Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic by Benedetto Croce

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Spencer is colossal in his ignorance of all that has been written or
thought on the subject of Aesthetic (to limit ourselves to this branch
alone). He actually begins his work on the Philosophy of Style with
these words: "No one, I believe, has ever produced a complete theory of
the art of writing." This in 1852! He begins his chapter on aesthetic
feelings in the _Principles of Psychology_ by admitting that he has
heard of the observation made by a German author, whose name he forgets
(Schiller!), on the connexion between art and play. Had Spencer's
remarks on Aesthetic been written in the eighteenth century, they might
have occupied a humble place among the first rude attempts at aesthetic
speculation, but appearing in the nineteenth century, they are without
value, as the little of value they contain had been long said by others.

In his _Principles of Psychology_ Spencer looks upon aesthetic feelings
as arising from the discharge of the exuberant energy of the organism.
This he divides into degrees, and believes that we attain complete
enjoyment when these degrees are all working satisfactorily each on its
own plane, and when what is painful in excessive activity has been
avoided. His degrees are sensation, sensation accompanied by
representative elements, perception accompanied by more complex elements
of representation, then emotion, and that state of consciousness which
surpasses sensations and perceptions. But Spencer has no suspicion of
what art really is. His views oscillate between sensualism and moralism,
and he sees little in the whole art of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, or
of modern times, which can be looked upon as otherwise than imperfect!

The Physiology of Aesthetics has also had its votaries in Great Britain,
among whom may be mentioned J. Sully, A. Bain, and Allen. These at any
rate show some knowledge of the concrete fact of art. Allen harks back
to the old distinction between necessary and vital activities and
superfluous activities, and gives a physiological definition, which may
be read in his _Physiological Aesthetics_. More recent writers also look
upon the physiological fact as the cause of the pleasure of art; but for
them it does not alone depend upon the visual organ, and the muscular
phenomena associated with it, but also on the participation of some of
the most important bodily functions, such as respiration, circulation,
equilibrium, intimate muscular accommodation. They believe that art owes
its origin to the pleasure that some prehistoric man must have
experienced in breathing regularly, without having to re-adapt his
organs, when he traced for the first time on a bone or on clay regular
lines separated by regular intervals.

A similar order of physico-aesthetic researches has been made in
Germany, under the auspices of Helmholtz, Brücke, and Stumpf. But these
writers have succeeded better than the above-mentioned, by restricting
themselves to the fields of optic and acoustic, and have supplied
information as to the physical processes of artistic technique and as to
the pleasure of visual and auditive impressions, without attempting to
melt Aesthetic into Physic, or to deprive the former of its spiritual
character. They have even occasionally indicated the difference between
the two kinds of research. Even the degenerate Herbartians, converting
the metaphysical forms of their master into physiological phenomena,
made soft eyes at the new sensualists and aesthetico-physiologists.

The Natural Sciences have become in our day a sort of superstition,
allied to a certain, perhaps unconscious, hypocrisy. Not only have
chemical, physical, and physiological laboratories become a sort of
Sibylline grots, where resound the most extraordinary questions about
everything that can interest the spirit of man, but even those who
really do prosecute their researches with the old inevitable method of
internal observation, have been unable to free themselves from the
illusion that they are, on the contrary, employing _the method of the
natural sciences_.

Hippolyte Taine's Philosophy of Art represents such an illusion. He
declares that when we have studied the diverse manifestations of art in
all peoples and at all epochs, we shall then possess a complete
Aesthetic. Such an Aesthetic would be a sort of Botany applied to the
works of man. This mode of study would provide moral science with a
basis equally as sure as that which the natural sciences already
possess. Taine then proceeds to define art without regard to the natural
sciences, by analysing, like a simple mortal, what passes in the human
soul when brought face to face with a work of art. But what analysis and
what definitions!

Art, he says, is imitation, but of a sort that tries to express an
essential characteristic. Thus the principal characteristic of a lion is
to be "a great carnivore," and we observe this characteristic in all its
limbs. Holland has for essential characteristic that of being a land
formed of alluvial soil.

