Croce's first philosophical essay--Is history an art or a science?--The
essence of art--History as the representation of reality, and
therefore, art--The distinction between art and science--A tentative
definition of history.
Croce's first philosophical essay is a short memoir, _La Storia ridotta
sotto il concetto generale dell' Arte_, which he read to the Accademia
Pontaniana of Naples in March, 1893. In his autobiographical notes,
Croce tells us that this memoir was sketched by him one evening in
February or March of the same year, "after a whole day of intense
meditation."[1] But the reader cannot help feeling that those few
pages are very far from being an improvisation; and this, not only
because of the ease with which the author finds his way among the
literature of his subject, but especially because one realizes that
only a discipline so constant and so severe as to become a kind of
second nature could give him that sure grasp of the essentials of his
problem, which he shows from the very beginning of his speculation.
The majority of historians and philologists, when they turn their
attention to what Croce calls the logic of their discipline, are apt to
trust themselves exclusively to their immediate experience of their
work, and to disregard the very obvious fact that an inquiry into the
general principles of a certain branch of knowledge is, and cannot
be anything but, philosophy: they are therefore either unwilling or
unable to follow the implications of that logic on to their ultimate
consequences, as this operation would inevitably lead them away from
their own safe and solid ground into a discussion of unfamiliar
concepts and ideas. They seem to perceive but dimly that the problems
of that logic have been intimately connected with the whole development
of philosophical thought from the Sophists to our day; and therefore
even when they go back to philosophical authorities in their treatment
of these problems, when they quote Plato or Aristotle, or Leibnitz or
Hegel, they are content with mere fragments, arbitrarily understood,
unconnected with the general body of thought from which they derive
their meaning. The result is, at best, a futile rediscovery of truths
and truisms which have their place in the history of thought, but are
meaningless in their modern context. An examination of the greatest
part of the methodological literature of the last fifty years, both in
Europe and in America, would easily bear out this contention: that it
is hard to find a more shallow and imcompetent philosophy than that of
the average historian and critic.
What saved Croce from the academic weakness which seems to be
congenital to this kind of lucubrations was, besides the native temper
of his mind, an instinctive realization of the true philosophical
import of the problems involved. The question, whether History is an
art or a science, had been a favourite one with the generation to which
Croce's masters belonged; and it was really threatening to become an
endless, insoluble one, since no attempt was ever made to solve it
by the only method which could give positive results, that is, by
an accurate definition of the concepts of both art and science. The
most common answer to it, and the one that most clearly proved the
confused state of mind of those who formulated it, was that history
was at the same time a science and an art. The traditional humanistic
view, which considered history as one of the arts, and to which the
inclusion of Clio in the college of the Muses bears witness, found but
little favour in a time which was entirely under the domination of the
pseudo-scientific philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and could therefore
hardly admit of any form of knowledge which was not scientific
knowledge. The third solution, history as a science, was in fact
the most usually accepted one, being but one aspect of that general
tendency of the age, superficial and uncritical, through which all
forms of knowledge were striving hard to assimilate themselves to the
mathematical and natural sciences. This tendency which was present
in all fields of philology, manifested itself in history either in
the attempt to transform history into sociology, and to substitute a
system of institutional schemes or of so-called general laws for the
actual historical processes, or in the raising of the usual canons and
criteria of historical method, that is, of a collection of maxims and
precepts for the proper handling of sources, documents, and monuments,
to the dignity of a supposititious science. It is characteristic of
Croce, that he did not directly attack the English and French and
Italian sociologism which was so popular in his day: to a mind which
had received its first logical training at the hands of a Thomistic
schoolmaster, and had been introduced to modern philosophy through
Labriola's Herbartism, the logic of the average sociologist was so
abhorrent in its barbarity, that it did not even afford him a starting
point for his own criticism. The fallacy of sociologism is made evident
in the course of the discussion, but rather by implication than through
a direct animadversion. He chose his own adversary among the exponents
of the other form of the same error, among the German critics, whose
ideas were more clearly defined and logically more consistent.
Their main position can be stated in a few words: history is a science
and not an art, because its aim is not to give æsthetic pleasure, but
knowledge. The premises of this formula are a hedonistic conception of
art, and the identification of all forms of knowledge with science:
that is, a too narrow definition of art, and a too broad definition of
science. Croce's demonstration takes the form of a rigorous syllogism:
he defines the concept of art and the concept of science, the two
definitions forming so to speak the two horns of a dilemma; history is
shown by its own definition to be included in the definition of art,
and the only remaining question is that of the distinction, within the
same concept, between art in the strict sense and history.
