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 lyrical essence of pure intuition, and of art, helps to make clear
what we have already observed concerning the persistence of the
intuition and of the fancy in the higher grades of the theoretical
spirit, why philosophy, history, and science have always an artistic
side, and why their expression is subject to aesthetic valuation. The
man who ascends from art to thought does not by so doing abandon his
volitional and practical base, and therefore he too finds himself in a
particular _state of the soul_, the representation of which is intuitive
and lyrical, and accompanies of necessity the development of his ideas.
Hence the various styles of thinkers, solemn or jocose, troubled or
gladsome, mysterious and involved, or level and expansive. But it would
not be correct to divide intuition immediately into two classes, the one
of _aesthetic_, the other of _intellectual_ or _logical_ intuitions,
owing to the persistence of the artistic element in logical thought,
because the relation of degrees is not the relation of classes, and
copper is copper, whether it be found alone, or in combination as
bronze.
Further, this close connection of feeling and intuition in pure
intuition throws much light on the reasons which have so often caused
art to be separated from the theoretic and confounded with the practical
activity. The most celebrated of these confusions are those formulated
about the relativity of tastes and of the impossibility of reproducing,
tasting, and correctly judging the art of the past, and in general the
art of others. A life lived, a feeling felt, a volition willed, are
certainly impossible to reproduce, because nothing happens more than
once, and my situation at the present moment is not that of any other
being, nor is it mine of the moment before, nor will be of the moment to
follow. But art remakes ideally, and ideally expresses my momentary
situation. Its image, produced by art, becomes separated from time and
space, and can be again made and again contemplated in its ideal-reality
from every point of time and space. It belongs not to the _world_, but
to the _superworld_; not to the flying moment, but to eternity. Thus
life passes, but art endures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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