Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General LinguisticCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic
Croce, Benedetto
Aesthetics; Language and languages -- Philosophy; Philosophy
But there was a divergence of opinion as to whether the latter should be
looked upon as part of the intellect or not.
There was the same divergence of opinion as to taste and intellectual
judgment. As regards the former, the opposition to the intellectual
principle was reinforced in the eighteenth century by Kant in his
_Kritik der Urtheilskraft_. But Voltaire and writers anterior to him
frequently fell back into intellectualist definitions of a word invented
precisely to avoid them. Dacier (1684) writes of taste as "Une harmonie,
un accord de l'esprit et de la raison." The difficulties surrounding a
true definition led to the creation of the expression _non so che_, or
_je ne sais quoi_, or _no se qué_, which throws into clear relief the
confusion between taste and intellectual judgment.
As regards imagination and feeling, or sentiment, there was a strong
tendency to sensualism. The Cardinal Sforza-Pallavicino talks of poetry
as ignoring alike truth or falsehood and yet delighting the senses. He
approves of the remark that poetry should make us "raise our eyebrows,"
but in later life this keen-eyed prince seems to have fallen back from
the brilliant intuition of his earlier years into the pedagogic theory.
Muratori was convinced that fancy was entirely sensual, and therefore he
posted the intellect beside it, "to refrain its wild courses, like a
friend having authority." Gravina practically coincides in this view of
poetic fancy, as a subordinate faculty, incapable of knowledge, fit only
to be used by moral philosophy for the introduction into the mind of the
true, by means of novelty and the marvellous.
In England, also, Bacon held poetry to belong to the fancy, and assigned
to it a place between history and science. Epic poetry he awarded to the
former, "parabolic" poetry to the latter. Elsewhere he talks of poetry
as a dream, and affirms that it is to be held "rather as an amusement of
the intelligence than as a science." For him music, painting, sculpture,
and the other arts are merely pleasure-giving. Addison reduced the
pleasures of the imagination to those caused by visible objects, or by
ideas taken from them. These pleasures he held to be inferior to those
of the senses and less refined than those of the intellect. He looked
upon imaginative pleasure as consisting in resemblances discovered
between imitations and things imitated, between copies and originals, an
exercise adapted to sharpen the spirit of observation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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