Benedetto Croce

“ A new reality, which is economic and moral life, turns the intellectual into the practical man, the politician, the saint, the man of business, the hero, and elaborates the a priori logical synthesis into the practical a priori synthesis; but this is nevertheless always a new feeling, a new desiring, a new willing, a new passionateness, in which the spirit can never rest, but solicits above all as new material a new intuition, a new lyricism, a new art. ”

“ If it be asked, which of the various activities of the spirit is real, or if they be all real, we must reply that none of them is real; because the only reality is the activity of all these activities, which does not reside in any one of them in particular: of the various syntheses that we have one after the other distinguished,—aesthetic synthesis, logical synthesis, practical synthesis,—the only real one is the synthesis of syntheses, the Spirit, which is the true Absolute, the actus purus. ”

“ An activity whose principle depends upon that of another activity is substantially that other activity, and retains for itself an existence that is only putative or conventional: art which depends upon morality, upon pleasure, or upon philosophy, is morality, pleasure, or philosophy; it is not art. If it be held not to be dependent, it will be advisable to investigate the foundation of its independence—that is to say, how art is distinguished from morality, from pleasure, from philosophy, and from all other things ”

“ THE dispute as to the dependence or independence of art was at its hottest in the romantic period, when the motto of “art for art’s sake” was coined, and, as its apparent antithesis, that other of “art for life”; and from that time it was discussed, to tell the truth, rather among men of letters or artists than philosophers. It has lost interest in our day, fallen to the rank of a theme with which beginners amuse or exercise themselves, or of an argument for academic orations. ”

“ Those who see in art the concept, history, mathematics, the type, morality, pleasure, and everything else, are right, because these and all other things are contained within it, owing to the unity of the spirit; indeed, the presence in it of them all, and the energetic unilaterality alike of art as of any other particular form, tending to reduce all activities to one, explains the passage from one form to another, the completing of one form in the other, and it explains development. ”

“ It may chance to be asserted, on the other hand, by those very people who affirm the concept of the original nature of art, that, although it preserve its peculiar nature, yet its place is below another activity of superior dignity, and (as used at one time to be said) that it is a handmaid to ethic, a minister’s wife to politics, and interpretess to science; but this would only prove that there are people who have the habit of contradicting themselves or of allowing discord among their thoughts: giddy folk who never seek proof of anything. ”

“ The independence of a form implies the matter upon which it acts, as we have already seen in the development of the genesis of art as an intuitive formation of a sentimental or passionate material; and in the case of absolute independence, since all material and aliment would be wanting to it, form itself, being void, would become nullified. But since the recognised independence prevents our thinking one activity as under the rule of another, the dependence must be such as to guarantee the independence. ”

“ But it is madness to attempt to prove that, were philosophy without art, it would exist for itself, because it would be without what conditions its problems, and air to breathe would be taken from it, in order to make it prevail alone against art ”

“ Not, be it well observed, that the intuitive power gives place to another power, as though taking its turn of pleasure or of service; but the intuitive power itself—or rather, the spirit itself, which at first seemed to be, and in a certain sense was, all intuition—develops in itself the new process, which comes forth from the vitals of the first. ”

“ Our thought is historical thought of a historical world, a process of development of a development; and hardly has a qualification of reality been pronounced, when the qualification is already of no value, because it has itself produced a new reality, which awaits a new qualification. ”

“ The last term, which again becomes the first, is not the old first, but presents itself with a multiplicity and precision of concepts, with an experience of life lived, and even of works contemplated, which was wanting to the old first term; and it affords material for a more lofty, more refined, more complex and more mature art. ”

“ And it will be well that I should mention again another problem of the same sort, to which I have already alluded in passing: namely, the connection between art and morality, which has been denied to be immediate identification of the one with the other, but which must now be reasserted, and to note that, since the poet preserves the passion for his art when free from every other passionateness, so he preserves in his art the consciousness of duty (duty toward art) , and every poet, in the act of creation, is moral, because he accomplishes a sacred function. ”

“ We shall therefore conduct it with the more profound criterion, which is that of image and perception, of intuition and judgment, which has already been explained; poetry will be the expression of the image, prose that of the judgment or concept. ”

“ Nevertheless, during the moments that he loves her, that woman is his universe, and he aspires to possess her as the highest beatitude, and in the enthusiasm of his admiration would render the mortal woman immortal, would transfigure this earthly creature into a divine creature for posterity, achieving for her a new miracle of love. ”

“ And since the poet, in this passage, not only presupposes a passionate material, owing to the unity of the spirit, but preserves the passionateness and elevates it to the passionateness of a poet (passion for art) , so the thinker or prosaist not only preserves that passionateness and elevates it to a passionateness for science, but also preserves the intuitive force, owing to which his judgments come forth expressed together with the passionateness that surrounds them, and therefore they retain their artistic as well as their scientific character. ”

