Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic by Benedetto Croce

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This "ideal beauty," wonderfully constructed from divine quintessence
and subtle pen and brush strokes, this academic mystery, had great
success. In Italy it was much discussed in the environment of Mengs and
of Winckelmann, who were working there.

The first counterblast to their aesthetic Neo-platonism came from an
Italian named Spalletti, and took the form of a letter addressed to
Mengs. He represents the _characteristic_ as the true principle of art.
The pleasure obtained from beauty is intellectual, and truth is its
object. When the soul meets with what is characteristic, and what really
suits the object to be represented, the work is held to be beautiful. A
well-made man with a woman's face is ugly. Harmony, order, variety,
proportion, etc.--these are elements of beauty, and man enjoys the
widening of his knowledge before disagreeable things characteristically
represented. Spalletti defines beauty as "that modification inherent to
the object observed, which presents it, as it should appear, with an
infallible characteristic."

Thus the Aristotelian thesis found a supporter in Italy, some years
before any protestation was heard in Germany. Louis Hirt, the historian
of art (1797) observed that ancient monuments represented all sorts of
forms, from the most beautiful and sublime to the most ugly and most
common. He therefore denied that ideal beauty was the principle of art,
and for it substituted the _characteristic_, applicable equally to gods,
heroes, and animals.

Wolfgang Goethe, in 1798, forgetting the juvenile period, during which
he had dared to raise a hymn to Gothic architecture, now began seriously
to seek a middle term between beauty and expression. He believed that he
had found it, in certain characteristic contents presenting to the
artist beautiful shapes, which the artist would then develop and reduce
to perfect beauty. Thus for Goethe at this period, the characteristic
was simply the _starting-point_, or framework, from which the beautiful
arose, through the power of the artist.

But these writers mentioned after J.B. Vico are not true philosophers.
Winckelmann, Mengs, Hogarth, Lessing, and Goethe are great in other
ways. Meier called himself a historian of art, but he was inferior both
to Herder and to Hamann. From J.B. Vico to Emmanuel Kant, European
thought is without a name of great importance as regards this subject.

Kant took up the problem, where Vico had left it, not in the historical,
but in the ideal sense. He resembled the Italian philosopher, in the
gravity and the tenacity of his studies in Aesthetic, but he was far
less happy in his solutions, which did not attain to the truth, and to
which he did not succeed in giving the necessary unity and
systematization. The reader must bear in mind that Kant is here
criticized solely as an aesthetician: his other conclusions do not enter
directly into the discussion.

What was Kant's idea of art? The answer is: the same in substance as
Baumgarten's. This may seem strange to those who remember his sustained
polemic against Wolf and the conception of beauty as confused
perception. But Kant always thought highly of Baumgarten. He calls him
"that excellent analyst" in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, and he used
Baumgarten's text for his University lectures on Metaphysic. Kant looked
upon Logic and Aesthetic as cognate studies, and in his scheme of
studies for 1765, and in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, he proposes to
cast a glance at the Critique of Taste, that is to say, Aesthetic,
"since the study of the one is useful for the other and they are
mutually illuminative." He followed Meier in his distinctions between
logical and aesthetic truth. He even quoted the Instance of the young
girl, whose face when distinctly seen, i.e. with a microscope, is no
longer beautiful. It is true, aesthetically, he said, that when a man is
dead he cannot come to life, although this be opposed both to logical
and to moral truth. It is aesthetically true that the sun plunges into
the sea, although that is not true logically or objectively.

No one, even among the greatest, can yet tell to what extent logical
truth should mingle with aesthetic truth. Kant believed that logical
truth must wear the habit of Aesthetic, in order to become _accessible_.
This habit, he thought, was discarded only by the rational sciences,
which tend to depth. Aesthetic certainly is subjective. It is satisfied
with authority or with an appeal to great men. We are so feeble that
Aesthetic must eke out our thoughts. Aesthetic is a vehicle of Logic.
But there are logical truths which are not aesthetic. We must exclude
from philosophy exclamations and other emotions, which belong to
aesthetic truth. For Kant, poetry is the harmonious play of thought and
sensation, differing from eloquence, because in poetry thoughts are
fitted to suggestions, in eloquence the reverse is true. Poetry should
make virtue and intellect visible, as was done by Pope in his _Essay on
Man_. Elsewhere, he says frankly that logical perfection is the
foundation of all the rest.

