyrical intuition. Croce does not care whether an author keeps a motor-car, like Maeterlinck, or prefers walking on Putney Heath, like Swinburne. All works of art must be judged by their own standard: how far has the author succeeded in doing what he intended?
Ainslie is careful to place Croce’s relation to his predecessors. Croce is not a Hegelian in the sense of a close follower. His work on Hegel—translatable as “What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel”—explains the Hegelian system more clearly than before, and shows Croce as independent of Hegel as of Kant, of Vico as of Spinoza. It is incorrect to accuse of Hegelianism the author of an anti-Hegelian Aesthetic, a Logic where Hegel is only half accepted, and a Philosophy of the Practical containing hardly a trace of Hegel. If Hegel’s great conquest be the dialectic of opposites, his great mistake lies in confusing opposites with things distinct but not opposite. The Hegelian triad formulating becoming—affirmation, negation, synthesis—applies to true and false, good and evil, being and not-being, but not to distinct things like art and philosophy, beauty and truth, the useful and the moral. These confusions led Hegel to talk of the death of art, to conceive a Philosophy of History as possible, and to apply natural sciences to constructing a Philosophy of Nature. Croce clears these difficulties away: a superior synthesis cannot arise from things distinct but not opposite, since these are connected as superior and inferior, and the inferior can exist without the superior, but not vice versa. Thus philosophy cannot exist without art, while art, occupying the lower place, can and does exist without philosophy.
The Introduction also records Croce’s generosity toward other thinkers. Kant thanks him for drawing attention to the Critique of Judgment; Baumgarten for reprinting the Latin thesis where the word Aesthetic first occurs; Schleiermacher for tributes in the History of Aesthetic. La Critica is full of generous appreciation of contemporaries by Croce and by Gentile. Historians, economists, poets, actors, and fiction writers have been rescued from undeserved limbo. False lights have been extinguished: Karl Marx finds in Croce an exponent of his views insofar as they are based on truth, but where he blunders Croce reveals the origin and nature of his mistakes. Croce’s economic studies are represented by “Historical Materialism and Marxist Economic.” He wrote a monograph on the sixteenth-century Neapolitan Pulcinella—the original of Punch—and on the Neapolitan in comedy. Since the death of the poet Carducci, no influence in Italy compares with Benedetto Croce’s. He assisted Salvatore di Giacomo, whose best poems are in Neapolitan dialect, which Croce persuaded him to retain. He loves Naples with blind love.
Croce, Ainslie says, feels he has a mission: leading thought back to belief in the spirit, deserted for crude empiricism and positivism. Philosophy sums up all higher human activities, including religion, and can solve any problem. There is no finality: solving one problem poses another. Man is the maker of life; spirit proceeds from lower to higher perfection. Hence Croce dislikes “Modernism.” Once a problem is correctly solved, returning to it is absurd. Roman Catholicism cannot march with the times; it exists by being conservative—its only Logic is to be illogical. Croce opposes Loisy and Neo-Catholicism and supports the Encyclical against Modernism. The Catholic religion, with its stores of myth and morality, remains for those unable to assimilate other food.
Structure of the Book
The volume opens with the translator’s Introduction, which is part memoir, part portrait, and part argument for the importance of its subject. Ainslie declares that there are always Americas to be discovered, the most interesting in Europe, and claims not to have discovered an America but a Columbus. Croce’s America belongs to the kingdom of the spirit; Ainslie strives to annex its most interesting province to the Anglo-Saxon race, noting that of philosophy, more truly than of love, it may be said that “to divide is not to take away.” The Historical Summary will show how many adventurers navigated the seas of speculation upon Art: Aristotle’s insight gave glimpses of its beauty, Plato threw away its golden fruit, Baumgarten sounded its depths, Kant sailed along its coast without landing, and Vico hoisted the Italian flag upon its shore. Croce is the first thoroughly to explore it, cutting inland through the undergrowth of imperfect thought, measuring its length and breadth; the country will bear his name, Estetica di Croce, a new America.
The Theory itself proceeds by a method of paired construction and demolition. It begins with the identification of intuition and expression, then distinguishes intuition from sensation, from association, and from representation, and argues that every true intuition is also expression. It exposes the illusions that make this identification seem paradoxical. It then turns to the critique of the theory of aesthetic senses, to the unity and indivisibility of the work of art, and to art as the deliverer. From there it moves to the relation of art and philosophy, to the critique of negations of the thesis that thought cannot exist without speech, and to historicism and intellectualism in aesthetic—the errors of verisimilitude, of art as supporting theses, of the typical, and of the symbol and allegory. A reformed Logic follows, in which the sole logical fact is the concept, and syllogistic is relegated to the art of exposition and dispute. The theoretic and practical activity are then distinguished, and the analogy between them is drawn: the practical activity has two grades, the simply useful or economical and the moral, so that Economy is the Aesthetic of practical life and Morality its Logic. The question of modes or grades of expression is raised and answered negatively: a philosophical classification of expressions is impossible, and translation in the strict sense is impossible too. The theory of ornament and the rhetorical categories is dismissed as scientifically nil or negative. The beautiful and the ugly are defined as successful and unsuccessful expression, and the apparent feelings of art are shown to be a tautology. Aesthetic hedonism is criticized in its several forms—the pleasing to sight and hearing, the theory of play, and the derivation of artistic pleasure from sexual reaction. The sublime and the comic are examined and found to be quantitative and vague, gaining meaning only from concrete cases. The physically beautiful in nature and art is distinguished from aesthetic expression, and the errors arising from confusing physic and aesthetic are catalogued. The activity of externalization—technique and the theory of the arts—is treated, followed by taste and the reproduction of art, the history of literature and art, and the conclusion on the identity of linguistic and aesthetic.
The Historical Summary then retraces the whole course of aesthetic speculation, and the Appendix closes the volume with Croce’s Heidelberg lecture on Pure Intuition and the lyrical nature of art.
Inside the Book
The Translator’s Discovery of Croce
Douglas Ainslie opens his 1909 English rendering of Croce’s Aesthetic with a dedication to the memory of the author’s parents and sister, and a note explaining his method: a close translation of the complete Theory of Aesthetic, and, with Croce’s consent, an abridgement of the historical portion. The table of contents maps the whole: an Introduction, an eighteen-chapter Theory running from “Intuition and Expression” through art and philosophy, historicism and intellectualism, the analogy of theoretic and practical activity, the indivisibility of expression, aesthetic sentiments, the beautiful and the ugly, the physically beautiful, externalization and technique, taste and the reproduction of art, the history of literature and art, to the identity of linguistic and aesthetic; then a Historical Summary from Graeco-Roman antiquity through Baumgarten, Vico, Kant, Idealism, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, De Sanctis and the epigoni to positivism and psychologism; and an Appendix translating Croce’s Heidelberg lecture on pure intuition and the lyrical nature of art.
