What we chiefly miss in Fiedler and others of the same tendency is the conception of the æsthetic fact not as something exceptional, produced by exceptionally gifted men, but as a ceaseless activity of man as such; for man possesses the world, so far as he does possess it, only in the form of representation-expressions, and only knows in so far as he creates.[46] Nor are these writers justified in treating language as parallel with art, or art with language; for comparisons are drawn between things at least partially different, whereas art and language are identical.
H. Bergson.
The same criticism can be made in the case of the French philosopher Bergson, who in his book on Laughter[47] states a theory of art very similar to that of Fiedler and makes the same mistake of conceiving the artistic faculty as something distinct and exceptional in comparison with the language of everyday use. In ordinary life, says Bergson, the individuality of things escapes us; we see only as much of them as our practical needs demand. Language helps this simplification; since all names, proper names excepted, are names of kinds or classes. Now and then, however, nature, as if in a fit of absence of mind, creates souls of a more divisible and detached kind (artists), who discover and reveal the riches hidden under the colourless signs and labels of everyday life, and help others (non-artists) to catch a glimpse of what they themselves see, employing for this purpose colours, forms, rhythmic connexions of words, and those rhythms of life and breath even more intimate to man, the sounds and notes of music.
Attempts to return to Baumgarten. C. Hermann.
A healthy return to Baumgarten, a revival and correction of the old philosopher's theories in the light of later discoveries, might perhaps have given Æsthetic some assistance, after the collapse of the old idealistic metaphysic, towards thinking the concept of art in its universality and discovering its identity with pure and true intuitive knowledge. But Conrad Hermann, who preached the return to Baumgarten[48] in 1876, did bad service to what might have been a good cause. According to him Æsthetic and Logic are normative sciences; but Logic does not contain, as does Æsthetic, "a definite category of external objects exclusively and specifically adequate to the faculty of thought"; and on the other hand "the products and results of scientific thought are not so external and sensibly intuitive as those of artistic invention." Logic and Æsthetic alike refer not to the empirical thinking and feeling of the soul, but to pure and absolute sensation and thought. Art constructs a representation standing midway between the individual and the universal. Beauty expresses specific perfection, the essential or, so to speak, the rightful (seinsollend) character of things. Form is "the external sensible limit, or mode of appearance of a thing, in opposition to the kernel of the thing itself and to its essential and substantial content." Content and form are both æsthetic, and the æsthetic interest concerns the entirety of the beautiful object. The artistic activity has no special organ such as thought possesses in speech. The æsthetician, like the lexicographer, has the task of compiling a dictionary of tones and colours and of the different meanings which may possibly be attached to them.[49] We can see that Hermann accepted side by side the most inconsistent propositions. He welcomes even the æsthetic law of the golden section, and applies it to tragedy; the longer segment of the Une is the tragic hero; the punishment which overtakes him (the entire line) exceeds his crime in the same proportion in which he oversteps the common measure (the shorter segment of the line).[50] It reads almost like a joke.
Without direct reference to Baumgarten, a proposal that Æsthetic be reformed and treated as the "science of intuitive knowledge" was made in a miserable little work by one Willy Nef (1898),[51] who makes the dumb animals share his "intuitive knowledge," in which he distinguishes a formal side (intuition) and a material side or content (knowledge), and considers the everyday relations between men, their games and their art, as belonging to intuitive knowledge.
Eclecticism. B. Bosanquet.
The English historian of Æsthetic, Bosanquet (1892) tried to find a reconciliation between content and form in unity of expression. "Beauty," says Bosanquet in the Introduction to his History, "is that which has characteristic and individual expressiveness for sensuous perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness by the same means." In another passage he observes: "The difficulty of real Æsthetic is to show how the combination of decorative forms in characteristic representations, by intensifying the essential character immanent in them from the beginning, subordinates them to a central signification which stands to their complex combination as their abstract signification stands to each one of them taken singly."[52] But the problem, as propounded in a way suggested by the antithesis between the two schools (contentism and formalism) of German Æsthetic, is in our opinion insoluble.
Æsthetic of expression: present state.
De Sanctis founded no school of æsthetic science in Italy. His thought was quickly misunderstood and mutilated by those who presumed to correct it, and, in fact, only returned to the outworn rhetorical conception of art as consisting of a little content and a little form. Only within the last ten years has there been a renewal of philosophical studies, arising out of discussions concerning the nature of history[53] and the relation in which it stands to art and science, and nourished by the controversy excited by the publication of De Sanctis' posthumous works.[54] The same problem of the relation between history and science, and their difference or antithesis, reappeared also in Germany, but without being put in its true connexion with the problem of Æsthetic.[55] These inquiries and discussions, and the revival of a Linguistic impregnated by philosophy in the work of Paul and some others, appear to us to offer much more favourable ground for the scientific development of Æsthetic than can be found on the summits of mysticism or the low plains of positivism and sensationalism.