[6] Teoria e Storia, p. 145.
[III. CRITICISM AND HISTORY]
Beyond the system—The universality of art—The discipline of art—Poetry, prose and oratory—Classicism and impressionism— Practical personality and poetical personality—The monographic method in criticism—The reform of æsthetic history—Criticism as philosophy—Sensibility and intelligence.
The identification of history and philosophy, in the form in which we have expounded it in the preceding chapter, is the turning point of Croce's thought; the system which in the first three volumes of the Filosofia dello Spirito had still a somewhat static and rigid appearance, is really set to movement, animated as if by a new and intenser life, since its implicit dynamism is made explicit in the fourth and concluding volume. To Croce himself, the whole of his work appears no longer as a system, but as "a series of systematizations," and his Filosofia dello Spirito, as a series of "volumes on the problems slowly gathering in his mind since the years of his youth." No wonder, therefore, that his later work should contain "thoughts that break the bars of the so-called system, and give, to a close scrutiny, new systems or new 'systematizations,' since always the whole moves with every one of our steps." No wonder that he should feel that he will continue to philosophize even if one day he shall abandon "philosophy," "as this is what the unity of philosophy and history implies: that we philosophize whenever we think, and of whatever object and in whatever form we may think."[1] And in fact, in these last few years, Croce has given many a severe shock to the faithful worshippers of his system, sometimes by extending his tolerance, or even his approval, to types of speculation apparently remote from his own, but in which he recognises, under a radically different aspect, some of the living impulses, and spiritual interests by which his own thought is moved; and sometimes by developing new theories, through which intellectual positions criticised by him at an earlier stage of his work were reëstablished as having a new meaning and value, once they were approached from a new and higher standpoint, partly reached by means of that same critical process which had previously revealed them as errors. Croce's conception of the function of error in the history of human thought, while making him violently intolerant of actual negative error, leads him to search painstakingly for that element of truth which is the reality of every error; and in this respect too, his philosophical career is as it were roughly divided into two periods, one of critical dissolution, and the other of critical reconstruction, respectively corresponding to the building up of the system, and to the successive liberation from the shackles of the system itself. Croce's name will certainly be remembered in the future, if on no other account, as that of the only philosopher who never became the slave of his dead thought. His coherence is never of the letter, but of the spirit.
This last phase of Croce's thought offers greater difficulties to the expositor than the preceding ones, partly because it is still in the making, and therefore lacks the necessary perspective, and partly because it is embodied not only in purely philosophical essays, but in every page of Croce's historical and critical writings; so that very often it would be impossible to give a clear account of it without ample and minute reference to the underlying historical material. The whole of Croce's thought could indeed be restated through an exposition of Croce's historical views, and it would be an alluring task to extract from his writings a kind of outline of the history of mankind, considered especially in its æsthetic and philosophical cal manifestations, and indirectly also in its moral and economic activities; but it would take us much beyond the limits which we have set to our labour. We shall therefore confine ourselves to examining, in this chapter, the latest developments of Croce's æsthetics, especially in relation with the history of art and poetry; and, in the following and concluding one, to considering his theory of truth or of the function of thought, in relation to other types of contemporary thought.
