Result of the history of Æsthetic.
We have reached the end of our history. Having passed in review the travail and doubt through which the discovery of the æsthetic concept was achieved, the vicissitudes first of neglect, then of revival and rediscovery to which it was exposed, the various oscillations and failures in its exact determination, the resurrection, triumphant and overwhelming, of ancient errors supposed to be dead and buried; we may now conclude, without appearing to assert anything unproven, that of Æsthetic in the proper sense of the word we have seen very little, even including the last two centuries' active research. Exceptional intellects have hit the mark and have supported their views with energy, with logic, and with consciousness of what they were doing. It would no doubt be possible to extract many true affirmations leading to the same point of view from the works of non-philosophical writers, art-critics and artists, from commonly received opinions and proverbial sayings; such a collection would show that this handful of philosophers does not stand alone, but is surrounded by a throng of supporters and is in perfect agreement with the general mind and universal common sense. But if Schiller was right in saying that the rhythm of philosophy is to diverge from common opinion in order to return with redoubled vigour, it is evident that such divergence is necessary, and constitutes the growth of science, which is science itself. During this tedious process Æsthetic made mistakes which were at once deviations from the truth and attempts to reach it: such were the hedonism of the sophists and rhetoricians of antiquity and of the sensationalists of the eighteenth and second half of the nineteenth century; the moralistic hedonism of Aristophanes, of the Stoics, of the Roman eclectics, of the mediæval and Renaissance writers; the ascetic and logical hedonism of Plato and the Fathers of the Church, of some mediæval and even some quite modern rigorists; and finally, the æsthetic mysticism which first appeared in Plotinus and reappeared again and again until its last and great triumph in the classical period of German philosophy. In the midst of these variously erroneous tendencies, ploughing the field of thought in every direction, a tenuous golden rivulet seems to flow, formed by the acute empiricism of Aristotle, the forceful penetration of Vico, the analytical work of Schleiermacher, Humboldt, De Sanctis and others who echoed them with weaker voice. This series of thinkers suffices to remind us that æsthetic science no longer remains to be discovered; but at the same time the fact that they are so few and so often despised, ignored or controverted, proves that it is in its infancy.
History of science and history of the scientific criticism of particular errors.
The birth of a science is like that of a living being: its later development consists, like every life, in fighting the difficulties and errors, general and particular, which lurk in its path on every side. The forms of error are numerous in the extreme and mingle with each other and with the truth in complications equally numerous: root out one, another appears in its stead; the uprooted ones also reappear, though never in the same shape. Hence the necessity for perpetual scientific criticism and the impossibility of repose or finality in a science and of an end to further discussion. The errors which may be described as general, negations of the concept of art itself, have been touched on from time to time in the course of this History; whence it may be gathered a simple affirmation of the truth has not always been accompanied by any considerable recapture of enemy territory. As to what we have called particular errors, it is clear that when freed from confusing admixture of other forms and divested of fanciful expression, they reduce themselves to three heads, under which they have already been criticized in the first or theoretical part of this work. That is to say, errors may be directed (a) against the characteristic quality of the æsthetic fact; (b) against the specific; (c) against the generic: they may involve denial of the character of intuition, of theoretic contemplation, or of spiritual activity, which together constitute the æsthetic fact. Among the errors which fall into these three categories we are now to sketch in outline the history of those which have had, or have to-day, the greatest importance. Rather than a history it will be a historical essay, sufficient to show that, even in the criticism of individual errors, æsthetic science is in its infancy. If among these errors some appear to be decadent and nearly forgotten, they are not dead; they have not accomplished a legal demise at the hands of scientific criticism. Oblivion or instinctive rejection is not the same thing as scientific denial.
[I]
RHETORIC: OR THE THEORY OF ORNATE FORM
Rhetoric in the ancient sense.
Proceeding according to rank in importance, we inevitably head the list of theories for examination with the theory of Rhetoric, or Ornate Form.
It will not be superfluous to observe that the meaning given in modern times to the word Rhetoric, namely, the doctrine of ornate form, differs from that which it had for the ancients. Rhetoric in the modern sense is above all a theory of elocution, while elocution (λέξις, φράσις, ἑρμηνεία, elocutio) was but one portion, and not the principal one, of ancient Rhetoric. Taken as a whole, it consisted strictly of a manual or vade-mecum for advocates and politicians; it concerned itself with the two or the three "styles" (judicial, deliberative, demonstrative), and gave advice or furnished models to those striving to produce certain effects by means of speech. No definition of the art is more accurate than that given by its inventors the earliest Sicilian rhetoricians, scholars of Empedocles (Corax, Tisias, Gorgias): Rhetoric is the creator of persuasion (πειθος δημιουργός). It devoted itself to showing the method of using language so as to create a certain belief, a certain state of mind, in the hearer; hence the phrase "making the weaker case stronger" (τὸ τὸν ἥττω λόgον κρείττω ποιεῖν); the "increase or diminution according to circumstances" (eloquentia in augendo minuendoque consistit); the advice of Gorgias to "turn a thing to a jest if the adversary takes it seriously, or to a serious matter if he takes it as a jest,"[1] and many similar well-known maxims.