Æsthetic as science of expression and general linguisticCroce, Benedetto
Philosophy
Æsthetic as science of expression and general linguistic
Croce, Benedetto
Aesthetics; Language and languages -- Philosophy; Philosophy
But to admit the independence of intuition as regards concept does
not suffice to give a true and precise idea of intuition. Another
error arises among those who recognize this, or who at any rate do not
explicitly make intuition dependent upon the intellect, to obscure
and confuse the real nature of intuition. By intuition is frequently
understood _perception,_ or the knowledge of actual reality, the
apprehension of something as _real._
Certainly perception is intuition: the perceptions of the room in
which I am writing, of the ink-bottle and paper that are before me,
of the pen I am using, of the objects that I touch and make use of as
instruments of my person, which, if it write, therefore exists;--these
are all intuitions. But the image that is now passing through my brain
of a me writing in another room, in another town, with different paper,
pen and ink, is also an intuition. This means that the distinction
between reality and non-reality is extraneous, secondary, to the true
nature of intuition. If we imagine a human mind having intuitions
for the first time, it would seem that it could have intuitions of
actual reality only, that is to say, that it could have perceptions
of nothing but the real. But since knowledge of reality is based upon
the distinction between real images and unreal images, and since this
distinction does not at the first moment exist, these intuitions
would in truth not be intuitions either of the real or of the unreal,
not perceptions, but pure intuitions. Where all is real, nothing is
real. The child, with its difficulty of distinguishing true from
false, history from fable, which are all one to childhood, can furnish
us with a sort of very vague and only remotely approximate idea of
this ingenuous state. Intuition is the undifferentiated unity of the
perception of the real and of the simple image of the possible. In our
intuitions we do not oppose ourselves as empirical beings to external
reality, but we simply objectify our impressions, whatever they be.
[Sidenote: _Intuition and the concepts of space and time._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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