Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic by Benedetto Croce

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C.G. Solger followed Schelling and agreed with him in finding but little
truth in the theories of Kant, and especially of Fichte. He held that
their dialectic had failed to solve the difficulty of intellectual
intuition. He too conceived of fancy as distinct from imagination, and
divided the former into three degrees. Imagination he held to appertain
to ordinary knowledge, "which re-establishes the original intuition to
infinity." Fancy "originates from the original antithesis in the idea,
and so operates that the opposing elements which are separated from the
idea become perfectly united in reality. By means of fancy, we are able
to understand things more lofty than those of common knowledge, and in
them we recognize the idea itself as real. In art, fancy is the faculty
of transforming the idea into reality."

For Solger as for Schelling, beauty belongs to the region of Ideas,
which are inaccessible to common knowledge. Art is nearly allied to
religion, for as religion is the abyss of the idea, into which our
consciousness plunges, that it may become essential, so Art and the
Beautiful resolve, in their way, the world of distinctions, the
universal and the particular. Artistic activity is more than
theoretical: it is practical, realized and perfect, and therefore
belongs to practical, not to theoretic philosophy, as Kant wrongly
believed. Since art must touch infinity on one side, it cannot have
ordinary nature for its object. Art therefore _ceases_ in the portrait,
and this explains why the ancients generally chose Gods or Heroes as
models for sculpture. Every deity, even in a limited and particular
form, expresses a definite modification of the Idea.

G.G.F. Hegel gives the same definition of art as Solger and Schelling,
All three were mystical aestheticians, and the various shades of
mystical Aesthetic, presented by these three writers, are not of great
interest. Schelling forced upon art the abstract Platonic ideas, while
Hegel reduced it to the _concrete idea_. This concrete idea was for
Hegel the first and lowest of the three forms of the liberty of the
spirit. It represented immediate, sensible, objectified knowledge; while
Religion filled the second place, as representative consciousness with
adoration, which is an element foreign to art alone. The third place was
of course occupied by Philosophy, the free thought of the absolute
spirit. Beauty and Truth are one for Hegel; they are united in the Idea.
The beautiful he defined as _the sensible appearance of the Idea_.

Some writers have erroneously believed that the views of the three
philosophers above mentioned lead back to those of Baumgarten. But that
is not correct. They well understood that art cannot be made a medium
for the expression of philosophic concepts. Not only are they opposed to
the moralistic and intellectualistic view, but they are its active
opponents. Schelling says that aesthetic production is in its essence
absolutely free, and Hegel that art does not contain the universal as
such.

Hegel accentuated the _cognoscitive_ character of art, more than any of
his predecessors. We have seen that he placed it with Philosophy and
Religion in the sphere of the absolute Spirit. But he does not allow
either to Art or to Religion any difference of function from that of
Philosophy, which occupies the highest place in his system. They are
therefore inferior, necessary, grades of the Spirit. Of what use are
they? Of none whatever, or at best, they merely represent transitory and
historical phases of human life.

Thus we see that the tendency of Hegelianism is _anti-artistic_, as it
is rationalistic and anti-religious.

This result of thought was a strange and a sad thing for one who loved
art so fervently as Hegel. Our memories conjure up Plato, who also loved
art well, and yet found himself logically obliged to banish the poet
from his ideal Republic, after crowning him with roses. But the German
philosopher was as staunch to the (supposed) command of reason as the
Greek, and felt himself obliged to announce the death of art. Art, he
says, occupies a lofty place in the human spirit, but not the most
lofty, for it is limited to a restricted content and only a certain
grade of truth can be expressed in art. Such are the Hellenic Gods, who
can be transfused in the sensible and appear in it adequately. The
Christian conception of truth is among those which cannot be so
expressed. The spirit of the modern world, and more precisely the spirit
of our religion and rational development, seem to have gone beyond the
point at which art is the chief way of apprehending the Absolute. The
peculiarity of artistic production no longer satisfies our highest
needs. Thought and reflexion have surpassed art, the beautiful. He goes
on to say that the reason generally given for this is the prevalence of
material and political interests. But the true reason is the inferiority
in degree of art as compared with pure thought. Art is dead, and
Philosophy can therefore supply its complete biography.

Hegel's _Vorlesungen Über Aesthetik_ amounts therefore to a funeral
oration upon Art.

