Benedetto Croce

“ Ideality (as has also been called this character that distinguishes the intuition from the concept, art from philosophy and from history, from the affirmation of the universal and from the perception or narration of what has happened) is the intimate virtue of art: no sooner are reflection and judgment developed from that ideality, than art is dissipated and dies: it dies in the artist, who becomes a critic; it dies in the contemplator, who changes from an entranced enjoyer of art to a meditative observer of life. ”

“ And indeed, whoever, when examining a work of art, should ask whether what the artist has expressed be metaphysically and historically true or false, asks a question that is without meaning and commits an error analogous to his who should bring the airy images of the fancy before the tribunal of morality: without meaning, because the discrimination of true and false always concerns an affirmation of reality, or a judgment, but it cannot fall under the head of an image or of a pure subject, which is not the subject of a judgment, since it is without qualification or predicate. ”

“ But the idea that has disappeared, the idea that has become entirely representative, the idea that we can no longer succeed in seizing as idea (save by extracting it, like sugar from sugared water) , is no longer idea, and is only the sign that the unity of the artistic image has not yet been achieved. Certainly art is symbol, all symbol—that is, all significant; but symbol of what? What does it mean? The intuition is truly artistic, it is truly intuition, and not a chaotic mass of images, only when it has a vital principle that animates it, making it all one with itself ”

“ The negative issue of the great dispute between classicists and romanticists is interesting, for it resulted in the negation of the art which strives to distract and illude the soul as to the deficiency of the image based upon abstract feeling, upon practical violence of feeling, upon feeling that has not become contemplation, and equally in the negation of the art which, by means of the superficial clearness of the image, of drawing correctly false, of the falsely correct word, seeks to deceive as to its lack of inspiration and its lack of an aesthetic reason to justify what it has produced. ”

“ Thus it happens that art manifests much more repugnance toward the positive and mathematical sciences than toward philosophy, religion and history, because these seem to it to be fellow-citizens of the same world of theory or of knowledge, whereas those others repel it with the roughness of the practical world toward contemplation. Poetry and classification, and, worse still, poetry and mathematics, appear to be as little in agreement as fire and water: the esprit mathématique and the esprit scientifique, the most declared enemies of the esprit poétique ”

“ An artistic image portrays an act morally praiseworthy or blameworthy; but this image, as image, is neither morally praiseworthy nor blameworthy. Not only is there no penal code that can condemn an image to prison or to death, but no moral judgment, uttered by a rational person, can make of it its object: we might just as well judge the square moral or the triangle immoral as the Francesca of Dante immoral or the Cordelia of Shakespeare moral, for these have a purely artistic function, they are like musical notes in the souls of Dante and of Shakespeare. ”

“ Thus that definition of art leads imagination back to logic and art to philosophy, contrary to intention; and is at most valid for the abstract conception of science, not for the problem of art (the aesthetic and teleological Critique of Judgment of Kant had precisely this historical function of correcting what of abstract there yet remained in the Critique of Pure Reason) . To seek a sensible element for the concept, beyond that which it already contains in itself as concrete concept, and beyond the words in which it expresses itself, would be superfluous. ”

“ The researches of the philosopher in relation to art must tread the paths of error in order to find the path of truth, which does not differ from, but is, those very paths of error which contain a clue to the labyrinth. ”

“ On other occasions they have sought to avail themselves of it for purposes of instruction, since not only virtue but also science is a difficult thing, and art could remove this difficulty and render pleasant and attractive the entrance into the ocean of science—indeed, lead them through it as through a garden of Armida, gaily and voluptuously, without their being conscious of the lofty protection they had obtained, or of the crisis of renovation which they were preparing for themselves. ”

“ Art lacks the thought that is necessary ere it can become myth and religion, and the faith that is born of thought; the artist neither believes nor disbelieves in his image: he produces it.
And, for a different reason, the concept of art as intuition excludes, on the other hand, the conception of art as the production of classes and types, species and genera, or again (as a great mathematician and philosopher had occasion to say of music) , as an exercise of unconscious arithmetic ”

“ Considered, then, in its genuine reality, in the soul of the believer and not of the unbeliever, it is religion and not a simple phantasm; and religion is philosophy, philosophy in process of becoming, philosophy more or less imperfect, but philosophy, as philosophy, is religion, more or less purified and elaborated, in continuous process of elaboration and purification, but religion or thought of the Absolute or Eternal. ”

“ And it is a utilitarian and hedonistic need that impels us sometimes to relax the bow of the mind and the bow of the will, and to stretch ourselves, allowing images to follow one another in our memory, or combining them in quaint forms with the aid of the imagination, in a sort of waking sleep, from which we rouse ourselves as soon as we are rested; and we sometimes rouse ourselves just to devote ourselves to the work of art, which cannot be produced by a mind relaxed. ”

“ The intuition is certainly the production of an image, but not of an incoherent mass of images obtained by recalling former images and allowing them to succeed one another capriciously, by combining one image with another in a like capricious manner, joining a horse’s neck to a human head, and thus playing a childish game. Old Poetic availed itself above all of the concept of unity, in order to express this distinction between the intuition and vain imagining, insisting that whatever the artistic work, it should be simplex et unum ”

