- At this point we might expect Croce to define art, or the moment when intuition-expression occurs in the pure state. And in fact, in his “Conclusion,” he writes: “having defined the nature of intuitive or expressive knowledge, the aesthetic or artistic act (I and II), and noted the other forms of knowledge, and the further combinations of this form” (p. 154). Unfortunately, this affirmation is false: nowhere in the Aesthetic do we find a definition of art that is not a definition of intuition, and nowhere do we find a definition of intuition that does not refer to the definition of art. The reason would seem to be that “the boundaries between the expression-intuitions that are called ‘art’ and those that are commonly called ‘non-art’ are purely empirical: they cannot be defined” (p. 14). Thus, Croce takes, so to speak, the experience of art (the confident immediate recognition of what art is) as a primitive that acts as a starting point for conferring on intuition all the (undefined) characteristics of art. Nor do things change when we proceed to formulas such as “lyrical intuition” (Breviario d’estetica, 1), since we discover that “lyrical” is not a specific difference, but a synonym of “intuition.” For a devotee of the Circle, the demonstrative circularity is perfect: the only intuition is artistic intuition, and art is intuition. This definitional circularity may have relieved Croce’s earliest readers of critical responsibility, reassuring them that art was nothing more or less than what they felt art was, and all the rest was professorial hair-splitting, to which the second part of the book, devoted to the history of aesthetics, does summary justice.
If this seems like a harsh judgment, we have only to consider such glaring tautologies as “it seems appropriate for us to define the beautiful as successful expression, or better, as expression simpliciter, since expression, when it is not successful, is not expression” (p. 87); or examples of woolliness that would not be countenanced even in a beginner, such as when, on page 78, the author, distinguishing “successful expressions” from those that are “flawed,” compares two pairs of paintings, of which we are told nothing except that one is “devoid of inspiration” and the other “inspired,” one “strongly felt,” the other “coldly allegorical,” though no explanation is offered of exactly what a “strongly felt” painting might look like. You can’t help thinking that many of Croce’s readers must have been delighted to see the feeble interjections they used in the cultural circles of the provincial Italy of the late nineteenth century raised to the level of critical categories.
The elusive nature of aesthetic form deprives Croce of a flexible theory of judgment and interpretation. A promising idea is presented in the fourth chapter: namely, that forming an aesthetic opinion means putting oneself in the artist’s place and following the process of creation “with the assistance of the physical sign he has produced.” Genius and taste are, then, substantially identical. But the fact that they share the same nature does not necessarily mean that any judgment of taste must fit the work of art in the same way and from the same point of view.
Croce is not unaware of the empirical phenomenon of the variety of judgments, due to the evolution of cultural conditions as well as to the physical nature of the work. But he considers it is always possible, with a proper philological effort, to recreate the original conditions and retrace the process in the only correct way possible. Either everything the artist intuited is fully reproduced, or the process is stymied. Tertium non datur. There is no third way. Since he did not develop a theory of the conditions that make a form what it is, the suspicion could not cross Croce’s mind that a form might lend itself to several different interpretations, each of which captures it fully from a separate point of view (as will be the case in Pareyson’s aesthetics). Even his 1917 reflections on the cosmic character of art presuppose that the successful work is like Borges’s Aleph from which one may view the entire cosmos: it’s all or nothing. Croce’s theory of form ignores Nicholas of Cusa’s complicatio, which is likewise ignored in his history of aesthetics.
- We feel a similar sense of unease when Croce announces his explanation of what he means by conceptual knowledge, as opposed to the intuitive form. His model of pure knowledge is the lucid and complete logical concept. When it comes to knowledge directed toward practical ends, all we have are his notorious pseudo-concepts. But if we take a closer look at what pseudo-concepts mean for Croce, we realize that they are far more important for him than they would later become for so many of his followers. In the opinion of the latter, they were mere mechanical lucubrations that the philosopher would be well advised not to meddle with. Croce on the other hand meddles as a matter of principle, because the pseudo-concepts of the sciences are fundamental to the orientation of our practical actions. We realize, with some satisfaction, that the pseudo-concepts too belong to the world of the inchoate hotchpotch in which our perceptions are formed, and like them proceed by standardizations, incomplete profiles of reality, and can always be jettisoned, as we all do with our own perceptions of the day before (“I must admit that that wardrobe seemed bigger than it really is”). The world of the hotchpotch is the everyday territory we live in, in which we proceed by trial and error, assays, conjecture, and, seeing a shadow pass by in the dark, we hazard a guess that it must have been a dog, and discovering that Mars passes through two points that cannot belong to a circle, we hazard a guess, as Kepler did, that the orbits of the planets may be elliptical.
Croce grasps this world very concretely, with a keen sense of life’s flux, and he describes it vividly: but after having recognized it, he loses interest, as if philosophy were not supposed to get involved with the human condition as it really is, but only with the way things ought to be, with forms so pure that they defy any attempt at definition. And yet Croce expects philosophy to prompt his readers to exclaim “I felt that too!,” and he remarks: “There is no greater satisfaction for a philosopher than to discover his philosophical ideas in the opinions of common sense” (Croce 1995: 211). It is as if Croce were tempted to flatter false common sense when he is explaining what pure intuition is by talking about a “strongly felt” painting, and that he turns away out of boredom when common sense is recognized in the everyday hotchpotch.
The quest after pure conceptual knowledge gives rise to a fair number of embarrassments. In chapter 3 of the Aesthetic an attempt is made to define it as “knowledge of the relationships between things, and the things are intuitions” (p. 24). “Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water; concept is: “water.” But we have been told that “this lake” is a true intuition only when painted by a great painter, whereas the lake I intuit is a schema, a sketch, or a label. If conceptual knowledge consists in establishing relationships among drafts and sketches, what we are really talking about are pseudo-concepts. And if it consists in establishing relationships between fully realized intuitions, the pure concept of water can only emerge from the relationship among the various intuitions of water had, say, by Dante, Leonardo, and Canaletto.
We could get to this point, if, treating spiritual phases and historical phases as identical, we were to take in a chronological sense Vico’s proposal that the original idiom of mankind was a poetical language: “were it not for the fact that a wholly poetical period in the history of humanity, without abstractions and without reasoning, never existed, indeed could not even be imagined” (p. 293). But Vico never believed that, except in a metaphorical sense, seeing that, while he posits a hieroglyphic language more fantastic than the symbolic and pistolare or “epistolary” languages, still “as gods, heroes and men began at the same time (for they were after all men who imagined the gods and believed their own heroic nature to be a mixture of the divine and human natures), so these three languages began at the same time” (Scienza Nuova Seconda, 2, 2, 4, p. 189, my translation).
With a much greater sense of concreteness, and less exclusive obsession with distinctions, the Croce of the 1909 Logica will posit, as strictly complementary to definitional judgment (which in the Aesthetic still figures as the only manifestation of logical thought [p. 48]), individual “or perceptive” judgment. Each of the two presupposes the other, and hence perception is shot through with concept: “to perceive means to apprehend a given fact as having such and such a nature, and is therefore the same as thinking and judging it. Not even the most fleeting impression, the most inconsequential fact is perceived by us except insofar as it is thought” (Logica, p. 109). Conversely, every universal definition will appear as the answer to a specific question, historically situated, starting from “a darkness that is in search of light,” to the point where “the nature of the question will lend its color to the answer.” How, then, are we to remove the logical form itself from the generous and vital territory of the hotchpotch