Romanticism and metaphysical idealism had placed art, sometimes above
the clouds, sometimes within them, and believing that it was no good
there to anyone, Hegel provided a decent burial.

Nothing perhaps better shows how well this fantastic conception of art
suited the spirit of the time, than the fact that even the adversaries
of Schelling, Solger, and Hegel either admit agreement with that
conception, or find themselves involuntarily in agreement with it, while
believing themselves to be very remote. They too are mystical
aestheticians.

We all know with what virulence Arthur Schopenhauer attacked and
combated Schelling, Hegel, and all the "charlatans" and "professors" who
had divided among them the inheritance of Kant.

Well, Schopenhauer's theory of art starts, just like Hegel's, from the
difference between the abstract and the concrete concept, which is the
_Idea_. Schopenhauer's ideas are the Platonic ideas, although in the
form which he gives to them, they have a nearer resemblance to the Ideas
of Schelling than to the Idea of Hegel.

Schopenhauer takes much trouble to differentiate his ideas from
intellectual concepts. He calls the idea "unity which has become
plurality by means of space and time. It is the form of our intuitive
apperception. The concept is, on the contrary, unity extracted from
plurality by means of abstraction, which is an act of our intellect. The
concept may be called _unitas post rem_, the idea _unitas ante rem_."

The origin of this psychological illusion of the ideas or types of
things is always to be found in the changing of the empirical
classifications created for their own purposes by the natural sciences,
into living realities.

Thus each art has for its sphere a special category of ideas.
Architecture and its derivatives, gardening (and strange to say
landscape-painting is included with it), sculpture and animal-painting,
historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture, etc., all possess
their special ideas. Poetry's chief object is man as idea. Music, on the
contrary, does not belong to the hierarchy of the other arts. Schelling
had looked upon music as expressing the rhythm of the universe itself.
For Schopenhauer, music does not express ideas, but the _Will itself_.

The analogies between music and the world, between fundamental notes and
crude matter, between the scale and the scale of species, between melody
and conscious will, lead Schopenhauer to the conclusion that music is
not only an arithmetic, as it appeared to Leibnitz, but indeed a
metaphysic: "the occult metaphysical exercise of a soul not knowing that
it philosophizes."

For Schopenhauer, as for his idealist predecessors, art is beatific. It
is the flower of life; he who is plunged in artistic contemplation
ceases to be an individual; he is the conscious subject, pure, freed
from will, from pain, and from time.

Yet in Schopenhauer's system exist elements for a better and a more
profound treatment of the problem of art. He could sometimes show
himself to be a lucid and acute analyst. For instance, he continually
remarks that the categories of space and time are not applicable to art,
_but only the general form of representation_. He might have deduced
from this that art is the most immediate, not the most lofty grade of
consciousness, since it precedes even the ordinary perceptions of space
and time. Vico had already observed that this freeing oneself from
ordinary perception, this dwelling in imagination, does not really mean
an ascent to the level of the Platonic Ideas, but, on the contrary, a
redescending to the sphere of immediate intuition, a return to
childhood.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer had begun to submit the Kantian
categories to impartial criticism, and finding the two forms of
intuition insufficient, added a third, causality.

He also drew comparisons between art and history, and was more
successful here than the idealist excogitators of a philosophy of
history. Schopenhauer rightly saw that history was irreducible to
concepts, that it is the contemplation of the individual, and therefore
not a science. Having proceeded thus far, he might have gone further,
and realized that the material of history is always the particular in
its particularity, that of art what is and always is identical. But he
preferred to execute a variation on the general motive that was in
fashion at this time.

The fashion of the day! It rules in philosophy as elsewhere, and we are
now about to see the most rigid and arid of analysts, the leader of the
so-called _realist_ school, or school of _exact science_ in Germany in
the nineteenth century, plunge headlong into aesthetic mysticism.

G.F. Herbart (1813) begins his Aesthetic by freeing it from the
discredit attaching to Metaphysic and to Psychology. He declares that
the only true way of understanding art is to study particular examples
of the beautiful and to note what they reveal as to its essence.

We shall now see what came of Herbart's analysis of these examples of
beauty, and how far he succeeded in remaining free of Metaphysic.

