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
II
INTUITION AND ART
[Sidenote] _Corollaries and explanations._
Before proceeding further, it seems opportune to draw certain
consequences from what has been established and to add some explanation.
[Sidenote] _Identity of art and intuitive knowledge._
We have frankly identified intuitive or expressive knowledge with the
aesthetic or artistic fact, taking works of art as examples of intuitive
knowledge and attributing to them the characteristics of intuition, and
_vice versa_. But our identification is combated by the view, held even
by many philosophers, who consider art to be an intuition of an
altogether special sort. "Let us admit" (they say) "that art is
intuition; but intuition is not always art: artistic intuition is of a
distinct species differing from intuition in general by something
_more_."
[Sidenote] _No specific difference._
But no one has ever been able to indicate of what this something more
consists. It has sometimes been thought that art is not a simple
intuition, but an intuition of an intuition, in the same way as the
concept of science has been defined, not as the ordinary concept, but as
the concept of a concept. Thus man should attain to art, by
objectifying, not his sensations, as happens with ordinary intuition,
but intuition itself. But this process of raising to a second power does
not exist; and the comparison of it with the ordinary and scientific
concept does not imply what is wished, for the good reason that it is
not true that the scientific concept is the concept of a concept. If
this comparison imply anything, it implies just the opposite. The
ordinary concept, if it be really a concept and not a simple
representation, is a perfect concept, however poor and limited. Science
substitutes concepts for representations; it adds and substitutes other
concepts larger and more comprehensive for those that are poor and
limited. It is ever discovering new relations. But its method does not
differ from that by which is formed the smallest universal in the brain
of the humblest of men. What is generally called art, by antonomasia,
collects intuitions that are wider and more complex than those which we
generally experience, but these intuitions are always of sensations and
impressions.
Art is the expression of impressions, not the expression of expressions.
[Sidenote] _No difference of intensity._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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