Ainslie’s Introduction is his own account. There are always Americas to be discovered, he says, and the most interesting lie in Europe; he has found not an America but a Columbus — Benedetto Croce of Naples, city of the antique Parthenope. Croce’s America belongs to the kingdom of the spirit, and Ainslie means to annex its most interesting province for the Anglo-Saxon race, noting that of philosophy, more truly than of love, it may be said that to divide is not to take away. The Historical Summary will show how many adventurers sailed the seas of speculation upon art: Aristotle glimpsed its beauty, Plato threw away its golden fruit, Baumgarten sounded its depths, Kant coasted without landing, Vico hoisted the Italian flag upon its shore. Croce is the first thoroughly to explore it, cutting inland through the undergrowth of imperfect thought; the country will bear his name, Estetica di Croce.
Oxford, Pater, and the Problem of Art
Ainslie first met the Philosopher of Aesthetic at Naples in the winter of 1907. Croce, born in the Abruzzi in 1866, is essentially a Neapolitan and rarely long absent from the city. Ainslie had been haunted by the problem of art all his youth. At Oxford he heard Walter Pater speak and read the Renaissance, which seemed to solve the riddle of the Sphinx but did not, delighting only with the pure pleasure of poetry and subtle thought in an Enchanted Garden. Oscar Wilde flashed wit like Mercutio’s rapier, but his works yield no definite aesthetic truth; Swinburne and Whistler gave only the exquisite pleasure of the moment. Among the dead he studied Spencer, Arnold, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Guyau, and conversed with Anatole France, the modern Rousseau, whose irony may yet destroy his society. The solution of the problem of Aesthetic is not in the gift of the Muses.
The Visit to the Palazzo
Reading La Critica, Ainslie became aware of a mind above the ordinary level of literary criticism; profound studies of Carducci, d’Annunzio and Pascoli led him to devote days to the journal, and he wrote to the philosopher who owned and edited it. Invited, he made his way past the coral-vendors’ shops around the Rione de la Bellezza and along the overcrowded Toledo to old Naples, climbing the lofty stone steps of the Palazzo where the philosopher dwells, feeling as though he had stumbled into the eighteenth century and were calling on Giambattista Vico. After inspection by a young man who appeared to be a secretary, he was admitted to a small room, then led to a larger one lined with barred and numbered bookcases. A door opened on his left and a rather short, thick-set man greeted him, pronouncing his name with a slight foreign accent. After brief formulae of politeness in French, they conversed in Italian.
Croce’s Method and the Question of Hegel
Ainslie explains that the thoroughness of the criticism in La Critica gives it importance. Croce’s method is always historical; approaching a work of art, he seeks to classify the spirit of its author as expressed in that work. Only two things need be considered in criticizing a book: its peculiarity — how it is singular and differentiated from other works — and its degree of purity, the extent to which the author kept free from considerations alien to the work’s perfection as expression, as lyrical intuition. Croce does not care whether an author keeps a motor-car, like Maeterlinck, or walks on Putney Heath, like Swinburne; all works must be judged by their own standard. He is above personal animus, though those he criticizes, like d’Annunzio, whose egoism and lack of human sympathy he points out, are often bitter and accuse him of want of courtesy.
On Croce’s philosophical position, Ainslie insists he is not a Hegelian in the sense of a close follower. His work on Hegel — “What is living and what is dead of the philosophy of Hegel” — shows him as independent of Hegel as of Kant, of Vico as of Spinoza. It is incorrect to accuse of Hegelianism the author of an anti-Hegelian Aesthetic, a Logic where Hegel is only half accepted, and a Philosophy of the Practical containing hardly a trace of Hegel. If Hegel’s great conquest be the dialectic of opposites, his great mistake lies in confusing opposites with things distinct but not opposite. The triad of affirmation, negation and synthesis applies to true and false, good and evil, being and not-being, but not to distinct things like art and philosophy, beauty and truth, the useful and the moral. These confusions led Hegel to talk of the death of art, to conceive a Philosophy of History as possible, and to construct a Philosophy of Nature. Croce clears these difficulties away: a superior synthesis cannot arise from things distinct but not opposite, since these are connected as superior and inferior, and the inferior can exist without the superior, but not vice versa. Thus philosophy cannot exist without art, while art, occupying the lower place, can and does exist without philosophy.
The Generous Critic and the Mission of the Spirit
Ainslie knows no philosopher more generous than Croce in praising others. Kant thanks him for drawing attention to the Critique of Judgment; Baumgarten for reprinting the Latin thesis where the word Aesthetic first occurs; Schleiermacher for tributes in the History of Aesthetic. La Critica is full of generous appreciation of contemporaries by Croce and by Gentile; historians, economists, poets, actors and fiction writers have been rescued from undeserved limbo. False lights have been extinguished: Karl Marx finds in Croce an exponent of his views insofar as they are based on truth, but where he blunders Croce reveals the origin and nature of his mistakes. Croce wrote a monograph on the sixteenth-century Neapolitan Pulcinella, the original of Punch, and on the Neapolitan in comedy. His average working day is ten hours; he sits on Royal Commissions but has taken no university degree and dislikes academic affectation. “Truth,” he says, “is democratic.”
The Limits of Natural Science and the Two Forms of Knowledge
Croce argues that true science is not intuition but concept, not individuality but universality, and so can only be a science of the spirit—Philosophy. What are called “natural sciences,” taken apart from philosophy, are not perfect sciences but complexes of knowledge arbitrarily abstracted and fixed. They calculate, measure, classify, and formulate laws, yet in their progress they always meet facts known intuitively and historically. Even geometry now rests on hypotheses, since space need not be three-dimensional or Euclidean; the assumption is preferred only for convenience. Whatever truth the natural sciences hold is either philosophy or historical fact; what is proper to them is abstract and arbitrary. To become perfect sciences they must enter the philosophical circle, positing concepts like the extensionless atom or vital force—true philosophical efforts when not mere empty words. Their concepts are useful, but no system can be built from them; system belongs only to the spirit. This also explains how what was once truth descends into mythological belief, and how some scientists call the basis of their teaching “mythical facts” or “conventions.” Naturalists and mathematicians approaching the energies of the spirit carry these habits into philosophy, speaking of truth and morality as conventions—yet if there are to be conventions, something must exist about which no convention is made, itself the agent of convention: the spiritual activity of man. The limitation of natural science postulates the illimitation of philosophy.
The pure forms of knowledge are two: intuition and concept—Art, and Science or Philosophy. With these is included History, the product of intuition placed in contact with the concept. All other forms, such as the natural sciences and mathematics, are impure, mingled with extraneous elements of practical origin. Intuition gives the phenomenon; the concept gives the noumenon, the Spirit.
