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
Kirchmann (1868) was one of the early adherents to psychological
Aesthetic, defining the beautiful as the idealized image of pleasure,
the ugly as that of pain. For him the aesthetic fact is the idealized
image of the real. Failing to apprehend the true nature of the aesthetic
fact, Kirchmann invented a new psychological category of ideal or
apparent feelings, which he thought were attenuated images from those
of real life.
The aged Theodore Fischer describes Aesthetic in his auto-criticism as
the union of mimetic and harmony, and the beautiful as the harmony of
the universe, which is never realized in fact, because it is infinite.
When we think to grasp the beautiful, we experience that exquisite
illusion, which is the aesthetic fact. Robert Fischer, son of the
foregoing, introduced the word _Einfühlung_, to express the vitality
which he believed that man inspired into things with the help of the
aesthetic process.
E. Siebeck and M. Diez, the former writing in 1875, the latter in 1892,
unite a certain amount of idealistic influence, derived from Kant and
Herbart, with the merely empirical and psychological views that have of
late been the fashion. Diez, for instance, would explain the artistic
function as the ideal of feeling, placing it parallel to science; the
ideal of thought, morality; the ideal of will and religion, the ideal of
the personality. But this ideal of feeling escapes definition, and we
see that these writers have not had the courage of their ideas: they
have not dared to push their thought to its logical conclusion.
The merely psychological and associationist view finds in Theodore Lipps
its chief exponent. He criticizes and rejects a series of aesthetic
theories, such as those of play, of pleasure, of art as recognition of
real life, even if disagreeable, of emotionality, of syncretism, which
attaches to art a number of other ends, in addition to those of play and
of pleasure.
The theory of Lipps does not differ very greatly from that of Jouffroy,
for he assumes that artistic beauty is the sympathetic. "Our ego,
transplanted, objectified, and recognized in others, is the object of
sympathy. We feel ourselves in others, and others in us." Thus the
aesthetic pleasure is entirely composed of sympathy. This extends even
to the pleasure derived from architecture, geometrical forms, etc.
Whenever we meet with the positive element of human personality, we
experience this feeling of beatitude, which is the aesthetic emotion.
But the value of the personality is an ethical value: the whole sphere
of ethic is included in it. Therefore all artistic or aesthetic pleasure
is the enjoyment of something which has ethical value, but this value is
not an element of a compound, but the object of aesthetic intuition.
Thus is aesthetic activity deprived of all autonomous existence and
reduced to a mere retainer of Ethic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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