The Essence of Aesthetic

CONTENTS

The Essence of Æsthetic—A lecture prepared for the inauguration of the Rice Institute, by Senator Benedetto Croce, Life Senator of the Italian Kingdom,

Member of several Royal Commissions, Editor of “La Critica,” and Minister for Education in the Gioletti Cabinet.

I | “What is Art?” |

Preface

PREFACE

When I first visited Naples, in 1909, I was quite unprepared for making the discovery of a new philosopher, and nothing was further from my mind than to become his prophet to the English-speaking world. Yet so it has happened.

If I may be permitted the use of metaphor and to take the eternal activities of the spirit of man as equivalent to the eternal ideas of Plato, yet far more real than they, because immanent and not transcendental, and if I may push yet further the metaphor and figure these activities of the spirit as planets, then one might say that Croce is the Adams-Leverrier of philosophy, and his Theory of Æsthetic the discovery of the planet Neptune. For just as those astronomer-mathematicians proved the independent existence of that planet, hitherto unknown, by observing the perturbations it set up throughout the planetary system, so Croce has proved the independent existence of Æsthetic, the last of the great planetary activities of the spirit of man to come into line with thought. Just as the action of Neptune was falsely attributed to other causes, so the action of Æsthetic has been falsely confused with Ethic, Economic and Logic. Croce has disentangled and proved its independence. And just as we can now say that there is no other planet to be discovered in the heavens, so we can say that there is no other activity of the spirit to be discovered.

Returning to 1909 and my visit to Naples, I was not long in finding a copy of the “Estetica,” and a single reading made clear to me its supreme importance. Although first published in 1901, no notice whatever had been taken of it in the English-speaking world. How long this might have continued, it is idle to surmise, but the fact that by far the greatest history of Italian literature (De Sanctis’), which dates from about the middle of last century, yet awaits translation and is little known in Great Britain, leads one to suppose that a like fate might have been in store for Croce’s discovery.

That is now for ever averted, as I have had the pleasure and privilege of presenting the English-speaking world with my translation of the “Complete System of the Philosophy of the Spirit,” in four volumes, besides other works by the master, such as the application of the theories of the Æsthetic to the greatest poets of Europe: Dante, Ariosto, Shakespeare, Corneille, to name them chronologically.

The present little volume, entirely original in statement, contains, as the author says, the condensation of his most important thoughts upon the subject of Æsthetic. In his belief, it may prove of use to young folk and others who wish to study poetry, and art in general, seriously. He is of opinion that the study of Æsthetic is perhaps better adapted to the understanding of philosophy than that of any other branch, for no other subject awakens youthful interest so soon as art and poetry. Logic remains, perhaps, rather severe and abstract, Ethic is apt to sound too like a “preachment,” and what is called “Psychology” is rather a turning away from than a guide to Philosophy. The problems of art, on the other hand, not only lead more easily to the habit of thought upon themselves, but also whet the appetite and sharpen the teeth for biting into the marrow of those other problems, which, since all are contained in the spirit, form with it an ideal whole.

Little remains to be said, beyond mentioning that the “Essence of Æsthetic” was originally written by Croce and translated by me to celebrate the inauguration of the great Rice Institute, of Houston, Texas, in 1912. Croce was invited to address the University personally, but he was even then too busy with his own country’s affairs and his enormous literary labours, and the learned and courteous President Odell Lovett therefore kindly accepted the written essay in lieu of the actual presence of the philosopher. I was also, and for the same reason, obliged to decline, on his behalf, the giving of the Gifford Lectures in 1912.

The University of Columbia has recently presented Croce with its gold medal for the most original and important contribution to literature during the past five years, and his present position in the Italian Government as Cabinet Minister and Minister for Education (accepted solely from a sense of duty) are, I think, proof that his merits are beginning to be recognised.

Plato, returning discomfited from Sicily, where he had failed to realise his conception of the Philosopher-King, would have taken heart could he have seen his remote brother and descendant, a scion of Greater Greece, so valiantly, so disinterestedly, ruling alike in the worlds of thought and practical life. For did he not lay it down as a condition that those only should rule who would fain be left to their lofty meditations?

Douglas Ainslie.

The Athenæum,

January, 1921.

Postscript.—I should like to thank my learned friend, the Librarian of the India Office, Dr. F. W. Thomas, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge, for kindly reading the proofs of this work and making certain valuable suggestions.

I. — “What is Art?”

THE ESSENCE OF ÆSTHETIC

I

“WHAT IS ART?”