Historicism and Intellectualism in Aesthetic
Turning to errors in aesthetic theory, Croce shows how confusing art’s exigencies with history’s produced the theory of verisimilitude as art’s object. Its intention was often more reasonable than its definition: verisimilitude really meant artistic coherence—completeness and effectiveness. Even fairies and sprites must be verisimilar, that is, coherent artistic intuitions. “Possible” was sometimes used instead, synonymous with the imaginable; everything coherently imagined is possible. But theoreticians formerly understood verisimilar as historical credibility, imposing it on art—as when the Jerusalem Delivered was criticized against the history of the Crusades, or the Homeric poems against the costume of emperors and kings. At other times art was required to reproduce historical reality, another erroneous sense of the imitation of nature. Verism and naturalism confused the aesthetic fact with natural-science processes, aiming at experimental drama or romance.
Confusions between art’s methods and philosophy’s were far more frequent. Art was often held competent to develop concepts, to unite the intelligible with the sensible, to represent ideas or universals—putting art in place of science. The theory of art supporting theses reduces to the same error, as does art as individual representation exemplifying scientific laws. The same applies to the aesthetic theory of the typical, when type means abstraction or concept. If typical means the individual, it is a mere verbal variation: to typify would signify to characterize. Don Quixote is a type—of all Don Quixotes, of himself—not of abstract concepts like the love of glory, under which infinite personages can be thought who are not Don Quixote. We call an expression typical when we find our impressions determined and verified in it; it might simply be called aesthetic. The symbol, too, has been given as art’s essence. If inseparable from intuition, it is synonymous with intuition itself, which always has ideal character: there is no double-bottom to art. But if symbol is looked on as separable—symbol on one side, thing symbolized on the other—we fall into the intellectualist error of allegory, science aping science. We must be just toward allegory: in some cases it is harmless. Given the Gerusalemme liberata, the allegory was imagined afterwards; given Marino’s Adone, the poet of the lascivious insinuated afterwards that it was written to show how immoderate indulgence ends in pain.
The Reform of Logic and the Concept
Croce proposes a reformed Logic whose sole logical fact is the concept—the universal formed by spirit. He rejects both “induction” and “deduction” as names, preferring “Logic of the concept,” which uses a speculative method intrinsic to it. The concept, abstractly considered, is inexpressible; no word is proper to it, and it remains the same despite varying verbal forms. Expression is merely a sign, determined by the speaker’s historical and psychological conditions. There is no true logical sense of words; whoever forms a concept bestows true meaning on words. Only propositions whose content is the determination of a concept are rigorously logical—these are definitions. Science is a complex of definitions unified in a supreme definition. Excluded from Logic are narrative judgments and expressions of desire: “Peter is passing,” “it is raining,” “I am sleepy,” “I want to read” are aesthetic or historical propositions, not definitions of universals.
Syllogistic, reasoning in forma, is not discovery of truth but the art of exposing, debating, disputing. Proceeding from formed concepts and observed facts, it infers consequences, representing what is already discovered. It is an idem per idem regarding invention but efficacious for teaching and exposition. Its abuses concern proving questions of fact syllogistically or neglecting meditation for formality. Mathematical Logic may aid memory and the manipulation of thought, but syllogistic cannot hold first place in philosophical Logic; the doctrine of the concept is central. Concept, judgment, and syllogism do not occupy the same position: only the first is the logical fact; the others are forms of its manifestation. Reasoning ill means speaking and writing ill; exact logical analysis is the basis of good expression—a tautology, since reasoning well is expressing well. The principle of contradiction is at bottom the aesthetic principle of coherence. Where a writer enunciates an ill-thought concept, he speaks and writes ill; he may recover in other true parts. Logic reformed will be formal Logic, studying the true form of thought, the concept, excluding particular concepts. Old Logic is better called verbal or formalistic. The science of thought is that of the concept, as Aesthetic is the science of expression.
Theoretic and Practical Activity
The practical form is the will—the activity producing actions, not knowledge. Action is voluntary; not-doing, resistance, rejection, is also action. Man understands with theory, changes with practice; knowledge independent of will is thinkable, will independent of knowledge unthinkable. Blind will is not will; true will has eyes. Objections about practical and contemplative men are empirical and quantitative; the practical man still starts from clear intuitions and concepts. Doubt halts action; a prolonged theoretical moment may make a Hamlet. Practical judgments follow, not precede, volition: we desire things not because they are good, but know them good because we desire them. No normative sciences exist. The practical is excluded from the aesthetic: the aesthetic fact is completed in expressive elaboration; external execution is a practical fact of will. The search for art’s end and the choice of content is ridiculous; expression is free inspiration.
Beauty, Ugliness, and the Illusion of Degrees
Croce begins by cataloguing how ordinary speech names the values and disvalues of spiritual life: beautiful, true, good, useful, just for successful activity; ugly, false, bad, useless, unjust for failure. Language shifts these names across orders of fact—intellectual beauty, beautiful action, moral beauty—and philosophers, especially aestheticians, lost themselves in this verbal labyrinth. Croce now defines beauty as successful expression, or rather as expression and nothing more, since unsuccessful expression is not expression at all. The ugly is therefore unsuccessful expression. In failed works the beautiful survives as unity and the ugly as multiplicity: we speak of the beautiful parts of imperfect works, but never of qualities in perfect ones, where one life circulates through the whole organism. Beauty admits no degrees—nothing is more or less expressive—while ugliness does, ranging from almost beautiful to extremely ugly. Complete ugliness would cease to be ugly, since the contradiction that sustains it would vanish. Because consciousness of beauty and ugliness rests on contrast, it fades toward the simplest cases of expression, giving the illusion that some expressions are neither beautiful nor ugly.
Aesthetic Pleasure and Its Counterfeits
The mystery of beauty and ugliness dissolves into these definitions. True aesthetic pleasure is the joy of the poet at the moment of intuition, when impressions take form and the countenance is irradiated with creative joy; but it is often reinforced by extraneous pleasures—rest, amusement, self-love satisfied, economic gain. A separate category of apparent aesthetic feelings arises from content rather than form: we tremble, rejoice, fear, weep with the personages of drama and romance. These are real feelings objectified and expressed, quantitatively attenuated because they have become form and activity rather than matter. The formula of apparent feelings is a tautology, and Croce runs his pen through it.
Critique of Aesthetic Hedonism
Section XI opposes hedonism generally, which confounds content with container, and aesthetic hedonism particularly, which reduces the aesthetic to a simple fact of feeling. One ancient form locates the beautiful in what pleases sight and hearing; but showing that aesthetic fact depends on no particular sensible impression comes only after other escapes are tried, and whoever holds this view cannot resist identifying beauty with pleasure generally, even the pleasures of cooking. The theory of play rightly recognizes the actifying character of expression—man is truly man only when he plays—but since play also means pleasure from exuberant organic energy, every game gets called aesthetic. Finally, some derive artistic pleasure from sexual conquest, seasoning the theory with anecdotes of savage custom; but poets adorning themselves with poetry are not poets but poor cocks spreading their tails, and the conquest of woman does not explain the art fact.
