From the Tree to the Labyrinth

16

The Definitions in Croce’s Aesthetic

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.

1. 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 of the world, our encounters with other people and nature—belongs to the territory of the guazzabuglio.

2. 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.

3. 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 and from the gamble of conjecture?

Once more, Croce succumbs to the fascination of the hotchpotch, but he does not ask himself, for instance, what are the probabilities that a perception or a definition may be, if not true, at least acceptable—and this despite the fact that, starting with the Aesthetic, he reserved this very concern for history, which, as knowledge of individual facts, neither unreal nor fantastic, must nevertheless resort to conjectures, suppositions, probabilities (p. 32).

4. Prepared to compromise on the hotchpotch as far as conceptual knowledge goes, the Croce of the Aesthetic seems determined not to give ground as far as intuition is concerned. Intuition is always without a conceptual component; at most it may employ concepts as the subject of artistic expression—but in that case “They were, indeed, once concepts, but have now become simply components of intuitions” (p. 2).

This explains why the Croce of the Aesthetic declares war on prescriptive rules: no doubt out of the need to distance himself from the preceding tradition, but in the end throwing out the baby with the bath water. In combating the rules, whether they are rhetorical rules, the classification of literature into genres, or the phenomenology of “styles,” Croce forgets that, in the hotchpotch of conjecture, we make ample use of formulas such as “military bearing” or “sickly complexion,” without these formulas exhausting or reducing the perception we may have of an individual in his or her irreducible peculiarity. If I say: “Yesterday I met the minister’s new assistant, I was expecting some kind of seminarist, but he looks more like a tennis player,” it does not imply pigeonholing a new experience in terms of a stereotype; on the contrary, it means using clichés to underline its novelty. In the same way, classifying something as a historical novel or a metaphor defines in the first case the expectations we bring to the work (expectations that may in fact be unexpectedly thwarted), and in the second the umpteenth but completely original variation on a rhetorical schema that has assumed a wide variety of forms over the centuries. While it is undeniable that “every true work of art has violated an established genre” (p. 41), the very fact that Croce realizes it merely highlights the role played by his awareness of the genre and his expectations and suspicions of it in generating his surprise and his positive judgment of taste. Much of Ariosto’s irony and his humor would be lost if, in his Orlando Furioso, he had not been playing fast and loose with the genre of the chivalric epic.

“The amount of damage wreaked by these [rhetorical] distinctions” (p. 77) is something that we all know, and maybe in 1902 there was some point in combating the facile rhetoric taught in Episcopal seminaries. But how much harm Croce did by broadcasting his scorn for rhetoric (with a rhetorical ability and a gift for polemical oversimplification that entranced his readers) has not perhaps been sufficiently realized. See, for instance, the argument against the definition of metaphor as “a word used in place of the literally correct one” (p. 77). The definition is certainly inadequate, but Croce is not in the least concerned with the problem—which still exercises not ignoble minds—of defining what really happens, not merely to language but to our cognitive structures themselves, when we use a trope. He simply comments: “And why give oneself the trouble of substituting a different word in place of the literally correct one and of taking the longer and worse way when the shorter and better is known to us? Perhaps because, as it is commonly said, the literal word, in certain cases, is not as expressive as the supposed nonliteral or metaphorical word? But if this is the case, the metaphor just is in this event the ‘literal’ word; and that which is usually called ‘literal,’ if it were used in this case, would be less expressive and therefore wholly improper” (p. 77). “Similar observations of elementary common sense,” however, are precisely that, elementary, and, instead of addressing the question, repeat it back as the answer. We are all aware that, when Dante says “conobbi il tremolar della marina” (“I recognized the trembling of the sea”), he is using a most felicitous expression, but the problem is to explain what made both Dante’s text and the entire patrimony of the language take a quantum leap, when the new expression is adjudged “perfectly proper” and takes the place of another whose meaning, however, is not cancelled. To address problems like these is the least we can expect of an aesthetics that claims at the same time to be a general linguistics.