IN reply to the question, “What is art?” it might be said jocosely (but this would not be a bad joke) that art is what everybody knows it to be. And indeed, if it were not to some extent known what it is, it would be impossible even to ask that question, for every question implies a certain knowledge of what is asked about, designated in the question and therefore known and qualified. A proof of this is to be found in the fact that we often hear just and profound ideas in relation to art expressed by those who make no profession of philosophy or of theory, by laymen, by artists who do not like to reason, by the ingenuous, and even by the common people: these ideas are sometimes implicit in judgments concerning particular works of art, but at others assume altogether the form of aphorisms and of definitions. Thus people have come to believe in the possibility of making blush, at will, any proud philosopher who should fancy himself to have “discovered” the nature of art, by placing before his eyes or making ring in his ears propositions taken from the most superficial books or phrases of the most ordinary conversation, and showing that they already most clearly contained his vaunted discovery.

And in this case the philosopher would have good reason to blush—that is, had he ever nourished the illusion of introducing into universal human consciousness, by means of his doctrines, something altogether original, something extraneous to this consciousness, the revelation of an altogether new world. But he does not blush, and continues upon his way, for he is not ignorant that the question as to what is art (as indeed every philosophical question as to the nature of the real, or in general every question of knowledge), even if by its use of language it seem to assume the aspect of a general and total problem, which it is claimed to solve for the first and last time, has always, as a matter of fact, a circumscribed meaning, referable to the particular difficulties that assume vitality at a determined moment in the history of thought. Certainly, truth does walk the streets, like the esprit of the well known French proverb, or like metaphor, “queen of tropes” according to rhetoricians, which Montaigne discovered in the babil of his chambrière. But the metaphor used by the maid is the solution of a problem of expression proper to the feelings that affect the maid at that moment; and the obvious affirmations that by accident or intent one hears every day as to the nature of art, are solutions of logical problems, as they present themselves to this or that individual, who is not a philosopher by profession, and yet as man is also to some extent a philosopher. And as the maid’s metaphor usually expresses but a small and vulgar world of feeling compared with that of the poet, so the obvious affirmation of one who is not a philosopher solves a problem small by comparison with that which occupies the philosopher. The answer as to what is art may appear similar in both cases, but is different in both cases owing to the different degree of richness of its intimate content; because the answer of the philosopher worthy of the name has neither more nor less a task than that of solving in an adequate manner all the problems as to the nature of art that have arisen down to that moment in the course of history; whereas that of the layman, since it revolves in a far narrower space, shows itself to be impotent outside those limits. Actual proof of this is also to be found in the force of the eternal Socratic method, in the facility with which the learned, by pressing home their questions, leave those without learning in open-mouthed confusion, though these had nevertheless begun by speaking well; but now finding themselves in danger of losing in the course of the inquiry what small knowledge they possessed, they have no resource but to retire into their shell, declaring that they do not like “subtleties.”

The philosopher’s pride is based therefore solely upon the greater intensity of his questions and answers; a pride not unaccompanied with modesty—that is, with the consciousness that, if his sphere be wider, or the largest possible, at a determined moment, yet it is limited by the history of that moment, and cannot pretend to a value of totality, or what is called a definitive solution. The ulterior life of the spirit, renewing and multiplying problems, does not so much falsify, as render inadequate preceding solutions, part of them falling among the number of those truths that are understood, and part needing to be again taken up and integrated. A system is a house, which, as soon as it has been built and decorated, has need of continuous labour, more or less energetic, in order to keep it in repair (subject as it is to the corrosive action of the elements); and at a certain moment there is no longer any use in restoring and propping up the system; we must demolish and reconstruct it from top to bottom. But with this capital difference: that in the work of thought, the perpetually new house is perpetually supported by the old one, which persists in it, almost by an act of magic. As we know, those superficial or ingenuous souls that are ignorant of this magic are terrified at it; so much so, that one of their tiresome refrains against philosophy is that it continually undoes its work, and that one philosopher contradicts another: as though man did not always make and unmake his houses, and as though the architect that follows did not always contradict the architect that precedes; and as though it were possible to draw the conclusion from this making and unmaking of houses and from this contradiction among architects, that it is useless to make houses!

The answers of the philosopher, though they have the advantage of greater intensity, also carry with them the dangers of greater error, and are often vitiated by a sort of lack of good sense, which has an aristocratic character, in so far as it belongs to a superior sphere of culture, and even when meriting reproof, is the object, not only of disdain and derision, but also of secret envy and admiration. This is the foundation of the contrast, which many delight to point out, between the mental equilibrium of ordinary people and the extravagances of philosophers; since, for example, it is clear that no man of good sense would have said that art is a reflection of the sexual instinct, or that it is something maleficent and deserves to be banned from well-ordered republics. These absurdities have, however, been uttered by philosophers, and even by great philosophers. But the innocence of the man of common sense is poverty, the innocence of the savage; and though there have often been sighs for the life of the savage, and a remedy has been called for to rescue good sense from philosophies, it remains a fact that the spirit, in its development, courageously affronts the dangers of civilisation and the momentary loss of good sense. The researches of the philosopher in relation to art must tread the paths of error in order to find the path of truth, which does not differ from, but is, those very paths of error which contain a clue to the labyrinth.

