Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic by Benedetto Croce

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A complete change of the Cartesian system, upon which Leibnitz based his
own, was necessary, if speculation were ever to surpass the Leibnitzian
aesthetic. But Wolff and the other German pupils of Leibnitz were as
unable to shake themselves free of the all-pervading intellectualism as
were the French pupils of Descartes.

Meanwhile a young student of Berlin, named Alexander Amedeus Baumgarten,
was studying the Wolffian philosophy, and at the same time lecturing in
poetry and Latin rhetoric. While so doing, he was led to rethink and
pose afresh the problem of how to reduce the precepts of rhetoric to a
rigorous philosophical system. Thus it came about that Baumgarten
published in September 1735, at the age of twenty-one, as the thesis for
his degree of Doctor, an opuscule entitled, _Meditationes philosophicae
de nonnullis ad poèma pertinentibus_, and in it we find written
_for the first time_ the word "Aesthetic," as the name of a special
science. Baumgarten ever afterwards attached great importance to his
juvenile discovery, and lectured upon it by request in 1742, at
Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and again in 1749. It is interesting to know that
in this way Emmanuel Kant first became acquainted with the theory of
Aesthetic, which he greatly altered when he came to treat of it in his
philosophy. In 1750, Baumgarten published the first volume of a more
ample treatise, and a second part in 1762. But illness, and death in
1762, prevented his completing his work.

What is Aesthetic for Baumgarten? It is the science of sensible
knowledge. Its objects are the sensible facts (_aisthaeta_),
which the Greeks were always careful to distinguish from the mental
facts (_noaeta_). It is therefore _scientia cognitionis
sensitivae, theoria liberalium artium, gnoseologia inferior, ars pulcre
cogitandi, ars analogi rationis_. Rhetoric and Poetic are for him
special cases of Aesthetic, which is a general science, embracing both.
Its laws are diffused among all the arts, like the mariner's star
(_cynosura quaedam_), and they must be always referred to in all cases,
for they are universal, not empirical or merely inductive (_falsa regula
pejor est quam nulla_). Aesthetic must not be confounded with
Psychology, which supplies only suppositions. Aesthetic is an
independent science, which gives the rules for knowing sensibly, and is
occupied with the perfection of sensible knowledge, which is beauty. Its
contrary is ugliness. The beauty of objects and of matter must be
excluded from the beauty of sensible knowledge, because beautiful
objects can be badly thought and ugly objects beautifully thought.
Poetic representations are those which are confused or imaginative.
Distinction and intellectuality are not poetic. The greater the
determination, the greater the poetry; individuals absolutely determined
(_omnimodo determinata_) are very poetical, as are images or fancies,
and everything which refers to feeling. The judgment of sensible and
imaginative representations is taste.

Such are, in brief, the truths which Baumgarten stated in his
_Meditationes_, and further developed and exemplified in his
_Aesthetica_. Close study of the two works above-mentioned leads to the
conviction that Baumgarten did not succeed in freeing himself from the
unity of the Leibnitzian monadology. He obtained from Leibnitz his
conception of the poetic as consisting of the confused, but German
critics are wrong in believing that he attributed to it a positive, not
a negative quality. Had he really done this, he would have broken at a
blow the unity of the Leibnitzian monad, and conquered the science of
Aesthetic.

This giant's step he did not take: he failed to banish the
contradictions of Leibnitz and of the other intellectualists. To posit a
_perfection_ did not suffice. It was necessary to maintain it against
the _lex continui_ of Leibnitz and to proclaim its independence of all
intellectualism. Aesthetic truths for Baumgarten were those which did
not seem altogether false or altogether true: in fact, the verisimilar.
If it were objected to Baumgarten that one should not occupy oneself
with what, like poetry, he defines as confused and obscure, he would
reply that confusion is a condition of finding the truth, that we do not
pass at once from night to dawn. Thus he did not surpass the thought of
Leibnitz in this respect. Poor Baumgarten was always in suspense lest he
should be held to occupy himself with things unworthy of a philosopher!
"How can you, a professor of philosophy, dare to praise lying and the
mixture of truth and falsehood?" He imagined that some such reproach
might be addressed to him on account of his purely philosophical
speculations, and true enough he actually received a criticism of his
theory, in which it was argued, that if poetry consisted of sensual
perfection, then it was a bad thing for mankind. Baumgarten
contemptuously replied that he had not the time to argue with those
capable of confounding his _oratio perfecta sensitiva_ with an _oratio
perfecte (omnino!) sensitiva_.

