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
For Kant art was always "a sensible and imaged covering for an
intellectual concept." He did not look upon art as pure beauty without a
concept. He looked upon it as a beauty adherent and fixed about a
concept. The work of genius contains two elements: imagination and
intelligence. To these must be added taste, which combines the two. Art
may even represent the ugly in nature, for artistic beauty "is not a
beautiful thing but a beautiful representation of a thing." But this
representation of the ugly has its limits in the arts (here Kant
remembers Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit in the
disgusting and the repugnant, which kills the representation itself. He
believes that there may be artistic productions without a concept, such
as are flowers in nature, and these would be ornaments to frameworks,
music without words, etc., etc., but since they represent nothing
reducible to a definite concept, they must be classed, like flowers,
with free beauties. This would certainly seem to exclude them from
Aesthetic, which, according to Kant, should combine imagination and
intelligence.
Kant is shut in with intellectualist barriers. A complete definition of
the _imagination_ is _wanting_ to his system. He does not admit that the
imagination belongs to the powers of the mind. He relegates it to the
facts of sensation. He is aware of the reproductive and combinative
imagination, but he does not recognize _fancy_ (_fantasia_), which is
the true productive imagination.
Yet Kant was aware that there exists an activity other than the
intellective. Intuition is referred to by him as preceding intellective
activity and differing from sensation. He does not speak of it, however,
in his critique of art, but in the first section of the _Critique of
Pure Reason_. Sensations do not enter the mind, until it has given them
_form_. This is neither sensation nor intelligence. It is _pure
intuition_, the sum of the _a priori_ principles of sensibility. He
speaks thus: "There must, then, exist a science that forms the first
part of the transcendental doctrine of the elements, distinct from that
which contains the principles of pure thought and is called
transcendental Logic."
What does he call this new science? He calls it _Transcendental
Aesthetic_, and refuses to allow the term to be used for the Critique of
Taste, which could never become a science.
But although he thus states so clearly the necessity of a science of the
form of the sensations, that is of _pure intuition_, Kant here appears
to fall into grave error. This arises from _his inexact idea_ of the
_essence of the aesthetic faculty or of art_, which, as we now know, is
pure intuition. He conceives the form of sensibility to be reducible to
the _two categories of space and time_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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