Benedetto croce aesthetics vs esthetics

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Sign up Log in. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Even if we allow Croce his widened notion of feeling, surely the distinction between a man who looks at a bowl of fruit but cannot draw or paint it, and the man who does draw or paint it, is precisely that of a man with a Crocean intuition but who cannot express it, and one who has both.

How then can expression be intuition? Croce comes at this concern from both sides. We have, most of the time, only fleeting, transitory intuitions amidst the bustle of our practical lives. For example we think unreflectively of wailing as a natural expression of pain or grief; generally, we think of expressive behaviour or gestures as being caused, at least paradigmatically, by the underlying emotion or feelings.

But Croce joins a long line of aestheticians in attempting a sharp distinction between this phenomenon and expression in art. Croce is no doubt right to want to distinguish these things, but whether his official position—that expression is identical to intuition—will let him do so is another matter; he does not actually analyze the phenomena in such a way as to deduce, with the help of his account of expression, the result.

He simply asserts it. But we will wait for our final section to articulate criticisms. The same goes for his refusal to rank pleasure as the aim, or at least an aim, of art Aes. Strictly speaking, they are dealt with in the Philosophy of the Practical, that is, in the theory of the will, and do not enter into the theory of art. That is, if the defining value of the Aesthetic is beautythe defining value of the Practical is usefulness.

But perhaps he is being consistent.

Benedetto croce aesthetics vs esthetics: Croce's unique and enduring idea that

The pragmatic pleasure had in beholding beauty is only contingently aroused, but in point of fact it always is aroused by such beholding, because the having of an intuition is an act of mind, and therefore the will is brought into play. The painting of pictures, the scrape of the bow upon strings, the chanting or inscription of a poem are, for Croce, only contingently related to the work of art, that is, to the expressed intuition.

What he is doing is always driven by the intuition, and thereby making it possible for others to have the intuition or rather, an intuition. First, the memory—though only contingently—often requires the physical work to sustain or develop the intuition. Second, the physical work is necessary for the practical business of the communication of the intuition.

For example the process of painting is a closely interwoven operation of positive feedback between the intuitive faculty and the practical or technical capacity to manipulate the brush, mix paint and so on:. Again, we defer criticism to the conclusion. The first task of the spectator of the work of art—the critic—is for Croce simple: one is to reproduce the intuition, or perhaps better, one is to realize the intuition, which is the work of art.

But given the foregoing strict distinction between practical technique and artistic activity properly so-called, his task is the same as that of the artist :. Leave aside the remark that we become identical with the poet. If by taste we mean the capacity for aesthetic judgement—that is, the capacity to find beauty—and by genius we mean the capacity to produce beauty, then they are the same: the capacity to realize intuitions.

Thus Croce says:. Of course there is as a matter of fact a great deal of variability in critical verdicts. Also one must realize that for Croce, all that Sibley famously characterized as aesthetic concepts—not just gracefulness, delicacy and so on but only aesthetically negative concepts like ugliness—are really variations on the over-arching master-concept beauty.

There are several interconnected aspects to this. From our perspective, we might regard Croce as arguing thus: 1 Referential semantics—scarcely mentioned by Croce—necessarily involves benedetto croce aesthetics vs esthetics of speech. If we take this as asserting the primacy of sentence meaning—glossing over the anti-abstraction remark which is tantamount to a denial of syntactic compositionality—then together with 3 a denial of what in modern terms would be distinction between semantic and expressive meaning, or perhaps in Fregean terms sense and tone, then it is not obvious that the resulting picture of language would not apply equally to, for example, drawing.

There is no doubt that on this point Croce was inspired by his great precursor, the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico — According to Croce Aes. As he became older, there was one aspect of his aesthetics that he was uneasy with. In the Aesthetic of Aes. The only value in art is beauty. But byin the essay The Totality of Artistic Expression PPH —73his attitude towards the moral content of art is more nuanced.

In other words, he still holds that to speak of a moral work of art would not impinge upon it aesthetically; likewise to speak of an immoral work, for the values of the aesthetic and moral domains are absolutely incommensurable. He means that a pure work of art cannot be subject to moral praise or blame because the Aesthetic domain exists independently of and prior, in the Philosophy of Spirit, to the Ethical.

In the Encyclopaedia article ofCroce asserts positively that the moral sensibility is a necessary condition of the artist:. For instance, Shakespeare could not have been Shakespeare without seeing into the moral heart of man, for morality is the highest domain of spirit. But we have to distinguish between the moral sensibility—the capacity to perceive and feel moral emotions—and the capacity to act morally.

In Essence of Aesthetic he writes:. Both would imply that our mode of aesthetic engagement would be something more, or something other than, the aesthetic, which is as always the intuitive capacity. The point is simply that our awareness of the form of the intuition in nothing but our awareness of the unifying currents of feeling running through it.

It is a claim about what it is that unifies an intuition, distinguishes it from the surrounding, relatively discontinuous or confused intuition. This is, in effect, a claim about the nature of beauty:. Croce—and undoubtedly the political situation in Italy in played a role in this—was anxious to assert the importance of art for humanity, and his assertion of it is full of feeling.

And the claim marks a decisive break from earlier doctrine: form is now linked with universality rather that with particular feelings. But that does not indicate what, positively, it means. But these are points of relative detail; the theory is whole is sufficiently well before us now to conclude by mentioning some general lines of criticism.