The fact about Baumgarten is that apart from baptizing the new science
Aesthetic, and apart from his first definitions, he does not stray far
from the old ruts of scholastic thought. The excellent Baumgarten, with
all his ardour and all his convictions, is a sympathetic and interesting
figure in the history of Aesthetic not yet formed, but in process of
formation.

The revolutionary who set aside the old definitions of Aesthetic, and
for the first time revealed the true nature of art and poetry, is the
Italian, Giambattista Vico.

What were the ideas developed by Vico in his _Scienza nuova_ (1725)?
They were neither more nor less than the solution of the problem, posed
by Plato, attempted in vain by Aristotle, again posed and again unsolved
at the Renaissance.

Is poetry a rational or an irrational thing? Is it spiritual or animal?
If it be spiritual, what is its true nature, and in what way does it
differ from art and science?

Plato, we know, banished poetry to the inferior region of the soul,
among the animal spirits. Vico on the contrary raises up poetry, and
makes of it a period in the history of humanity. And since Vico's is an
ideal history, whose periods are not concerned with contingent facts,
but with spiritual forms, he makes of it a moment of the ideal history
of the spirit, a form of knowledge. Poetry comes before the intellect,
but _after_ feeling. Plato had _confused_ it with feeling, and for that
reason banished it from his Republic. "Men _feel_," says Vico, "before
observing, then they observe with perturbation of the soul, finally they
reflect with the pure intellect," He goes on to say, that poetry being
composed of passion and of feeling, the nearer it approaches to the
_particular_, the more _true_ it is, while exactly the reverse is true
of philosophy.

Imagination is independent and autonomous as regards the intellect. Not
only does the intellect fail of perfection, but all it can do is to
destroy it. "The studies of Poetry and Metaphysic are _naturally
opposed_. Poets are the feeling, philosophers the intellect of the human
race." The weaker the reason, the stronger the imagination. Philosophy,
he says, deals with abstract thought or universals, poetry with the
particular. Painters and poets differ only in their material. Homer and
the great poets appear in barbaric times. Dante, for instance, appeared
in "the renewed barbarism of Italy." The poetic ages preceded the
philosophical, and poetry is the father of prose, by "necessity of
nature," not by the "caprice of pleasure." Fables or "imaginary
universals" were conceived before "reasoned or philosophical
universals." To Homer, says Vico, belongs wisdom, but only poetic
wisdom. "His beauties are not those of a spirit softened and civilized
by any philosophy."

If any one make poetry in epochs of reflexion, he becomes a child again;
he does not reflect with his intellect, but follows his fancy and dwells
upon particulars. If the true poet make use of philosophic ideas, he
only does so that he may change logic into imagination.

Here we have a profound statement of the line of demarcation between
science and art. _They cannot be confused again_.

His statement of the difference between poetry and history is a trifle
less clear. He explains why to Aristotle poetry seemed more
philosophical than history, and at the same time he refutes Aristotle's
error that poetry deals with the universal, history with the particular.
Poetry equals science, not because it is occupied with the intellectual
concept, but because, like science, it is ideal. A good poetical fable
must be all ideal: "With the idea the poet gives their being to things
which are without it. Poetry is all fantastic, as being the art of
painting the idea, not icastic, like the art of painting portraits. That
is why poets, like painters, are called divine, because in that respect
they resemble God the Creator." Vico ends by identifying poetry and
history. The difference between them is posterior and accidental. "But,
as it is impossible to impart false ideas, because the false consists of
a vicious combination of ideas, so it is impossible to impart a
tradition, which, though it be false, has not at first contained some
element of truth. Thus mythology appears for the first time, not as the
invention of an individual, but as the spontaneous vision of the truth
as it appears to primitive man."

Poetry and language are for Vico substantially identical. He finds in
the origins of poetry the origins of languages and letters. He believed
that the first languages consisted in mute acts or acts accompanied by
bodies which had natural relations to the ideas that it was desired to
signify. With great cleverness he compared these pictured languages to
heraldic arms and devices, and to hieroglyphs. He observed that during
the barbarism of the Middle Age, the mute language of signs must return,
and we find it in the heraldry and blazonry of that epoch. Hence come
three kinds of languages: divine silent languages, heroic emblematic
languages, and speech languages.

Formal logic could never satisfy a man with such revolutionary ideas
upon poetry and language. He describes the Aristotelian syllogism as a
method which explains universals In their particulars, rather than
unites particulars to obtain universals, looks upon Zeno and the sorites
as a means of subtilizing rather than sharpening the intelligence, and
concludes that Bacon is a great philosopher, when he advocates and
illustrates _induction_, "which has been followed by the English to the
great advantage of experimental philosophy." Hence he proceeds to
criticize mathematics, which, had hitherto always been looked upon as
the type of the _perfect science_.