The most important part of this demonstration is that which concerns
art. Croce's object was to discover the nature of history, but his real
achievement in his first essay was that of stating the æsthetic problem
in its true terms. His opinions about history and about science were
destined to undergo many changes in the further development of his
thought; but his whole theory of æsthetics is already virtually present
in these few pages about art and the Beautiful.
"Art is an _activity_ aiming at the production of the Beautiful."[2]
A purely psychological doctrine of æsthetics, which considers not art
as an activity, but the objects of art as a collection of stimuli, a
doctrine of æsthetic appreciation rather than of æsthetic creation, of
the land that has flourished in Germany and in England during the last
twenty years, especially in the field of the graphic and plastic arts,
will therefore be incapable of even grasping that which is the specific
subject of æsthetics. But Croce does not lose his time in attacking
the psychologists. The error of their ways has its philosophical
expression in Sensualism and in Formalism, which he summarily dismisses
together with Rationalism or Abstract Idealism: the Beautiful as
pleasure, the Beautiful as a system of formal relations, the Beautiful
as abstractly one with the Good and the True. The fourth solution of
the problem of the Beautiful, which he accepts, is that of the Concrete
Idealism of Hegel and Hartmann: the Beautiful as _expression,_ as the
sensuous manifestation of the ideal. But Croce was guided by his Latin
moderation (and probably also helped by his, at the time, insufficient
understanding of German Idealism) to give to this formula not the
intellectualistic interpretation which rightly belongs to it, but the
very simple meaning of an adequate and efficacious representation of
reality. The difference between this conception of Art--as an activity
aiming at the representation of reality--and the one that we shall find
in Croce's later elaborations of his æsthetic theory, does not lie in
the conception itself, but in its context of general thought. Here he
is still working under the common-sense assumption of a double reality,
of being and of thought, and this explains why he still speaks of form
and content, and why he still admits of a category of Beauty of nature
side by side with artistic Beauty. Later, the relation between form
and content will transform itself into that of the æsthetic activity
with the other forms of spiritual activity; but even such a momentous
change in the foundations of his theory does but slightly impair the
substantial truth of the words in which he first expressed it: "An
object is either beautiful or ugly according to the category through
which we perceive it. Art is a category of apperception, and in art,
the whole of natural and human reality--which is either beautiful or
ugly according to its various aspects--becomes beautiful because it is
perceived as reality in general, which we want to see fully expressed.
Every character, or action, or object, entering into the world of art,
loses, artistically speaking, the qualifications it has in real life,
and is judged only inasmuch as art represents it with more or less
perfection. Caliban is a monster in reality, but no longer a monster
as an artistic creation."[3] As to natural Beauty, Croce observes
that it is not inanimate, as Hegel and his followers would have it,
but animated by the spirit of the beholder, and its contemplation is
therefore a kind of artistic creation:[4] but this observation, in
which the later doctrine is present in germ, is set forth timidly in
a note, and remains for the moment sterile and as if incapable able
of yielding its obvious logical results. If it were admitted that
history is a representation of reality, its inclusion in the concept
of art would be obvious. But the adverse contention is that history is
a scientific study of reality, or to use Bernheim's definition, the
science of the development of men in their activity as social beings.
Croce's answer is that history is not a science, because history is
constantly concerned with the exposition of particular facts, and not
with the formation of concepts, which is the proper sphere of science.
There may be a science or philosophy of history, investigating the
philosophical problems connected with the facts of history, but such
a science or philosophy, which cannot be distinguished as a separate
organism from the philosophy of reality as a whole, is not history.
History does not elaborate concepts, but reproduces reality in its
concreteness: it is therefore not science but art.
Sociology, on the other hand, which renounces the concreteness of
history in the quest for the general laws of human development,
is neither art nor science. When compared with the concepts or
laws of science, the laws of sociology appear as vague and empty
generalizations, and sometimes as mere pseudo-scientific enunciations
of contemporary social and political ideologies. The sociology which
Croce had in mind in his criticism was, in substance, because of the
fallacy of its logical premises, either inferior science or poor
philosophy; but because of the uncertainty of his own idea of the
relations between science and philosophy, it was easier for him to
reject it than to define it. His reaction was the instinctive one of
a sound logical organism against a mental hybrid. He was certain that
sociology, whatever else it might have been, was not history.