Now without staying to consider these two remarkable instances, let us
ask, what is this essential characteristic of Taine? It is the same as
the ideas, types, or concepts that the old aesthetic teaching assigned
to art as its object. Taine himself removes all doubt as to this, by
saying that this characteristic is what philosophers call the essence of
things, and for that reason they declare that the purpose of art is to
manifest things. He declares that he will not employ the word essence,
which is technical. But he accepts and employs the thought that the word
expresses. He believes that there are two routes by which man can attain
to the superior life: science and art. By the first, he apprehends
fundamental laws and causes, and expresses them in abstract terms; by
the second, he expresses these same laws and causes in a manner
comprehensible to all, by appealing to the heart and feeling, as well as
to the reason of man. Art is both superior and popular; it makes
manifest what is highest, and makes it manifest to all.

That Taine here falls into the old pedagogic theory of Aesthetic is
evident. Works of art are arranged for him in a scale of values, as for
the aesthetic metaphysicians. He began by declaring the absurdity of all
judgment of taste, "à chacun son goût," but he ends by declaring that
personal taste is without value, that we must establish a common measure
before proceeding to praise or blame. His scale of values is double or
triple. We must first fix the degree of importance of the
characteristic, that is, the greater or less generality of the idea, and
the degree of good in it, that is to say, its greater or lesser moral
value. These, he says, are two degrees of the same thing, strength, seen
from different sides. We must also establish the degree of convergence
of the effects, that is, the fulness of expression, the harmony between
the idea and the form.

This half-moral, half-metaphysical exposition is accompanied with the
usual protestations, that the matter in hand is to be studied
methodically, analytically, as the naturalist would study it, that he
will try to reach "a law, not a hymn." As if these protestations could
abolish the true nature of his thought! Taine actually went so far as to
attempt dialectic solutions of works of art! "In the primitive period of
Italian art, we find the soul without the body: Giotto. At the
Renaissance, with Verrocchio and his school, we find the body without
the soul. With Raphael, in the sixteenth century, we find expression and
anatomy in harmony: body and soul." Thesis, antithesis, synthesis!

With G.T. Fechner we find the like protestations and the like
procedure. He will study Aesthetic inductively, from beneath. He seeks
clarity, not loftiness. Proceeding thus inductively, he discovers a long
series of laws or principles of Aesthetic, such as unity in variety,
association and contrast, change and persistence, the golden mean, etc.
He exhibits this chaos with delight at showing himself so much of a
physiologist, and so inconclusive. Then he proceeds to describe his
experiments in Aesthetics. These consist of attempts to decide, for
instance, by methods of choice, which of certain rectangles of cardboard
is the most agreeable, and which the most disagreeable, to a large
number of people arbitrarily chosen. Naturally, these results do not
agree with others obtained on other occasions, but Fechner knows that
errors correct themselves, and triumphantly publishes long lists of
these valuable experiments. He also communicates to us the shapes and
measurements of a large number of pictures in museums, as compared with
their respective subjects! Such are the experiments of physiological
aestheticians.

But Fechner, when he comes to define what beauty and what art really
are, is, like everyone else, obliged to fall back upon introspection.
But his definition is trivial, and his comparison of his three degrees
of beauty to a family is simply grotesque in its _naïveté_. He terms
this theory the eudemonistic theory, and we are left wondering why, when
he had this theory all cut and dried in his mind, he should all the same
give himself the immense trouble of compiling his tables and of
enumerating his laws and principles, which do not agree with his theory.
Perhaps it was all a pastime for him, like playing at patience, or
collecting postage-stamps?

Another example of superstition in respect to the natural sciences
is afforded by Ernest Grosse. Grosse abounds in contempt for what
he calls speculative Aesthetic. Yet he desires a Science of Art
(Kunstwissenschaft), which shall formulate its laws from those
historical facts which have hitherto been collected.

But Grosse wishes us to complete the collection of historical evidence
with ethnographical and prehistoric materials, for we cannot obtain
really general laws of art from the exclusive study of cultivated
peoples, "just as a theory of reproduction exclusively based upon the
form it takes with mammifers, must necessarily be imperfect!"