Vico is indeed a revolutionary, a pioneer. He knows very well that he is
in direct opposition to all that has been thought before about poetry.
"My new principles of poetry upset all that first Plato and then
Aristotle have said about the origin of poetry, all that has been said
by the Patrizzi, by the Scaligers, and by the Castelvetri. I have
discovered that It was through lack of human reason that poetry was born
so sublime that neither the Arts, nor the Poetics, nor the Critiques
could cause another equal to it to be born, I say equal, and not
superior." He goes as far as to express shame at having to report the
stupidities of great philosophers upon the origin of song and verse. He
shows his dislike for the Cartesian philosophy and its tendency to dry
up the imagination "by denying all the faculties of the soul which come
to it from the body," and talks of his own time as of one "which freezes
all the generous quality of the best poetry and thus precludes it from
being understood."

As regards grammatical forms, Vico may be described as an adherent of
the great reaction of the Renaissance against scholastic verbalism and
formalism. This reaction brought back as a value the experience of
feeling, and afterwards with Romanticism gave its right place to the
imagination. Vico, in his _Scienza nuova_, may be said to have been the
first to draw attention to the imagination. Although he makes many
luminous remarks on history and the development of poetry among the
Greeks, his work is not really a history, but a science of the spirit or
of the ideal. It is not the ethical, logical, or economic moment of
humanity which interests him, but the _imaginative_ moment. _He
discovered the creative imagination_, and it may almost be said of the
_Scienza nuova_ of Vico that it is Aesthetic, the discovery of a new
world, of a new mode of knowledge.

This was the contribution of the genius of Vico to the progress of
humanity: he showed Aesthetic to be an autonomous activity. It remained
to distinguish the science of the spirit from history, the modifications
of the human spirit from the historic vicissitudes of peoples, Aesthetic
from Homeric civilization.

But although Goethe, Herder, and Wolf were acquainted with the _Scienza
nuova_, the importance of this wonderful book did not at first dawn upon
the world. Wolf, in his prolegomena to Homer, thought that he was
dealing merely with an ingenious speculator on Homeric themes. He did
not realize that the intellectual stature of Vico far surpassed that of
the most able philologists.

The fortunes of Aesthetic after Vico were very various, and the list of
aestheticians who fell back into the old pedagogic definition, or
elaborated the mistakes of Baumgarten, is very long. Yet with C.H.
Heydenreich in Germany and Sulzer in Switzerland we find that the truths
contained in Baumgarten have begun to bear fruit. J.J. Herder (1769) was
more important than these, and he placed Baumgarten upon a pedestal,
though criticizing his pretension of creating an _ars pulchre cogitandi_
instead of a simple _scientia de pulchro et pulchris philosophice
cogitans_. Herder admitted Baumgarten's definition of poetry as _oratio
sensitiva perfecta_, perfect sensitived speech, and this is _probably
the best definition of poetry that has ever been given_. It touches the
real essence of poetry and opens to thought the whole of the philosophy
of the beautiful. Herder, although he does not cite Vico upon aesthetic
questions, yet praises him as a philosopher. His remarks about poetry as
"the maternal language of humanity, as the garden is more ancient than
the cultivated field, painting than writing, song than declamation,
exchange than commerce," are replete with the spirit of the Italian
philosopher.

But despite similar happy phrases, Herder is philosophically the
inferior of the great Italian. He is a firm believer in the Leibnitzian
law of continuity, and does not surpass the conclusions of Baumgarten.

Herder and his friend Hamann did good service as regards the philosophy
of language. The French encyclopaedists, J.J. Rousseau, d'Alembert, and
many others of this period, were none of them able to get free of the
idea that a word is either a natural, mechanical fact, or a sign
attached to a thought. The only way out of this difficulty is to look
upon the imagination as itself active and expressive in _verbal
imagination_, and language as the language of _intuition_, not of the
intelligence. Herder talks of language as "an understanding of the soul
with itself." Thus language begins to appear, not as an arbitrary
invention or a mechanical fact, but as a primitive affirmation of human
activity, as a _creation_.

But all unconscious of the discoveries of Vico, the great mass of
eighteenth century writers try their hands at every sort of solution.
The Abbé Batteux published in 1746 _Les Beaux-arts réduits a un seul
principe_, which is a perfect little bouquet of contradictions. The Abbé
finds himself confronted with difficulties at every turn, but with "un
peu d'esprit on se tire de tout," and when for instance he has to
explain artistic enjoyment of things displeasing, he remarks that the
imitation never being perfect like reality, the horror caused by reality
disappears.

