Benedetto Croce: An Introduction to His Philosophy

by Raffaello Piccoli

A similar kind of classification is the one which gives rise to the literary genre, and to similar abstractions in the other arts: legitimate instruments of work as long as we do not forget that there does not exist anything like the idea of a tragedy or sonata apart from all concrete tragedies or sonatas, and as long as we do not condemn a new tragedy or a new sonata simply because it is not like the old ones, that is, as long as we do not transform an abstract type into a law. Every new æsthetic creation, far from being bound to obey external laws, establishes new laws, or rather is its own law. It must, and will, answer only for itself, and the only claim that we can put upon it is that of internal coherence. Both the theories of the arts and the theories of the genres, when we try to treat them as true and rigorous, and not as mere practical expedients, manifest the absurdity of their task through their incapacity to give precise and absolute definitions. Every work of art expresses a state of mind, and every state of mind is irreducibly individual and new: a complete classification would therefore be only that in which every class has under itself a single intuition.

Another form of the technical prejudice is the creation of rhetorical categories, which are also abstract classes of expressions tending to transform themselves into precepts. The main prejudice of rhetoric, in literature as well as in all other arts, is that of the distinction between the simple and the ornate, which is founded on a conception of beauty not as the value of the expression, but as something that can be added, so to speak, mechanically, to the expression. Because of its preceptive character, rhetoric has done more harm in the history of poetry and art, than any of the other classifications of the same order; and though it is generally discredited among artists and critics to-day, in its pure original form, yet rhetorical prejudices, both in the creation and judgment of art, are still endowed with an obstinately vigorous life.

These naturalistic classifications in art have their counterpart in the study of language, in the creation of grammatical genres or categories or parts of speech, and in the attempts to reduce the empirical grammars to preceptive or normative grammars: that is, a practical or pedagogic expedient, to a rhetoric or technique of language. But the individuality and indivisibility of expression is in the nature of language as well as of art, and language obeys not the abstract precepts of grammarians, but the law of the æsthetic spirit which makes us find a new expression for every new intuition. Even phonetic laws, the modern scientific instruments of grammar, are mere descriptive summaries of observed facts, of physical moments abstracted from their spiritual reality, and therefore abstract or naturalistic laws, and never actually represent the concrete, individually determined facts of language.

A coherent theory of æsthetic (literary and artistic) criticism can be deduced from the concept of art as intuition, and we have already anticipated its main theses in the discussion of the concept itself. We have seen that in the process of reproduction of an æsthetic process, the actual moment in which the original image, through the medium of what we have abstracted as the physical stimulus, reproduces itself in a mind other than that of the creator (or, in what we might consider as a particular case, in the mind of the creator himself at a time other than that of the original creation), is a moment of æsthetic activity identical with that of creation. Given an identity of circumstances, that which takes place within my mind is the same æsthetic process which took place originally in the mind of the artist. If we call genius the creative, and taste the reproductive activity, the corollary of these considerations is that of the identity of genius and taste: in the act of contemplating and judging a work of art, our spirit becomes one with the spirit of the artist. Though in practice this identity may never be attained (because of variations in the material conditions of the physical stimulus, or in the spiritual attitude of the contemplator), yet if we deny it, and establish a difference in kind between these two aspects of æsthetic activity, we find ourselves inevitably led to exclude the possibility not of the æsthetic judgment only, but of all forms of æsthetic communication. There is a sense in which we can speak of the relativity of taste, and which accounts for the actual variety of judgments, not in relation to art only, but to all forms of human activity: every judgment is relative to our knowledge, at a particular moment, of the actual conditions in which the work of art was originally produced. But this is the intrinsic relativity of all the particular determinations of reality, not a relativity peculiar to æsthetic values, which are as real, though of a different order, as those of logic or morality.

But the æsthetic judgment itself is not the mere intuitive reproduction of the work of art, made possible by what we call historical criticism in the narrow sense of the word, that is, by interpretation and comment. These are the antecedent of the æsthetic judgment, which consists in a logical proposition of the form: "A is art," or "A is not art," "A is art in a b c, A is not art in d e f"; or again: "There is a fact, A, which is a work of art," "There is a fact, A, which is falsely believed to be a work of art." The æsthetic judgment, like all other judgments, establishes a relation between a particular, concrete fact, and a universal category, which is that of art. And, like all other judgments, it is at the same time a judgment of value and an historical judgment, which is the obvious consequence of Croce's identification of value and fact. Æsthetic criticism therefore coincides with the history of the æsthetic activity, with the history of poetry or art.

A frequent reaction to Croce's æsthetics, and to its implications in the theory of criticism, especially among literary critics, is a sense of irritation caused by the loss of the so-called standards of judgment. It would be interesting to analyze these supposed standards, which generally are not explicitly enunciated (probably because their clear enunciation would manifest their true nature, and annul them as standards of æsthetic judgment), but only more or less obscurely referred to with a mixture of pride and reverence. They would then show themselves to be the critical duplicates of the various æsthetic errors which we have already discussed.

If the standards of which the critics speak are, as is often the case, moral or intellectual ideals, it is clear that Croce's æsthetics does not question their validity, but only their application. There is a large number of literary critics, who are such only in name, and whose real interests are intellectual or moral, critics of thought and of the ethical life, and not of art. They use works of art as documents and undoubtedly works of art are, in the unity of the human spirit, documents of intellectual and moral life; but their error begins when they confuse the issues, and censure or praise the art of the past, or try to influence the art of the future, with criteria which are no longer intellectual or moral, but, because they have been transposed outside their legitimate sphere, intellectualistic and moralistic.

All other so-called standards are derived from the abstract ideas of literary genres and of rhetorical categories. It is easy to judge of a new tragedy if you know what a tragedy ought to be, if you have a catalogue of purely external characteristics which you may either find, or not find, in the new work that comes before you. This is, of course, the crudest form of rhetorical criticism; there is another which is not less frequent, but more subtle. The critic builds up an ideal of what art ought to be, not with abstract categories, and classifications transformed into arbitrary æsthetic precepts or standards, but through his predilection for one particular author, or for one particular epoch, the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the Classics or the Romantics: every work of art which is different either in spirit or in form from those that have been chosen is condemned in proportion to its variation from the ideal. This form of criticism is often also vitiated by the intrusion of intellectualistic and moralistic errors, since an ideal which is a mere particular determination of the past assumed as a universal value is likely to be mere rhetoric of thought and morality as well as of art.

The only legitimate standard in æsthetic criticism is the æsthetic standard, that of beauty or expression, as against ugliness or non-expression. Our critical judgment is the reaction of our æsthetic personality in the presence of a work of art, as the moral judgment is the reaction of our moral personality in the presence of an action. Our knowledge of a work of art, of a concrete and individual intuition, as our knowledge of an action, approaches more or less to the ideal limit, according to the breadth of our experience and the depth of our understanding; but there exist no external criteria on which we can rest our judgment, no mechanical props which will support it. This theory of criticism, far from justifying a capricious and arbitrary subjectivism, requires from the critic a constant vigilance against that which is narrowly personal, capricious, and arbitrary in himself; a patient, unceasing effort in the labor of recapturing and recreating the material and spiritual circumstances from which the work of art originally sprang; and the quick sensitivity of the artist coupled with the wide understanding of the historian and the philosopher.