Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy

by Raffaello Piccoli

A further step in the deduction of the concept of intuitive or æsthetic knowledge, is made by identifying intuition with expression. Given the active and conscious character of intuition, we are already prepared to admit that every true intuition is at the same time an expression; that which cannot objectify itself into an expression is nothing but mere sensation. The mind does not actually intuit except by doing, forming, and expressing. We must not think only of verbal expressions: there are intuitions which cannot be expressed by words, but only by sounds or lines or colours. But in any case the two words are interchangeable: what really exists in our spirit is only what we can express. It is only when we can express ourselves, that we are conscious of actually possessing, that is, of having actually formed, our intuitions. It is impossible to distinguish the expression from the intuition because they are not two but one.

This identification runs counter to a number of very common and very dear delusions: we constantly imagine that the difference between ourselves and a great painter or a great poet does not consist in the power of seeing and feeling, but in a supposed gift of merely external expression; and again, we credit ourselves with a number of thoughts and images, which we might express if we only wished to. The easiest way to free ourselves of such delusions is to try to express whatever it seems to us that we possess: it becomes then apparent that our pictorial or poetical intuitions are really mere fragments, or echoes, of intuitions; are, in fact, not more than that which we succeed in expressing. It must however be borne in mind that we give here to the word expression a purely mental or spiritual significance: we mean by it the image that we form in our mind, and of which the painting or the poem, as objects, are the material extrinsications. It requires but little reflection to realize that there is no painting or poem—there is no word that we utter—unless it be a mere flatus vocis, which has not been preceded in our mind by an internal image, which is the true expression.

The reader will have remarked that, in order to give examples of intuitive knowledge, we have now had recourse to poetry and to painting. The fact is that there is no difference between intuitive knowledge, or expression, and art, except a purely extensive and empirical one: that is, we call a poet or an artist a man who possesses this expressive power in a higher degree than the rest of mankind; we call a poem or a work of art an expression which is fuller, more complex, more elaborate, than those which are the product of our common intuitive activity, mere waves of the continuous stream of spiritual life, in which they are constantly interrupted by and mixed with reflections and volitions, with logical and practical facts. The difference between the genius and the common man, in the æsthetic as well as in the other spheres of human activity, is a quantitative, not a qualitative one. Art is not a peculiar spiritual function, and therefore a closed circle to which none but the elect are admitted: the artist appeals to the intuitive man in each of us, in a language of which every human mind finds the key within itself.

The definition of art as expression emphasizes the creative and formal character of art; and its immediate consequence is the identification of form and content, that is, the solution of one of the oldest and most confused of æsthetic problems. Art is form, not in the technical or formalistic sense, but in the meaning which we have given to the word when discussing the relation between sensation and intuition; and the content of a particular work of art cannot be abstracted from the work itself as something that existed before it, and to which a form has been added from outside. There is no content, in art, which is not the content of a particular form, that is, that which has ceased to exist as a possible content, and has transformed itself into a definite form. This conception of the relations of form and content implies also either a new interpretation, or the repudiation, of the theory of art as the imitation of nature, meaningless in a mechanical sense, true, and synonymous with the theory of intuition, in a creative and formative sense. Through the same critical process, all discussions of the relations between art and the senses appear as being founded on a confusion between that which is still beyond the limit of spiritual activity, the sensation or impression, and the actual æsthetic elaboration, which begins only when the mind becomes aware of the impression that has reached it through the channel of the senses.

We have mentioned, in connection with the identification of intuition and expression, the fact that every word that we utter is constantly preceded by an internal image; which is as much as saying that language is a perpetual spiritual creation, on the same plane as all our other expressions, and as art. We are accustomed to seeing dead words and syllables in grammars and dictionaries, and we consider them as something external, as a kind of instrument that we use and accommodate to this and that purpose. But words that grammarians study, through a naturalistic process, as independent elements of the linguistic organism, are really alive and full of their meaning only in the active context of speech. The reality of words is only in the individual spirit that speaks, and every word is new every time that it is employed because it expresses that particular, individual moment of spiritual activity, which cannot be the same as any other one. Philologists have been divided on the question of the origin of language for centuries, some finding it in the logical activity, others in a system of mechanical symbols and conventions, a few admitting the conception of language as a pure æsthetic creation only for a mythic, primitive period, which is succeeded in the history of every language by a period of development by convention and association. But, as in all other branches of spiritual activity, it is here impossible to draw a distinction between the problem of the origins and the problem of the nature of language: linguistic expressions have fixed themselves in the course of centuries and stand before us as a body of language, as a reality independent of the individual activity that produces the particular expressions; this is what prevents us from recognizing in the actual linguistic facts the same creative energy that formed the first words uttered by man.

