Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy

by Raffaello Piccoli

The problem of literary criticism—The three phases: exposition, valuation, history—Æsthetic judgment and history of art: the exigency of a new Æsthetics—The place of Æsthetics in Croce's thought—Moral and logical preoccupations—Croce and Spaventa.

At the end of the following year (1894), Croce interrupted again the steady flow of his erudite production with the publication of a little book, La Critica Letteraria: questioni teoriche, which was the outcome of a discussion he had had during the summer with a friend, a professor of philosophy. As the net result of his first philosophical effort had been the conquest of a clearer conception of art, it was natural that he should proceed to investigate the relations between history and the subject-matter of history in that field in which he felt he had already been able to find some light. The general problem of the nature of history, of which he had seen but one aspect, was set aside for the moment, giving way to a close examination of the methods of historical thought in the study of literature.

Only a few of the conclusions of this particular research were destined to have any kind of permanency in Croce's theories; but it is useful to recall them, not only as a step in the development of his thought, but as representing a marked progress in that conception of literary criticism which is still predominant wherever the influence of that thought has not yet been felt. Croce submitted that conception to a process similar to what a French critic calls a disassociation of ideas, trying to establish which can be said to be the essential operations of literary criticism, and the relations between these and the various kinds of possible works on literary material. Given this method, which is that of abstract classification, and having approached his problem through criticism itself instead of starting from the other end and deducing the concept of criticism from the concept of art and literature, he was bound to reach a number of abstract concepts, apparently irreducible to each other, and the fundamental unity of which he could only later affirm through the general progress of his theory of æsthetics.

Literary criticism, which until fifty or sixty years ago, stood only for the judgment and valuation of literary works, to-day usually includes, beside the æsthetic valuation, the study of the historical development, the edition and comment of the text, the biography of the author, the exposition of the work itself, the æsthetic theory of literature, and so on; in fact, every kind of conceivable work on literature. The danger of this extension of meaning lies in the facility with which we are led to believe that many things, when called with one name, are really one thing: we think of literary criticism as of the synthesis of all the above-mentioned operations—a synthesis which, as Croce observes, when it exists cannot be due to anybody but the printer. Or, again, we may consider that one or another of those operations is the true aim of literary criticism—and to that one we subordinate all the others, as merely subservient to the particular aim we have in sight. This is the origin of the various schools of criticism—æsthetic, historical, psychological—each of which believes itself to be in possession of the only legitimate method. But if we subordinate the history of a work to its æsthetic valuation, we deny the independence and intrinsic importance of history; if we subordinate the æsthetic valuation to the historical consideration, we make of the former a useless accessory of the latter; if we subordinate the biography of the author to the historical explanation of the work, we destroy the importance of biography, which, though useful in a certain sense to the explanation of the work, is in itself "nothing but the history of the development of a moral personality."[1] In fact, the unity of literary criticism lies not in its aim, but in its subject-matter: what we mean by literary criticism is "a series of particular operations having independent aims, without any other connection than that of the material employed in each of them."[2] Croce does not deny the possibility of using the results of one of these operations for the purposes of another, but this does not change the nature of either: "the spirit of man is not divided into small compartments: all our experience helps us in whatever work we are doing. To understand Petrarch's poetry, it is useful either to be or to have been in love; but it doesn't follow that to make love and to understand that poetry are one and the same thing."[3]

The study of the principles of literature does not belong to literary criticism, but to Æsthetics; or, to use Vico's distinction, not to Philology but to Philosophy. Textual criticism, and interpretative comment, are preliminaries of literary criticism, which begins only with the contemplation or æsthetic enjoyment of literature: that is, with that operation of reading which is made possible through the establishment of a correct text, and by the help, when needed, of a convenient commentary. In literary criticism proper Croce distinguishes three successive phases, or moments, answering respectively to the questions: What have I read? What is the value of that which I have read? Which is the genesis and fortune of this particular work? The first is the exposition or description—which in itself is a work of art of which another work of art is the subject; the second, the valuation or æsthetic judgment; the third, the history of the work under consideration. Outside these three moments or phases, Croce does not admit of any other independent critical operation: the research of the sources of a work is only part of the history of that work; comparative criticism is an instrument of historical criticism; philology in the strict sense of the word can in turn be used as a help to each of the three main operations, but when it is exclusively concerned with the general history of a language, it is no longer a literary discipline; bibliography is a mere external element of the history of the work; the study of the content is a literary study only if it is pursued in relation with either the exposition, valuation or history of the work, that is, when the work itself is viewed as literature, and not as a document for the purposes of another science or discipline; the biography of the author is an element of the genesis of the work, and therefore of its history, but its main interest is moral and not literary.