The Sublime, the Comic, and the Humorous
What is the sublime? Two definitions are offered—the unexpected affirmation of an ultra-powerful moral force, and the recognition of an ultra-powerful but immoral and destructive will—both vague until applied to a concrete case, and at bottom mere metaphors or tautologies. The humorous is laughter mingled with tears, the inverted sublime, mockery of the ideal itself; each poem is its own definition. The comic is displeasure at a perceived deformity, instantly followed by greater pleasure from the relaxation of psychic forces strained in anticipation: a heroic purpose is led to expect heroic action, a mean or foolish action deceives us, and the release of accumulated energy produces laughter. This definition, praised as among the most accurate, actually enunciates characteristics of every spiritual process; its differentiation is quantitative and vague, and Jean Paul Richter said all definitions of the comic are themselves comic. These psychological facts bear no relation to the artistic fact beyond supplying art with material: Dante’s Farinata is aesthetically beautiful and nothing but beautiful.
The Physically Beautiful and Naturalistic Expression
Aesthetic activity, when it expresses itself, is always accompanied by practical activity and its physical or psychophysical accompaniment—sounds, tones, movements, lines, colours—though whether this physical side truly exists is left in suspense. This possibility generates confusion between aesthetic expression and expression in the naturalistic sense: the blush of shame, the pallor of fear, the falling barometer, the rate of exchange. An abyss separates the man convulsed by anger from the one who expresses anger aesthetically, the tortured sufferer from the singer who portrays his torture. Aesthetic contemplation can even hinder practical use: Frederick William shrank from ordering his magnificent grenadiers into battle, while his less aesthetic son obtained excellent service from them. The artist never makes a stroke without having first seen it in imagination; the physical point he leans on is a pedagogic aid, like Baumgarten’s advice to poets to ride on horseback and drink wine in moderation.
Mistakes of Associationism and Aesthetic Physic
Associationism identifies the aesthetic fact with the association of two images, splitting a picture into the image of the picture and the image of its meaning; but the physical fact does not enter the spirit as an image, it blindly stimulates reproduction of the one aesthetic image. Either association is kept and unity surrendered, or unity kept and association surrendered—no third way exists. From failing to recognize natural beauty as an incident of aesthetic reproduction comes the false science of Aesthetic Physic, with its mineralogy, botany, and zoology: it is scientifically meaningless to ask whether the dog is beautiful and the ornithorhynchus ugly. The question of the beauty of the human body collapses once we press from the abstract to the concrete—male or female, which race, which age, at rest or at work?—until we reach the individual pointed out with the finger, whose beauty shifts with the artist’s point of view. Geometric figures are concepts, neither beautiful nor ugly; bodies with geometric forms are beautiful or ugly like every natural fact.
The Limits of the Arts and the Autonomy of Art
The so-called arts possess no aesthetic limits, and any aesthetic classification of them is absurd; all books on systems of the arts could be burned without loss. The impossibility is proved by the strange methods used: arts of hearing, sight, and imagination; of space and time; of rest and motion; classic and romantic. The theory of limits may once have been a beneficial reaction against those who thought the Iliad could become a series of paintings, but a victorious rebellion does not make its arguments sound. The union of the arts falls with it: different intuitions need different physical means, and powers of different means cannot be compared when objects differ. Only by rigorously distinguishing aesthetic activity from the practical activity of externalization can we solve the questions of art and utility and art and morality. Art as art is independent of utility and morality; but this independence must not extend to externalization and communication, which utility and morality have every right to govern. We select from the crowd of our intuitions according to economic and moral conditions, and concepts of selection, the interesting, and educational end are thus partly justified. Croce endorses liberty in vulgarizing means of reproduction, leaving legislative proposals to hypocrites and idlers, while insisting that morality still judges the artist who calculates on unhealthy tastes and the police the hawker of obscene statuettes.
Taste and the Reproduction of Art
When the aesthetic and externalizing process is complete and a beautiful expression is fixed in physical material, what judges it? Critics answer almost unanimously: we must reproduce it in ourselves.
Restoring the Past: Philology, Interpretation, and the Limits of Recovery
Paleographers and philologists labour to restore texts to their original physiognomy, while restorers of pictures and statues strive to give physical objects back their primitive energy. Such efforts never fully succeed—a restoration complete in its smallest details is hardly ever possible—but the insurmountable is only accidentally present and cannot prevent recognition of the favourable results nonetheless obtained. Historical interpretation works in the same spirit, labouring to reintegrate in us the historical conditions altered by time. It revives the dead, completes the fragmentary, and lets us see a work of art as its author saw it at the moment of production. Its condition is tradition, with whose help scattered rays are collected and made to converge on one centre; with memory’s help we surround the physical stimulus with all the facts among which it arose, so that it may react upon us as it acted upon its producer.
When tradition is broken, interpretation is arrested and the products of the past remain silent—Etruscan or Messapian inscriptions stay unattainable, ethnographers still debate certain products of savage art, and archaeologists cannot always say whether figures on ancient ceramic are religious or profane. Yet such arrest is never a definitely unsurmountable barrier; daily discoveries of sources and new methods of exploiting antiquity link up broken tradition. Erroneous interpretation sometimes produces palimpsests—new expressions imposed upon the antique, artistic imaginings instead of historical reproductions. The so-called fascination of the past depends in part on these expressions of ours woven into historical ones: the calm and serene intuition of life discovered in Hellenic plastic art, or the “terror of the millennium” discerned on Byzantine saints’ faces, which is an equivoke or artificial legend invented by modern scholars. Historical criticism tends precisely to circumscribe vain imaginings and establish the exact point of view from which we must look. Thus we live in communication with other men of the present and of the past, and we must not conclude, because we often face the unknown, that when we believe we are in dialogue we are always speaking a monologue.
The History of Literature and Art
Without tradition and historical criticism, enjoyment of nearly all works of art produced by humanity would be irrevocably lost; we should be little more than animals, immersed in the present alone. Only fools despise him who reconstitutes an authentic text, explains the sense of words and customs, and investigates the conditions in which an artist lived. Historical research does not only help reproduce and judge artistic works: the biography of a writer, and the study of a period’s costume, possess their own interest, foreign to the history of art but not to other forms of history. The historical student must often reconcile himself to the useful but little glorious office of a cataloguer of facts—facts that remain for the time being formless and insignificant, but are preserves, or mines, for the historian of the future. Just as an intelligent librarian acquires and catalogues books he foresees may be of service, so intelligent students possess the instinct as to what may more probably be useful among the mass of facts investigated. Others, less well-endowed or more hasty, accumulate useless selections and lose themselves in refinements and gossipy discussions—but this appertains to the economy of research, not our affair.
