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
The German, Ernest Platner, at any rate did not suffer from a like
confusion of thought. He developed his researches on the lines of
Hogarth, but was only able to discover a prolongation of sexual pleasure
in aesthetic facts. "Where," he exclaims, "is there any beauty that does
not come from the feminine figure, the centre of all beauty? The
undulating line is beautiful, because it is found in the body of woman;
essentially feminine movements are beautiful; the notes of music are
beautiful, when they melt into one another; a poem is beautiful, when
one thought embraces another with lightness and facility."
French sensualism shows itself quite incapable of understanding
aesthetic production, and the associationism of David Hume is not more
fortunate in this respect.
The Dutchman Hemsterhuis (1769) developed an ingenious theory, mingling
mystical and sensualist theory with some just remarks, which afterwards,
in the hands of Jacobi, became sentimentalism. Hemsterhuis believed
beauty to be a phenomenon arising from the meeting by the
sentimentalism, which gives multiplicity, with the internal sense, which
tends to unity. Consequently the beautiful will be that which presents
the greatest number of ideas in the shortest space of time. To man is
denied supreme unity, but here he finds approximative unity. Hence the
joy arising from the beautiful, which has some analogy with the joy of
love.
With Winckelmann (1764) Platonism or Neo-platonism was vigorously
renewed. The creator of the history of the figurative arts saw in the
divine indifference and more than human elevation of the works of Greek
sculpture a beauty which had descended from the seventh heaven and
become incarnate in them. Mendelssohn, the follower of Baumgarten, had
denied beauty to God: Winckelmann, the Neoplatonician, gave it back to
Him. He holds that perfect beauty is to be found only in God. "The
conception of human beauty becomes the more perfect in proportion as it
can be thought as in agreement with the Supreme Being, who is
distinguished from matter by His unity and indivisibility." To the other
characteristics of supreme beauty, Winckelmann adds "the absence of any
sort of signification" (Unbezeichnung). Lines and dots cannot explain
beauty, for it is not they alone which form it. Its form is not proper
to any definite person, it expresses no sentiment, no feeling of
passion, for these break up unity and diminish or obscure beauty.
According to Winckelmann, beauty must be like a drop of pure water taken
from the spring, which is the more healthy the less it has of taste,
because it is purified of all foreign elements.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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