Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, Benedetto Croce [read e books online free TXT] 📗

in peace, for they cannot get inspiration, save from what has made an impression upon them. The critics should think rather of how they can effect changes in nature and in society, in order that those impressions may not exist. If ugliness were to vanish from the world, if universal virtue and felicity were established there, perhaps artists would no longer represent perverse or pessimistic sentiments, but sentiments that are calm, innocent, and joyous, like Arcadians of a real Arcady. But so long as ugliness and turpitude exist in nature and impose themselves on the artist, it is not possible to prevent the expression of these things also; and when it has arisen, factum infectum fieri nequit. We speak thus entirely from the aesthetic point of view, and from that of pure aesthetic criticism.

We do not delay to pass here in review the damage which the criticism of choice does to artistic production, with the prejudices which it produces or maintains among the artists themselves, and with the contrast which it occasions between artistic impulse and critical exigencies. It is true that sometimes it seems to do some good also, by assisting the artists to discover themselves, that is, their own impressions and their own inspiration, and to acquire consciousness of the task which is, as it were, imposed upon them by the historical moment in which they live, and by their individual temperament. In these cases, criticism of choice merely recognizes and aids the expressions which are already being formed. It believes itself to be the mother, where, at most, it is only the midwife.

[Sidenote] The independence of art.

The impossibility of choice of content completes the theorem of the independence of art, and is also the only legitimate meaning of the expression: art for art’s sake. Art is thus independent of science, as it is of the useful and the moral. Let it not be feared that thus may be justified art that is frivolous or cold, since that which is truly frivolous or cold is so because it has not been raised to expression; or in other words, frivolity and frigidity come always from the form of the aesthetic elaboration, from the lack of a content, not from the material qualities of the content.

[Sidenote] Critique of the saying: the style is the man.

The saying: the style is the man, can also not be completely criticized, save by starting from the distinction between the theoretic and the practical, and from the theoretic character of the aesthetic activity. Man is not simply knowledge and contemplation: he is also will, which contains in it the cognoscitive moment. Now the saying is either altogether void, as when it is understood that the man is the style, in so far as he is style, that is to say, the man, but only in so far as he is an expression of activity; or it is erroneous, when the attempt is made to deduce from what a man has seen and expressed, that which he has done and willed, inferring thereby that there is a necessary link between knowing and willing. Many legends in the biographies of artists have sprung from this erroneous identification, since it seemed impossible that a man who gives expression to generous sentiments should not be a noble and generous man in practical life; or that the dramatist who gives a great many stabs in his plays, should not himself have given a few at least in real life. Vainly do the artists protest: lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba. They are merely taxed in addition with lying and hypocrisy. O you poor women of Verona, how far more subtle you were, when you founded your belief that Dante had really descended to hell, upon his dusky countenance! Yours was at any rate a historical conjecture.

[Sidenote] Critique of the concept of sincerity in art.

Finally, sincerity imposed upon the artist as a duty (this law of ethics which, they say, is also a law of aesthetic) arises from another equivoke. For by sincerity is meant either the moral duty not to deceive one’s neighbour; and in that case Is foreign to the artist. For he, in fact, deceives no one, since he gives form to what is already in his mind. He would deceive, only if he were to betray his duty as an artist by a lesser devotion to the intrinsic necessity of his task. If lies and deceit are in his mind, then the form which he gives to these things cannot be deceit or lies, precisely because it is aesthetic. The artist, if he be a charlatan, a liar, or a miscreant, purifies his other self by reflecting it in art. Or by sincerity is meant, fulness and truth of expression, and it is clear that this second sense has nothing to do with the ethical concept. The law, which is at once ethical and aesthetic, reveals itself in this case in a word employed alike by Ethic and Aesthetic.

VII

ANALOGY BETWEEN THE THEORETIC AND THE PRACTICAL

[Sidenote] The two forms of practical activity.

The twofold grade of the theoretical activity, aesthetic and logical, has an important parallel in the practical activity, which has not yet been placed in due relief. The practical activity is also divided into a first and second degree, the second implying the first. The first practical degree is the simply useful or economical activity; the second the moral activity.

Economy is, as it were, the Aesthetic of practical life; Morality its Logic.

[Sidenote] The economically useful.

If this has not been clearly seen by philosophers; if its suitable place in the system of the mind has not been given to the economic activity, and it has been left to wander in the prolegomena to treatises on political economy, often uncertain and but slightly elaborated, this is due, among other reasons, to the fact that the useful or economic has been confused, now with the concept of technique, now with that of the egoistic.