Historical research directed to illuminate a work of art does not alone suffice to bring it to birth in our spirit: taste, and an imagination trained and awakened, are likewise presupposed. The greatest historical erudition may accompany a taste in part gross or defective, a lumbering imagination, a cold, hard heart closed to art. Which is the lesser evil—great erudition and defective taste, or natural good taste and great ignorance? The question has often been asked, and perhaps it is best to deny its possibility. The merely learned man never succeeds in entering into communication with the great spirits, and keeps wandering for ever about the outer courts and antechambers of their palaces; but the gifted ignoramus either passes by masterpieces inaccessible to him, or, instead of understanding works of art as they really are, substitutes his own.
The Divisions of Art History and the Question of Progress
The celebrated divisions of art history share a defect. They run: an oriental period of disequilibrium between idea and form, with prevalence of form; a classical period of equilibrium; a romantic period of new disequilibrium, with prevalence of idea. Another scheme makes oriental art imperfection of form, classical perfection of form, romantic perfection of content and form. Thus “classic” and “romantic” have also meant progressive or regressive periods relative to some indefinite artistic ideal of humanity. But there is no aesthetic progress of humanity. What is sometimes meant is the ever-increasing accumulation of historical knowledge, enabling sympathy with all artistic products of all peoples and times—a more “catholic” taste. The eighteenth century, incapable of escaping itself, contrasts with the present, which enjoys Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine, mediaeval, Arabic, Renaissance, baroque, and seventeenth-century art, while Egyptian, Babylonian, Etruscan, and prehistoric art are studied more profoundly daily. The savage and civilized man do not differ in human faculties: the savage has speech, intellect, religion, morality, and is a complete man. We are not more spiritually alert than the contemporaries of Pericles, but we are richer—rich with their riches and those of other peoples and generations. Aesthetic progress also means greater abundance of artistic intuitions and fewer imperfect works in one epoch versus another, or refinement and psychical complications in civilized versus barbarous art—but this progress belongs to the complex conditions of society, not to artistic activity, to which the material is indifferent.
Conclusion: The Identity of Linguistic and Aesthetic
The treatise has considered the aesthetic fact in itself and in relation to other spiritual activities, passing from subject to object, from birth to historical argument. It may seem meagre versus great volumes on Aesthetic, but nine-tenths of those contain matter not belonging to Aesthetic—definitions of pseudo-aesthetic concepts, a supposed Zoology of Aesthetic, universal history judged aesthetically, mangled history of art with judgments on Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo. Deducting this, the treatise is more copious than ordinary ones. Its thesis: Aesthetic and Linguistic, as true sciences, are one single science. General Linguistic, insofar as reducible to philosophy, is nothing but Aesthetic. Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing. If Linguistic were different, it would lack expression as its object—but sounds expressing nothing are not language. Language is articulate, limited, organized sound employed in expression. If special, it would need a special class of expressions—but classes of expression do not exist. Linguistic’s problems and errors parallel Aesthetic’s: disputes whether it is scientific or historical, natural or psychological; the interjection theory was abandoned; the association theory was refuted; the onomatopoeic variant is the “bow-wow” theory. Current eclecticism mixing interjections, onomatopes, and conventions is worthy of late-nineteenth-century decadence. Philologists who admit language was originally spiritual creation yet say it was later increased by association err: origin means nature or essence. Expressions already produced must redescend to impressions before giving rise to new ones; new words transform old ones creatively, not associatively.
Grammar, Logic, and the Individuality of Speech
The question appears as Grammar and Logic relations: logical form is indissoluble from grammatical, but grammatical is dissoluble from logical.
Vico: Imagination, Poetry, and the Autonomy of Aesthetic
Vico held imagination to be independent of and prior to the intellect, which can only weaken it, not perfect it. Poetry and metaphysics are natural opposites: poets are the feeling, philosophers the intellect, of the human race. The weaker the reason, the stronger the imagination; philosophy deals in abstract universals, poetry in particulars. Great poets arise in barbaric ages—Homer among the ancients, Dante in “the renewed barbarism of Italy.” Poetic ages precede philosophical ones, and poetry is the father of prose by a necessity of nature, not caprice. Fables, or “imaginary universals,” were conceived before reasoned universals. A poet in an age of reflexion becomes a child again, dwelling on particulars; if he borrows philosophic ideas, he merely turns logic back into imagination. Here Vico drew a profound line between science and art.
He explained why poetry seemed more philosophical than history to Aristotle, while refuting Aristotle’s error that poetry treats the universal and history the particular. Poetry equals science not through concept but because, like science, it is ideal; a good fable must be wholly ideal, the poet giving being to what lacks it. Poetry is all fantastic—the art of painting the idea, not portrait-painting—and poets and painters are called divine because they resemble God the Creator. Vico ends by identifying poetry and history, their difference posterior and accidental. Since false ideas cannot be imparted, a tradition, though false, must originally have contained some truth; mythology is thus not an individual’s invention but the spontaneous vision of truth as it appears to primitive man.
Poetry and language are substantially identical for Vico, who finds in poetry’s origins the origins of languages and letters. The first languages were mute acts, or acts accompanied by bodies naturally related to the ideas signified—pictured languages like heraldic arms and hieroglyphs. With the barbarism of the Middle Ages the mute language of signs returned, in heraldry and blazonry. Hence three kinds of language: divine silent, heroic emblematic, and speech.
Formal logic could not satisfy Vico. He found the Aristotelian syllogism explained universals through particulars rather than uniting particulars to obtain universals, and judged Zeno and the sorites as subtilizing rather than sharpening intelligence; Bacon, advocating induction, was for him a great philosopher. He criticized mathematics, hitherto the type of perfect science, and knew himself a revolutionary opposing all previous thought on poetry—upsetting Plato, Aristotle, the Patrizzi, the Scaligers, the Castelvetri. He discovered that poetry was born sublime through lack of human reason, and expressed shame at reporting the stupidities of great philosophers on the origin of song and verse. He disliked Cartesian philosophy for drying up imagination “by denying all the faculties of the soul which come to it from the body,” calling his time one “which freezes all the generous quality of the best poetry.”
In grammar Vico adhered to the Renaissance reaction against scholastic verbalism, which restored the experience of feeling and later, with Romanticism, gave imagination its place. In the Scienza nuova he was the first to draw attention to imagination; his work is not truly a history but a science of the spirit, concerned not with the ethical, logical, or economic moment but with the imaginative one. He discovered the creative imagination, and the Scienza nuova may almost be called Aesthetic—the discovery of a new world, a new mode of knowledge, showing Aesthetic to be an autonomous activity. It remained to distinguish the science of the spirit from history, and Aesthetic from Homeric civilization. Though Goethe, Herder, and Wolf knew the work, its importance did not at first dawn on the world; Wolf, in his prolegomena to Homer, thought he dealt merely with an ingenious speculator, not realizing Vico’s stature surpassed the ablest philologists.