“ Nevertheless, objection has been taken to the idea of the circle in general, which affords so much aid in making clear the connection of dependence and independence of art and of the other spiritual forms, on the ground that it thinks the work of the spirit a tiresome and melancholy doing and undoing, a monotonous turning upon itself, not worth the trouble. ”

“ For our part, we shall take care not to fall into such a condition; and having already made clear that art is distinguished from the physical world and from the practical, moral, and conceptual activity as intuition, we shall give ourselves no further anxiety, and shall assume that with that first demonstration we have also demonstrated the independence of art. ”

“ Independence is a concept of relation, and in this aspect the only absolute independence is the Absolute, or absolute relation; every particular form and concept is independent no one side and dependent on another, or both independent and dependent. ”

“ With perception we have entered a new and very wide spiritual field; and truly, words are not strong enough to satirise those thinkers who, now as in the past, confound image and perception, making of the image a perception (a portrait or copy or imitation of nature, or history of the individual and of the times, etc.) ”

“ But the ideal, indivisible moments of the ideal drama can be seen as if divided in empirical reality, as in a bodily symbol of the ideal distinction. Not that they are really divided (ideality is the true reality) , but they appear to be so empirically to him who observes with a view to classification, for he possesses no other way of determining the individuality of the facts in the types that have attracted his attention, save that of enlarging and of exaggerating ideal distinctions. ”

“ Thus the artist, the philosopher, the historian, the naturalist, the mathematician, the man of business, the good man, seem to live separated from one another; and the spheres of artistic, philosophical, historical, naturalistic, mathematical culture, and those of economic and ethic and of the many institutions connected with them, seem to be distinct from one another ”

“ But I have already had occasion to state of what this repose consists: an effectual negation of reality, beneath the appearance of elevation and sublimation; and it is certainly attained, but is called death; the death of the individual, not of reality, which does not die, and is not afflicted by its own motion, but enjoys it. Others dream of a spiritual form, in which the circle is dissolved, a form which should be Thought of thought, unity of the Theoretical and of the Practical, Love, God, or whatever other name it may bear ”

“ Further, perception (the variety of perceptions) explains why the human intellect strives to emerge from them and to impose upon them a world of types and of laws, governed by mathematical measures and relations; because natural sciences and mathematics are formed in addition to philosophy and history. ”

“ Hence, considering the matter in general, it appears that there is no other way of thinking the simultaneous independence and dependence of the various spiritual activities than that of conceiving them in the relation of condition and conditioned, in which the conditioned surpasses the condition and presupposes it, and, becoming again in its turn condition, gives rise to a new conditioned, thus constituting a series of development. ”

“ He finds his satisfaction in this image, because he has worked and moved in this direction: all know more or less the joy of the complete expression which we succeed in giving to our own proper impulses, and the joy in those of others, which are also ours, when we contemplate the works of others, which are to some extent ours, and which we make ours. But is the satisfaction definite? Was the artist-man impelled only toward the image? Toward the image and toward something else at the same time; toward the image in so far as he is artistman, toward something else in so far as he is manartist ”

“ For this purpose we shall again return to the artist, or manartist, who has achieved the process of liberation from the sentimental tumult and has objectified it in a lyrical image—that is, has attained to art. ”

“ And we all know also, from continual experience, the new need which lurks behind the formation of images. Ugo Foscolo has a love-affair with the Countess Arese; he knows with what sort of love and with what sort of woman he has to do, as can be proved from the letters he wrote, which are to be read in print. ”

“ But does such satisfaction differ from that afforded by art in being complete and final? Does not dissatisfaction perhaps appear side by side with the satisfaction of knowing reality? This, too, is most certain ”

“ But this would not be guaranteed even by the hypothesis that one activity should be made to depend on another in the same way as that other upon it, like two forces which counterbalance each other, and of which the one does not vanquish the other ”

“ Another objection, or rather another movement of rebellion against the same idea, is frequently to be observed, though not clearly self-conscious: the restlessness, existing in some or several, the endeavour to break and to surpass the circularity that is a law of life, and to attain to a region of repose from movement, so full of anxiety ”

“ Criticism of the philosophy underlying Dante’s poem is certainly possible, but that criticism will enter the subterranean parts of the art of Dante, as though by undermining, and will leave intact the soil on the surface, which is the art ”

“ This conception seems to be the only way out of the difficulties with which the other conceptions of spiritual life are striving, both that which makes it consist of an assemblage of independent and unrelated faculties of the soul, or of independent and unrelated ideas of value, and that which subordinates all these in one and resolves them in that one, which remains immobile and impotent ”