It may seem odd to include a critique of Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic in a collection of essays devoted to the history of semiotics and the philosophy of language. But, apart from the fact that the full title of Croce’s work (The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General)1 entitles us to speculate on what “linguistics in general” might mean for Croce, the present chapter will deal for the most part with the lack of precision of the definitions on which the Aesthetic is founded. In a volume that opened with a critique of the most venerable model of definition (the Porphyrian tree)—whose inability to define we attempted to demonstrate, but to which we must at least grant an almost heroic effort of logical rigor—we feel duty bound to examine a theoretical work which undermines its own project through the dramatically approximate nature of the definitions it pretends to provide.
Rereading the Aesthetic today, we encounter a number of ideas that have become part of received wisdom, as well as the record of a series of battles lost from the outset. Among the latter, this is not the place to tackle the indefensible equation between aesthetics and “linguistics in general,” a paradox of such proportions as to call for a separate treatment of its own.2 What seems to me more urgent is an examination of Croce’s theory of intuition, not just because this is the first topic the work addresses, but because with it Croce intends to lay the cornerstone of his entire system.
- The book’s incipit asserts that knowledge takes two forms: it is either intuitive or logical, and, consequently, knowing means producing either representations or concepts. But, after passing in review several traditional woolly notions regarding the nature of intuition, Croce confronts the problem himself, not by definition but by example: “the net result in the case of a work of art is an intuition” (p. 2). The procedure would be incorrect if it was Croce’s intention to demonstrate what art is, taking the notion of intuition as his starting point; but in fact his intention is to demonstrate what intuition is, taking as his starting point the experience we have of art. Even in this latter case, we would simply have gone from example to antonomasia, if it were not for the fact that the antonomasia in fact conceals an absolute identity.
For Croce, intuition is not pure sensation (which in any case is not pure, but matter without form, passivity), even when the latter is seen, in Kantian fashion, as formed and organized in space and time (we have intuitions outside of space and time, such as when we react with a spontaneous cry to a sensation of pain or a sentimental impulse). It would appear at first blush, however, that the result of perception is intuition. True, Croce’s intuition has wider implications, since we have intuitions of what today we would call “counterfactual” states of affairs, while successful perception requires representation and reality to be congruent. Our author suggests, however, that what we call a representation or an image could be intuition, especially when we reflect that the phenomenon of intuition also applies to the nonverbal or to what cannot necessarily be put into words, as is the case, for instance, when we intuit the form of a triangle.
Nevertheless, the intuitive nature of perception becomes problematic once Croce introduces (p. 8) the twin category that dominates his aesthetics, affirming that every true intuition and representation is also, inseparably, expression, because “the spirit only intuits by making, forming, expressing” (pp. 8–9). Intuiting a geometrical figure, then, means having its image so clear in one’s mind as to be able to trace it immediately on paper or on a blackboard.
At this point Croce has not yet excluded perceptions from the category of intuitions, but he leads us to suspect that, if indeed they are intuitions, they are extremely imperfect ones. The uneducated fisherman, who may not even know how to use a sextant, can find his way back to port even at the height of a storm, because he “recognizes” every feature of the coast, every indentation. This is because he is working with a stored system of perceptions, present and past. But if he were asked to make a drawing of the coastline, he would be incapable of doing so. The anthropologists have given us many examples of natives who know every bend of the river they sail on every day, but when confronted with a map are completely at a loss. Or again, it is a common experience for lovers who are apart not to be able to picture the features of the beloved, however fully and adoringly they “perceive” those features when the beloved is present. They are frustrated by this form of expressive impotence, though the sentiment that accompanies this imperfect reevocation remains extremely vivid (and recognition of the beloved when he or she appears is of course immediate, even at a great distance, as if we knew their most imperceptible movements by heart).
If perceiving and representing to oneself were the same thing as intuition, which coincides with the most complete kind of expression, what happens when, having known someone at the age of twenty, young, clean-shaven with a shock of curly hair, I run into him again at forty, bald or white-haired, with a grey beard? The completeness of today’s intuition not being commensurate with the completeness of yesterday’s intuition, I ought not to recognize anything at all. Instead I say: “How you’ve changed, it doesn’t look like you!” This implies that knowing a person means selecting as pertinent certain features, in a kind of mnemonic schema (not necessarily exclusively morphological, because I may have selected a twinkle in the eye or a crease at the corner of the mouth), and preserving in our memories a “type” with which we compare every “token” of the person, each time I see him or her. The type of the beloved breaks down precisely because I try to pack in an infinite number of pertinent traits, the voracity of my passion makes me want to memorize too much. Croce is the first to recognize that “even of our closest friend, the person to whom we are close every hour of every day, we possess intuitively only a very few physiognomic traits” (p. 10).
In the face of these problems, Croce decides (pp. 13–14) that
the world that we normally intuit is a petty thing and translates itself into petty expressions that are gradually enlarged and made more adequate only by an increasing spiritual concentration at certain given moments. They are the internal words that we say to ourselves, the judgments we express tacitly: ‘there’s a man, there’s a horse, this is heavy, this is bitter, I like this, etc., etc.’: it is a dazzle of light and colour that, pictorially, could only find a true and proper expression in a hotchpotch [the word Croce uses is guazzabuglio] of colour, and from which one could hardly extract a few distinct details. These, and nothing else, are what we possess in our everyday lives and are what serves as the basis of our everyday actions. (p. 10)
Guazzabuglio or “hotchpotch” seems to me an extremely effective term to describe what we are faced with in everyday life, and I shall use it. What is it that rises above this quotidian hotchpotch? The intuition-expression of Raphael, who sees, knows, and reproduces on canvas La Fornarina. Intuition-expression belongs only to art, and “good” art at that, given that Croce is prepared to assign to the hotchpotch the imperfect expressions of Manzoni, Proust, Mallarmé, and many others.
Hence, the first form of the spirit, the form onto which the lucidity of the concept and ethical action and economic action must be grafted, is that of great art. The rest—our perceptions