He is, however, aware that the results of experiences among savages and
prehistoric races do not alone suffice to furnish us with an equipment
for such investigations as that concerning the nature of Art, and, like
any ordinary mortal, he feels obliged to interrogate, before starting,
the spirit of man. He therefore proceeds to define Aesthetic on
apriorist principles, which, he remarks, can be discarded when we shall
have obtained the complete theory, in like manner with the scaffolding
that has served for the erection of a house.

Words! Words! Vain words! He proceeds to define Aesthetic as the
activity which in its development and result has the immediate value of
feeling, and is, therefore, an end in itself. Art is the opposite of
practice; the activity of games stands intermediate between the two,
having also its end in its own activity.

The Aesthetics of Taine and of Grosse have been called sociological.
Seeing that any true definition of sociology as a science is impossible,
for it is composed of psychological elements, which are for ever
varying, we do not delay to criticize the futile attempts at definition,
but pass at once to the objective results attained by the sociologists.
This superstition, like the naturalistic, takes various forms in
practical life. We have, for instance, Proudhon (1875), who would hark
back to Platonic Aesthetic, class the aesthetic activity among the
merely sensual, and command the arts to further the cause of virtue, on
pain of judicial proceedings in case of contumacy.

But M. Guyau is the most important of sociological aestheticians. His
works, published in Paris toward the end of last century, and his
posthumous work, entitled _Les problèmes de l'Esthétique contemporaine_,
substitute for the theory of play, that of _life_, and the posthumous
work above-mentioned makes it evident that by life he means social life.
Art is the development of social sympathy, but the whole of art does not
enter into sociology. Art has two objects; the production of agreeable
sensations (colours, sounds, etc.) and of phenomena of psychological
induction, which include ideas and feelings of a more complex nature
than the foregoing, such as sympathy for the personages represented,
interest, piety, indignation, etc. Thus art becomes the expression of
life. Hence arise two tendencies: one for harmony, consonance, for all
that delights the ear and eye; the other transforming life, under the
dominion of art. True genius is destined to balance these two
tendencies; but the decadent and the unbalanced deprive art of its
sympathetic end, setting aesthetic sympathy against human sympathy. If
we translate this language into that with which we are by this time
quite familiar, we shall see that Guyau admits an art that is merely
hedonistic, and places above it another art, also hedonistic, but
serving the ends of morality.

M. Nordau wages war against the decadent and unbalanced, in much the
same manner as Guyau. He assigns to art the function of re-establishing
the integrity of life, so much broken up and specialized in our
industrial civilization. He remarks that there is such a thing as art
for art's sake, the simple expression of the internal states of the
individual, but it is the art of the cave-dweller.

C. Lombroso's theory of genius as degeneration may be grouped with the
naturalistic theories. His argument is in essence the following. Great
mental efforts, and total absorption in one dominant thought, often
produce physiological disorders or atrophy of important vital functions.
Now these disorders often lead to madness; therefore, genius may be
identified with madness. This proof, from the particular to the general,
does not follow that of traditional Logic. But with Lombroso, Büchner,
Nordau, and the like we have come to the boundary between specious and
vulgar error. They confuse scientific analysis with historical research.
Such inquiries may have value for history, but they have none for
Aesthetic. Thus, too, A. Lang maintains that the doctrine of the origin
of art as disinterested expression of the mimetic faculty is not
confirmed in what we know of primitive art, which is rather decorative
than expressive. But primitive art, which is a given fact to be
interpreted, cannot ever become its own criterion of interpretation.

The naturalistic misunderstanding has had a bad effect on linguistic
researches, which have not been carried out on the lofty plane to which
Humboldt and Steinthal had brought them.

Max Müller is popular and exaggerated. He fails clearly to distinguish
thought from logical thought, although in one place he remarks that the
formation of names has a more intimate connexion with wit than with
judgment. He holds that the science of language is not historical, but
natural, because language is not the invention of man, altogether
ignoring the science of the spirit, philosophy, of which language is a
part. For Max Müller, the natural sciences were the only sciences. The
consciousness of the science of the spirit becomes ever more obscured,
and we find the philologist W.D. Whitney combating Max Müller's
"miracles" and maintaining the separability of thought and speech.

