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 truth, nowhere; for all those concepts are without philosophical
value. They are nothing but a series of classes, which can be fashioned
in the most various ways and multiplied at pleasure, to which it is
sought to reduce the infinite complications and shadings of the values
and disvalues of life. Of these classes, some have an especially
positive significance, like the beautiful, the sublime, the majestic,
the solemn, the serious, the weighty, the noble, the elevated; others
a significance chiefly negative, like the ugly, the painful, the
horrible, the dreadful, the tremendous, the monstrous, the insipid, the
extravagant; finally in others a mixed significance prevails, such as
the comic, the tender, the melancholy, the humorous, the tragi-comic.
The complications are infinite, because the individuations are
infinite; hence it is not possible to construct the concepts, save in
the arbitrary and approximate manner proper to the natural sciences,
satisfied with making the best classification they can of that reality
which they can neither exhaust by enumeration, nor understand and
conquer speculatively. And since _Psychology_ is the naturalistic
science which undertakes to construct types and schemes of the
spiritual life of man (a science whose merely empirical and descriptive
character becomes more evident day by day), these concepts do not
belong to Æsthetic, nor to Philosophy in general, but must simply be
handed over to Psychology.
[Sidenote: _Impossibility of rigorous definitions of them._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account