After Vico: German Aestheticians to Kant
Aesthetic’s fortunes after Vico were various; many fell back into the old pedagogic definition or elaborated Baumgarten’s mistakes. With C. H. Heydenreich in Germany and Sulzer in Switzerland, Baumgarten’s truths began to bear fruit. J. J. Herder (1769) was more important, placing Baumgarten on a pedestal while criticizing his pretension of creating an ars pulchre cogitandi instead of a simple scientia de pulchro.
Kant held that logical truth must wear the habit of Aesthetic to become accessible, a habit discarded only by the rational sciences tending to depth. Aesthetic is subjective, satisfied with authority or appeals to great men, and serves as a vehicle of Logic; philosophy must exclude the exclamations and emotions belonging to aesthetic truth. For Kant poetry is the harmonious play of thought and sensation, differing from eloquence because in poetry thoughts fit suggestions while in eloquence the reverse holds. Logical perfection, he said, is the foundation of all the rest. His Critique of Judgment, which Schelling deemed the most important of the three Critiques, treats art always as “a sensible and imaged covering for an intellectual concept,” not pure beauty without a concept but adherent beauty fixed about a concept. The work of genius contains imagination and intelligence plus taste combining them. Art may represent the ugly, since artistic beauty “is not a beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing,” though with limits in the arts and an absolute limit in the disgusting, which kills the representation. Productions without a concept—flowers, ornaments, wordless music—are classed as free beauties, seemingly excluding them from Aesthetic. Kant is shut in by intellectualist barriers: a complete definition of imagination is wanting, he does not admit imagination among the powers of the mind, and though aware of reproductive and combinative imagination, he does not recognize fancy, the true productive imagination. Yet he knew an activity other than intellective: intuition precedes intellective activity and differs from sensation, discussed in the first section of the Critique of Pure Reason. Sensations enter the mind only after it gives them form; this is neither sensation nor intelligence but pure intuition, the sum of a priori principles of sensibility, which he calls Transcendental Aesthetic—refusing the term for the Critique of Taste, which could never become a science. But Kant errs through his inexact idea of the aesthetic faculty, which is pure intuition; he conceives the form of sensibility as reducible to space and time, which Croce has shown are complex posterior formations, not categories. Colour, hardness, density are already intuitions—the aesthetic activity in its rudimentary manifestation. Characterizing imagination should take the place occupied by space and time in the first Critique and constitute the true Transcendental Aesthetic, prologue to Logic; had Kant done this, he would have surpassed Leibnitz and Baumgarten and equalled Vico.
Kant did not identify the Beautiful with art; he established the “four moments of Beauty.” The two negative moments are: “That is beautiful which pleases without interest,” against the sensualist school of English writers; and “That is beautiful which pleases without a concept,” against the intellectualists—affirming a spiritual domain distinct from organic pleasure, the useful, the good, and the true. The two others are: “That is beautiful which has the form of finality without the representation of an end,” and “That is beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure.”
Physiological and Naturalistic Aesthetics
In Great Britain, J. Sully, A. Bain, and Allen are named as votaries of the physiology of aesthetics; Allen revives the distinction between necessary and vital versus superfluous activities and gives a physiological definition in his Physiological Aesthetics. More recent writers treat the physiological fact as the cause of art’s pleasure, locating it not only in the visual organ and associated muscular phenomena but also in respiration, circulation, equilibrium, and intimate muscular accommodation. They trace art’s origin to a prehistoric man’s pleasure in breathing regularly, without re-adapting his organs, when he first traced regular lines at regular intervals on bone or clay.
In Germany, Helmholtz, Brücke, and Stumpf sponsor similar physico-aesthetic research, but succeed better by restricting themselves to optic and acoustic fields, supplying information on artistic technique’s physical processes and on visual and auditive pleasure, without melting Aesthetic into Physic or depriving it of spiritual character; they occasionally indicate the difference between the two kinds of research. Even degenerate Herbartians, converting their master’s metaphysical forms into physiological phenomena, made soft eyes at the new sensualists and aesthetico-physiologists.
The passage then attacks the superstition of the Natural Sciences, allied to unconscious hypocrisy: chemical, physical, and physiological laboratories become Sibylline grots, and even those using internal observation believe they employ the method of natural sciences. Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophy of Art exemplifies this illusion: he claims a complete Aesthetic would follow from studying art’s manifestations in all peoples and epochs—a Botany applied to works of man, giving moral science a basis as sure as natural science. Taine defines art as imitation expressing an essential characteristic: a lion’s principal characteristic is “a great carnivore”; Holland’s is being a land of alluvial soil. This essential characteristic is the old ideas, types, or concepts; Taine avoids the word essence but accepts its thought. He holds science and art are two routes to superior life; art expresses laws and causes comprehensibly, appealing to heart, feeling, and reason. He falls into the old pedagogic theory: works are ranked on a scale of values, despite beginning with “à chacun son goût” and ending declaring personal taste valueless. His double or triple scale fixes the characteristic’s importance (generality of idea), its degree of good (moral value)—two degrees of strength—and the degree of convergence of effects (fulness of expression, harmony of idea and form). He protests methodical, analytical study reaching “a law, not a hymn,” yet attempts dialectic solutions: Giotto shows soul without body; Verrocchio’s school, body without soul; Raphael, expression and anatomy in harmony—thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
G.T. Fechner likewise protests and proceeds inductively, seeking clarity, not loftiness, discovering laws such as unity in variety, association and contrast, change and persistence, the golden mean. He delightedly exhibits chaos, then describes experiments choosing agreeable/disagreeable rectangles of cardboard among arbitrarily chosen people; results disagree, but errors correct themselves, and he publishes long lists. He gives shapes and measurements of museum pictures compared with subjects. When defining beauty and art, he falls back on introspection; his definition is trivial, his comparison of three degrees of beauty to a family grotesque in its naïveté. He terms this the eudemonistic theory, leaving us wondering why he compiled tables and laws disagreeing with it—perhaps a pastime like patience or stamp-collecting.
Ernest Grosse, another example, scorns speculative Aesthetic yet desires a Science of Art (Kunstwissenschaft) formulating laws from historical facts, completed with ethnographical and prehistoric materials, since general laws cannot come from cultivated peoples alone—”just as a theory of reproduction exclusively based upon the form it takes with mammifers, must necessarily be imperfect!” He knows savage and prehistoric experiences do not alone suffice, so interrogates the spirit of man, defining Aesthetic on apriorist principles discardable once the complete theory is obtained, like scaffolding after a house is built. “Words! Words! Vain words!” He defines Aesthetic as activity whose development and result have the immediate value of feeling, an end in itself; art is opposite to practice; games stand intermediate, also ending in their own activity.