We have followed the evolution, or rather the deepening, of Croce's concept of art as pure intuition, into lyrical intuition, through which the movement and life which might seem to have been denied to the products of the æsthetic activity considered as a mere form of knowledge, were recognised as intrinsically belonging to them by reason of the very nature of that cognitive activity, and of its relations with the practical sphere of the spirit, the states of mind, which can be abstracted as the matter or content of the æsthetic form. Another difficulty, however, still persisted in Croce's theory, due to the sharp distinction between the æsthetic and the logical activity, which reserved to the first the field of individual, to the second that of universal knowledge—constituting a double-grade relation, in which the æsthetic was implied by the logic activity, but not vice-versa. The corresponding distinction of the two forms of the practical spirit, the economic and the ethic, evolved by Croce at a maturer stage of his speculation, establishes not only a double-grade relation, but also a reciprocal implication. Croce's essay on Il carattere di totalità della espressione artistica (1917) is an attempt at interpreting his first distinction in the light of the second, thereby recognising the universal or cosmic character of art. That universality which becomes explicit in the logical judgment is implicit in the intuition, already identified with the category of feeling, with the concrete states of mind, on which it imposes its form: "Since, what is a feeling or a state of mind? is it something that can be detached from the universe and developed by itself? have the part and the whole, the individual and the cosmos, the finite and the infinite, any reality, one outside the other? One may be inclined to grant that every severance and isolation of the two terms of the relation could not be anything but the work of abstraction, for which only there is an abstract individuality and an abstract finite, an abstract unity and an abstract infinite. But the pure intuition, or artistic representation, abhors abstraction; or rather it does not even abhor it, since it knows it not, because of its naïve or auroral cognitive character. In it, the individual lives by the life of the whole, and the whole is in the life of the individual; and every true artistic representation is itself and the universe, the universe in that individual form, and that individual form as the universe. In every accent of a poet, in every creature of his phantasy, there is the whole of human destiny, all the hopes, the illusions, the sorrows and the joys, all human greatness and all human misery, the entire drama of reality, which perpetually becomes and grows upon itself, suffering and rejoicing."[2]
This recognition of the implicit universality of the æsthetic expression does not abolish, as it might seem to a superficial observer, the distinction between æsthetic and logical knowledge; it rather makes it clearer and truer. An imperfect recognition may lead to an intellectualistic or mystic theory of art; and intellectualism and mysticism in æsthetics remain for Croce as typical forms of error, whether they are directed towards a confusion between intuition and judgment, or towards a symbolical or allegorical interpretation of art, or towards a semi-religious theory of art as the revelation of the Deus absconditus. But the truth that those errors tried to express in their imperfect formulas, is finally understood by him to be that character of universality which belongs to every aspect and to every fragment of the living reality. Feeling itself, or a state of mind, partakes in its actuality of that universal character, but when expressed in art, it retains its universality only by losing its practical nature, and subjecting itself entirely to the form which expresses it. Thus the æsthetic activity, because bent on realizing its own universality, which is the perfection of its form, imposes on the artist a morality and a discipline which cannot be identified with practical morality, with the discipline of life. The sincerity of the' artist is of another order than that of the practical man, though (we can never repeat it too often) æsthetic virtues being incommensurable with moral values, his work as an artist does not exempt him from his duties as a man.
This further determination of the concept of expression is used by Croce to clarify a distinction which had already been adumbrated in the Estetica; the distinction between poetic, intellectual, and practical expression, between the word in which the pure intuition embodies itself, the word which is a sign or symbol of thought, and the word which is an instrument for the awakening of the emotions, a preparation for action. Thus the old categories of poetry, prose, and oratory reappear, but no longer as criteria of material classification, no longer to be identified with classes or genres of expression. They become synonyms, respectively, of the æsthetic, the logical, and the practical activity; to be used as instruments of literary and artistic criticism, if the critic is willing to renounce all external helps and material standards, and to penetrate into the "individuality of the act, where only it is given to him to discern the different spiritual dispositions, and what is poetry from what is not poetry. Under the semblance of prose, in a comedy or in a novel, we may find a true and deeply felt lyric; as under that of verse, in a tragedy or in a poem, nothing but reflection and oratory."[3] It is easy to perceive how this distinction will also react on Croce's theory of language as intuition and expression, not by altering its initial position, but by offering new means for the empirical analysis of the facts of language, the nature of which is obviously determined by the kind of impulse which man obeys in the individual act of expression. By the employment of such a method, the history of language as æsthetic expression can be qualified and illumined through the consideration of the moments in which language ceases to be a pure act of æsthetic creation, and is subordinated, as a symbol or instrument, to the purposes of the logical and practical mind.