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
The defects of Schiller's æsthetic doctrine are its lack of precision
and its generality. Who has given a better description of certain
aspects of art, the catharsis produced by artistic activity, the
serenity and calm resulting from the domination over natural
impressions? Equally just is his remark that art, although wholly
independent of morality, is in some way connected with it. But what
precisely this connexion may be, or what the exact nature of æsthetic
activity, Schiller does not succeed in explaining. Conceiving the
moral and intellectual as the only formal activities (_Formtrieb)_ and
denying as a convinced anti-sensationalist in opposition to Burke and
philosophers of his type that art can belong to the passionate and
sensuous nature (_Stofftrieb_), he cut himself off from the means of
recognizing the general category to which artistic activity belongs.
His own concept of the formal is too narrow: too narrow, also, his
concept of the cognitive activity, in which he is able to see the
logical or intellectual form, but not that of the imagination. What
for him was this art he describes as an activity neither formal nor
material, neither cognitive nor moral? Was it for him, as for Kant,
an activity of feeling, a play of several faculties at once? It would
seem so, since Schiller distinguishes four points of view or relations
of man with things: the physical, in which these affect our senses:
the logical, in which they excite knowledge: the moral, in which they
appear to us as an object of rational volition: and the æsthetic
"in which they refer to our powers in entirety without becoming the
determinate object of any one faculty." For example, a man is pleased
æsthetically when his feeling depends in no way on the pleasure of
the senses and when he is not conscious of thinking about any law or
end.[8] We look in vain for any more conclusive reply.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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