The confirmation of this is found in his _Critique of Judgment_, which
Schelling looked upon as the most important of the three _Critiques_,
and which Hegel and other metaphysical idealists always especially
esteemed.

For Kant art was always "a sensible and imaged covering for an
intellectual concept." He did not look upon art as pure beauty without a
concept. He looked upon it as a beauty adherent and fixed about a
concept. The work of genius contains two elements: imagination and
intelligence. To these must be added taste, which combines the two. Art
may even represent the ugly in nature, for artistic beauty "is not a
beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing." But this
representation of the ugly has its limits in the arts (here Kant
remembers Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit in the
disgusting and the repugnant, which kills the representation itself. He
believes that there may be artistic productions without a concept, such
as are flowers in nature, and these would be ornaments to frameworks,
music without words, etc., etc., but since they represent nothing
reducible to a definite concept, they must be classed, like flowers,
with free beauties. This would certainly seem to exclude them from
Aesthetic, which, according to Kant, should combine imagination and
intelligence.

Kant is shut in with intellectualist barriers. A complete definition of
the _imagination_ is _wanting_ to his system. He does not admit that the
imagination belongs to the powers of the mind. He relegates it to the
facts of sensation. He is aware of the reproductive and combinative
imagination, but he does not recognize _fancy_ (_fantasia_), which is
the true productive imagination.

Yet Kant was aware that there exists an activity other than the
intellective. Intuition is referred to by him as preceding intellective
activity and differing from sensation. He does not speak of it, however,
in his critique of art, but in the first section of the _Critique of
Pure Reason_. Sensations do not enter the mind, until it has given them
_form_. This is neither sensation nor intelligence. It is _pure
intuition_, the sum of the _a priori_ principles of sensibility. He
speaks thus: "There must, then, exist a science that forms the first
part of the transcendental doctrine of the elements, distinct from that
which contains the principles of pure thought and is called
transcendental Logic."

What does he call this new science? He calls it _Transcendental
Aesthetic_, and refuses to allow the term to be used for the Critique of
Taste, which could never become a science.

But although he thus states so clearly the necessity of a science of the
form of the sensations, that is of _pure intuition_, Kant here appears
to fall into grave error. This arises from _his inexact idea_ of the
_essence of the aesthetic faculty or of art_, which, as we now know, is
pure intuition. He conceives the form of sensibility to be reducible to
the _two categories of space and time_.

Benedetto Croce has shown that space and time are far from being
categories or functions: they are complex posterior formations. Kant,
however, looked upon density, colour, etc., as material for sensations;
but the mind only observes colour or hardness when it has _already_
given a form to its sensations. Sensations, in so far as they are _crude
matter_, are _outside_ the mind: they are a _limit_. Colour, hardness,
density, etc., are _already_ intuitions. _They are the aesthetic
activity in its rudimentary manifestation._

Characterizing or qualifying imagination, that is, _aesthetic activity_,
should therefore _take the place occupied by the study of space and
time_ in the _Critique of Pure Reason_, and constitute the true
_Transcendental Aesthetic_, prologue to Logic.

Had Kant done this, he would have surpassed Leibnitz and Baumgarten; he
would have equalled Vico.

Kant did not identify the Beautiful with art. He established what he
called "the four moments of Beauty," amounting to a definition of it.
The two negative moments are, "That is beautiful which pleases _without
interest_"; this thesis was directed against the sensualist school of
English writers, with whom Kant had for a time agreed; and "That is
beautiful which pleases without a concept," directed against the
intellectualists. Thus he affirmed the existence of a spiritual domain,
distinct from that of organic pleasure, of the useful, the good, and the
true. The two other moments are, "That is beautiful which has the form
of finality without the representation of an end," and "That is
beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure." What is this
disinterested pleasure that we experience before pure colours, pure
sounds, and flowers? Benedetto Croce replies that this mysterious domain
has no existence; that the instances cited represent, either instances
of organic pleasure, or are artistic facts of expression.

