Croce Benedetto (1866–1952), Italian philosopher. He was born at Pescasseroli, in the Abruzzi, and after 1886 lived in Naples. He briefly attended the University of Rome and was led to study Herbart’s philosophy. In 1904 he founded the influential journal La critica. In 1910 he was made life member of the Italian senate. Early in his career he befriended Giovanni Gentile, but this friendship was breached by Gentile’s Fascism. During the Fascist period and World War II Croce lived in isolation as the chief anti-fascist thinker in Italy. He later became a leader of the Liberal party and at the age of eighty founded the Institute for Historical Studies. Croce was a literary and historical scholar who joined his great interest in these fields to philosophy. His best-known work in the Englishspeaking world is Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902). This was the first part of his ‘Philosophy of Spirit’; the second was his Logic (1905), the third his theory of the Practical (1909), and the fourth his Historiography (1917). Croce was influenced by Hegel and the Hegelian aesthetician Francesco De Sanctis (1817–83) and by Vico’s conceptions of knowledge, history, and society. He wrote The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1911) and a famous commentary on Hegel, What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (1907), in which he advanced his conception of the ‘dialectic of distincts’ as more fundamental than the Hegelian dialectic of opposites.
Croce held that philosophy always springs from the occasion, a view perhaps rooted in his concrete studies of history. He accepted the general Hegelian identification of philosophy with the history of philosophy. His philosophy originates from his conception of aesthetics. Central to his aesthetics is his view of intuition, which evolved through various stages during his career. He regards aesthetic experience as a primitive type of cognition. Intuition involves an awareness of a particular image, which constitutes a non-conceptual form of knowledge. Art is the expression of emotion but not simply for its own sake. The expression of emotion can produce cognitive awareness in the sense that the particular intuited as an image can have a cosmic aspect, so that in it the universal human spirit is perceived. Such perception is present especially in the masterpieces of world literature. Croce’s conception of aesthetic has connections with Kant’s ‘intuition’ (Anschauung) and to an extent with Vico’s conception of a primordial form of thought based in imagination (fantasia).
Croce’s philosophical idealism includes fully developed conceptions of logic, science, law, history, politics, and ethics. His influence to date has been largely in the field of aesthetics and in historicist conceptions of knowledge and culture. His revival of Vico has inspired a whole school of Vico scholarship. Croce’s conception of a ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ showed it was possible to develop a post-Hegelian philosophy that, with Hegel, takes ‘the true to be the whole’ but which does not simply imitate Hegel.
See also AESTHETICS , HEGEL, KANT, VICO. D.P.V.