But the French were equalled and indeed surpassed by the English in
their amateur Aesthetics. The painter Hogarth was one day reading in
Italian a speech about the beauty of certain figures, attributed to
Michael Angelo. This led him to imagine that the figurative arts depend
upon a principle which consists of conforming to a given line. In 1745
he produced a serpentine line as frontispiece of his collection of
engravings, which he described as "the line of beauty." Thus he
succeeded in exciting universal curiosity, which he proceeded to satisfy
with his "Analysis of Beauty." Here he begins by rightly combating the
error of judging paintings by their subject and by the degree of their
imitation, instead of by their form, which is the essential in art. He
gives his definition of form, and afterwards proceeds to describe the
waving lines which are beautiful and those which are not, and maintains
that among them all there is but one that is really worthy to be called
"the line of beauty," and one definite serpentine line "the line of
grace." The pig, the bear, the spider, and the frog are ugly, because
they do not possess serpentine lines. E. Burke, with a like assurance in
his examples, was equally devoid of certainty in his general principles.
He declares that the natural properties of an object cause pleasure or
pain to the imagination, but that the latter also procures pleasure from
their resemblance to the original. He does not speak further of the
second of these, but gives a long list of the natural properties of the
sensible, beautiful object. Having concluded his list, he remarks that
these are in his opinion the qualities upon which beauty depends and
which are the least liable to caprice and confusion. But "comparative
smallness, delicate structure, colouring vivid but not too much so," are
all mere empirical observations of no more value than those of Hogarth,
with whom Burke must be classed as an aesthetician. Their works are
spoken of as "classics." Classics indeed they are, but of the sort that
arrive at no conclusion.

Henry Home (Lord Kaimes) is on a level a trifle above the two just
mentioned. He seeks "the true principles of the beaux-arts," in order to
transform criticism into "a rational science." He selects facts and
experience for this purpose, but in his definition of beauty, which he
divides into two parts, relative and intrinsic, he is unable to explain
the latter, save by a final cause, which he finds in the Almighty.

Such theories as the three above mentioned defy classification, because
they are not composed by any scientific method. Their authors pass from
physiological sensualism to moralism, from imitation of nature to
finalism, and to transcendental mysticism, without consciousness of the
incongruity of their theses, at variance each with itself.

The German, Ernest Platner, at any rate did not suffer from a like
confusion of thought. He developed his researches on the lines of
Hogarth, but was only able to discover a prolongation of sexual pleasure
in aesthetic facts. "Where," he exclaims, "is there any beauty that does
not come from the feminine figure, the centre of all beauty? The
undulating line is beautiful, because it is found in the body of woman;
essentially feminine movements are beautiful; the notes of music are
beautiful, when they melt into one another; a poem is beautiful, when
one thought embraces another with lightness and facility."

French sensualism shows itself quite incapable of understanding
aesthetic production, and the associationism of David Hume is not more
fortunate in this respect.

The Dutchman Hemsterhuis (1769) developed an ingenious theory, mingling
mystical and sensualist theory with some just remarks, which afterwards,
in the hands of Jacobi, became sentimentalism. Hemsterhuis believed
beauty to be a phenomenon arising from the meeting by the
sentimentalism, which gives multiplicity, with the internal sense, which
tends to unity. Consequently the beautiful will be that which presents
the greatest number of ideas in the shortest space of time. To man is
denied supreme unity, but here he finds approximative unity. Hence the
joy arising from the beautiful, which has some analogy with the joy of
love.

With Winckelmann (1764) Platonism or Neo-platonism was vigorously
renewed. The creator of the history of the figurative arts saw in the
divine indifference and more than human elevation of the works of Greek
sculpture a beauty which had descended from the seventh heaven and
become incarnate in them. Mendelssohn, the follower of Baumgarten, had
denied beauty to God: Winckelmann, the Neoplatonician, gave it back to
Him. He holds that perfect beauty is to be found only in God. "The
conception of human beauty becomes the more perfect in proportion as it
can be thought as in agreement with the Supreme Being, who is
distinguished from matter by His unity and indivisibility." To the other
characteristics of supreme beauty, Winckelmann adds "the absence of any
sort of signification" (Unbezeichnung). Lines and dots cannot explain
beauty, for it is not they alone which form it. Its form is not proper
to any definite person, it expresses no sentiment, no feeling of
passion, for these break up unity and diminish or obscure beauty.
According to Winckelmann, beauty must be like a drop of pure water taken
from the spring, which is the more healthy the less it has of taste,
because it is purified of all foreign elements.