It is easy to see that, however fruitful as a reaction to the prevailing confusion, this abstract partition was still very artificial; but it was impossible for Croce to go beyond it, with the help of the mechanical and unhistoric logic which was his only instrument at that time. He still divided a fact from its genesis, and the fact and genesis from the judgment, and therefore it was impossible for him to see that the internal history of a work is its true exposition or characterization, and that such characterization is one with the valuation. In regard to the valuation itself, he considered it to be purely subjective and relative, as he was unable to accept either Kant's theory of the objectivity of taste, because of its intellectualism, or the psychologists' childish delusion of the possibility of drawing a normal or standard taste from the average of the æsthetic likings and judgments of different communities and different ages; and on the other hand he was still very far from discovering that identity of the æsthetic judgment with the æsthetic activity, which was to be the foundation of his later doctrine.

The discussion that follows, on the relations between the æsthetic judgment and the history of a work of art, obviously suffers from the impossibility of drawing useful consequences from a distinction of purely abstract concepts; from the fact that that which was Croce's only real discovery at the time, his conception of art, had not yet been thought out by him in the fulness of its relations with the other activities of the human spirit. As regards history, this little book is a step forward because it is a valid criticism of a confused and naïve state of mind, in which these abstract concepts could help to introduce some sort of order and method; but, on the whole, though it clarifies the terms of the general problem, it does not bring it appreciably nearer to a solution.

Croce was, however, more or less consciously aware of this deficiency. In a long excursus on De Sanctis, whose work he upheld as a model of perfect literary criticism, he insisted on the importance of a sound theory of art, such as De Sanctis undoubtedly possessed, as an essential part of the mental equipment of a literary critic; and the chief reproach that he addressed to his contemporaries in the field of literary studies in Italy, was that of neglecting those theoretical problems to which very little attention had been paid in our country after the work of Vico. He pointed to the great development of æsthetic studies in Germany during the nineteenth century, and affirmed the necessity of "dismissing every spirit of impatience and false pride, and of submitting oneself to the hard labour of extracting the essence of the abundant literature created by the philosophic activity of the Germans around those problems."[4] His final words contained at the same time an appeal and a programme of work: "There is a good deal to be expected from a work especially directed towards these two points: to banish a series of concepts which have introduced themselves in æsthetics, and which are entirely foreign to it, and with their presence maintain an invincible confusion; and to free the concept of art and of the Beautiful from the limits within which it has been circumscribed by linguistic habits, acknowledging the intimate connection between the so-called æsthetic and artistic facts and other facts of the life of the spirit."[5] That his attitude towards the later German æsthetics was, from the very beginning, a critical one, is clearly shown by what immediately follows: "Working in this direction, I believe that we shall find ourselves, with a new consciousness and with a wealth of observations gathered in the course of a century, to the point from which modern Æsthetics started, to the school of Leibnitz and Wolff, and to Baumgarten's conception,"[6]—that is, to Baumgarten's Meditations of 1735, which the word Æsthetica appears for the first time as the name of an independent philosophical cal discipline, contrasted to Logic in the same sense in which the Greeks used to contrast aisthēta to noēta, the facts of sensuous knowledge to the facts of mental knowledge. Which means that Croce believed the science of Æsthetics to be still in its infancy, and to require a great creative effort which was well worth making, both for the sake of the general philosophical problems involved, and for the effects that a deeper view of those problems could not but have on the practical work of the literary critic and of the historian.

Through these first discussions, which at the time appeared to him more as acts of personal liberation than as the beginning of a philosophical career, Croce had really discovered his vocation. From De Sanctis he had learnt that "art is neither the work of reflection and logic, nor the product of craft, but a pure and spontaneous forma fantastica":[7] through his own experience of dry erudition, and through his meditations on the relations between history and criticism, he had verified the validity and usefulness of De Sanctis' conception, and had been made aware of the necessity of doing what De Sanctis had not been either willing or capable of doing: "of creating a philosophy where he had given nothing but critical essays and delineations of literary history, and a new criticism, a new historiography, as a consequence of the philosophic deepening and systematization of his thought."[8]

But from Croce's published work at this time it would be easy to gather the fallacious impression that his interest was an exclusively literary one: that he proceeded to create a philosophy of literature and art, and that only through the necessities of the system he was led to the consideration of logical, economic and ethical facts. If that were true, with the exception of his theory of æsthetics, practically the whole of his philosophy would be opened to the reproach that he levelled against the greatest part of the German æsthetic theories of the nineteenth century: "of not being derived from spontaneous and direct researches, but rather from the need of filling a compartment in a philosophical system."[9] A good many among Croce's critics have been the victims of such a misconception of the actual genesis of his thought; and have discounted the importance of any but his æsthetic theories, considering all the rest as a kind of philosophical by-product, with the result that they have not been able properly to understand even that part of his work in which they were interested. The typical example is given by those moralistic critics of his æsthetics, who would have been spared many mistakes and inanities, if they had thought Croce's ethics and logic worth a little consideration. They would then have realized that their criticisms had been anticipated and criticized long before they had been uttered. But perhaps it is asking too much of the average student of literature, once he has made the effort to think about the problems of art, that he should also try to turn the light of his reason on the obscure promptings of his moral consciousness; a suggestion which in many cases would be violently rejected as the height of immorality.