Kant was less severe with the Neoplatonicians than with the two schools
of thought above mentioned. His _Critique of Judgment_ contains some
curious passages, in one of which he gives his distinction of form from
matter: "In music, the melody is the matter, harmony the form: in a
flower, the scent is the matter, the shape or configuration the form."
In the other arts, he found that the design was the essential. "Not what
pleases in sensation, but what is approved for its form, is the
foundation of taste."

In his pursuit of the phantom of a beauty, which is neither that of art
nor of sensual pleasure, exempt alike from expression and from
enjoyment, he became enveloped in inextricable contradictions. Little
disposed as he was to let himself be carried away by the imagination, he
expressed his contempt for philosopher-poets like Herder, and kept
saying and unsaying, affirming and then immediately criticizing his own
affirmations as to this mysterious beauty. The truth is that _this
mystery is simply his own individual uncertainty before a problem which
he could not solve_, owing to his having no clear idea of an activity of
sentiment. Such an activity represented for him a logical contradiction.
Such expressions as "necessary universal pleasure," "finality without
the idea of end," are verbal proofs of his uncertainty.

How was he to emerge from this uncertainty, this contradiction? He fell
back upon the concept of a base of subjective finality as the base of
the judgment of taste, that is of the subjective finality of nature by
the judgment. But nothing can be known or disclosed to the object by
means of this concept, which is indeterminate in itself and not adapted
for knowledge. Its determining reason is perhaps situated in "the
suprasensible substratum of humanity." Thus beauty becomes a symbol of
morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is, the indeterminate
idea of the suprasensible in us, can be indicated as the sole key to
reveal this faculty, which remains unknown to us in its origin. Nothing
but this principle can make that hidden faculty comprehensible."

Kant had a tendency to mysticism, which this statement does not serve to
conceal, but it was a mysticism without enthusiasm, a mysticism almost
against the grain. His failure to penetrate thoroughly the nature of the
aesthetic activity led him to see double and even triple, on several
occasions. Art being unknown to him in its essential nature, he invents
the functions of _space_ and _time_ and terms this _transcendental
aesthetic_; he develops the theory of the imaginative beautifying of the
intellectual concept by genius; he is finally forced to admit a
mysterious power of feeling, intermediate between the theoretic and the
practical activity. This power is cognoscitive and non-cognoscitive,
moral and indifferent to morality, agreeable and yet detached from the
pleasure of the senses. His successors hastened to make use of this
mysterious power, for they were glad to be able to find some sort of
justification for their bold speculations in the severe philosopher of
Königsberg.

In addition to Schelling and Hegel, for whom, as has been said, the
_Critique of Judgment_ seemed the most important of the three Critiques,
we must now mention the name of a poet who showed himself as great in
philosophical as in aesthetic achievement.

_Friedrich Schiller_ first elaborated that portion of the Kantian
thought contained in the _Critique of Judgment_. Before any professional
philosopher, Schiller studied that sphere of activity which unites
feeling with reason. Hegel talks with admiration of this artistic
genius, who was also so profoundly philosophical and first announced the
principle of reconciliation between life as duty and reason on the one
hand, and the life of the senses and feeling on the other.

To Schiller belongs the great merit of having opposed the subjective
idealism of Kant and of having made the attempt to surpass it.

The exact relations between Kant and Schiller, and the extent to which
the latter may have been influenced by Leibnitz and Herder, are of less
importance to the history of Aesthetic than the fact that Schiller
_unified_ once for all art and beauty, which had been separated by Kant,
with his distinctions between adherent and pure beauty. Schiller's
artistic sense must doubtless have stood him here in good stead.