Benedetto croce aesthetics vs esthetics: The first concern of

The equation of intuition with expression as at section 4. Ducasse put his finger on it. Croce has lost sight of the ordinary sense of passively contemplating and doing something; between reading and writing, looking and drawing, listening and playing, dancing and watching. Of course all the first members of these pairs involve a mental action of a kind, and there are important connections between the first members and the corresponding seconds—perhaps in terms of what Berenson calls ideated sensations —but that is not to say that there are not philosophically crucial distinctions between them.

The equation also defeats the purpose of art criticism or interpretation, and indeed of the very notion of an aesthetic community, of an audience. To say that the work of art is identical with the intuition is to say that it is necessarily private. But these intuitions cannot be compared, and there is no higher standard; thus they cannot be said to agree or disagree, since any such comparison would be logically impossible see TilghmanCh.

It is independent of it. Undoubtedly Croce was influenced by his lifelong immersion in literature in his proclamation that all language is poetry. But as Bosanquet pointed out inthis does not mean that language is only poetry, or that the referential dimension of language does not exist. It must have something that distinguishes a scientific treatise from a tune—in fact it must be the same thing, which we are calling the referential dimension, that serves to distinguish poetry from a tune it has to have sound and senseas we say.

So to say that drawings and tunes are equally good examples of language seems, at best, strained. Perhaps Croce would have said that the referential dimension does not exist, or is a false abstraction; but his general philosophical views may be forcing him down an unprepossessing path. More promising would be a formalist endeavor to try to isolate the pure sonic aspect of poetry—comprising metre, alliteration and so on—and then to search for instantiations or at least analogies in the other arts.

Suppose Croce were to give up the idea that art is intuition, and agree that the work of art is identical with the material work—remember this would not prevent him benedetto croce aesthetics vs esthetics an idealist in his general philosophy—and suppose he allowed that he was wrong about language. What would remain of his theory would arguably be its essence: that art is expression, and we engage with it via the intuitive capacity.

It remains individual, and perhaps pre-conceptual. Finally, Collingwood devotes his final sections to a topic left unaddressed by Croce: the problem of whether or in what way the responses of the audience can constrain the object presented by the artist. Thanks to Dr. Martine Lejeune of the Department for Applied Linguistics, College Ghent, for bibliographical help and for pointing out certain errors in the original entry.

The SEP editors would like to thank Filippo Contesi for notifying us of a number of typographical infelicities in this entry. The Four Domains of Spirit or Mind 2. The Primacy of the Aesthetic 3. Art and Aesthetics 4. Intuition and Expression 4. Natural Expression, Beauty and Hedonic Theory 6. Externalization 7. Judgement, Criticism and Taste 8.

The Identity of Art and Language 9. Later Developments Problems The Primacy of the Aesthetic Philosophers since Kant customarily distinguish intuitions or representations from concepts or universals. This principle has for Croce a profound significance: We must hold firmly to our identification, because among the principal reasons which have prevented Aesthetic, the science of art, from revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature, has been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made of it a sort of special function or aristocratic club….

There is not … a special chemical theory of stones as distinct from mountains.

Benedetto croce aesthetics vs esthetics: Each of the four

In the same way, there is not a science of lesser intuition as distinct from a science of greater intuition, nor one of ordinary intuition as distinct from artistic intuition. Intuition and Expression We now reach the most famous and notorious Crocean doctrine concerning art. It is in the difference between feeling as contemplated poetry, in factand feeling as enacted or undergone, that lies the catharsis, the liberation from the affections, the calming property which has been attributed to art; and to this corresponds the aesthetic condemnation of works of art if, or in so far as, immediate feeling breaks into them or uses them as an outlet.

PPH Externalization The painting of pictures, the scrape of the bow upon strings, the chanting or inscription of a poem are, for Croce, only contingently related to the work of art, that is, to the expressed intuition. For example the process of painting is a closely interwoven operation of positive feedback between the intuitive faculty and the practical or technical capacity to manipulate the brush, mix paint and so on: Likewise with the painter, who paints upon canvas or upon wood, but could not paint at all, did not the intuited image, the line and colour as they have taken shape in the fancy, precedeat every stage of the work, from the first stroke of the brush or sketch of the outline to the finishing touches, the manual actions.

And when it happens that some stroke of the brush runs ahead of the image, the artist, in his final revision, erases and corrects it. It is, no doubt, very difficult to perceive the frontier between expression and communication in actual fact, for the two processes usually alternate rapidly and are almost intermingled. But the distinction is ideally clear and must be strongly maintained… The technical does not enter into art, but pertains to the concept of communication.

PPH —8, emphasis added; cf. Judgement, Criticism and Taste The first task of the spectator of the work of art—the critic—is for Croce simple: one is to reproduce the intuition, or perhaps better, one is to realize the intuition, which is the work of art. But given the foregoing strict distinction between practical technique and artistic activity properly so-called, his task is the same as that of the artist : How could that which is produced by a given activity be judged a different activity?

The critic may be a small genius, the artist a great one … but the nature of both must remain the same. To benedetto croce aesthetics vs esthetics Dante, we must raise ourselves to his level: let it be well understood that empirically we are not Dante, nor Dante we; but in that moment of contemplation and judgement, our spirit is one with that of the poet, and in that moment we and he are one thing.

Thus Croce says: …the criterion of taste is absolute, but absolute in a different way from that of the intellect, which expresses itself in ratiocination. The criterion of taste is absolute, with the intuitive absoluteness of the imagination. Expression is an indivisible whole. Noun and verb do not exist in it, but are abstractions made by us, destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is the sentence.

Later Developments As he became older, there was one aspect of his aesthetics that he was uneasy with.