Taine’s and Grosse’s Aesthetics are called sociological. Since a true definition of sociology is impossible—composed of ever-varying psychological elements—the passage passes to sociologists’ objective results. Proudhon (1875) would hark back to Platonic Aesthetic, class aesthetic activity as merely sensual, and command arts to further virtue, on pain of judicial proceedings for contumacy. M. Guyau is the most important sociological aesthetician; his works published in Paris toward the end of last century, and his posthumous Les problèmes de l’Esthétique contemporaine, substitute the theory of life for play, meaning social life. Art develops social sympathy, but not all art enters sociology. Art has two objects: production of agreeable sensations (colours, sounds) and phenomena of psychological induction, including complex ideas and feelings—sympathy for personages, interest, piety, indignation. Art becomes expression of life, yielding two tendencies: harmony, consonance, delighting ear and eye; and transforming life under art’s dominion. True genius balances these; decadent and unbalanced set aesthetic sympathy against human sympathy. Guyau admits a merely hedonistic art and places above it another hedonistic art serving morality.
M. Nordau wars against the decadent and unbalanced like Guyau, assigning art the function of re-establishing life’s integrity, broken by industrial civilization; art for art’s sake, simple expression of internal states.
Hanslick, Fiedler, and the Specialists
Hanslick held that the sole end of music was form, or musical beauty. The followers of Herbart treated him as an unexpected ally, and Hanslick reciprocated by citing Herbart and R. Zimmermann in later editions of his work as having “completely developed the great aesthetic principle of form.” But Hanslick meant something different by “form” than the Herbartians did: symmetry, mere acoustic relations, and pleasure of the ear did not constitute the musically beautiful for him, and he regarded mathematics as useless to musical Aesthetic. He described sonorous forms as full, not empty, comparable not to lines enclosing space but to spirit taking bodily form; music is more a picture than an arabesque, yet a picture whose subject is inexpressible in words and not enclosed in a precise concept. Music has meaning and connexion of a specially musical nature—a language we speak and understand but cannot translate. Hanslick conceded that music, if it does not render the quality of sentiments, renders their tone or dynamic side: adjectives rather than substantives, the “murmuring” and the “impetuous.” The essence of his book lies in denying that form and content can be separated in music: sounds called content have already received form, and what we call form is already filled form possessing content. These observations show acute penetration, but Hanslick’s belief that they were peculiar to music rather than common to all art alone prevented him from seeing further.
C. Fiedler published in German in 1887 a luminous work on the origin of artistic activity, describing how the passive spectator seems to grasp all reality until he tries to realize it artistically, when all disappears, leaving the emptiness of his own thoughts. Only by concentration do we attain expression; art is a language gradually learned.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the book is that art is knowledge—specifically, that it is intuitive knowledge, the knowledge of the individual, and that this knowledge is identical with expression. Croce reaches this position by a series of distinctions. Intuition has often been confounded with simple sensation; since this confusion is too shocking to good sense, it is attenuated by the phraseology that claims intuition is sensation but not simple sensation—rather an association of sensations. The equivocation lies in “association.” If association means memory, mnemonic association, conscious recollection, it is absurd to join in memory elements not intuited, distinguished, possessed by the spirit and produced by consciousness. If it means association of unconscious elements, we remain in the world of sensation and nature. If associationists speak of a productive association—formative, constructive, distinguishing—then the thing itself is admitted and only its name denied: productive association is no longer association in the sensualist sense but synthesis, spiritual activity. Synthesis may be called association, but with productivity is posited the distinction between passivity and activity, sensation and intuition.
Other psychologists distinguish from sensation something that is no longer sensation but not yet intellective concept: the representation or image. Croce asks the difference between their representation and his intuitive knowledge: the greatest, and none at all. “Representation” is equivocal. If it means something detached and standing out from the psychic base of sensations, then representation is intuition. If it means a complex sensation, we return to simple sensation, which does not change quality according to richness or poverty. Nor is the equivocation remedied by defining representation as a psychic product of secondary order: if secondary order means qualitative, formal difference, Croce agrees—representation is elaboration of sensation, intuition. If it means greater complexity, a quantitative, material difference, intuition is again confused with simple sensation.
There is a sure method of distinguishing true intuition from the inferior, mechanical, passive, natural fact: every true intuition or representation is also expression. What does not objectify itself in expression is not intuition but sensation and naturality. The spirit obtains intuitions only by making, forming, expressing. Whoever separates intuition from expression never succeeds in reuniting them. Intuitive activity possesses intuitions to the extent that it expresses them. The word “expression” is generally restricted to verbal expression, but there are also non-verbal expressions—line, colour, sound. The intuition and expression together of a painter are pictorial; of a poet, verbal. No intuition can lack expression, because it is inseparable from intuition. How can we have a true intuition of a geometrical figure unless we possess so accurate an image as to trace it immediately on paper or slate? How can we have an intuition of the contour of a region, such as the island of Sicily, if we cannot draw it in all its meanderings? Everyone can experience the internal illumination following success in formulating impressions and sentiments, but only so far as he is able to formulate them. Sentiments pass by means of words from the obscure region of the soul into the clarity of the contemplative spirit. In this cognitive process it is impossible to distinguish intuition from expression: they are produced at the same instant, because they are not two but one.
The principal reason the theme appears paradoxical is the illusion that we possess a more complete intuition of reality than we do. People say they have important thoughts but cannot express them; in truth, if they really had them, they would have coined them into beautiful, ringing words. If thoughts seem to vanish or become poor in expression, either they did not exist or were scarce and poor. People think ordinary men imagine countries, figures, scenes like painters; bodies like sculptors—save that painters and sculptors know how to paint and sculpture, while we possess images only within our souls. They believe anyone could have imagined a Madonna of Raphael, but that Raphael was Raphael owing to technical ability in putting the Madonna on canvas. Nothing is more false. The world of which we ordinarily have intuitions is small: little expressions growing greater with increasing spiritual concentration—words we speak within ourselves, tacit judgments: “Here is a man, here is a horse, this is heavy, this is hard, this pleases me.” It is a medley of light and colour that could not pictorially attain to more sincere expression than a haphazard splash of colours, from which a few distinctive traits would with difficulty stand out. This is the basis of ordinary action—the index of a book; labels tied to things take the place of the things themselves. These suffice for small needs and actions. From time to time we pass from index to book, from label to thing, from slight to greater intuitions, and from these to the greatest and most lofty.
