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
In Beauty are contained truth and goodness, necessity and liberty. When
beauty appears to be in conflict with truth, the truth in question
is a finite truth with which beauty ought not to agree, because, as
we have seen, the art of naturalism and of the merely characteristic
is a false art.[28] The individual forms of art, being in themselves
representatives of the infinite and the universe, are called Ideas.[29]
Considered from the point of view of reality, Ideas are gods; their
essence, their "in-itself," is in fact equivalent to God; every idea
is an idea so far as it is God in a particular form; every idea,
therefore, is equal to God, but to a particular god. Characteristic of
all the gods is pure limitation and indivisible absoluteness: Minerva
is the idea of wisdom united with strength, but she is lacking in
womanly tenderness; Juno is power without wisdom and without the sweet
attraction of love, for which she is forced to borrow the cestus of
Venus; Venus again has not the weighty wisdom of Minerva. What would
become of these ideas if deprived of their limitations? They would
cease to be objects of Imagination.[30] Imagination is a faculty which
has no connexion with pure intellect or with reason (_Vernunft_) and is
distinct from fancy (_Einbildungskraft_) which collects and arranges
the products of art, whereas imagination intuits them, forms them out
of itself, represents them. Imagination is to fancy as intellectual
intuition is to reason: it is therefore the intellectual intuition of
art.[31] "Reason" no longer suffices in a philosophy such as this:
intellectual intuition, which for Kant was a limiting concept, is now
asserted as really existing: intellect sinks to a subordinate place:
even the genuine imagination which operates in art is overshadowed
by this new-fangled Imagination, twin with intellectual Intuition,
who sometimes changes places with this sister of hers. Mythology
is proclaimed a necessary condition of all art: mythology which is
not allegory, for in the latter the particular signifies only the
universal, while the former is already itself the universal; which
explains how easy it is to allegorize, and how fascinating are such
poems as those of Homer which lend themselves to such interpretations.
Christian, as well as Hellenic, art has its mythology: Christ; the
persons of the Trinity; the Virgin mother of God.[32] The fine between
mythology and art is as shadowy as that between art and philosophy.
[Sidenote: _K. W. Solger._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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