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
[Sidenote] _Indissolubility of intellective from intuitive knowledge._
The two forms of knowledge, aesthetic and intellectual or conceptual,
are indeed diverse, but this does not amount altogether to separation
and disjunction, as we find with two forces going each its own way. If
we have shown that the aesthetic form is altogether independent of the
intellectual and suffices to itself without external support, we have
not said that the intellectual can stand without the aesthetic. This
_reciprocity_ would not be true.
What is knowledge by concepts? It is knowledge of relations of things,
and those things are intuitions. Concepts are not possible without
intuitions, just as intuition is itself impossible without the material
of impressions. Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook, this
rain, this glass of water; the concept is: water, not this or that
appearance and particular example of water, but water in general, in
whatever time or place it be realized; the material of infinite
intuitions, but of one single and constant concept.
However, the concept, the universal, if it be no longer intuition in one
respect, is in another respect intuition, and cannot fail of being
intuition. For the man who thinks has impressions and emotions, in so
far as he thinks. His impression and emotion will not be love or hate,
but _the effort of his thought itself_, with the pain and the joy, the
love and the hate joined to it. This effort cannot but become intuitive
in form, in becoming objective to the mind. To speak, is not to think
logically; but to _think logically_ is, at the same time, to _speak_.
[Sidenote] _Critique of the negations of this thesis._
That thought cannot exist without speech, is a truth generally admitted.
The negations of this thesis are all founded on equivoques and errors.
The first of the equivoques is implied by those who observe that one can
likewise think with geometrical figures, algebraical numbers,
ideographic signs, without a single word, even pronounced silently and
almost insensibly within one. They also affirm that there are languages
in which the word, the phonetic sign, expresses nothing, unless the
written sign also be looked at. But when we said "speech," we intended
to employ a synecdoche, and that "expression" generically, should be
understood, for expression is not only so-called verbal expression, as
we have already noted. It may be admitted that certain concepts may be
thought without phonetic manifestations. But the very examples adduced
to show this also prove that those concepts never exist without
expressions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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