With Hermann Paul (1880) we have an awakening of Humboldt's spirit. Paul
maintains that the origin of language is the speech of the individual
man, and that a language has its origin every time it is spoken. Paul
also showed the fallacies contained in the _Völkerpsychologie_ of
Steinthal and Lazarus, demonstrating that there is no such thing as a
collective soul, and that there is no language save that of the
individual.

W. Wundt (1886), on the other hand, commits the error of connecting
language with Ethnopsychology and other non-existent sciences, and
actually terms the glorious doctrine of Herder and of Humboldt
_Wundertheorie_, or theory of miracle, accusing them of mystical
obscurity. Wundt confuses the question of the historical appearance of
language with that of its internal nature and genesis. He looks upon the
theory of evolution as having attained to its complete triumph, in its
application to organic nature in general, and especially to man. He has
no suspicion whatever of the function of fancy, and of the true relation
between thought and expression, between expression in the naturalistic,
and expression in the spiritual and linguistic sense. He looks upon
speech as a specially developed form of psycho-physical vital
manifestations, of expressive animal movements. Language is developed
continuously from such facts, and thus is explained how, "beyond the
general concept of expressive movement, there is no specific quality
which delimits language in a non-arbitrary manner."

Thus the philosophy of Wundt reveals its weak side, showing itself
incapable of understanding the spiritual nature of language and of art.
In the _Ethic_ of the same author, aesthetic facts are presented as a
mixture of logical and ethical elements, a special normative aesthetic
science is denied, and Aesthetic is merged in Logic and Ethic.

The neo-critical and neo-Kantian movement in thought was not able to
maintain the concept of the spirit against the hedonistic, moralistic,
and psychological views of Aesthetic, in vogue from about the middle of
last century. Neo-criticism inherited from Kant his view as to the
slight importance of the creative imagination, and appears indeed to have
been ignorant of any form of knowledge, other than the intellective.

Kirchmann (1868) was one of the early adherents to psychological
Aesthetic, defining the beautiful as the idealized image of pleasure,
the ugly as that of pain. For him the aesthetic fact is the idealized
image of the real. Failing to apprehend the true nature of the aesthetic
fact, Kirchmann invented a new psychological category of ideal or
apparent feelings, which he thought were attenuated images from those
of real life.

The aged Theodore Fischer describes Aesthetic in his auto-criticism as
the union of mimetic and harmony, and the beautiful as the harmony of
the universe, which is never realized in fact, because it is infinite.
When we think to grasp the beautiful, we experience that exquisite
illusion, which is the aesthetic fact. Robert Fischer, son of the
foregoing, introduced the word _Einfühlung_, to express the vitality
which he believed that man inspired into things with the help of the
aesthetic process.

E. Siebeck and M. Diez, the former writing in 1875, the latter in 1892,
unite a certain amount of idealistic influence, derived from Kant and
Herbart, with the merely empirical and psychological views that have of
late been the fashion. Diez, for instance, would explain the artistic
function as the ideal of feeling, placing it parallel to science; the
ideal of thought, morality; the ideal of will and religion, the ideal of
the personality. But this ideal of feeling escapes definition, and we
see that these writers have not had the courage of their ideas: they
have not dared to push their thought to its logical conclusion.

The merely psychological and associationist view finds in Theodore Lipps
its chief exponent. He criticizes and rejects a series of aesthetic
theories, such as those of play, of pleasure, of art as recognition of
real life, even if disagreeable, of emotionality, of syncretism, which
attaches to art a number of other ends, in addition to those of play and
of pleasure.

The theory of Lipps does not differ very greatly from that of Jouffroy,
for he assumes that artistic beauty is the sympathetic. "Our ego,
transplanted, objectified, and recognized in others, is the object of
sympathy. We feel ourselves in others, and others in us." Thus the
aesthetic pleasure is entirely composed of sympathy. This extends even
to the pleasure derived from architecture, geometrical forms, etc.
Whenever we meet with the positive element of human personality, we
experience this feeling of beatitude, which is the aesthetic emotion.
But the value of the personality is an ethical value: the whole sphere
of ethic is included in it. Therefore all artistic or aesthetic pleasure
is the enjoyment of something which has ethical value, but this value is
not an element of a compound, but the object of aesthetic intuition.
Thus is aesthetic activity deprived of all autonomous existence and
reduced to a mere retainer of Ethic.

