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

But if the activity of feeling in the sense here defined must not be substituted for all the other forms of spiritual activity, we have not said that it cannot accompany them. Indeed it accompanies them of necessity, because they are all in close relation, both with one another and with the elementary volitional form. Therefore each of them has for concomitants individual volitions and volitional pleasures and pains which are known as feeling. But we must not confound what is concomitant, with the principal fact, and take the one for the other.

The discovery of the truth, or the satisfaction of a moral duty fulfilled, produces in us a joy which makes our whole being vibrate, for, by attaining to those forms of spiritual activity, it attains at the same time that to which it was practically tending, as to its end, during the effort. Nevertheless, economic or hedonistic satisfaction, ethical satisfaction, aesthetic satisfaction, intellectual satisfaction, remain always distinct, even when in union.

Thus is solved at the same time the much-debated question, which has seemed, not wrongly, a matter of life or death for aesthetic science, namely, whether the feeling and the pleasure precede or follow, are cause or effect of the aesthetic fact. We must enlarge this question, to include the relation between the various spiritual forms, and solve it in the sense that in the unity of the spirit one cannot talk of cause and effect and of what comes first and what follows it in time.

And once the relation above exposed is established, the statements, which it is customary to make, as to the nature of aesthetic, moral, intellectual, and even, as is sometimes said, economic feelings, must also fall. In this last case, it is clear that it is a question, not of two terms, but of one, and the quest of economic feeling can be but that same one concerning the economic activity. But in the other cases also, the search can never be directed to the substantive, but to the adjective: aesthetic, morality, logic, explain the colouring of the feelings as aesthetic, moral, and intellectual, while feeling, studied alone, will never explain those refractions.

[Sidenote] Meaning of certain ordinary distinctions of feelings.

A further consequence is, that we can free ourselves from the distinction between values or feelings of value, and feelings that are merely hedonistic and without value; also from other similar distinctions, like those between disinterested feelings and interested feelings, between objective feelings and the others that are not objective but simply subjective, between feelings of approval and others of mere pleasure (_Gefallen_ and Vergn�gen of the Germans). Those distinctions strove hard to save the three spiritual forms, which have been recognised as the triad of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, from confusion with the fourth form, still unknown, yet insidious through its indeterminateness, and mother of scandals. For us this triad has finished its task, because we are capable of reaching the distinction far more directly, by welcoming even the selfish, subjective, merely pleasurable feelings, among the respectable forms of the spirit; and where formerly antitheses were conceived of by ourselves and others, between value and feelings, as between spirituality and naturality, henceforth we see nothing but difference between value and value.

[Sidenote] Value and disvalue: the contraries and their union.

As has already been said, the economic feeling or activity reveals itself as divided into two poles, positive and negative, pleasure and pain, which we can now translate into useful, and useless or hurtful.

This bipartition has already been noted above, as a mark of the active character of feeling, precisely because the same bipartition is found in all forms of activity. If each of these is a value, each has opposed to it antivalue or disvalue. Absence of value is not sufficient to cause disvalue, but activity and passivity must be struggling between themselves, without the one getting the better of the other; hence the contradiction, and the disvalue of the activity that is embarrassed, contested, or interrupted. Value is activity that unfolds itself freely: disvalue is its contrary.

We will content ourselves with this definition of the two terms, without entering into the problem of the relation between value and disvalue, that is, between the problem of contraries. (Are these to be thought of dualistically, as two beings or two orders of beings, like Ormuzd and Ahriman, angels and devils, enemies to one another; or as a unity, which is also contrariety?) This definition of the two terms will be sufficient for our purpose, which is to make clear aesthetic activity in particular, and one of the most obscure and disputed concepts of Aesthetic which arises at this point: the concept of the Beautiful.

[Sidenote] The Beautiful as the value of expression, or expression and nothing more.

Aesthetic, intellectual, economic, and ethical values and disvalues are variously denominated in current speech: beautiful, true, good, useful, just, and so on—these words designate the free development of spiritual activity, action, scientific research, artistic production, when they are successful; ugly, false, bad, useless, unbecoming, unjust, inexact designate embarrassed activity, the product of which is a failure. In linguistic usage, these denominations are being continually shifted from one order of facts to another, and from this to that. Beautiful, for instance, is said not only of a successful expression, but also of a scientific truth, of an action successfully achieved, and of a moral action: thus we talk of an intellectual beauty, of a beautiful action, of a moral beauty. Many philosophers, especially aestheticians, have lost their heads in their pursuit of these most varied uses: they have entered an inextricable and impervious verbal labyrinth. For this reason it has hitherto seemed convenient studiously to avoid the use of the word beautiful to indicate successful expression. But after all the explanations that have been given, and all danger of misunderstanding being now dissipated, and since, on the other hand, we cannot fail to recognize that the prevailing tendency, alike in current speech and in philosophy, is to limit the meaning of the vocable beautiful altogether to the aesthetic value, we may define beauty as successful expression, or better, as expression and nothing more, because expression, when it is not successful, is not expression.

