Æsthetic as science of expression and general linguistic

by Benedetto Croce

The distinction between poetry and prose also cannot be justified, save as that between art and science. It was seen in antiquity that such distinction could not be founded on external elements, such as rhythm and metre, or on rhymed or unrhymed form; that it was, on the contrary, altogether internal. Poetry is the language of feeling, prose of the intellect; but since the intellect is also feeling, in its concreteness and reality, all prose has its poetical side.

The relation of first and second degree.

The relation between intuitive knowledge or expression and intellectual knowledge or concept, between art and science, poetry and prose, cannot be otherwise defined than by saying that it is one of double degree. The first degree is the expression, the second the concept: the first can stand without the second, but the second cannot stand without the first. There is poetry without prose, but not prose without poetry. Expression, indeed, is the first affirmation of human activity. Poetry is "the mother tongue of the human race"; the first men "were by nature sublime poets." We assert this in another way, when we observe that the passage from soul to spirit, from animal to human activity, is effected by means of language. And this should be said of intuition or expression in general. But to us it appears somewhat inaccurate to define language or expression as an intermediate link between nature and humanity, as though it were a mixture of both. Where humanity appears, the other has already disappeared; the man who expresses himself, certainly emerges from the state of nature, but he really does emerge: he does not stand half within and half without, as the use of the phrase "intermediate link" would imply.

Non-existence of other forms of knowledge.

The cognitive spirit has no form other than these two. Expression and concept exhaust it completely. The whole speculative life of man is spent in passing from one to the other and back again.

Historicity. Its identity with and difference from art.

Historicity is incorrectly held to be a third theoretical form. Historicity is not form, but content: as form, it is nothing but intuition or æsthetic fact. History does not seek for laws nor form concepts; it employs neither induction nor deduction; it is directed ad narrandum, non ad demonstrandum; it does not construct universals and abstractions, but posits intuitions. The this and here, the individuum omnimode determinatum, is its domain, as it is the domain of art. History, therefore, is included in the universal concept of art.

As against this doctrine, in view of the impossibility of conceiving a third mode of knowledge, objections have been brought forward which would lead to the affiliation of history to intellectual or scientific knowledge. The greater portion of these objections is animated by the prejudice that in refusing to history the character of conceptual science something of its value and dignity has been taken from it. This really arises from a false idea of art, conceived not as an essential theoretic function, but as an amusement, a superfluity, a frivolity. Without reopening a long debate, which so far as we are concerned is finally closed, we will mention here one sophism which has been and still is widely repeated. Its purpose is to show the logical and scientific nature of history. The sophism consists in admitting that historical knowledge has for its object the individual; but not the representation, it is added, but rather the concept of the individual. From this it is argued that history is also a logical or scientific form of knowledge. History, in fact, is supposed to work out the concept of a personage such as Charlemagne or Napoleon; of an epoch, like the Renaissance or the Reformation; of an event, such as the French Revolution and the Unification of Italy. This it is held to do in the same way as Geometry works out the concepts of spatial forms, or Æsthetic that of expression. But all this is untrue. History cannot do otherwise than represent Napoleon and Charlemagne, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the French Revolution and the Unification of Italy as individual facts with their individual physiognomy: that is, in the sense in which logicians use the word "represent" when they say that one cannot have a concept of the individual, but only a representation. The so-called concept of the individual is always a universal or general concept, full of characteristics, supremely full, if you like, but however full it be, incapable of attaining to that individuality to which historical knowledge, as æsthetic knowledge, alone attains.

To show how the content of history comes to be distinguished from that of art in the narrow sense, we must recall what has already been observed as to the ideal character of the intuition or first perception, in which all is real and therefore nothing is real. Only at a later stage does the spirit form the concepts of external and internal, of what has happened and what is desired, of object and subject, and the like: only at this later stage, that is, does it distinguish historical from non-historical intuition, the real from the unreal, real imagination from pure imagination. Even internal facts, what is desired and imagined, castles in the air, and countries of Cockaigne, have their reality, and the soul, too, has its history. His illusions form part of the biography of every individual as real facts. But the history of an individual soul is history, because the distinction between the real and the unreal is always active in it, even when the illusions themselves are the real. But these distinctive concepts do not appear in history like the concepts of science, but rather like those that we have seen dissolved and melted in the æsthetic intuitions, although in history they stand out in a manner altogether special to themselves. History does not construct the concepts of the real and unreal, but makes use of them. History, in fact, is not the theory of history. Mere conceptual analysis is of no use in ascertaining whether an event in our lives was real or imaginary. We must mentally reproduce the intuitions in the most complete form, as they were at the moment of production. Historicity is distinguished in the concrete from pure imagination as any one intuition is distinguished from any other: in memory.

Historical criticism.