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

The sensualists, as we know, maintain that all the senses are aesthetic.

That is the hedonistic hypothesis, which has been dealt with and disproved in this book. We have shown the embarrassment in which the hedonists find themselves, when they have dubbed all the senses “aesthetic,” or have been obliged to differentiate in an absurd manner some of the senses from the others. The only way out of the difficulty lies in abandoning the attempt to unite orders of facts so diverse as the representative form of the spirit and the conception of given physical organs or of a given material of impressions.

The origin of classes of speech and of grammatical forms is to be found in antiquity, and as regards the latter, the disputes among the Alexandrian philosophers, the analogists, and the anomalists, resulted in logic being identified with grammar. Anything which did not seem logical was excluded from grammar as a deviation. The analogists, however, did not have it all their own way, and grammar in the modern sense of the word is a compromise between these extreme views, that is, it contains something of the thought of Chrysippus, who composed a treatise to show that the same thing can be expressed with different sounds, and of Apollonius Discolus, who attempted to explain what the rigorous analogists refused to admit into their schemes and classifications. It is only of late years that we have begun to emerge from the superstitious reverence for grammar, inherited from the Middle Age. Such writers as Pott, in his introduction to Humboldt, and Paul in his Principien d. Sprachgeschichte, have done good service in throwing doubt upon the absolute validity of the parts of speech. If the old superstitions still survive tenaciously, we must attribute this partly to empirical and poetical grammar, partly to the venerable antiquity of grammar itself, which has led the world to forget its illegitimate and turbid origin.

The theory of the relativity of taste is likewise ancient, and it would be interesting to know whether the saying “there’s no accounting for tastes” could be traced to a merely gustatory origin. In this sense, the saying would be quite correct, as it is quite wrong when applied to aesthetic facts. The eighteenth century writers exhibit a piteous perplexity of thought on this subject. Home, for instance, after much debate, decides upon a common “standard of taste,” which he deduces from the necessity of social life and from what he calls “a final cause.” Of course it will not be an easy matter to fix this “standard of taste.” As regards moral conduct, we do not seek our models among savages, so with regard to taste, we must have recourse to those few whose taste has not been corrupted nor spoilt by pleasure, who have received good taste from nature, and have perfected it by education and by the practice of life.

If after this has been done, there should yet arise disputes, it will be necessary to refer to the principles of criticism, as laid down in his book by the said Home.

We find similar contradictions and vicious circles in the Discourse on Taste of David Hume. We search his writings in vain for the distinctive characteristics of the man of taste, whose judgments should be final.

Although he asserts that the general principles of taste are universal in human nature, and admits that no notice should be accorded to perversions and ignorance, yet there exist diversities of taste that are irreconcilable, insuperable, and blameless.

But the criticism of the sensualist and relativist positions cannot be made from the point of view of those who proclaim the absolute nature of taste and yet place it among the intellectual concepts. It has been shown to be impossible to escape from sensualism and relativity save by falling into the intellectualist error. Muratori in the eighteenth century is an instance of this. He was one of the first to maintain the existence of a rule of taste and of universal beauty. Andr� also spoke of what appears beautiful in a work of art as being not that which pleases at once, owing to certain particular dispositions of the faculties of the soul and of the organs of the body, but that which has the right of pleasing the reason and reflection through its own excellence. Voltaire admitted an “universal taste,” which was “intellectual,” as did many others. Kant appeared, and condemned alike the intellectualist and the sensualistic error; but placing the beautiful in a symbol of morality, he failed to discover the imaginative absoluteness of taste. Later speculative philosophy did not attach importance to the question.

The correct solution was slow in making its way. It lies, as we know, in the fact that to judge a work of art we must place ourselves in the position of the artist at the time of production, and that to judge is to reproduce. Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, was among the first to state this truth:

A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ.

Remarks equally luminous were made by Antonio Conti, Terrasson, and Heydenreich in the eighteenth century, the latter with considerable philosophical development. De Sanctis gave in his adhesion to this formula, but a true theory of aesthetic criticism had not yet been given, because for such was necessary, not only an exact conception of nature in art, but also of the relations between the aesthetic fact and its historical conditions. In more recent times has been denied the possibility of aesthetic criticism; it has been looked upon as merely individual and capricious, and historical criticism has been set up in its place. This would be better called a criticism of extrinsic erudition and of bad philosophical inspiration—positivist and materialist. The true history of literature will always require the reconstruction and then the judgment of the work of art. Those who have wished to react against such emasculated erudition have often thrown themselves into the opposite extreme, that is, into a dogmatic, abstract, intellectualistic, or moralistic form of criticism.