From the identity of intuition and expression, Croce derives the unity and indivisibility of the work of art. Every expression is unique; activity fuses impressions in an organic whole. Hence art should have unity, or unity in variety—a synthesis of the multiple in the one. Dividing a work into parts—scenes, episodes, similes; figures, background, foreground—annihilates it, as dividing an organism into heart, brain, nerves, muscles turns a living being into a corpse. Where division yields more living things, we must conclude for a multiplicity of germs of life—a re-elaboration of parts into new single expressions. Expression is sometimes based on other expressions: simple and compound expressions. No real difference exists between the eureka of Archimedes and the five acts of a regular tragedy. Expression is always directly based on impressions. He who conceives a tragedy puts many impressions into a crucible; expressions conceived on other occasions fuse with the new into a single mass, as bronze pieces and precious statuettes are melted before a new statue. Old expressions must descend to the level of impressions to be synthetized anew.
By elaborating impressions, man frees himself from them; by objectifying them, he becomes their superior. The liberating and purifying function of art is another formula of its character of activity: activity drives away passivity. This explains why artists are attributed both maximum sensibility and passion—relating to the rich material absorbed into the psychic organism—and maximum insensibility and Olympic serenity, relating to the form that subjugates and dominates the tumult of feelings.
The two forms of knowledge—aesthetic and intellectual—are diverse but not separated. The aesthetic form is independent of the intellectual and suffices to itself; but the intellectual cannot stand without the aesthetic. Knowledge by concepts is knowledge of relations of things, and those things are intuitions. Concepts are not possible without intuitions, as intuition is impossible without the material of impressions. Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water; the concept is: water in general. The concept, the universal, is in another respect intuition, and cannot fail of being intuition. The man who thinks has impressions and emotions; his effort of thought, with pain and joy, love and hate, becomes intuitive in form, becoming objective to the mind. To speak is not to think logically; but to think logically is at the same time to speak.
That thought cannot exist without speech is generally admitted; negations are founded on equivoques and errors. The first equivoque: those who observe that one can think with geometrical figures, algebraical numbers, ideographic signs, without a word; or that some languages require written signs. But “speech” was intended as a synecdoche for “expression” generically. Certain concepts may be thought without phonetic manifestations, but the very examples prove those concepts never exist without expressions. Others maintain that animals think or reason without speaking. Questions about how, whether, and what animals think—whether they be rudimentary half-savage men or physiological machines—do not concern us. The philosopher talking of animal, brutal, impulsive, instinctive nature bases himself not on conjectures about dogs, cats, lions, ants, but on observations of what is called animal and brutal in man. If individual animals possess something of human activity, so much the better or worse for them; we must talk not of their nature as a whole but of its animal basis. If animals think and form concepts, what justifies admitting they do so without corresponding expressions? The analogy with man, human psychology, would suggest the contrary.
True science is not intuition but concept, not individuality but universality, and therefore can only be a science of the spirit—Philosophy. If “natural sciences” are spoken of apart from philosophy, they are not perfect sciences but complexes of knowledge arbitrarily abstracted and fixed. The natural sciences themselves admit they are surrounded by limitations, which are nothing but historical and intuitive data. They calculate, measure, establish equalities, regularity, create classes and types, formulate laws, and show how one fact arises from others, but in their progress they always meet facts known intuitively and historically. Even geometry now rests on hypotheses, since space is not three-dimensional or Euclidean, though this assumption is preferred for convenience. Whatever truth the natural sciences contain is either philosophy or historical fact; what is proper to them is abstract and arbitrary. To become perfect sciences they must leave their circle and enter the philosophical circle, positing concepts like the atom without extension, ether or vibrating matter, vital force, or space beyond intuition—true philosophical efforts when not mere meaningless words. Natural science concepts are useful, but no system can be obtained from them; system belongs only to the spirit. These historical and intuitive assumptions also explain how, in the progress of knowledge, what was once considered truth descends to mythological beliefs and imaginary illusions, and how some natural scientists call the basis of their teaching “mythical facts,” “verbal expedients,” or “conventions.” Naturalists and mathematicians approaching the energies of the spirit without preparation carry these mental habits into philosophy, speaking of conventions “as arranged by man,” making conventions of truth and morality, with the Spirit itself as supreme convention. But if there are to be conventions, something must exist about which no convention is made, itself the agent of convention—the spiritual activity of man. The limitation of the natural sciences postulates the illimitation of philosophy.
The pure or fundamental forms of knowledge are two: intuition and concept—Art, and Science or Philosophy. With these is included History, the product of intuition placed in contact with the concept, of art receiving philosophic distinctions while remaining concrete and individual. All other forms—natural sciences and mathematics—are impure, mingled with extraneous elements of practical origin. Intuition gives the world, the phenomenon; the concept gives the noumenon, the Spirit.
From confusing art’s exigencies with history’s arose the theory of verisimilitude as art’s object. Though its intention was often more reasonable than its definition, verisimilitude meant artistic coherence—completeness and effectiveness. If “verisimilar” is translated as “coherent,” exact meaning appears in critics’ discussions. An improbable personage or ending is badly drawn, happenings without artistic motive. Even fairies and sprites must have verisimilitude—be really sprites, coherent artistic intuitions. “Possible” has sometimes been used instead, synonymous with the imaginable or intuitively knowable; everything coherently imagined is possible. But formerly theoreticians understood verisimilar as historical credibility—historical truth not demonstrable but conjecturable. This was imposed on art, as in criticism of the Jerusalem Delivered based on Crusades history, or of the Homeric poems on the verisimilitude of emperors’ and kings’ costume. At other times art was required to reproduce historical reality—another erroneous signification of the imitation of nature. Verism and naturalism confused the aesthetic fact with natural-science processes, aiming at experimental drama or romance.
Confusions between art’s methods and philosophical sciences’ methods were far more frequent. Art was often held competent to develop concepts, unite the intelligible with the sensible, represent ideas or universals—putting art in place of science, confusing the artistic function with the case where it becomes aesthetico-logical. The theory of art supporting theses reduces to the same error, as does art as individual representation exemplifying scientific laws; the example stands for the thing exemplified, an exposition of the universal, a form of science. The same applies to the aesthetic theory of the typical, when type means abstraction or concept, affirming that art should make the species shine in the individual. If typical means the individual, it is a verbal variation: to typify would signify to characterize—to determine and represent the individual. Don Quixote is a type—of all Don Quixotes, of himself—not of abstract concepts like loss of the sense of reality or love of glory, under which infinite personages can be thought who are not Don Quixote. We find our impressions determined and verified in a poet’s expression; we call that expression typical, which might be called simply aesthetic. Poetical or artistic universals have been spoken of to show that the artistic product is altogether spiritual and ideal.
The symbol has sometimes been given as art’s essence. If inseparable from artistic intuition, it is synonymous with intuition itself, which always has ideal character. There is no double-bottom to art, but one only; in art all is symbolical because all is ideal. But if symbol is looked upon as separable—symbol on one side, thing symbolized on the other—we fall into the intellectualist error: that pretended symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept, an allegory, science, or art aping science.