C. Groos (1895) shows some signs of recognizing aesthetic activity as a
theoretic value. Feeling and intellect, he says, are the two poles of
knowledge, and he recognizes the aesthetic fact as internal imitation.
Everything beautiful belongs to aestheticity, but not every aesthetic
fact is beautiful. The beautiful is the representation of sensible
pleasure, and the ugly of sensible displeasure. The sublime is the
representation of something powerful, in a simple form. The comic is the
representation of an inferiority, which provokes in us the pleasurable
feeling of "superiority." Groos very wisely makes mock of the supposed
function of the Ugly, which Hartmann and Schasler had inherited and
developed from a long tradition. Lipps and Groos agree in denying
aesthetic value to the comic, but Lipps, although he gives an excellent
analysis of the comic, is nevertheless in the trammels of his moralistic
thesis, and ends by sketching out something resembling the doctrine of
the overcoming of the ugly, by means of which may be attained a higher
aesthetic and (sympathetic) value.

Labours such as those of Lipps have been of value, since they have
cleared away a number of errors that blocked the way, and restrained
speculation to the field of the internal consciousness. Similar is the
merit of E. Véron's treatise (1883) on the double form of Aesthetic, in
which he combats the academic view of the absolute beauty, and shows
that Taine confuses Art and Science, Aesthetic and Logic. He acutely
remarks that if the object of art were to reveal the essence of things,
the greatest artists would be those who best succeeded in doing this,
and the greatest works would all be _identical_; whereas we know that
the very opposite is the case. Véron was a precursor of Guyau, and we
seek for scientific system in vain in his book. Véron looks upon art as
two things: the one _decorative_, pleasing eye and ear, the other
_expressive_, "l'expression émue de la personalité humaine." He thought
that decorative art prevailed in antiquity, expressive art in modern
times.

We cannot here dwell upon the aesthetic theories of men of letters, such
as that of E. Zola, developing his thesis of natural science and history
mixed, which is known as that of the human document or as the
experimental theory, or of Ibsen and the moralization of the art
problem, as presented by him and by the Scandinavian school. Perhaps no
French writer has written more profoundly upon art than Gustave
Flaubert. His views are contained in his Correspondence, which has been
published. L. Tolstoï wrote his book on art while under the influence of
Véron and his hatred of the concept of the beautiful. Art, he says,
communicates the feelings, as the word communicates the thoughts. But
his way of understanding this may be judged from the comparison which he
institutes between Art and Science. According to this, "Art has for its
mission to make assimilable and sensible what may not have been
assimilated in the form of argument. There is no science for science's
sake, no art for art's sake. Every human effort should be directed
toward increasing morality and suppressing violence." This amounts to
saying that well-nigh all the art that the world has hitherto seen is
false. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Dante, Tasso,
Milton, Shakespeare, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Bach, Beethoven, are all,
according to Tolstoï, "false reputations, made by the critics."

We must also class F. Nietzsche with the artists, rather than with the
philosophers. We should do him an injustice (as with J. Ruskin) were we
to express in intellectual terminology his aesthetic affirmations. The
criticism which they provoke would be too facile. Nowhere has Nietzsche
given a complete theory of art, not even in his first book, _Die Geburt
der Tragödie oder Griechentum und Pessimismus_. What seems to be theory
there, is really the confession of the feelings and aspirations of the
writer. Nietzsche was the last, splendid representative of the romantic
period. He was, therefore, deeply preoccupied with the art problem and
with the relation of art to natural science and to philosophy, though he
never succeeded in definitely fixing those relations. From Romanticism,
rather than from Schopenhauer, he gathered those elements of thought out
of which he wove his conception of the two forms of art: the Apollonian,
all serene contemplation, as expressed in the epic and in sculpture; the
Dionysaïc, all tumult and agitation, as expressed in music and the
drama. These doctrines are not rigorously proved, and their power of
resistance to criticism is therefore but slender, but they serve to
transport the mind to a more lofty spiritual level than any others of
the second half of the nineteenth century.

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