[1] This chapter and the following two are founded especially on the Estetica, pp. 1-171; the essay on L'intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell' arte, in Problemi, pp. 1-30; and the Breviario, in Nuovi Saggi, pp. 1-91.
[III. THE CONCEPT OF ART]
Further determinations of the concept of art—Theoretical and practical activity—The progress of æsthetic theories—An American instance: morality and art—The typical—The ends of art—The process of æsthetic production—Relations of the æsthetic with the practical activity—The delusion of objective beauty—Æsthetic hedonism—The æsthetic value.
The determination of the concept of art as pure intuition would be little more than a verbal variation of older doctrines, if its validity and importance could not be proved in the actual practice of thought on æsthetic problems, in the study of the relations of the æsthetic fact with the other facts of human activity, and in the criticism of errors which have invaded the field of æsthetic thought through a confusion of the æsthetic with the intellectual or the practical. We shall therefore not be able to grasp the new concept in the fulness of its meaning until we have surveyed the whole ground of the philosophy of mind: the æsthetic concept cannot be said to be fully determined until we have a clear conception of the other fundamental grades or forms of the spirit. For the purposes of our exposition, we may however anticipate a summary or scheme of the essential relations, which will be more fully developed in the following chapters.
We have already seen how the logical activity springs from the soil of the pure intuition; how the knowledge of the universal follows the knowledge of the individual. The æsthetic and the logic grade, of which the second implies the first, exhaust the whole of knowledge, the whole theoretical life of man. A third grade or form does not exist: not in history, which Croce still considered, in the first years of this period, as reducible to the concept of art, and differentiated from it only by its employment of the predicate of existence, of the distinction between reality and imagination; and not in the natural and mathematical sciences, which elaborate the data of intuition through fictions, hypotheses, and conventions, which are practical and not theoretical processes.
The relation between the theoretical and the practical activity is of the same kind as that between the two grades of the theoretical activity: that is, the first is the basis of the second. We can think of a knowing which is independent from the will, but not of a will which is independent of knowledge: it is impossible to will without historical intuitions and a knowledge of relations. Within the practical activity, we can further distinguish two grades corresponding to the two grades of the theoretical activity: the economic, which is the will of the individual, of a particular end, and the ethic, which is the will of the universal, of the rational end. The relation between the economic and the ethic activity is again the same grade-relation as between the æsthetic and the logic, the theoretical and the practical. The concrete life of the human spirit consists in the perpetually recurring cycle of the four grades of its activity, which is the law of its unity and development. The concept rises from the intuition, and action from knowledge; ethical activity is not conceivable without a theoretical foundation, and the concreteness of a particular end. At the close of the cycle, the spiritual life itself becomes the object of a new intuition, from which a new concept and a new action are reproduced ad infinitum. In the history of æsthetics, the errors deriving from the confusion of that which is distinctively æsthetic with other forms of theoretical or practical activity, present themselves as a series of doctrines, which can be considered as gradual approximations to the definition of art as intuition. It is not necessarily, or not only, a chronological series, but rather a succession of actual moments in the deduction of the concept of art. Empirical æsthetics recognises the existence of a class of æsthetic or artistic facts, without attempting to reduce them under a single concept; practical (hedonistic or moralistic) æsthetics makes a first attempt at interpreting them by putting them in relation with one of the categories of spiritual activity; intellectualiste æsthetics denies that they belong to the practical sphere, though failing to discover their precise theoretical character; agnostic æsthetics criticises all the preceding moments, and is satisfied with a purely negative definition; mystic æsthetics, conscious of the difference of æsthetic from logical facts, makes a new spiritual category of them, affirms their autonomy and independence, but mistakes the nature of their relation with conceptual knowledge. We are all more or less familiar with the various aspects of these doctrines, and it can be said that none of them (with the exception of the first, which is now represented by psychologic æsthetics) is now being held consistently by any responsible thinker. The truth of the intuitive theory, which we find adumbrated already in classical antiquity in the Aristotelian theory of mimesis, and of which artists and critics have always had a kind of obscure presentiment, is now implicitly recognised by all who have an intimate contact with and a sincere feeling for art and poetry. The literary and artistic development of the end of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth century has been accompanied by such a wealth of critical thought, that a conscious understanding of the nature of art is now much more frequent than in former ages. The forces that were at work liberating logical and moral thought from the shackles of the past, reacted vigorously on æsthetic thought, and helped to make it more and more independent from both intellectualistic and moralistic errors. It would be possible to extract aphorisms and meditations from the writings of the greatest poets, artists, and musicians of the period, to show how common among them was and is the knowledge of the spiritual autonomy and of the intuitive character of art. But because the task of the artist is not that of elaborating a philosophy of art, and a good many critics and æstheticians, on the other hand, have very little experience of the actual æsthetic processes, we find that though the other doctrines are discredited, yet a number of prejudices which have their roots in them are still current,—the artists themselves rejecting them, as it were, by instinct and not by reasoning, and the critics and æstheticians clinging to them because they help them to gain a fictitious possession of that artistic reality which escapes them in its purity and actuality. An intellectualiste or moralistic critic can easily mask his lack of æsthetic taste, his fundamental ignorance of art, by talking at length and with great solemnity about unessentials. Artists and poets, on the other hand, are apt to react to these prejudices by falling into the errors of æstheticism, that is by attributing to their empirical selves the freedom that belongs to their function, and by denying in the name of art the autonomy and dignity of intellectual and moral values. In both cases, what is manifestly lacking is a proper understanding of the meaning of logical, or ideal distinctions, for which the artists, I suppose, ought to be more readily forgiven than the critics, though æstheticism may be as dangerous to art as moralism or intellectualism are to thought.