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
principles: the other in the mere feeling of the unity of the
representation.[6] To imagination, to intellect and to spirit (_Geist_)
we must add taste, the link between imagination and intellect.[7] Art
may therefore represent natural ugliness: artistic beauty "is not a
beautiful _thing_ but a beautiful representation of a thing": although
the representation of ugliness has limits varying with the individual
arts (a reminiscence of Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit
at the disgusting and nauseating, which kill representation itself.[8]
In natural things, too, there is adherent beauty which cannot be judged
by the æsthetic judgement alone but demands a concept. Nature thus
appears as a work of art, though superhuman art: "the teleological
judgement is the basis and condition of the æsthetic." When we say
"this is a beautiful woman," we merely mean that "nature beautifully
represents in the form of this woman her purpose in the construction
of the female body": it is necessary therefore, besides noting simple
form, to aim at a concept, "so that the object may be apprehended
through an æsthetic judgement logically conditioned."[9] By this
means is formed the ideal of beauty in the human face, the expression
of moral life.[10] Kant admits that there may also be artistic
productions without a concept, comparable with the free beauties of
nature, flowers and some birds (parrot, humming-bird, bird of paradise,
etc.): ornamental drawings, cornice-mouldings, musical fantasies
without words, represent nothing, no object reducible to a determined
concept, and must be reckoned among free beauties.[11] But does not
this necessitate their exclusion from true and proper art, from the
operation of genius in which fancy and intellect must both, according
to Kant, have a place?
[Sidenote: _Imagination in Kant's system._]
This is Baumgartenism transposed into a higher key, more concentrated,
more elaborated, more suggestive, until from moment to moment it seems
about to burst into a wholly different conception of art. But it is
still Baumgartenism, from whose intellectualistic bonds it never
escapes. Nor was escape possible. A profound concept of imagination was
entirely lacking to Kant's system and his philosophy of the spirit.
Glancing over the table of faculties of the spirit which precedes
his _Critique of Judgment,_ we see that Kant co-ordinates with it
the cognitive faculty, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the
appetitive faculty; to the first corresponds intellect, to the second,
judgement (teleological and æsthetic), to the third, reason;[12] he
finds no place for imagination amongst powers of the spirit but places
it among the facts of sensation. He knows a reproductive imagination
and an associative, but he knows nothing of a genuinely productive
imagination, imagination in the proper sense.[13] We have seen that, in
his doctrine, genius is the co-operation of several faculties.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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