The close connection of error and truth arises from the fact that a complete and total error is inconceivable, and, since it is inconceivable, does not exist. Error speaks with two voices, one of which affirms the false, but the other denies it; it is a colliding of yes and no, which is called contradiction. Therefore, when we descend from general considerations to the examination of a theory that has been condemned as erroneous in its definite particulars, we find the cure in the theory itself—that is, the true theory, which grows out of the soil of error. Thus it happens that those very people who claim to reduce art to the sexual instinct, in order to demonstrate their thesis, have recourse to arguments and meditations which, instead of uniting, separate art from that instinct; or that he who would expel poetry from the well-constituted republic, shudders in so doing, and himself creates a new and sublime poetry. There have been historical periods in which the most crude and perverted doctrines of art have dominated; yet this did not prevent the habitual and secure separation of the beautiful from the ugly at those periods, nor the very subtle discussion of the theme, when the abstract theory was forgotten and particular cases were studied. Error is always condemned, not by the mouth of the judge, but ex ore suo.

Owing to this close connection with error, the affirmation of the truth is always a process of strife, by means of which it keeps freeing itself in error from error; whence arises another pious but impossible desire, namely, that which demands that truth should be directly exposed, without discussion or polemic; that it should be permitted to proceed majestically alone upon its way: as if this stage parade were the symbol suited to truth, which is thought itself, and as thought, ever active and in labour. Indeed, nobody succeeds in exposing a truth, save by criticising the different solutions of the problem with which it is connected; and there is no philosophical treatise, however weak, no little scholastic manual or academic dissertation, which does not collect at its beginning or contain in its body a review of opinions, historically given or ideally possible, which it wishes to oppose or to correct. This fact, though frequently realised in a capricious and disorderly manner, just expresses the legitimate desire to pass in review all the solutions that have been attempted in history or are possible of achievement in idea (that is, at the present moment, though always in history), in such a way that the new solution shall include in itself all the preceding labour of the human spirit.

But this demand is a logical demand, and as such intrinsic to every true thought and inseparable from it; and we must not confound it with a definite literary form of exposition, in order that we may not fall into the pedantry for which the scholastics of the Middle Ages and the dialecticians of the school of Hegel in the nineteenth century became celebrated, and which is very closely connected with the formalistic superstition, and represents a belief in the marvellous virtue of a certain sort of external and mechanical philosophical exposition. We must, in short, understand it in a substantial, not in an accidental sense, respecting the spirit, not the letter, and proceed with freedom in the exposition of our own thought, according to time, place, and person. Thus, in these rapid lectures, intended to provide as it were a guide to the right way of thinking out problems of art, I shall carefully refrain from narrating (as I have done elsewhere) the whole process of liberation from erroneous conceptions of art, mounting upwards from the poorest to the richest; and I shall cast far away, not from myself, but from my readers, a part of the baggage with which they will charge themselves when, prompted thereto by the sight of the country passed over in our bird’s flight, they shall set themselves to accomplish more particular voyages in this or that part of it, or to cross it again from end to end.

However, connecting the question which has given occasion to this indispensable prologue (indispensable for the purpose of removing from my discourse every appearance of pretentiousness, and also all blemish of inutility),—the question as to what is art,—I will say at once, in the simplest manner, that art is vision or intuition. The artist produces an image or a phantasm; and he who enjoys art turns his gaze upon the point which the artist has indicated, looks through the chink which he has opened, and reproduces that image in himself. “Intuition,” “vision,” “contemplation,” “imagination,” “fancy,” “figurations,” “representations,” and so on, are words continually recurring, like synonyms, when discoursing upon art, and they all lead the mind to the same conceptual sphere, which indicates general agreement.

But this reply of mine, that art is intuition, obtains its force and meaning from all that it implicitly denies and distinguishes from art. What negations are implicit in it? I shall indicate the principal, or at least those that are the most important for us at this present moment of our culture.