A special faculty is required to appreciate this beauty, which
Winckelmann is inclined to call intelligence, or a delicate internal
sense, free of all instinctive passions, of pleasure, and of friendship.
Since it becomes a question of perceiving something immaterial,
Winckelmann banishes colour to a secondary place. True beauty, he says,
is that of form, a word which describes lines and contours, as though
lines and contours could not also be perceived by the senses, or could
appear to the eye without any colour.

It is the destiny of error to be obliged to contradict itself, when it
does not decide to dwell in a brief aphorism, in order to live as well
as may be with facts and concrete problems. The "History" of Winckelmann
dealt with historic concrete facts, with which it was necessary to
reconcile the idea of a supreme beauty. His admission of the contours of
lines and his secondary admission of colours is a compromise. He makes
another with regard to the principle of expression. "Since there is no
intermediary between pain and pleasure in human nature, and since a
human being without these feelings is inconceivable, we must place the
human figure in a moment of action and of passion, which is what is
termed expression in art." So Winckelmann studied expression after
beauty. He makes a third compromise between his one, indivisible,
supreme, and constant beauty and individual beauties. Winckelmann
preferred the male to the female body as the most complete incarnation
of supreme beauty, but he was not able to shut his eyes to the
indisputable fact that there also exist beautiful bodies of women and
even of animals.

Raphael Mengs, the painter, was an intimate friend of Winckelmann and
associated himself with him in his search for a true definition of the
beautiful. His ideas were generally in accordance with those of
Winckelmann. He defines beauty as "the visible idea of perfection, which
is to perfection what the visible is to the mathematical point." He
falls under the influence of the argument from design. The Creator has
ordained the multiplicity of beauties. Things are beautiful according to
our ideas of them, and these ideas come from the Creator. Thus each
beautiful thing has its own type, and a child would appear ugly if it
resembled a man. He adds to his remarks in this sense: "As the diamond
is alone perfect among stones, gold among metals, and man among living
creatures, so there is distinction in each species, and but little is
perfect." In his _Dreams of Beauty_, he looks upon beauty as "an
intermediate disposition," which contains a part of perfection and a
part of the agreeable, and forms a _tertium quid_, which differs from
the other two and deserves a special name. He names four sources of the
art of painting: beauty, significant or expressive character, harmony,
and colouring. The first of these he finds among the ancients, the
second with Raphael, the third with Correggio, the fourth with Titian.
Mengs does not succeed in rising above this empiricism of the studio,
save to declaim about the beauty of nature, virtue, forms, and
proportions, and indeed everything, including the First Cause, which is
the most beautiful of all.

The name of G.E. Lessing (1766) is well known to all concerned with art
problems. The ideas of Winckelmann reappear in Lessing, with less of a
metaphysical tinge. For Lessing, the end of art is the pleasing, and
since this is "a superfluous thing," he thought that the legislator
should not allow to art the liberty indispensable to science, which
seeks the truth, necessary to the soul. For the Greeks painting was, as
it should always be, "imitation of beautiful bodies." Everything
disagreeable or ill-formed should be excluded from painting. "Painting,
as clever imitation, may imitate deformity. Painting, as a fine art,
does not permit this." He was more inclined to admit deformity in
poetry, as there it is less shocking, and the poet can make use of it to
produce in us certain feelings, such as the ridiculous or the terrible.
In his _Dramaturgie_ (1767), Lessing followed the Peripatetics, and
believed that the rules of Aristotle were as absolute as the theorems of
Euclid. His polemic against the French school is chiefly directed to
claiming a place in poetry for the verisimilar, as against absolute
historical exactitude. He held the universal to be a sort of mean of
what appears in the individual, the catharsis was in his view a
transformation of the passions into virtuous dispositions, and he held
the duty of poetry to be inspiration of the love of virtue. He followed
Winckelmann in believing that the expression of physical beauty was the
supreme object of painting. This beauty exists only as an ideal, which
finds its highest expression in man. Animals possess it to a slighter
extent, vegetable and inanimate nature not at all. Those mistaken enough
to occupy themselves with depicting the latter are imitating beauties
deprived of all ideal. They work only with eye and hand; genius has
little if any share in their productions. Lessing found the physical
ideal to reside chiefly in form, but also in the ideal of colour, and in
permanent expression. Mere colouring and transitory expression were for
him without ideal, "because nature has not imposed upon herself anything
definite as regards them." At bottom he does not care for colouring,
finding in the pen drawings of artists "a life, a liberty, a delicacy,
lacking to their pictures." He asks "whether even the most wonderful
colouring can make up for such a loss, and whether it be not desirable
that the art of oil-painting had never been invented."

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