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

love one may have for a beautiful child can convert it into an adult. We must accept the child as a child, the adult as an adult.

Therefore, the Aesthetic of pure intuition, while it proclaims energetically the autonomy of art and of the aesthetic activity, is at the same time averse to all aestheticism, that is, to every attempt at lowering the life of thought, in order to elevate that of fancy. The origin of aestheticism is the same as that of mysticism. Both proceed from a rebellion against the predominance of the abstract sciences and against the undue abuse of the principle of causation in metaphysic.

When we pass from the stuffed animals of the zoological museums, from anatomical reconstructions, from tables of figures, from classes and subclasses constituted by means of abstract characters, or from the fixation and mechanization of life for the ends of naturalistic science, to the pages of the poets, to the pictures of the painters, to the melodies of the composers, when in fact we look upon life with the eye of the artist, we have the impression that we are passing from death to life, from the abstract to the concrete, from fiction to reality. We are inclined to proclaim that only in art and in aesthetic contemplation is truth, and that science is either charlatanesque pedantry, or a modest practical expedient. And certainly art has the superiority of its own truth; simple, small, and elementary though it be, over the abstract, which, as such, is altogether without truth. But in violently rejecting science and frantically embracing art, that very form of the theoretic spirit is forgotten, by means of which we can criticize science and recognize the nature of art. Now this theoretic spirit, since it criticizes science, is not science, and, as reflective consciousness of art, is not art. Philosophy, the supreme fact of the theoretic world, is forgotten. This error has been renewed in our day, because the consciousness of the limits of the natural sciences and of the value of the truth which belongs to intuition and to art, have been renewed. But just as, a century ago, during the idealistic and romantic period, there were some who reminded the fanatics for art, and the artists who were transforming philosophy, that art was not “the most lofty form of apprehending the Absolute”; so, in our day, it is necessary to awaken the consciousness of Thought. And one of the means for attaining this end is an exact understanding of the limits of art, that is, the construction of a solid Aesthetic.

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