This part of Croce's argument is undoubtedly the weakest. His
conception of science was inadequate, and his discussion of the
relations of history with science suffered from this inadequacy: the
problem which he had attacked could not be solved at this stage of
his speculation. While his æsthetics was contained in germ in his
conception of art, his logic was not even adumbrated in his conception
of science. In fact, the only real function of the latter was to mark
the limits of the former: "In the presence of an object, human mind can
perform but two operations of knowledge. It can ask itself: what is
it?, and it can represent to itself that object in its concreteness.
It can wish to understand it, or merely to contemplate it. It can
submit it to a scientific elaboration, or to what we are wont to call
an artistic elaboration." "Either we make science, or we make art.
Whenever we assume the particular under the general, we make science;
whenever we represent the particular as such, we make art."[5]
This distinction is the old Platonic one between _logos_ and _mythos_;
a distinction that appears in one form or another in practically
every system of philosophy, but the true import of which has never
been completely grasped before Vico. From Vico Croce quotes in this
connection the following passage: "Metaphysics abstracts the mind from
the senses, the poetical faculty must submerge the whole mind in the
senses; metaphysics lifts itself above the universal, the poetical
faculty must plunge itself in the particulars."[6] This quotation
shows how decisive was Vico's influence in the determination of the
main theses of Croce's æsthetics: of which we already find here the
three fundamental ones, that is, the recognition of art, or the
æsthetic activity, as one of the fundamental forms of knowledge; the
distinction of the æsthetic activity from, and its opposition to, the
logical activity; and, finally, the exclusion of any other form of
knowledge besides the æsthetic and the logical, which exhausts the
whole of man's theoretical activity.
The rest of this particular discussion is not as fruitful or as
interesting. Having included history in the concept of art, Croce
proceeds to draw a distinction between art in the strict sense, which
is a representation of imaginary or merely possible reality, and
history, which represents that portion of reality which has actually
happened. His final definition of history is: "That kind of artistic
production the object of which is to represent that which has really
happened."[7] The value of this definition is what we might call a
value of reaction against the pseudo-scientific sociology of his day:
it consists in the emphasis laid on the concreteness and individuality
of historical processes, against the void schematism of general laws.
But by introducing the distinction between the possible and the real,
Croce had in fact recognized the presence of a conceptual element in
history--a conceptual element totally different from the concepts
of the sciences, which were all that he could then see outside the
æsthetic activity in human knowledge. In a preface to a reprint of his
early philosophical essays, written twenty-five years later, Croce
explained the conditions which prevented him from perceiving the new
problem at once, in a page of admirable self-criticism: "Why did I not
perceive it? Because I was full of the first truth which I had found,
and for the moment I did not feel any other need: I had violently
rejected the weight of sensism and sociologism, and I could breathe.
And in my culture at that time the impulses towards that other need
were lacking; because neither my scholastic logic nor Labriola's
Herbartism opened my mind to a distinction between the concepts of the
sciences and the speculative concept; and De Sanctis, entirely given
to the criticism of poetry, gave little attention to logical problems.
The authority of my first masters of philosophy induced me, in regard
to the problems which I had not experienced in myself, to content
myself with temporary formulas and solutions, which attracted me
through some aspects of truth, and to be satisfied with an imagination
of the Ideal above the real, and of the world of Concepts above the
world of representations. By this separation, by this collocation in
the Empyrean, it seemed to me that I could better attest my reverence
for concepts and ideals, which positivists and evolutionists were
dragging in the mud, or lowering to the status of superstitions and
hallucinations. Now, running again through my pages, it is not
possible for me to think those transcendental doctrines again, not
because I thought them in the past, and what is past is past, but, on
the contrary, because I did not truly think them even then, but only
received them or imagined them, so that what I can think now is only
the way in which, then, I was brought to imagine them, and to believe
that I thought them."[8]
[Footnote 1: _Contributo_, p. 32.]
[Footnote 2: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 8.]
[Footnote 3: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 14.]
[Footnote 4: _Primi Saggi,_ p. 140.]
[Footnote 5: _Primi Saggi_, p. 23.]
[Footnote 6: _Primi Saggi_, p. 230.]
[Footnote 7: _Primi Saggi_, p. 36.]
[Footnote 8: _Primi Saggi_, pp. XI-XII.]