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
Our answer is: there is no such sphere; it does not exist; the
examples given are instances either of pleasure in general or of
facts of artistic expression. Kant, who so emphatically criticizes
the sensationalists and the intellectualists, does not show the same
severity towards the neo-Platonic line of thought whose revival we
remarked in the eighteenth century. Winckelmann in particular exercised
strong influence over his mind. In one course of his Lectures we find
him making a curious distinction between form and matter: in music
melody is matter and harmony form: in a flower the scent is material
and the shape (_Gestalt)_ is form (_Form_).[21] This reappears
slightly modified in the _Critique of Judgment._ "In painting,
statuary and all the figurative arts in architecture and gardening,
so far as they are fine arts, the drawing is the essential; in which
the foundation of taste lies not in what gratifies (_vergnügt_) in
sensation, but in that which pleases (_gefällt_) by its form. The
colours which illuminate the drawing belong to sensuous stimulus
(_Reiz_) and may bring the object more vividly before the senses, but
do not render it worthy of contemplation as a thing of beauty; they
are, moreover, often limited by the exigencies of the beautiful form,
and even where their sensuous stimulus is legitimate, they are ennobled
only by the beautiful form."[22] Continuing in pursuit of this phantasm
of beauty which is not the beauty of art nor yet the pleasing, and is
equally detached from expressiveness and pleasure, Kant loses himself
in insoluble contradictions. Little inclined to submit himself to the
charm of imagination, abhorring "poetic philosophers" like Herder,[23]
he makes statements and refuses to commit himself to them, affirms
and immediately criticizes his affirmations, and wraps up Beauty in
a mystery which, at bottom, was nothing more than his own individual
incertitude and inability to see clearly the existence of an activity
of feeling which, in the spirit of his sane philosophy, represented a
logical contradiction. "Necessary and universal pleasure" and "finality
without the idea of an end" are the organized expression in words of
this contradiction.
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