For Herbart, beauty consists of _relations_. The science of Aesthetic
consists of an enumeration of all the fundamental relations between
colours, lines, tones, thoughts, and will. But for him these relations
are not empirical or physiological. They cannot therefore be studied in
a laboratory, because thought and the will form part of them, and these
belong as much to Ethics as to the external world. But Herbart
explicitly states that no true beauty is sensible, although sensation
may and does often precede and follow the intuition of beauty. There is
a profound distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable or
pleasant: the latter does not require a representation, while the former
consists in representations of relations, which are immediately followed
by a judgment expressing unconditioned approval. Thus the merely
pleasurable becomes more and more indifferent, but the beautiful appears
always as of more and more permanent value. The judgment of taste is
universal, eternal, immutable. The complete representation of the same
relations always carries with it the same judgment. For Herbart,
aesthetic judgments are the general class containing the sub-class of
ethical judgments. The five ethical ideas, of internal liberty, of
perfection, of benevolence, of equity, and of justice, are five
aesthetic ideas; or better, they are aesthetic concepts applied to the
will in its relations.

Herbart looked upon art as a complex fact, composed of an external
element possessing logical or psychological value, the content, and of a
true aesthetic element, which is the form. Entertainment, instruction,
and pleasure of all sorts are mingled with the beautiful, in order to
obtain favour for the work in question. The aesthetic judgment, calm and
serene in itself, may be accompanied by all sorts of psychic emotions,
foreign to it. But the content is always transitory, relative, subject
to moral laws, and judged by them. The form alone is perennial,
absolute, and free. The true catharsis can only be effected by
separating the form from the content. Concrete art may be the sum of two
values, _but the aesthetic fact is form alone_.

For those capable of penetrating beneath appearances, the aesthetic
doctrines of Herbart and of Kant will appear very similar. Herbart is
notable as insisting, in the manner of Kant, on the distinction between
free and adherent beauty (or adornment as sensuous stimulant), on the
existence of pure beauty, object of necessary and universal judgments,
and on a certain mingling of ethical with his aesthetic theory. Herbart,
indeed, called himself "a Kantian, but of the year 1828." Kant's
aesthetic theory, though it be full of errors, yet is rich in fruitful
suggestions. Kant belongs to a period when philosophy is still young and
pliant. Herbart came later, and is dry and one-sided. The romantics and
the metaphysical idealists had unified the theory of the beautiful and
of art. Herbart restored the old duality and mechanism, and gave us an
absurd, unfruitful form of mysticism, void of all artistic inspiration.

Herbart may be said to have taken all there was of false in the thought
of Kant and to have made it into a system.

The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany is notable for the
great number of philosophical theories and of counter-theories, broached
and rapidly discussed, before being discarded. None of the most
prominent names in the period belong to philosophers of first-rate
importance, though they made so much stir in their day.

The thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher was obscured and misunderstood
amid those crowding mediocrities; yet it is perhaps the most interesting
and the most noteworthy of the period.

Schleiermacher looked upon Aesthetic as an altogether modern form of
thought. He perceived a profound difference between the "Poetics" of
Aristotle, not yet freed from empirical precepts, and the tentative of
Baumgarten in the eighteenth century. He praised Kant as having been the
first to include Aesthetic among the philosophical disciplines. He
admitted that with Hegel it had attained to the highest pinnacle, being
connected with religion and with philosophy, and almost placed upon
their level.

But he was dissatisfied with the absurdity of the attempt made by the
followers of Baumgarten to construct a science or theory of sensuous
pleasure. He disapproved of Kant's view of taste as being the principle
of Aesthetic, of Fichte's art as moral teaching, and of the vague
conception of the beautiful as the centre of Aesthetic.

He approved of Schiller's marking of the moment of spontaneity in
productive art, and he praised Schelling for having drawn attention to
the figurative arts, as being less liable than poetry to be diverted to
false and illusory moralistic ends. Before he begins the study of the
place due to the artistic activity in Ethic, he carefully excludes from
the study of Aesthetic all practical rules (which, being empirical, are
incapable of scientific demonstration).

