19 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
perceptive judgment, whence they are born and in which
they live, identifying philosophy and history, and which
men of good sense discover in their own way, whenever
they observe that ideas suspended in the air are phantoms,
and that what alone is true, and alone worthy of being
known, are facts which occur — real facts. 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.
It is not here my task to give a sketch of Logic, as I have
been or am giving a sketch of Æsthetic; and therefore,
refraining from determining and developing the theory of
Logic, and of intellectual, perceptive, and historical
knowledge, I shall resume the thread of the argument, not
proceeding on this occasion from the artistic and intuitive
spirit, but from the logical and historical, which has
surpassed the intuitive and has elaborated the image in
perception. Does the spirit find satisfaction in this form?
Certainly: all know the very lively satisfactions of
knowledge and science; all know, from experience, the
desire which takes possession of one to discover the
countenance of reality, concealed by our illusions; and
even though that countenance be terrible, the discovery is
never unaccompanied with profound pleasure, due to the
satisfaction of possessing the truth. 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; and the dissatisfaction
of having known manifests itself (as indeed all know by
experience) in the desire for action: it is well to know the
real state of affairs, but we must know it in order to act;
by all means let us know the world, but in order that we
may change it: tempus cognoscendi, tempus destruendi,
tempus renovandi. No man remains stationary in
knowledge, not even sceptics or pessimists who, in
consequence of that knowledge, assume this or that
attitude, adopt this or that form of life. And that very
fixing of acquired knowledge, that “retaining” after
“understanding,” without which (still quoting Dante)
“there can be no science,” the formation of types and laws
and criteria of measurement, the natural sciences and
mathematics, to which I have just referred, were a
surpassing of the act of theory by proceeding to the act of
action. And not only does everyone know from
experience, and can always verify by comparison with
facts, that this is indeed so; but on consideration, it is
evident that things could not proceed otherwise. There
was a time (which still exists for not a few unconscious
Platonicians, mystics, and ascetics) when it was believed
that to know was to elevate the soul to a God, to an Idea,
to a world of ideas, to an Absolute placed above the
phenomenal human world; and it was natural that when
the soul, becoming estranged from itself by an effort
against nature, had attained to that superior sphere, it
returned confounded to earth, where it could remain
perpetually happy and inactive. That thought, which was
no longer thought, had for counterpoise a reality that was
not reality. But since (with Vico, Kant, Hegel, and other
heresiarchs) knowledge has descended to earth, and is no
longer conceived as a more or less pallid copy of an
immobile reality, but remains always human, and
produces, not abstract ideas, but concrete concepts which
are syllogisms and historical judgments, perceptions of
the real, the practical is no longer something that
represents a degeneration of knowledge, a second fall
from heaven to earth, or from paradise to hell, nor
something that can be resolved upon or abstained from,
but is implied in theory itself, as a demand of theory; and
as the theory, so the practice. 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. 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.
And thus the last term of the series reunites itself (as I
stated at the beginning) with the first term, the circle is
closed, and the passage begins again: a passage which is a
return of that already made, whence the Vichian concept
expressed in the word “return,” now become classic. But
the development which I have described explains the
independence of art, and also the reasons for its apparent
dependence, in the eyes of those who have conceived
erroneous doctrines (hedonistic, moralistic,
conceptualistic, etc.), which I have criticised above,
though noting, in the course of criticism, that in each one
of them could be found some reference to truth. 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. But from another point of
view, and for the same reason, all are real, in the unity of
the spirit, in the eternal going and coming, which is their
eternal constancy and reality. 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