It denies, above all, that art is a physical fact: for example, certain determined colours, or relations of colours; certain definite forms of bodies; certain definite sounds, or relations of sounds; certain phenomena of heat or of electricity—in short, whatsoever be designated as “physical.” The inclination towards this error of physicising art is already present in ordinary thought, and as children who touch the soap-bubble and would wish to touch the rainbow, so the human spirit, admiring beautiful things, hastens spontaneously to trace out the reasons for them in external nature, and proves that it must think, or believes that it should think, certain colours beautiful and certain other colours ugly, certain forms beautiful and certain other forms ugly. But this attempt has been carried out intentionally and with method on several occasions in the history of thought: from the “canons” which the Greek theoreticians and artists fixed for the beauty of bodies, through the speculations as to the geometrical and numerical relations of figures and sounds, down to the researches of the aestheticians of the nineteenth century (Fechner, for example), and to the “communications” presented in our day by the inexpert, at philosophical, psychological and natural science congresses, concerning the relations of physical phenomena with art. And if it be asked why art cannot be a physical fact, we must reply, in the first place, that physical facts do not possess reality, and that art, to which so many devote their whole lives and which fills all with a divine joy, is supremely real; thus it cannot be a physical fact, which is something unreal. This sounds at first paradoxical, for nothing seems more solid and secure to the ordinary man than the physical world; but we, in the seat of truth, must not abstain from the good reason and substitute for it one less good, solely because the first may have the appearance of a lie; and besides, in order to surpass what of strange and difficult may be contained in that truth, to become at home with it, we may take into consideration the fact that the demonstration of the unreality of the physical world has not only been proved in an indisputable manner and is admitted by all philosophers (who are not crass materialists and are not involved in the strident contradictions of materialism), but is professed by these same physicists in the spontaneous philosophy which they mingle with their physics, when they conceive physical phenomena as products of principles that are beyond experience, of atoms or of ether, or as the manifestation of an Unknowable: besides, the matter itself of the materialists is a supermaterial principle. Thus physical facts reveal themselves, by their internal logic and by common consent, not as reality, but as a construction of our intellect for the purposes of science. Consequently, the question whether art be a physical fact must rationally assume this different signification: that is to say, whether it be possible to construct art physically. And this is certainly possible, for we indeed carry it out always, when, turning from the sense of a poem and ceasing to enjoy it, we set ourselves, for example, to count the words of which the poem is composed and to divide them into syllables and letters; or, disregarding the aesthetic effect of a statue, we weigh and measure it: a most useful performance for the packers of statues, as is the other for the typographers who have to “compose” pages of poetry; but most useless for the contemplator and student of art, to whom it is neither useful nor licit to allow himself to be “distracted” from his proper object. Thus art is not a physical fact in this second sense either; which amounts to saying that when we propose to ourselves to penetrate its nature and mode of action, to construct it physically is of no avail.

Another negation is implied in the definition of art as intuition: if it be intuition, and intuition is equivalent to theory in the original sense of contemplation, art cannot be a utilitarian act; and since a utilitarian act aims always at obtaining a pleasure and therefore at keeping off a pain, art, considered in its own nature, has nothing to do with the useful and with pleasure and pain, as such. It will be admitted, indeed, without much difficulty, that a pleasure as a pleasure, any sort of pleasure, is not of itself artistic; the pleasure of a drink of water that slakes thirst, or a walk in the open air that stretches our limbs and makes our blood circulate more lightly, or the obtaining of a longed-for post that settles us in practical life, and so on, is not artistic. Finally, the difference between pleasure and art leaps to the eyes in the relations that are developed between ourselves and works of art, because the figure represented may be dear to us and represent the most delightful memories, and at the same time the picture may be ugly; or, on the other hand, the picture may be beautiful and the figure represented hateful to our hearts, or the picture itself, which we approve as beautiful, may also cause us rage and envy, because it is the work of our enemy or rival, for whom it will procure advantage and on whom it will confer new strength: our practical interests, with their relative pleasures and pains, mingle and sometimes become confused with art and disturb, but are never identified with, our aesthetic interest. At the most it will be affirmed, with a view to maintaining more effectively the definition of art as the pleasurable, that it is not the pleasurable in general, but a particular form of the pleasurable. But such a restriction is no longer a defence, it is indeed an abandonment of that thesis; for given that art is a particular form of pleasure, its distinctive character would be supplied, not by the pleasurable, but by what distinguishes that pleasurable from other pleasurables, and it would be desirable to turn the attention to that distinctive element—more than pleasurable or different from pleasurable. Nevertheless, the doctrine that defines art as the pleasurable has a special denomination (hedonistic aesthetic), and a long and complicated development in the history of aesthetic doctrines: it showed itself in the Graeco-Roman world, prevailed in the eighteenth century, reflowered in the second half of the nineteenth, and still enjoys much favour, being especially well received by beginners in aesthetic, who are, above all, struck by the fact that art causes pleasure. The life of this doctrine has consisted of proposing in turn one or another class of pleasures, or several classes together (the pleasure of the superior senses, the pleasure of play, of consciousness of our own strength, of criticism, etc., etc.), or of adding to it elements differing from the pleasurable, the useful, for example (when understood as distinct from the pleasurable), the satisfaction of cognoscitive and moral wants, and the like. And its progress has been caused just by this restlessness, and by its allowing foreign elements to ferment in its bosom, which it introduces through the necessity of somehow bringing itself into agreement with the reality of art, thus attaining to its dissolution as hedonistic doctrine and to the promotion of a new doctrine, or at least to drawing attention to its necessity. And since every error has its element of truth (and that of the physical doctrine has been seen to be the possibility of the physical “construction” of art as of any other fact), the hedonistic doctrine has its eternal element of truth in the placing in relief the hedonistic accompaniment, or pleasure, common to the aesthetic activity as to every form of spiritual activity, which it has not at all been intended to deny in absolutely denying the identification of art with the pleasurable, and in distinguishing it from the pleasurable by defining it as intuition.