Schiller found a very unfortunate and misleading term to apply to the
aesthetic sphere. He called it the sphere of _play_ (Spiel). He strove
to explain that by this he did not mean ordinary games, nor material
amusement. For Schiller, this sphere of play lay intermediate between
thought and feeling. Necessity in art gives place to a free disposition
of forces; mind and nature, matter and form are here reconciled. The
beautiful is life, but not physiological life. A beautiful statue may
have life, and a living man be without it. Art conquers nature with
form. The great artist effaces matter with form. The less we are
sensible of the material in a work of art, the greater the triumph of
the artist. The soul of the spectator should leave the magic sphere of
art as pure and as perfect as when it left the hands of the Creator. The
most frivolous theme should be so treated that we can pass at once from
it to the most rigorous, and _vice versa_. Only when man has placed
himself outside the world and contemplates it aesthetically, can he know
the world. While he is merely the passive receiver of sensations, he is
one with the world, and therefore cannot realize it. Art is
indeterminism. With the help of art, man delivers himself from the yoke
of the senses, and is at the same time free of any rational or moral
duty: he may enjoy for a moment the luxury of serene contemplation.

Schiller was well aware that the moment art is employed to teach morals
directly, it ceases to be art. All other teachings give to the soul a
special imprint. Art alone is favourable to all without prejudice. Owing
to this indifference of art, it possesses a great educative power, by
opening the path to morality without preaching or persuasion; without
determining, it produces determinability. This was the main theme of the
celebrated "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man," which Schiller
wrote to his patron the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg. Here, and in his
lectures at the University of Jena, it is clear that Schiller addresses
himself to a popular audience. He began a work, on scientific Aesthetic,
which he intended to entitle "Kallias," but unfortunately died without
completing it. We possess only a few fragments, contained in his
correspondence with his friend Körner. Körner did not feel satisfied
with the formula of Schiller, and asks for some more precise and
objective mark of the beautiful. Schiller tells him that he has found
it, but what he had found we shall never know, as there is no document
to inform us.

The fault of Schiller's aesthetic theory was its lack of precision. His
artistic faculty enabled him to give unsurpassable descriptions of the
catharsis and of other effects of art, but he fails to give a precise
definition of the aesthetic function. True, he disassociates it from
morality, yet admits that it may in a measure be associated with it. The
only formal activities that he recognizes are the moral and the
intellectual, and he denies altogether (against the sensualists) that
art can have anything to do with passion or sensuality. His intellectual
world consisted only of the logical and the intellectual, leaving out
the imaginative activity.

What is art for Schiller? He admits four modes of relation between man
and external things. They are the physical, the logical, the moral, and
the aesthetic. He describes this latter as a mode by which things affect
the whole of our different forces, without being a definite object for
any one in particular. Thus a man may be said to please aesthetically,
"when he does so without appealing to any one of the senses directly,
and without any law or end being thought of in connection with him."
Schiller cannot be made to say anything more definite than this. His
general position was probably much like Kant's (save in the case above
mentioned, where he made a happy correction), and he probably looked
upon Aesthetic as a mingling of several faculties, as a play of
sentiment.

Schiller was faithful to Kant's teaching in its main lines, and his
uncertainty was largely due to this. The existence of a _third sphere_
uniting form and matter was for Schiller rather an ideal conformable to
reason than a _definite_ activity; it was supposititious, rather than
effective.

But the Romantic movement in literature, which was at that time gaining
ground, with its belief in a superhuman faculty called imagination, in
genius breaker of rules, found no such need for restraint. Schiller's
modest reserve was set aside, and with J.P. Richter we approach a
mythology of the imagination. Many of his observations are, however,
just, and his distinction between productive and reproductive
imagination is excellent. How could humanity appreciate works of genius,
he asks, were it without some common measure? All men who can go as far
as saying "this is beautiful" before a beautiful thing, are capable of
the latter. He then proceeds to establish to his own satisfaction
categories of the imagination, leading from simple talent to the supreme
form of male genius in which all faculties flourish together: a faculty
of faculties.

The Romantic conception of art is, in substance, that of idealist German
philosophy, where we find it in a more coherent and systematic form. It
is the conception of Schelling, Solger, and Hegel.

Fichte, Kant's first great pupil, cannot be included with these, for his
view of Aesthetic, largely influenced by Schiller, is transformed in the
Fichtian system to a moral activity, to a representation of the ethical
ideal. The subjective idealism of Fichte, however, generated an
Aesthetic: that of irony as the base of art. The I that has created the
universe can also destroy it. The universe is a vain appearance, smiled
at by the Ego its creator, who surveys it as an artist his work, from
without and from above. For Friedrich Schlegel, art was a perpetual
farce, a parody of itself; and Tieck defined irony as a force which
allows the poet to dominate his material.