It should be said in Croce’s defense that all his polemical exaggerations are always tempered with a great deal of common sense. Thus, having condemned the notion of literary genres, he is prepared to admit their practical utility. While such “groupings” retain their usefulness as criteria for classifying books in a library, they are also useful for selecting certain books and reading them with a certain attitude of mind—the attitude that will allow Croce to define as “tragic” in Torquato Tasso “the vital impulse and joie de vivre that at times find their issue in suffering and death and are thereby redeemed.” What’s more, the genres thrown out the door come back in again through the window when Croce finds himself having to explain how an architectural work, whose practical intentions no one can deny, can produce an aesthetic effect: all the artist has to do is to make “the destination of the object that is to serve a practical end enter as material for his aesthetic intuition and external expression. He has no need to add anything to the object in order to make it an instrument for aesthetics impressions: it will be such if perfectly adapted to its purposes” (p. 113). Excellently put: but why not apply the principle to someone proposing to produce a chivalric epic, a seascape, or a madrigal?

As for rhetoric, Croce is the first to see in its classifications a way of identifying a “family likeness” (a fine pre-Wittgensteinian expression)—resemblances, in other words, which reveal spiritual relationships between artists. It is by considering these procedural similarities that we can confer a minimum of legitimacy on translations, “not insofar as they are reproductions (which it would be useless to attempt) of the original expressions, but insofar as they are productions of expressions which resemble their originals more or less closely” (p. 81).

5. More embarrassing is the discourse Croce broaches in chapter 6 of the Aesthetic, devoted to the difference between theoretical activity and practical activity, in which the incredible proposition is announced whereby the intuition-expression of art is entirely contained in its inner elaboration, while its technical and material exteriorization, in marble, on canvas, in emitted vocal sounds, is totally accessory and inessential, having as its only end the “conservation and reproduction” of the original inner illumination (p. 108). Just a minute! Isn’t this the same author who a hundred pages earlier had declared “One often hears people claim to have in their heads many important thoughts but not to be able to express them. But the truth is that if they truly had them, they would have coined them in so many ringing words” (p. 9)? Of course, Croce can tell us that putting those thoughts into concrete words is no more than an empirical necessity, a stenographic device, so to speak, for the record, to let him or another judge know that the thoughts really were there. But what are we to say of the famous tenor who one night, after having a perfect internal intuition of a magnificent high C, is hooted off the stage by the gallery merely because he had tried to externalize it, just for the record, only to have his vocal cords fail him? Who knows his craft but has a trembling hand, as Dante put it (Paradiso, XIII, 78). The fact is that what Croce says does not correspond to what we know from the practice of other artists, who have made sketch after sketch trying to come up with the definitive image, or who have struggled with a set square and a pair of compasses to produce a perfect vanishing point.

On this point, however, Croce’s convictions are unfortunately adamant and seem to spring from an extremely limited familiarity with the arts, not only in the sense of his never having practiced one, but also in the sense that he never had much interest in what artists actually did. Croce condemns as superficial the observation that “the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting and sketching, writing and composing,” because artists “in fact, do not make strokes of the brush without first having seen [the work] by means of the imagination” (p. 114). But if the word “reality” has any meaning in Croce’s system, actual artists in fact never tire of recounting how the consistency of the material stimulated their imaginations, and it is only when reciting their rough drafts aloud that some poets find the clue that leads them to change the rhythm and come up with the right word. Croce, however, states, in La poesia, that poets abhor the empirical externalization of their inner intuitions to the point that are reluctant to recite their poems out loud. Which is statistically inaccurate as far as the poets I know are concerned.

