Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic - Benedetto Croce (best feel good books txt) 📗

scientific. In the last of these, passion is represented, not immediately, but mediately, or, to speak exactly, it is no longer represented, but thought. Thus the origin of language, that is, its true nature, has several times been placed in interjection. Thus, too, Aristotle, when he wished to give an example of those propositions which were not apophantic, but generically semantic (we should say, not logical, but purely Aesthetic), and did not predicate the logically true and false, but nevertheless said something, gave as example invocation or prayer, hae enchae. He added that these propositions do not appertain to Logic, but to Rhetoric and Poetic. A landscape is a state of the soul; a great poem may all be contained in an exclamation of joy, of sorrow, of admiration, or of lament. The more objective is a work of art, by so much the more is it poetically suggestive.

If this deduction of lyricism from the intimate essence of pure intuition do not appear easily acceptable, the reason is to be sought in two very deep-rooted prejudices, of which it is useful to indicate here the genesis. The first concerns the nature of the imagination, and its likenesses to and differences from fancy. Imagination and fancy have been clearly distinguished thus by certain aestheticians (and among them, De Sanctis), as also in discussions relating to concrete art: they have held fancy, not imagination, to be the special faculty of the poet and the artist. Not only does a new and bizarre combination of images, which is vulgarly called invention, not constitute the artist, but ne fait rien � l’affaire, as Alceste remarked with reference to the length of time expended upon writing a sonnet. Great artists have often preferred to treat groups of images, which had already been many times used as material for works of art. The novelty of these new works has been solely that of art or form, that is to say, of the new accent

which they have known how to give to the old material, of the new way in which they have felt and therefore intuified it, thus creating new images upon the old ones. These remarks are all obvious and universally recognized as true. But if mere imagination as such has been excluded from art, it has not therefore been excluded from the theoretic spirit.

Hence the disinclination to admit that a pure intuition must of necessity express a state of the soul, whereas it may also consist, as they believe, of a pure image, without a content of feeling. If we form an arbitrary image of any sort, stans pede in uno, say of a bullock’s head on a horse’s body, would not this be an intuition, a pure intuition, certainly quite without any content of reflexion? Would one not attain to a work of art in this way, or at any rate to an artistic motive? Certainly not. For the image given as an instance, and every other image that may be produced by the imagination, not only is not a pure intuition, but it is not a theoretic product of any sort. It is a product of choice, as was observed in the formula used by our opponents; and choice is external to the world of thought and contemplation. It may be said that imagination is a practical artifice or game, played upon that patrimony of images possessed by the soul; whereas the fancy, the translation of practical into theoretical values, of states of the soul into images, is the creation of that patrimony itself.

From this we learn that an image, which is not the expression of a state of the soul, is not an image, since it is without any theoretical value; and therefore it cannot be an obstacle to the identification of lyricism and intuition. But the other prejudice is more difficult to eradicate, because it is bound up with the metaphysical problem itself, on the various solutions of which depend the various solutions of the aesthetic problem, and vice versa. If art be intuition, would it therefore be any intuition that one might have of a physical object, appertaining to external nature? If I open my eyes and look at the first object that they fall upon, a chair or a table, a mountain or a river, shall I have performed by so doing an aesthetic act? If so, what becomes of the lyrical character, of which we have asserted the necessity? If not, what becomes of the intuitive character, of which we have affirmed the equal necessity and also its identity with the former? Without doubt, the perception of a physical object, as such, does not constitute an artistic fact; but precisely for the reason that it is not a pure intuition, but a judgment of perception, and implies the application of an abstract concept, which in this case is physical or belonging to external nature. And with this reflexion and perception, we find ourselves at once outside the domain of pure intuition. We could have a pure perception of a physical object in one way only; that is to say, if physical or external nature were a metaphysical reality, a truly real reality, and not, as it is, a construction or abstraction of the intellect. If such were the case, man would have an immediate intuition, in his first theoretical moment, both of himself and of external nature, of the spiritual and of the physical, in an equal degree. This represents the dualistic hypothesis. But just as dualism is incapable of providing a coherent system of philosophy, so is it incapable of providing a coherent Aesthetic. If we admit dualism, we must certainly abandon the doctrine of art as pure intuition; but we must at the same time abandon all philosophy. But art on its side tacitly protests against metaphysical dualism. It does so, because, being the most immediate form of knowledge, it is in contact with activity, not with passivity; with interiority, not exteriority; with spirit, not with matter, and never with a double order of reality. Those who affirm the existence of two forms of intuition—the one external or physical, the other subjective or aesthetic; the one cold and inanimate, the other warm and lively; the one imposed from without, the other coming from the inner soul—attain without doubt to the distinctions and oppositions of the vulgar (or dualistic) consciousness, but their Aesthetic is vulgar.