Novalis, that Romantic Fichtian, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art
of creating by an instantaneous act of the Ego. But Schelling's "system
of transcendental idealism" was the first great philosophical
affirmation of Romanticism and of conscious Neo-platonism reborn in
Aesthetic.

Schelling has obviously studied Schiller, but he brings to the problem a
mind more purely philosophical and a method more exactly scientific. He
even takes Kant to task for faultiness of method. His remarks as to
Plato's position are curious, if not conclusive. He says that Plato
condemned the art of his time, because it was realistic and
naturalistic: like all antique art, it exhibited a _finite_ character.
Plato's judgment would have been quite different had he known Christian
art, of which the character is _infinity_.

Schelling held firm to the fusion of art and beauty effected by
Schiller, but he combated Winckelmann's theory of abstract beauty with
its negative conception of the characteristic, assigning to art the
limits of the individual. Art is characteristic beauty; it is not the
individual, but the living conception of the individual. When the artist
recognizes the eternal idea in an individual, and expresses it
outwardly, he transforms the individual into a world apart, into a
species, into an eternal idea. Characteristic beauty is the fulness of
form which slays form: it does not silence passion, but restrains it as
the banks of a river the waters that flow between them, but do not
overflow.

Schelling's starting-point is the criticism of teleological judgment, as
stated by Kant in his third Critique. Teleology is the union of
theoretic with practical philosophy. But the system would not be
complete, unless we could show the identity of the two worlds, theoretic
and practical, in the subject itself. He must demonstrate the existence
of an activity, which is at once unconscious as nature and conscious as
spirit. This activity we find in Aesthetic, which is therefore "the
general organ of philosophy, the keystone of the whole building."

Poetry and philosophy alone possess the world of the ideal, in which the
real world vanishes. True art is not the impression of the moment, but
the representation of infinite life: it is transcendental intuition
objectified. The time will come when philosophy will return to poetry,
which was its source, and on the new philosophy will arise a new
mythology. Philosophy does not depict real things, but their ideas; so
too, art. Those same ideas, of which real things are, as philosophy
shows, the imperfect copies, reappear in art objectified as ideas, and
therefore in their perfection. Art stands nearest to philosophy, which
itself stands nearest to the Idea, and therefore nearest to perfection.
Art differs from philosophy only by its _specialization_: in all other
ways it is the ideal world in its most complete expression. The three
Ideas of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty correspond to the three powers of
the ideal and of the real world. Beauty is not the universal whole,
which is truth, nor is it the only reality, which is action: it is the
perfect mingling of the two. "Beauty exists where the real or particular
is so adequate to its concept that this infinite thing enters into the
finite, and is contemplated in the concrete." Philosophy unites truth,
morality, and beauty, in what they possess in common, and deduces them
from their unique Source, which is God. If philosophy assume the
character of science and of truth, although it be superior to truth, the
reason for this lies in the fact that science and truth are simply the
formal determination of philosophy.

Schelling looked upon mythology as a necessity for every art. Ideas are
Gods, considered from the point of view of reality; for the essence of
each is equal to God in a _particular_ form. The characteristics of all
Gods, including the Christian, are _pure limitation and absolute
indivisibility_. Minerva has wisdom and strength, but lacks womanly
tenderness; Juno has power and wisdom, but is without amorous charm,
which she borrows with the girdle of Venus, who in her turn is without
the wisdom of Minerva. What would these Gods become without their
limitations? They would cease to be the objects of Fancy. Fancy is a
faculty, apart from the pure intellect and from the reason. Distinct
from imagination, which develops the products of art, Fancy has
intuitions of them, grasps them herself, and herself represents them.
Fancy is to imagination as intellectual intuition is to reason. Fancy,
then, is intellectual intuition in art. In the thought of Schelling,
fancy, the new or artistic intuition, sister of intellectual intuition,
came to dominate alike the intellect and the old conception of the fancy
and the imagination, in a system for which reason alone did not suffice.

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