In his Breviario d’estetica Croce demonstrates the inessential nature of the technical aspects of art, citing the cases of very great painters who have used colors that faded over time; but in so doing he confuses artistic technique with the science of materials. In the Aesthetic there is an interesting page describing the efforts of a poet who tries out different words and phrases in search of “an expression for an impression he feels, or of which he has a presentiment” (p. 132); but only a few pages earlier he had said that artists whose expression is still unformed apply an experimental brushstroke “not to externalize their expressions (which do not then exist), but as if to try out and to have a simple point of support” or as a “heuristic device” (p. 114). What Croce calls a “point of support” is like the hotchpotch of our everyday perception: it’s all we have. But what common sense recognizes as everything, for philosophy becomes nothing, with the minor inconvenience that everything that’s left becomes impalpable.

I believe it can be pacifically agreed that in these pages Croce affirms the exact contrary of the truth, if the truth is what common sense concedes in the light of a thousand recorded experiences. I am not sufficiently familiar with the entirety of his works to know whether Croce ever commented on the sonnet in which Michelangelo reminds us that: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto / c’un marmo solo in sé non conconscriva / col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva / la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto” [“The best of artists does not have any concept / that a single [block of] marble does not encompass / with its excess, and only to that [concept] arrives / the hand that obeys the intellect”]. If he read it, he forgot it, on purpose. Because what Michelangelo is telling us here is that the artist finds his intuition-expression in a dialogue with his materials, with their vein, their bias, the possibilities they offer. Indeed Michelangelo goes still further, for the sake of hyperbole: the statue is already present in the marble, and all the artist has to do is to remove the excess that conceals it.

And here we have Croce, as it were, contradicting Michelangelo, speaking of the “piece of marble that embodies the statue of Moses and of the piece of coloured wood embodying the Transfiguration” (p. 112, my emphasis). The citation leaves no room for doubt: what we consider works of art (over whose deterioration, restoration, counterfeiting ,or theft we agonize) are merely the containers of the only, unique, true (and at this point unattainable) works that existed in the completely inward intuitions of their authors. Elsewhere, speaking of how the judgment of taste retraces the genesis of the original intuition, Croce will refer to these physical embodiments as mere “signs,” instruments practically didactic in nature that facilitate the process of reconstruction. Not realizing that, for a philosopher reluctant to acknowledge the social existence of systems of signs, with their own laws and definable unities, who sees instead every expressive act as a unicum in which the language is, as it were, reborn as though for the first time, a sign ought not be something negligible, and the relationship between sign and intuition should be understood to be less accidental and external.

Croce tells us that that block of marble and that wooden panel are said to be beautiful only as a metaphor. Then it occurs to him that we really are using a metaphor when we say the score that contains Mozart’s Don Giovanni is beautiful, and he recognizes that the first metaphor is more immediate than the second. But, for an author who has refused to define metaphor, the solution leaves something to be desired. What does this difference in immediateness between metaphors conceal? And what is the status of the Don Giovanni contained in the score? Is it something that exists in the realm of sound (and therefore physically externalized and externalizable) or is it the original intuition that Mozart could even have refused to perform? And why does it continue to be performed today, rather than simply evoked by reading the score, as Croce believes dramatic works should be read, instead of seeing them externalized on the stage?

It seems clear that what Croce is articulating (encouraged by his lack of interest in everything that goes by the name of “nature,” and dominated by his humanistic education with its verbo-centric model, whereby beauty is inevitably defined with reference to verbal poetry) is a complex paralogism whose phases it will be useful to follow.

(i) First of all he is aware that there exist volatile expressions (in the sense in which verba volant [“words fly away”] and do not congeal in mid-air as Rabelais put it) and permanent expressions, such as statues or drawings. The difference is so evident that humankind has developed means by which to make the first permanent, from writing to magnetic tapes—authentic physical vehicles for the recording of previous expressions in the realm of sound.

