Æsthetic as science of expression and general linguistic. Benedetto Croce
as has been seen, philosophy of history, nor philosophy of nature; and therefore there cannot be a philosophical science of what is not form and universal, but material and particular. This amounts to affirming the impossibility of Metaphysic.
The methodology or logic of history has supplanted the philosophy of history; an epistemology of the concepts employed in the natural sciences succeeded the Philosophy of Nature. What philosophy can study of history is its mode of construction (intuition, perception, document, probability, etc.); of the natural sciences the forms of the concepts which constitute them (space, time, motion, number, types, classes, etc.). Philosophy as metaphysic in the sense above described would, on the other hand, claim to compete with history and with the natural sciences, which alone are legitimate and effective in their field. Such a challenge could do nothing but reveal the incompetence of those who made it. In this sense we are anti-metaphysicans, while declaring ourselves to be ultra-metaphysicians, when the word is used to claim and to affirm the office of philosophy as self-consciousness of the spirit, distinguished from the merely empirical and classificatory office of the natural sciences.
Mental imagination and the intuitive intellect.
Metaphysic has been obliged to assert the existence of a specific spiritual activity producing it, in order to maintain itself side by side with the sciences of the spirit. This activity, called in antiquity mental or superior imagination, and more often in modern times intuitive intellect or intellectual intuition, was held to unite the characters of imagination and intellect in an altogether special form. It was supposed to provide the means of passing by deduction or dialectic from the infinite to the finite, from form to matter, from the concept to the intuition, from science to history, acting by a method which was held to penetrate both the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete, intuition and intellect. A faculty marvellous indeed and most valuable to possess; but we, who do not possess it, have no means of establishing its existence.
Mystical Æsthetic.
Intellectual intuition has sometimes been considered to be the true æsthetic activity. At others a no less marvellous æsthetic activity has been placed beside, below, or above it, a faculty altogether different from simple intuition. The glories of this faculty have been celebrated, and the production of art attributed to it, or at least of certain groups of artistic production, arbitrarily chosen. Art, religion and philosophy have seemed in turn to be one only, or three distinct faculties of the spirit, sometimes one, sometimes another of them being supreme in the dignity shared by all.
It is impossible to enumerate all the various attitudes assumed or capable of being assumed by this conception of Æsthetic, which we will call mystical. We are here in the kingdom, not of the science of imagination, but of imagination itself, which creates its world out of varying elements drawn from impressions and feelings. Suffice it to mention that this mysterious faculty has been conceived, sometimes as practical, sometimes as a mean between the theoretic and the practical, at others again as a theoretic form side by side with philosophy and religion.
Mortality and immortality of art.
The immortality of art has sometimes been deduced from this last conception, as belonging with its sisters to the sphere of absolute spirit. At other times, on the other hand, when religion has been looked upon as mortal and as dissolved in philosophy, then has been proclaimed the mortality, even the death, actual or at least imminent, of art. This question has no meaning for us, because, seeing that the function of art is a necessary degree of the spirit, to ask if art can be eliminated is the same as to ask if sensation or intelligence can be eliminated. But Metaphysic, in the above sense, transplanting itself into an arbitrary world, is not to be criticized in its particulars, any more than we can criticize the botany of the garden of Alcina or the navigation of the voyage of Astolfo. Criticism can only exist when we refuse to join in the game; that is to say, when we reject the very possibility of Metaphysic, always in the sense above indicated.
There is therefore no intellectual intuition in philosophy, as there is no surrogate or equivalent of it in art, or any other mode by which this imaginary function may be called and represented. There does not exist (if we may repeat ourselves) a fifth degree, a fifth or supreme faculty, theoretic or practical-theoretic, imaginative-intellectual, or intellectual-imaginative, or however otherwise it may be attempted to conceive such a faculty.
The characters of art.
It is customary to give long catalogues of the characters of art. Having reached this point of the treatise, after having studied art as spiritual activity, as theoretic activity, and as special theoretic activity (intuitive), we are able to discover that those varied and numerous determinations of characters, where they refer to anything real, do nothing but represent what we have already met with as genera, species and individuality of the æsthetic form. To the generic are reducible, as we have already observed, the characters, or rather, the verbal variants of unity, and of unity in variety, of simplicity, or originality, and so on; to the specific, the characters of truth, of sincerity, and the like; to the individual, the characters of life, of vivacity, of animation, of concreteness, of individuality, of characteristicality. The words may change again, but they will not contribute anything scientifically new. The analysis of expression as such is completely effected in the results expounded above.
Non-existence of modes of expression.
It might, on the other hand, be asked at this point if there be modes or degrees of expression; if, having distinguished two degrees of activity of the spirit, each of which is subdivided into two other degrees, one of these, the intuitive-expressive, is not in its turn subdivided into two or more intuitive modes, into a first, second or third degree of expression. But this further division is impossible; a classification of intuition-expressions is certainly permissible, but is not philosophical: individual expressive facts are so many individuals, not one of which is interchangeable with another, save in its common quality of expression. To employ the language of the schools: expression is a species which cannot function in its turn as a genus. Impressions or contents vary; every content differs from every other content, because nothing repeats itself in life; and the irreducible variety of the forms of expression corresponds to the continual variation of the contents, the æsthetic synthesis of impressions.
Impossibility of translations.
A corollary of this is the impossibility of translations, in so far as they pretend to effect the re-moulding of one expression into another, like a liquid poured from a vase of a certain shape into a vase of another shape. We can elaborate logically what we have already elaborated in æsthetic form only; but we cannot reduce what has already possessed its æsthetic form to another form also æsthetic. Indeed, every translation either diminishes and spoils, or it creates a new expression, by putting the former back into the crucible and mingling it with the personal impressions of the so-called translator. In the former case, the expression always remains one, that of the original, the translation being more or less deficient, that is to say, not properly expression: in the other case, there would certainly be two expressions, but with two different contents. "Faithful ugliness or faithless beauty" is a proverb that well expresses the dilemma with which every translator is faced. Un-æsthetic translations, such as those that are word for word, or paraphrastic, are to be looked upon as simple commentaries upon the original.
Criticism of the rhetorical categories.
The illegitimate division of expressions into various grades is known in literature by the name of doctrine of ornament or of rhetorical categories. But similar attempts at distinctions in other artistic groups are not wanting: suffice it to recall the realistic and symbolic forms, so often mentioned in relation to painting and sculpture.
Realistic and symbolic, objective and subjective, classical and romantic, simple and ornate, proper and metaphorical, the fourteen forms of metaphor, the figures of word and sentence, pleonasm, ellipse, inversion, repetition, synonyms and homonyms, these and all other determinations of modes or degrees of expression reveal their philosophical