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 two forms of knowledge, æsthetic and intellectual or conceptual,
are indeed different, but this does not altogether amount to separation
and disjunction, as of two forces each pulling in its own direction.
If we have shown that the æsthetic form is altogether independent of
the intellectual and suffices to itself without external support, we
have not said that the intellectual can stand without the æsthetic. To
describe the independence as _reciprocal_ would not be true.
What is knowledge by concepts? It is knowledge of the relations of
things, and things are intuitions. Concepts are not possible without
intuitions, just as intuition is itself impossible without the matter
of impressions. Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook,
this rain, this glass of water; the concept is: water, not this or
that appearance and particular example of water, but water in general,
in whatever time or place it be realized; the material of infinite
intuitions, but of one single constant concept.
But the concept, the universal, if it be no longer intuition in one
respect, is intuition in another respect, and cannot fail of being
intuition. The man who thinks has impressions and emotions, in so far
as he thinks. His impression and emotion will be not love or hate,
not the passion of the man who is not a philosopher, not hate or love
for certain objects and individuals, but _the effort of his thought
itself,_ with the pain and the joy, the love and the hate joined to it.
This effort cannot but assume an intuitive form, in becoming objective
to the spirit. To speak is not to think logically; but to _think
logically_ is also to _speak._
[Sidenote: _Criticism of the negations of this thesis._]
That thought cannot exist without speech, is a truth generally
admitted. The negations of this thesis are all founded on equivocations
and errors.
The first of the equivocations is that of those who observe that one
can likewise think with geometrical figures, algebraical numbers,
ideographic signs, without any word, even pronounced silently and
almost insensibly within one; that there are languages in which the
word, the phonetic sign, expresses nothing, unless the written sign
also be examined, and so on. But when we said "speak," we intended
to employ a synecdoche, by which was to be understood "expression"
in general, for we have already remarked that expression is not only
so-called verbal expression. It may or may not be true that certain
concepts may be thought without phonetic manifestations. But the very
examples adduced to show this also prove that those concepts never
exist without expressions.
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