The lyrical essence of pure intuition, and of art, helps to make clear what we have already observed concerning the persistence of the intuition and of the fancy in the higher grades of the theoretical spirit, why philosophy, history, and science have always an artistic side, and why their expression is subject to aesthetic valuation. The man who ascends from art to thought does not by so doing abandon his volitional and practical base, and therefore he too finds himself in a particular state of the soul, the representation of which is intuitive and lyrical, and accompanies of necessity the development of his ideas.

Hence the various styles of thinkers, solemn or jocose, troubled or gladsome, mysterious and involved, or level and expansive. But it would not be correct to divide intuition immediately into two classes, the one of aesthetic, the other of intellectual or logical intuitions, owing to the persistence of the artistic element in logical thought, because the relation of degrees is not the relation of classes, and copper is copper, whether it be found alone, or in combination as bronze.

Further, this close connection of feeling and intuition in pure intuition throws much light on the reasons which have so often caused art to be separated from the theoretic and confounded with the practical activity. The most celebrated of these confusions are those formulated about the relativity of tastes and of the impossibility of reproducing, tasting, and correctly judging the art of the past, and in general the art of others. A life lived, a feeling felt, a volition willed, are certainly impossible to reproduce, because nothing happens more than once, and my situation at the present moment is not that of any other being, nor is it mine of the moment before, nor will be of the moment to follow. But art remakes ideally, and ideally expresses my momentary situation. Its image, produced by art, becomes separated from time and space, and can be again made and again contemplated in its ideal-reality from every point of time and space. It belongs not to the world, but to the superworld; not to the flying moment, but to eternity. Thus life passes, but art endures.

Finally, we obtain from this relation between the intuition and the state of the soul the criterion of exact definition of the sincerity

required of artists, which is itself also an essential request. It is essential, precisely because it means that the artist must have a state of the soul to express, which really amounts to saying, that he must be an artist. His must be a state of the soul really experienced, not merely imagined, because imagination, as we know, is not a work of truth. But, on the other hand, the demand for sincerity does not go beyond asking for a state of the soul, and that the state of soul expressed in the work of art be a desire or an action. It is altogether indifferent to Aesthetic whether the artist have had only an aspiration, or have realized that aspiration in his empirical life. All that is quite indifferent in the sphere of art. Here we also find the confutation of that false conception of sincerity, which maintains that the artist, in his volitional or practical life, should be at one with his dream, or with his incubus. Whether or no he have been so, is a matter that interests his biographer, not his critic; it belongs to history, which separates and qualifies that which art does not discriminate, but represents.

III

This attitude of indiscrimination and indifference, observed by art in respect to history and philosophy, is also foreshadowed at that place of the De interpretatione (c. 4), to which we have already referred, to obtain thence the confirmation of the thesis of the identity of art and language, and another confirmation, that of the identity of lyric and pure intuition. It is a really admirable passage, containing many profound truths in a few short, simple words, although, as is natural, without full consciousness of their richness. Aristotle, then, is still discussing the said rhetorical and poetical propositions, semantic and not apophantic, and he remarks that in them there rules no distinction between true and false: to alaetheueion hae pseudeothai ouk hyparchei. Art, in fact, is in contact with palpitating reality, but does not know that it is so in contact, and therefore is not truly in contact. Art does not allow itself to be troubled with the abstractions of the intellect, and therefore does not make mistakes; but it does not know that it does not make mistakes. If art, then (to return to what we said at the beginning), be the first and most ingenuous form of knowledge, it cannot give complete satisfaction to man’s need to know, and therefore cannot be the ultimate end of the theoretic spirit. Art is the dream of the life of knowledge. Its complement is waking, lyricism no longer, but the concept; no longer the dream, but the judgment.

Thought could not be without fancy; but thought surpasses and contains in itself the fancy, transforms the image into perception, and gives to the world of dream the clear distinctions and the firm contours of reality. Art cannot achieve this; and however great be our love of art, that cannot raise it in rank, any more than the