“ The inclination towards this error of physicising art is already present in ordinary thought, and as children who touch the soap-bubble and would wish to touch the rainbow, so the human spirit, admiring beautiful things, hastens spontaneously to trace out the reasons for them in external nature, and proves that it must think, or believes that it should think, certain colours beautiful and certain other colours ugly, certain forms beautiful and certain other forms ugly. ”

“ As we know, those superficial or ingenuous souls that are ignorant of this magic are terrified at it; so much so, that one of their tiresome refrains against philosophy is that it continually undoes its work, and that one philosopher contradicts another: as though man did not always make and unmake his houses, and as though the architect that follows did not always contradict the architect that precedes; and as though it were possible to draw the conclusion from this making and unmaking of houses and from this contradiction among architects, that it is useless to make houses! ”

“ And since every error has its element of truth (and that of the physical doctrine has been seen to be the possibility of the physical “construction” of art as of any other fact) , the hedonistic doctrine has its eternal element of truth in the placing in relief the hedonistic accompaniment, or pleasure, common to the aesthetic activity as to every form of spiritual activity, which it has not at all been intended to deny in absolutely denying the identification of art with the pleasurable, and in distinguishing it from the pleasurable by defining it as intuition. ”

“ This is the foundation of the contrast, which many delight to point out, between the mental equilibrium of ordinary people and the extravagances of philosophers; since, for example, it is clear that no man of good sense would have said that art is a reflection of the sexual instinct, or that it is something maleficent and deserves to be banned from well-ordered republics. These absurdities have, however, been uttered by philosophers, and even by great philosophers. But the innocence of the man of common sense is poverty, the innocence of the savage ”

“ If we persist in this search, it is true that we abandon the conception of art as philosophy or history, but only to pass to the conception of art as allegory. And the unsurmountable difficulties of the allegory are well known, as its frigid and anti-historical character is known and universally felt. Allegory is the external union, the conventional and arbitrary juxtaposition of two spiritual acts, a concept or thought and an image, where it is assumed that this image must represent that concept. ”

“ And if it be asked why art cannot be a physical fact, we must reply, in the first place, that physical facts do not possess reality, and that art, to which so many devote their whole lives and which fills all with a divine joy, is supremely real ”

“ And the others say, What is the use of the shock of the passions, if the spirit do not rest upon a beautiful image? And if the image be beautiful, if our taste be satisfied, what matters the absence of those emotions which can all of them be obtained outside art, and which life does not fail to provide, sometimes in greater quantity than we desire? ”

“ Thus people have come to believe in the possibility of making blush, at will, any proud philosopher who should fancy himself to have “discovered” the nature of art, by placing before his eyes or making ring in his ears propositions taken from the most superficial books or phrases of the most ordinary conversation, and showing that they already most clearly contained his vaunted discovery. ”

“ The philosopher’s pride is based therefore solely upon the greater intensity of his questions and answers; a pride not unaccompanied with modesty—that is, with the consciousness that, if his sphere be wider, or the largest possible, at a determined moment, yet it is limited by the history of that moment, and cannot pretend to a value of totality, or what is called a definitive solution. ”

“ Thus physical facts reveal themselves, by their internal logic and by common consent, not as reality, but as a construction of our intellect for the purposes of science. Consequently, the question whether art be a physical fact must rationally assume this different signification: that is to say, whether it be possible to construct art physically. ”

“ Therefore, when we descend from general considerations to the examination of a theory that has been condemned as erroneous in its definite particulars, we find the cure in the theory itself—that is, the true theory, which grows out of the soil of error. Thus it happens that those very people who claim to reduce art to the sexual instinct, in order to demonstrate their thesis, have recourse to arguments and meditations which, instead of uniting, separate art from that instinct ”

“ But he does not blush, and continues upon his way, for he is not ignorant that the question as to what is art (as indeed every philosophical question as to the nature of the real, or in general every question of knowledge) , even if by its use of language it seem to assume the aspect of a general and total problem, which it is claimed to solve for the first and last time, has always, as a matter of fact, a circumscribed meaning, referable to the particular difficulties that assume vitality at a determined moment in the history of thought. ”

“ But the metaphor used by the maid is the solution of a problem of expression proper to the feelings that affect the maid at that moment; and the obvious affirmations that by accident or intent one hears every day as to the nature of art, are solutions of logical problems, as they present themselves to this or that individual, who is not a philosopher by profession, and yet as man is also to some extent a philosopher. ”

“ A proof of this is to be found in the fact that we often hear just and profound ideas in relation to art expressed by those who make no profession of philosophy or of theory, by laymen, by artists who do not like to reason, by the ingenuous, and even by the common people: these ideas are sometimes implicit in judgments concerning particular works of art, but at others assume altogether the form of aphorisms and of definitions. ”

“ What function (it is asked) can a world of pure images without philosophical, historical, religious or scientific value, and without even moral or hedonistic value, possess in the spirit of man? What is more vain than to dream with open eyes in life, which demands, not only open eyes, but an open mind and a nimble spirit? ”

“ Thus art is not a physical fact in this second sense either; which amounts to saying that when we propose to ourselves to penetrate its nature and mode of action, to construct it physically is of no avail. ”