For Schleiermacher, the sphere of Ethic included the whole Philosophy of
the Spirit, in addition to morality. These are the two forms of human
activity--that which, like Logic, is the same in all men, and is called
activity of identity, and the activity of difference or individuality.
There are activities which, like art, are internal or immanent and
individual, and others which are external or practical. _The true work
of art is the internal picture_. Measure is what differentiates the
artist's portrayal of anger on the stage and the anger of a really angry
man. Truth is not sought in poetry, or if it be sought there, it is
truth of an altogether different kind. The truth of poetry lies in
coherent presentation. Likeness to a model does not compose the merit of
a picture. Not the smallest amount of knowledge comes from art, which
expresses only the truth of a particular consciousness. Art has for its
field the immediate consciousness of self, which must be carefully
distinguished from the thought of the Ego. This last is the
consciousness of identity in the diversity of moments as they pass; the
immediate consciousness of self is the diversity itself of the moments,
of which we should be aware, for life is nothing but the development of
consciousness. In this field, art has sometimes been confused with two
facts which accompany it there: these are sentient consciousness (that
is, the feelings of pleasure and of pain) and religion. Schleiermacher
here alludes to the sensualistic aestheticians of the eighteenth
century, and to Hegel, who had almost identified art and religion. He
refutes both points of view by pointing out that sentient pleasure and
religious sentiment, however different they may be from other points of
view, are yet both determined by an objective fact; while art, on the
contrary, is free productivity.

Dream is the best parallel and proof of this free productivity. All the
essential elements of art are found in dream, which is the result of
free thoughts and of sensible intuitions, consisting simply of images.
But dream, as compared with art, is chaotic: when measure and order is
established in dream, it becomes art. Thoughts and images are alike
essential to art, and to both is necessary ponderation, reflexion,
measure, and unity, because otherwise every image would be confused with
every other image. Thus the moments of inspiration and of ponderation
are both necessary to art.

Schleiermacher's thought, so firm and lucid up to this point, begins to
become less secure, with the discussion of typicity and of the extent to
which the artist should follow Nature. He says that ideal figures, which
Nature would give, were she not impeded by external obstacles, are the
products of art. He notes that when the artist represents something
really given, such as a portrait or a landscape, he renounces freedom of
production and adheres to the real. In the artist is a double tendency,
toward the perfection of the type and toward the representation of
natural reality. He should not fall into the abstraction of the type,
nor into the insignificance of empirical reality. Schleiermacher feels
all the difficulty of such a problem as whether there be one or several
ideals of the human figure. This problem may be transferred to the
sphere of art, and we may ask whether the poet is to represent only the
ideal, or whether he should also deal with those obstacles to it that
impede Nature in her efforts to attain. Both views contain half the
truth. To art belongs the representation of the ideal as of the real, of
the subjective and of the objective alike. The representation of the
comic, that is of the anti-ideal and of the imperfect ideal, belongs to
the domain of art. For the human form, both morally and physically,
oscillates between the ideal and caricature.

He arrives at a most important definition as to the independence of art
in respect to morality. The nature of art, as of philosophic
speculation, excludes moral and practical effects. Therefore, _there is
no other difference between works of art than their respective artistic
perfection (Vollkommenheit in der Kunst)_. If we could correctly
predicate volitional acts in respect of works of art, then we should
find ourselves admiring only those works which stimulated the will, and
there would thus be established a difference of valuation, independent
of artistic perfection. The true work of art depends upon the degree of
perfection with which the external in it agrees with the internal.

Schleiermacher rightly combats Schiller's view that art is in any sense
a game. That, he says, is the view held by mere men of business, to whom
business alone is serious. But artistic activity is universal, and a man
completely deprived of it unthinkable, although the difference here
between man and man, is gigantic, ranging from the simple desire to
taste of art to the effective tasting of it, and from this, by infinite
gradations, to productive genius.

The regrettable fact that Schleiermacher's thought has reached us only
in an imperfect form, may account for certain of its defects, such as
his failure to eliminate aesthetic classes and types, his retention of a
certain residue of abstract formalism, his definition of art as the
activity of difference. Had he better defined the moment of artistic
reproduction, realized the possibility of tasting the art of various
times and of other nations, and examined the true relation of art to
science, he would have seen that this difference is merely empirical and
to be surmounted. He failed also to recognize the identity of the
aesthetic activity, with language as the base of all other theoretic
activity.