A third negation, effected by means of the theory of art as intuition, is that of art as a moral act; that is to say, that form of practical act which, although necessarily uniting with the useful and with pleasure and pain, is not immediately utilitarian and hedonistic, and moves in a superior spiritual sphere. But the intuition, in so far as it is a theoretic act, is opposed to the practical of any sort. And in truth, art, as has been remarked from the earliest times, does not arise as an act of the will; good will, which constitutes the honest man, does not constitute the artist. And since it is not the result of an act of will, so it escapes all moral discrimination, not because a privilege of exemption is accorded to it, but simply because moral discrimination cannot be applied to art. An artistic image portrays an act morally praiseworthy or blameworthy; but this image, as image, is neither morally praiseworthy nor blameworthy. Not only is there no penal code that can condemn an image to prison or to death, but no moral judgment, uttered by a rational person, can make of it its object: we might just as well judge the square moral or the triangle immoral as the Francesca of Dante immoral or the Cordelia of Shakespeare moral, for these have a purely artistic function, they are like musical notes in the souls of Dante and of Shakespeare. Further, the moralistic theory of art is also represented in the history of aesthetic doctrines, though much discredited in the common opinion of our times, not only on account of its intrinsic demerit, but also, in some measure, owing to the moral demerit of certain tendencies of our times, which render possible that refutation of it on psychological grounds, which should be made—and which we here make—solely for logical reasons. The end attributed to art, of directing the good and inspiring horror of evil, of correcting and ameliorating customs, is a derivation of the moralistic doctrine; and so is the demand addressed to artists to collaborate in the education of the lower classes, in the strengthening of the national or bellicose spirit of a people, in the diffusion of the ideals of a modest and laborious life; and so on. These are all things that art cannot do, any more than geometry, which, however, does not lose anything of its importance on account of its inability to do this; and one does not. see why art should do so either. That it cannot do these things was partially perceived by the moralistic aestheticians also, for they very readily effected a transaction with it, permitting it to provide pleasures that were not moral, provided they were not openly dishonest, or recommending it to employ to a good end that empire over souls which it possessed through its hedonistic power to gild the pill, to sprinkle sweetness upon the rim of the glass containing the bitter draught—in short, to play the courtesan (since it could not get rid of its old and inborn habits) in the service of holy church or of morality: meretrix ecclesiae. On other occasions they have sought to avail themselves of it for purposes of instruction, since not only virtue but also science is a difficult thing, and art could remove this difficulty and render pleasant and attractive the entrance into the ocean of science—indeed, lead them through it as through a garden of Armida, gaily and voluptuously, without their being conscious of the lofty protection they had obtained, or of the crisis of renovation which they were preparing for themselves. We cannot now refrain from a smile when we talk of these theories, but should not forget that they were once a serious matter, corresponding to a serious effort to understand the nature of art and to elevate the conception of it; and that among those who believed in it (to limit ourselves to Italian literature) were Dante and Tasso, Parini and Alfieri, Manzoni and Mazzini. And the moralistic doctrine of art was and is and will be perpetually beneficial by its very contradictions; it was and will be an effort, however unhappy, to separate art from the merely pleasing, with which it is sometimes confused, and to assign to it a more worthy post: and it also has its true side, because, if art be beyond morality, the artist is neither this side of it nor that, but under its empire, in so far as he is a man who cannot withdraw himself from the duties of man, and must look upon art itself—art, which is not and never will be moral—as a mission to be exercised, a priestly office.