(ii) From this correct empirical observation he draws the erroneous conclusion that volatile expressions are not material facts, as if writing and recordings did not record sounds. His verbal experience must have made him think of poets who mouth their poems to themselves, thinking of the sound they could give them. But they do so because they have already had experience of what sounds they could produce, so that an experimental psychologist (a category Croce didn’t have much time for) might argue that, when we think of Pavarotti hitting a high C, our organs of phonation, however imperceptibly, imitate the externalization we are thinking of. When we intuit, what we intuit are externalizations; when we think, we do not think outside the body but with the body. Croce is sufficiently well aware of this to have devoted a rather memorable passage to the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which he says that words on the page evoke not just thoughts but auditory, tactile, and thermal sensations. If Michelangelo had been born blind, he could never have “intuited” his Moses.

(iii) Beguiled by his (empirical) experience of discourses that take place in the mind (of which, however, we become fully aware only when they have been “minted in the currency of words”—and the physical metaphor of coining is worth noting), Croce makes this possibility into an absolute and extends it to the arts of permanence. Of course, we can all imagine a sculptor who, away from his workshop, imagines down to the tiniest details the statue he could produce with his chisel. But he can do so only because he has sweated over marble before, because he has hammered away in his shop; he can do so in the same way anyone can intuit that if they swallow a cube of ice they will feel a pain in the middle of their forehead, because they recall having already felt it under similar circumstances. Without the memory of our previous natural experiences we can intuit nothing, and someone who has never smelled a verbena can never intuit the scent of a verbena, just as someone born blind can never intuit what a dolce color d’orïental zaffiro (“sweet color of an oriental sapphire” [Dante, Purgatory, I, 13]) might be.

When we consider these paradoxes we understand why the generations that came after Croce were fascinated by alternative theories: by Pareyson’s appeal to the fundamental importance of the materials in the genesis of a work of art, by Anceschi’s concern for the artist’s poetics, by Dorfles and Formaggio’s emphasis on artistic techniques, by Morpurgo Tagliabue’s return to the hoary concepts of style and rhetorical apparatus, by Della Volpe’s insistence on the “rational” moment in the artistic process, not to mention the liberation that came with reading Dewey’s Art as Experience, in which the fullness of naturalistic empiricism is revalued. The question was what was the place of “the philosophy of the four words” (the polemical characterization is Gentile’s) within that vital flux to which Croce was after all so attentive.³ How to do justice to Croce himself, in whom there was constantly “a hiatus, as it were, a hidden conflict between his extremely detailed analysis of vast sectors of human experience and culture, and his ‘system.’… On the one hand, part and parcel of the precise discussion of cultural data and experience, we find ‘concepts,’ extremely ‘impure’ if you will, but precious if we are to understand, in other words, connect and clarify, the multiple forms taken by human action and history. On the other, a few extremely abstract ideas, whose development is affirmed rather than demonstrated” (Garin 1966: 2:1315).

6. Perhaps, however, it is the unresolved persistence of this gap that accounts for the influence Croce’s works have enjoyed: readers grasped the abstractness of the few ideas, but they were attracted to them because they saw them as the logical conclusion of the concrete analysis, admirable for its common sense, clarity, and penetration. In the hotchpotch the readers recognized both the embarrassments of their own personal experience and their longing for an uncontaminated idea of beauty, truth, goodness, and the useful itself—values that all the metaphysical systems so abhorred by Croce had defined in their hyperuranic spiritual nature, without descending to compromise with that corporality that is mere envelope, mortal coil, the prison of the soul. In Croce they saw both the confirmation of the inevitable and the promise of the desirable, interpreting as systematic mediation what was instead an unresolved contradiction.