But Schleiermacher's merits far outweigh these defects. He removed from
Aesthetic its _imperativistic_ character; he distinguished _a form of
thought_ different from logical thought. He attributed to our science a
_non-metaphysical, anthropological_ character. He _denied_ the concept
of the beautiful, substituting for it _artistic perfection_, and
maintaining the aesthetic equality of a small with a great work of art,
he looked upon the aesthetic fact as an exclusively _human
productivity_.

Thus Schleiermacher, the theologian, in this period of metaphysical
orgy, of rapidly constructed and as rapidly destroyed systems,
perceived, with the greatest philosophical acumen, what is really
characteristic of art, and distinguished its properties and relations.
Even where he fails to see clearly his way, he never abandons analysis
for mere guess-work.

Schleiermacher, thus exploring the obscure region of the _immediate
consciousness_, or of the aesthetic fact, can almost be heard crying out
to his straying contemporaries: _Hic Rhodus, hi salta_!

Speculation upon the origin and nature of language was rife at this time
in Germany. Many theories were put forward, among the most curious being
that of Schelling, who held language and mythology to be the product of
a pre-human consciousness, allegorically expressed as the diabolic
suggestions which had precipitated the Ego from the infinite to the
finite.

Even Wilhelm von Humboldt was unable to free himself altogether from the
intellectualistic prejudice of the substantial identity and the merely
historical and accidental diversity of logical thought and language. He
speaks of a _perfect_ language, broken up and diminished with the lesser
capacities of lesser peoples. He believed that language is something
standing outside the individual, independent of him, and capable of
being revived by use. But there were two men in Humboldt, an old man and
a young one. The latter was always suggesting that language should be
looked upon as a living, not as a dead thing, as an activity, not as a
word. This duality of thought sometimes makes his writing difficult and
obscure. Although he speaks of an internal form of speech, he fails to
identify this with art as expression. The reason is that he looks upon
the word in too unilateral a manner, as a means of developing logical
thought, and his ideas of Aesthetic are too vague and too inexact to
enable him to discover their identity. Despite his perception of the
profound truth that poetry precedes prose, Humboldt gives grounds for
doubt as to whether he had clearly recognized and firmly grasped the
fact that language is always poetry, and that prose (science) is a
distinction, not of aesthetic form, but of content, that is, of logical
form.

Steinthal, the greatest follower of Humboldt, solved his master's
contradictions, and in 1855 sustained successfully against the Hegelian
Becker the thesis that words are necessary for thought. He pointed to
the deaf-mute with his signs, to the mathematician with his formulae, to
the Chinese language, where the figurative portion is an essential of
speech, and declared that Becker was wrong in believing that the
Sanskrit language was derived from twelve cardinal concepts. He showed
effectively that the concept and the word, the logical judgment and the
proposition, are not comparable. The proposition is not a judgment, but
the representation of a judgment; and all propositions do not represent
logical judgments. Several judgments can be expressed with one
proposition. The logical divisions of judgments (the relations of
concepts) have no correspondence in the grammatical division of
propositions. "If we speak of a logical form of the proposition, we fall
into a contradiction in terms not less complete than his who should
speak of the angle of a circle, or of the periphery of a triangle." He
who speaks, in so far as he speaks, has not thoughts, but language.

When Steinthal had several times solemnly proclaimed the independence of
language as regards Logic, and that it produces its forms in complete
autonomy, he proceeded to seek the origin of language, recognizing with
Humboldt that the question of Its origin is the same as that of its
nature. Language, he said, belongs to the great class of reflex
movements, but this only shows one side of it, not its true nature.
Animals, like men, have reflex actions and sensations, though nature
enters the animal by force, takes it by assault, conquers and enslaves
it. With man is born language, because he is resistance to nature,
governance of his own body, and liberty. "Language is liberation; even
to-day we feel that our soul becomes lighter, and frees itself from a
weight, when we speak." Man, before he attains to speech, must be
conceived of as accompanying all his sensations with bodily movements,
mimetic attitudes, gestures, and particularly with articulate sounds.
What is still lacking to him, that he may attain to speech? The
connexion between the reflex movements of the body and the state of the
soul. If his sentient consciousness be already consciousness, then he
lacks the consciousness of consciousness; if it be already intuition,
then he lacks the intuition of intuition. In sum, he lacks the _internal
form of language_. With this comes speech, which forms the connexion.
Man does not choose the sound of his speech. This is given to him and he
adopts it instinctively.

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