[Sidenote] The ugly, and the elements of beauty which compose it.

Consequently, the ugly is unsuccessful expression. The paradox is true, that, in works of art that are failures, the beautiful is present as unity and the ugly as multiplicity. Thus, with regard to works of art that are more or less failures, we talk of qualities, that is to say of those parts of them that are beautiful. We do not talk thus of perfect works. It is in fact impossible to enumerate their qualities or to designate those parts of them that are beautiful. In them there is complete fusion: they have but one quality. Life circulates in the whole organism: it is not withdrawn into certain parts.

The qualities of works that are failures may be of various degrees. They may even be very great. The beautiful does not possess degrees, for there is no conceiving a more beautiful, that is, an expressive that is more expressive, an adequate that is more than adequate. Ugliness, on the other hand, does possess degrees, from the rather ugly (or almost beautiful) to the extremely ugly. But if the ugly were complete, that is to say, without any element of beauty, it would for that very reason cease to be ugly, because in it would be absent the contradiction which is the reason of its existence. The disvalue would become nonvalue; activity would give place to passivity, with which it is not at war, save when there effectively is war.

[Sidenote] Illusions that there exist expressions which are neither beautiful nor ugly.

And because the distinctive consciousness of the beautiful and of the ugly is based on the contrasts and contradictions in which aesthetic activity is developed, it is evident that this consciousness becomes attenuated to the point of disappearing altogether, as we descend from the more complicated to the more simple and to the simplest cases of expression. From this arises the illusion that there are expressions which are neither beautiful nor ugly, those which are obtained without sensible effort and appear easy and natural being so considered.

[Sidenote] True aesthetic feelings and concomitant or accidental feelings.

The whole mystery of the beautiful and the ugly is reduced to these henceforth most easy definitions. Should any one object that there exist perfect aesthetic expressions before which no pleasure is felt, and others, perhaps even failures, which give him the greatest pleasure, it is necessary to advise him to pay great attention, as regards the aesthetic fact, to that only which is truly aesthetic pleasure.

Aesthetic pleasure is sometimes reinforced by pleasures arising from extraneous facts, which are only casually found united with it. The poet or any other artist affords an instance of purely aesthetic pleasure, during the moment in which he sees (or has the intuition of) his work for the first time; that is to say, when his impressions take form and his countenance is irradiated with the divine joy of the creator. On the other hand, a mixed pleasure is experienced by any one who goes to the theatre, after a day’s work, to witness a comedy: when the pleasure of rest and amusement, and that of laughingly snatching a nail from the gaping coffin, is accompanied at a certain moment by real aesthetic pleasure, obtained from the art of the dramatist and of the actors. The same may be said of the artist who looks upon his labour with pleasure, when it is finished, experiencing, in addition to the aesthetic pleasure, that very different one which arises from the thought of self-love satisfied, or of the economic gain which will come to him from his work. Examples could be multiplied.

[Sidenote] Critique of apparent feelings.

A category of apparent aesthetic feelings has been formed in modern Aesthetic. These have nothing to do with the aesthetic sensations of pleasure arising from the form, that is to say from the work of art. On the contrary, they arise from the content of the work of art. It has been observed that “artistic representations arouse pleasure and pain in their infinite variety and gradations. We tremble with anxiety, we rejoice, we fear, we laugh, we weep, we desire, with the personages of a drama or of a romance, with the figures in a picture, or with the melody of music. But these feelings are not those that would give occasion to the real fact outside art; that is to say, they are the same in quality, but they are quantitively an attenuation. Aesthetic and apparent

pleasure and pain are slight, of little depth, and changeable.” We have no need to treat of these apparent feelings, for the good reason that we have already amply discussed them; indeed, we have treated of them alone. What are ever feelings that become apparent or manifest, but feelings objectified, intensified, expressed? And it is natural that they do not trouble and agitate us passionately, as do those of real life, because those were matter, these are form and activity; those true and proper feelings, these intuitions and expressions. The formula, then, of apparent feelings is nothing but a tautology. The best that can be done is to run the pen through it.

As we are opposed to hedonism in general, that is to say, to the theory which is based