This mention of the history of certain doctrines relating to Aesthetic suffices to show the range of error possible in the theory. Aesthetic has need to be surrounded by a vigilant and vigorous critical literature which shall derive from it and be at once its safeguard and its source of strength.

I here add as an appendix, at the request of the author, a translation of his lecture which he delivered before the Third International Congress of Philosophy, at Heidelberg, on 2nd September 1908.

The reader will find that it throws a vivid light upon Benedetto Croce’s general theory of Aesthetic.

PURE INTUITION AND THE LYRICAL CHARACTER OF ART.

A Lecture delivered at Heidelberg at the second general session of the Third International Congress of Philosophy.

There exists an empirical Aesthetic, which although it admits the existence of facts, called aesthetic or artistic, yet holds that they are irreducible to a single principle, to a rigorous philosophical concept. It wishes to limit itself to collecting as many of those facts as possible, and in the greatest possible variety, thence, at the most, proceeding to group them together in classes and types. The logical ideal of this school, as declared on many occasions, is zoology or botany. This Aesthetic, when asked what art is, replies by indicating successively single facts, and by saying: “Art is this, and this, and this too is art,” and so on, indefinitely. Zoology and botany renew the representatives of fauna and of flora in the same way. They calculate that the species renewed amount to some thousand, but believe that they might easily be increased to twenty or a hundred thousand, or even to a million, or to infinity.

There is another Aesthetic, which has been called hedonistic, utilitarian, moralistic, and so on, according to its various manifestations. Its complex denomination should, however, be practicism, because that is precisely what constitutes its essential character. This Aesthetic differs from the preceding, in the belief that aesthetic or artistic facts are not a merely empirical or nominalistic grouping together, but that all of them possess a common foundation. Its foundation is placed in the practical form of human activity. Those facts are therefore considered, either generically, as manifestations of pleasure and pain, and therefore rather as economic facts; or, more particularly, as a special class of those manifestations; or again, as instruments and products of the ethical spirit, which subdues and turns to its own ends individual hedonistic and economic tendencies.

There is a third Aesthetic, the intellectualist, which, while also recognizing the reducibility of aesthetic facts to philosophical treatment, explains them as particular cases of logical thought, identifying beauty with intellectual truth; art, now with the natural sciences, now with philosophy. For this Aesthetic, what is prized in art is what is learned from it. The only distinction that it admits between art and science, or art and philosophy, is at the most that of more or less, or of perfection and imperfection. According to this Aesthetic, art would be the whole mass of easy and popular truths; or it would be a transitory form of science, a semi-science and a semi-philosophy, preparatory to the superior and perfect form of science and of philosophy.

A fourth Aesthetic there is, which may be called agnostic. It springs from the criticism of the positions just now indicated, and being guided by a powerful consciousness of the truth, rejects them all, because it finds them too evidently false, and because it is too loth to admit that art is a simple fact of pleasure or pain, an exercise of virtue, or a fragmentary sketch of science and philosophy. And while rejecting them, it discovers, at the same time, that art is not now this and now that of those things, or of other things, indefinitely, but that it has its own principle and origin. However, it is not able to say what this principle may be, and believes that it is impossible to do so. This Aesthetic knows that art cannot be resolved into an empirical concept; knows that pleasure and pain are united with the aesthetic activity only in an indirect manner; that morality has nothing to do with art; that it is impossible to rationalize art, as is the case with science and philosophy, and to prove it beautiful or ugly with the aid of reason.

Here this Aesthetic is content to stop, satisfied with a knowledge consisting entirely of negative terms.

Finally, there is an Aesthetic which I have elsewhere proposed to call mystic. This Aesthetic avails itself of those negative terms, to define art as a spiritual form without a practical character, because it is theoretic, and without a logical or intellective form, because it is a theoretic form, differing alike from those of science and of philosophy, and superior to both. According to this view, art would be the highest pinnacle of knowledge, whence what is seen from other points seems narrow and partial; art would alone reveal the whole horizon or all the abysses of Reality.

Now, the five Aesthetics so far mentioned are not referable to contingent facts and historical epochs, as are, on the other hand, the denominations of Greek and Mediaeval Aesthetic, of Renaissance and eighteenth-century Aesthetic, the Aesthetic of Wolff and of Herbart, of Vico and of Hegel. These five are, on the contrary, mental attitudes, which are found in all periods, although they have not always conspicuous representatives of the kind that are said to become historical. Empirical Aesthetic is, for example, called Burke in the eighteenth, Fechner in the nineteenth century; moralistic Aesthetic is Horace or Plutarch in antiquity, Campanella in modern times; intellectualist or logical Aesthetic is Cartesian in the seventeenth, Leibnitzian in the eighteenth,