[Sidenote] Distinction between the useful and the technical.

Technique is certainly not a special activity of the spirit.

Technique is knowledge; or better, it is knowledge itself, in general, that takes this name, as we have seen, in so far as it serves as basis for practical action. Knowledge which is not followed, or is presumed to be not easily followed by practical action, is called pure: the same knowledge, if effectively followed by action, is called applied; if it is presumed that it can be easily followed by the same action, it is called technical or applied. This word, then, indicates a situation in which knowledge already is, or easily can be found, not a special form of knowledge. So true is this, that it would be altogether impossible to establish whether a given order of knowledge were, intrinsically, pure or applied. All knowledge, however abstract and philosophical one may imagine it to be, can be a guide to practical acts; a theoretical error in the ultimate principles of morals can be reflected and always is reflected in some way, in practical life. One can only speak roughly and unscientifically of truths that are pure and of others that are applied.

The same knowledge which is called technical, can also be called useful. But the word “useful,” in conformity with the criticism of judgments of value made above, is to be understood as used here in a linguistic or metaphorical sense. When we say that water is useful for putting out fire, the word “useful” is used in a non-scientific sense.

Water thrown on the fire is the cause of its going out: this is the knowledge that serves for basis to the action, let us say, of firemen.

There is a link, not of nature, but of simple succession, between the useful action of the person who extinguishes the conflagration, and this knowledge. The technique of the effects of the water is the theoretical activity which precedes; the action of him who extinguishes the fire is alone useful.

[Sidenote] Distinction between the useful and the egoistic.

Some economists identify utility with ego�sm, that is to say, with merely economical action or desire, with that which is profitable to the individual, in so far as individual, without regard to and indeed in complete opposition to the moral law. The egoistic is the immoral. In this case Economy would be a very strange science, standing, not beside, but facing Ethic, like the devil facing God, or at least like the advocatus diaboli in the processes of canonization. Such a conception of it is altogether inadmissible: the science of immorality is implied in that of morality, as the science of the false is implied in Logic, the science of the true, and a science of ineffectual expression in Aesthetic, the science of successful expression. If, then, Economy were the scientific treatment of egoism, it would be a chapter of Ethic, or Ethic itself; because every moral determination implies, at the same time, a negation of its contrary.

Further, conscience tells us that to conduct oneself economically is not to conduct oneself egoistically; that even the most morally scrupulous man must conduct himself usefully (economically), if he does not wish to be inconclusive and, therefore, not truly moral. If utility were egoism, how could it be the duty of the altruist to behave like an egoist?

[Sidenote] Economic will and moral will.

If we are not mistaken, the difficulty is solved in a manner perfectly analogous to that in which is solved the problem of the relations between the expression and the concept, between Aesthetic and Logic.

To will economically is to will an end; to will morally is to will the rational end. But whoever wills and acts morally, cannot but will and act usefully (economically). How could he will the rational, unless he willed it also as his particular end?

[Sidenote] Pure economicity.

The reciprocal is not true; as it is not true in aesthetic science that the expressive fact must of necessity be linked with the logical fact.

It is possible to will economically without willing morally; and it is possible to conduct oneself with perfect economic coherence, while pursuing an end which is objectively irrational (immoral), or, better, an end which would be so judged in a superior grade of consciousness.

Examples of the economic, without the moral character, are the Prince of Machiavelli, Caesar Borgia, or the Iago of Shakespeare. Who can help admiring their strength of will, although their activity is only economic, and is opposed to what we hold moral? Who can help admiring the ser Ciappelletto of Boccaccio, who, even on his death-bed, pursues and realizes his ideal of the perfect rascal, making the small and timid little thieves who are present at his burlesque confession exclaim: “What manner of man is this, whose perversity, neither age, nor infirmity, nor the fear of death, which he sees at hand, nor the fear of God, before whose judgment-seat he must stand in a little while, have been able to remove, nor to cause that he should not wish to die as he has lived?”

[Sidenote] The economic side of morality.

The moral man unites with the pertinacity and fearlessness of a Caesar Borgia, of an Iago, or of a ser Ciappelletto, the good will of the saint or of the hero. Or, better, good will would not be will, and consequently not good, if it did not possess, in addition to the side which makes it good, also that which makes it will. Thus a logical thought, which does not succeed in expressing itself, is not thought, but at the most, a confused presentiment of a thought yet to come.

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