6 / Croce /
The Essence of Aesthetic
indistinction of reality and unreality, the image with its
value as mere image, the pure ideality of the image; and
opposing the intuitive or sensible knowledge to the
conceptual or intelligible, the aesthetic to the noetic, it
aims at claiming the autonomy of this more simple and
elementary form of knowledge, which has been compared
to the dream (the dream, and not the sleep) of the
theoretic life, in respect to which philosophy would be the
waking. And indeed, whoever, when examining a work of
art, should ask whether what the artist has expressed be
metaphysically and historically true or false, asks a
question that is without meaning and commits an error
analogous to his who should bring the airy images of the
fancy before the tribunal of morality: without meaning,
because the discrimination of true and false always
concerns an affirmation of reality, or a judgment, but it
cannot fall under the head of an image or of a pure
subject, which is not the subject of a judgment, since it is
without qualification or predicate. It is useless to object
that the individuality of the image cannot subsist without
reference to the universal, of which that image is the
individuation, because we do not here deny that the
universal, as the spirit of God, is everywhere and
animates all things with itself, but we deny that the
universal is rendered logically explicit and is thought in
the intuition. Useless also is the appeal to the principle of
the unity of the spirit, which is not broken, but on the
contrary strengthened by the clear distinction of fancy
from thought, because from the distinction comes
opposition, and from opposition concrete unity.
Ideality (as has also been called this character that
distinguishes the intuition from the concept, art from
philosophy and from history, from the affirmation of the
universal and from the perception or narration of what has
happened) is the intimate virtue of art: no sooner are
reflection and judgment developed from that ideality, than
art is dissipated and dies: it dies in the artist, who
becomes a critic; it dies in the contemplator, who changes
from an entranced enjoyer of art to a meditative observer
of life.
But the distinction of art from philosophy (taken widely
as including all thinking of the real) brings with it other
distinctions, among which that of art from myth occupies
the foremost place. For myth, to him who believes in it,
presents itself as the revelation and knowledge of reality
as opposed to unreality, — a reality that drives away other
beliefs as illusory or false. It can become art only for him
who no longer believes in it and avails himself of
mythology as a metaphor, of the austere world of the gods
as of a beautiful world, of God as of an image of
sublimity. Considered, then, in its genuine reality, in the
soul of the believer and not of the unbeliever, it is religion
and not a simple phantasm; and religion is philosophy,
philosophy in process of becoming, philosophy more or
less imperfect, but philosophy, as philosophy, is religion,
more or less purified and elaborated, in continuous
process of elaboration and purification, but religion or
thought of the Absolute or Eternal. Art lacks the thought
that is necessary ere it can become myth and religion, and
the faith that is born of thought; the artist neither believes
nor disbelieves in his image: he produces it.
And, for a different reason, the concept of art as intuition
excludes, on the other hand, the conception of art as the
production of classes and types, species and genera, or
again (as a great mathematician and philosopher had
occasion to say of music), as an exercise of unconscious
arithmetic; that is, it distinguishes art from the positive
sciences and from mathematics, in both of which appears
the conceptual form, though without realistic character, as
mere general representation or mere abstraction. But that
ideality which natural and mathematical science would
seem to assume, as opposed to the world of philosophy, of
religion and of history, and which would seem to
approximate it to art (and owing to which scientists and
mathematicians of our day are so ready to boast of
creating worlds, of fictiones, resembling the fictions and
figurations of the poets, even in their vocabulary), is
gained with the renunciation of concrete thought, by
means of generalisation and abstraction, which are
capricious, volitional decisions, practical acts, and, as
practical acts, extraneous and inimical to the world of art.
Thus it happens that art manifests much more repugnance
toward the positive and mathematical sciences than
toward philosophy, religion and history, because these
seem to it to be fellow-citizens of the same world of
theory or of knowledge, whereas those others repel it with
the roughness of the practical world toward
contemplation. Poetry and classification, and, worse still,
poetry and mathematics, appear to be as little in
agreement as fire and water: the esprit mathématique and
the esprit scientifique, the most declared enemies of the
esprit poétique; those periods in which the natural
sciences and mathematics prevail (for example, the
intellectualism of the eighteenth century) seem to be the
least fruitful in poetry.
And since this vindication of the alogical character of art
is, as I have said, the most difficult and important of the
negations included in the formula of art-intuition, the
theories that attempt to explain art as philosophy, as
religion, as history, or as science, and in a lesser degree as
mathematics, occupy the greater part of the history of
aesthetic science and are adorned with the names of the
greatest philosophers. Schelling and Hegel afford
examples of the identification or confusion of art with
religion and philosophy in the eighteenth century; Taine,
of its confusion with the natural sciences; the theories of
the French verists, of its confusion with historical and
documetary observation; the formalism of the
Herbartians, of its confusion with mathematics. But it
would be vain to seek pure examples of these errors in
any of these authors and in the others that might be
mentioned, because error is never pure, for if it were so, it