In this reduction of the philosophy of language to æsthetics, Croce again follows Vico, who professed to have found the true origins of languages in the principles of poetry, who first asserted the functional identity of language and poetry. This theory, however, seems to clash with the existence of what we might call the implicit conceptuality of language, of which we are constantly made aware by our grammatical categories. The fact is that the relation between language and concept is the same as between intuition and concept: that is, on one side, language is the material of our reflected thought, and it would be impossible for the reflection to begin without or before the language; but, on the other hand, the concepts appear in language not as forms but as matter. In other words, to speak it is not necessary to think logically, but it is impossible to think logically without speaking. The grammatical categories are not real elements of language, but products of abstraction, of a purely practical character, of the kind that we shall soon have to examine in the rhetoric of the arts.

What may help us, in thus conceiving of the active and intuitive character of language, is a comparison with other classes of expressive facts. When we speak of musical or pictorial language, we are aware that we are using mere metaphors for the purpose of collecting certain general characteristics which are common to some of these facts. The various musical grammars, the rules of harmony or of orchestration, are nothing but summaries of abstractions: in the presence of a certain music, or of a certain picture, we cannot forget the principle that no expression can give birth to a new expression without first undergoing a new creative process. And this is as true of the highest forms of artistic expression as of the words which we use in our daily life.

A number of objections to Croce's æsthetics have been prompted by his use of the word intuition. To the reader who has followed our argument, it is not necessary to explain that Croce's intuition has nothing in common either with the mystic intuition of the Neoplatonists or of the ultra-romantics, or with the intuition which Bergson substitutes for the intellect as the proper organ of absolute knowledge. It is not a mysterious instrument of the mind, by which man can either come in contact with supernatural realities, or, renouncing that which is distinctively human in him, enter into the actual movement and life of nature. The fact that Croce has spent so much time and thought in trying to understand this first, naïve, elementary grade of the theoretical activity, does not justify his critics in putting him in the same class either with romantic metaphysicians or with romantic naturalists. That such a confusion has ever been possible is only a further proof of the immaturity and superficiality of a large part of our most solemn contemporary thought. It shows how it has been given to grown-up and apparently educated men, to read a book without knowing what its subject was, and without even being able to shield themselves behind the saving grace of silence.

An objection of a quite different order was raised by Croce himself, who found its solution in the elaboration of his philosophy of the practical, or of will. It can be said of the theory of art as intuition, that it reduces art to a form of knowledge, to a theoretical function, while what we look for in works of art is life and movement, and the feeling and personality of the artist, that is, something that is not theoretical but practical. The answer might be that the feeling is content and the intuition form; but such a dualistic point of view would in reality destroy not only Croce's æsthetics, but the foundations of his whole philosophy of mind. And we would be back at a position which we thought we had already criticised and surpassed. The truth is that intuition, and the personality, or lyrical character, of a work of art, are only different aspects of the same spiritual process, that where one is, the other too will have to be found. What we can abstract as the psychic content of intuition, since we have already excluded abstractions and concepts, is only what we call appetition, tendency, feeling, will—the various facts which constitute the practical form of the human spirit. Pure intuition cannot represent anything but the will in its manifestations, that is, nothing but states of mind. And the states of mind are that passion, feeling, and personality which we find in art, and which determine its lyrical character.

In order properly to understand this new point of view, it must be borne in mind that the lyrical character of the poetry does not however coincide with the practical passion of the poet: the relation between the emotion and the intuition is not a deterministic one, as of cause and effect, but a creative one, as of matter and form. The poetical vibration is different in kind from the practical one. If I grasp Croce's meaning correctly, the feeling and movement which we find in art is something that belongs intrinsically to the intuitive activity—it is the dynamic of the creative process itself. And in fact, what we look for in the works of art is not the empirical personality of the artist, but the tonality of his individual æsthetic activity, which is always new and always unmistakably his own,—not the rhythm of his passion but that of his vision or contemplation, of his intuition of the passion. Any other way of considering this relation would inevitably lead us back to the conventional distinction of form and content, to the attribution of æsthetic characters to the emotions themselves, and to a definition of intuition not as a simple and primitive fact, but as a combination of the practical and the theoretical, of will and knowledge. I consider this deduction of the lyrical character of intuition as one of the points of Croce's æsthetics which opens the way to new problems and stand in need of further elaboration; but what is important in it, and already firmly established, is the recognition of this character, through which the whole doctrine of intuition gains a deeper and richer meaning, and becomes more apt to deal with the concrete facts of our æsthetic experience.