These readers were delighted to be told that art was fundamentally what they were hoping it was, and non-art what they—perturbed and disturbed—could witness all around them. What exactly pure forms were they did not know, but they were quick to embrace a judgment of taste such as that on Proust: “one feels that what is dominant in the author’s soul is a rather perverse sensual eroticism, an eroticism that already permeates his eagerness to relive the sensations of a distant past. But this state of mind does not achieve clarity in a lyric motif or a poetic form, as occurs instead in the better works of the less complicated but more inspired Maupassant” (“Postille” to La poesia). Of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, Croce asserts “the critics stubbornly continue to analyze and discuss it as an inspired and poetically successful novel,” whereas all it is “from one end to the other, is a novel of moral exhortation, measured and conducted with a firm eye” (La poesia, VII). And, if I may be forgiven the invidious comparison (the two texts after all display certain similarities), when in 1937, one year after the appearance of La poesia, a much lesser writer attempted to justify his Philistine parody of Manzoni, after praising the author’s workmanship in I promessi sposi (“ah! what a genius he was!”), he adduced the following alibi for the sacrilege he was about to commit: “The truth is this: that in Manzoni the only thing missing is the poet.… Is there a single episode, a character, a personage that remains impressed on my mind with the same ever purer and more glittering clarity that characterizes the immortal creations of art? Well, if I must be sincere, I have to reply in the negative” (Da Verona 1937: viii–xiii).

The thought occurs to us that, instead of Croce creating a readership of Croceans, a readership that already existed, with its own myths and its own unshakable uncertainties regarding the good and the beautiful, adopted him as their spokesperson.

For this readership (and for our good fortune) Croce was then obliged (in La poesia) to open up a no man’s land (no man’s and everyman’s), where hotchpotch and purity could live together in peace and reconciliation, a space he called literature. To this space Croce could allocate the entertainments composed by the likes of Dumas and Poe, whom he basically enjoyed, as well as the works of authors he did not relish, like Horace and Manzoni. “Literature” is not a spiritual form, it is a part of civility and good manners, it is the realm of prose and civil conversation.

And this is the region from Croce writes. Why are Croce’s readers not aware of the unresolved contradiction, why do they see a well-knit system where things were falling apart? Because Croce is a masterly writer. The rhythm, the subtle dosage of sarcasm and pacific reflection, the perfection of his periodic sentences, make everything he thinks or says persuasive. When he says something, he says it so well, that, being said so well, it is unthinkable that it shouldn’t also be true. Croce, the great master of oratory and style, succeeds in convincing us of the existence of Poetry (incorporeal and angelified as he understands it) through a corporeal, courtly, harmonious example of Literature.⁴

A reworking of a book review, written for La rivista dei libri in October 1991, of the new edition of Croce’s Estetica published in 1990 by Adelphi. The essay was republished in Eco (1997) with the title “Croce e l’intuizione” (but it was not included in the English translation of that work, Kant and the Platypus [Eco 2000]). [Translator’s note: Page references to Croce’s Estetica in this chapter are to the English translation by Colin Lyas (Croce 1992).]

1. The work was first published by Sandron in 1902 (when Croce was thirty-five years old) and represented the point of arrival of a study begun in 1898. After an initial reprint by Sandron in 1904, subsequent editions were published by Laterza, with the ninth edition—the last in the author’s lifetime—appearing in 1950. For three of these reprintings, Croce wrote new prefaces (dated November 1907, September 1921, and January 1941) pointing out corrections that he had made in the text (see Maggi 1989) to bring it into line with the subsequent development of his thought (his Logica, Filosofia della pratica, Teoria e storia della storiografia, and, naturally, his Breviario d’estetica, Aesthetica in nuce, Problemi di estetica, Nuovi saggi di estetica, and La poesia). Since the author did not make any changes after the 1941 edition, we must presume that he still considered it current at mid-century. The 1941 ne varietur is the text reprinted by Adelphi and discussed in what follows.

2. The reader is referred to De Mauro (1965: ch. IV).

3. [Translator’s note: This characterization of Croce’s philosophy is that of fellow Italian Idealist and sometime collaborator Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). The four words in question were aesthetics, logic, economics, and ethics.]

4. [Translator’s note: In his criticism Croce opposes poesia (= poetry), the term he applies to inspired art, and non-poesia (= non-poetry), which he also he calls allotria (= extraneous matter, padding), struttura, or simply, with negative implications, letteratura (= literature or intellectual confectionery). Croce’s dichotomy is famously hard on the structural elements in that most structured of works, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Croce and his disciples dominated Italian literary criticism in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.]