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
He who enters a picture-gallery, or who reads a series of poems, may,
after he has looked and read, go further: he may seek out the relations
of the things there expressed. Thus those pictures and compositions,
each of which is an individual inexpressible by logic, are resolved into
universals and abstractions, such as _costumes, landscapes, portraits,
domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes,
deserts, tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic,
knightly, idyllic facts_, and the like. They are often also resolved
into merely quantitative categories, such as _little picture, picture,
statuette, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, garland of sonnets, poetry,
poem, story, romance_, and the like.
When we think the concept _domestic life_, or _knighthood_, or _idyll_,
or _cruelty_, or any other quantitative concept, the individual
expressive fact from which we started is abandoned. From aesthetes that
we were, we have been changed into logicians; from contemplators of
expression, into reasoners. Certainly no objection can be made to such a
process. In what other way could science be born, which, if aesthetic
expressions be assumed in it, yet has for function to go beyond them?
The logical or scientific form, as such, excludes the aesthetic form. He
who begins to think scientifically has already ceased to contemplate
aesthetically; although his thought will assume of necessity in its turn
an aesthetic form, as has already been said, and as it would be
superfluous to repeat.
The error begins when we try to deduce the expression from the concept,
and to find in the thing substituting the laws of the thing substituted;
when the difference between the second and the first step has not been
observed, and when, in consequence, we declare that we are standing on
the first step, when we are really standing on the second. This error is
known as _the theory of artistic and literary classes_.
What is the aesthetic form of domestic life, of knighthood, of the
idyll, of cruelty, and so forth? How should these contents be
_represented_? Such is the absurd problem implied in the theory of
artistic and literary classes. It is in this that consists all search
after laws or rules of styles. Domestic life, knighthood, idyll,
cruelty, and the like, are not impressions, but concepts. They are not
contents, but logico-aesthetic forms. You cannot express the form, for
it is already itself expression. And what are the words cruelty, idyll,
knighthood, domestic life, and so on, but the expression of those
concepts?
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