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
Locke was as intellectualist in the England of this period as was
Descartes in France. He speaks of wit as combining ideas in an agreeable
variety, which strikes the imagination, while the intellect or judgment
seeks for differences according to truth. The wit, then, consists of
something which is not at all in accordance with truth and reason. For
Shaftesbury, taste is a sense or instinct of the beautiful, of order and
proportion, identical with the moral sense and with its "preconceptions"
anticipating the recognition of reason. Body, spirit, and God are the
three degrees of beauty. Francis Hutcheson proceeded from Shaftesbury
and made popular "the internal sense of beauty, which lies somewhere
between sensuality and rationality and is occupied with discussing unity
in variety, concord in multiplicity, and the true, the good, and the
beautiful in their substantial identity." Hutcheson allied the pleasure
of art with this sense, that is, with the pleasure of imitation and of
the likeness of the copy to the original. This he looked upon as
relative beauty, to be distinguished from absolute beauty. The same view
dominates the English writers of the eighteenth century, among whom may
be mentioned Reid, the head of the Scottish school, and Adam Smith.
With far greater philosophical vigour, Leibnitz in Germany opened the
door to that crowd of psychic facts which Cartesian intellectualism had
rejected with horror. His conception of reality as _continuous_ (_natura
non facit saltus_) left room for imagination, taste, and their
congeners. Leibnitz believed that the scale of being ascended from the
lowliest to God. What we now term aesthetic facts were then identified
with what Descartes and Leibnitz had called "confused" knowledge, which
might become "clear," but not distinct. It might seem that when he
applied this terminology to aesthetic facts, Leibnitz had recognized
their peculiar essence, as being neither sensual nor intellectual. They
are not sensual for him, because they have their own "clarity,"
differing from pleasure and sensual emotion, and from intellectual
"distinctio." But the Leibnitzian law of continuity and intellectualism
did not permit of such an interpretation. Obscurity and clarity are here
to be understood as quantitative grades of a _single_ form of knowledge,
the distinct or intellectual, toward which they both tend and reach at a
superior grade. Though artists judge with confused perceptions, which
are clear but not distinct, these may yet be corrected and proved true
by intellective knowledge. The intellect clearly and distinctly knows
the thing which the imagination knows confusedly but clearly. This view
of Leibnitz amounts to saying that the realization of a work of art can
be perfected by intellectually determining its concept. Thus Leibnitz
held that there was only one true form of knowledge, and that all other
forms could only reach perfection in that. His "clarity" is not a
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