The four grades of spiritual activity--Intuition and conceptual
knowledge--The intuitive consciousness--The limits of intuitive
knowledge--Identifications of intuition and expression--Art as
expression: content and form--Language as expression; the reality of
words--Croce's use of the word intuition--The lyrical character of the
pure intuition.
The whole cycle of the philosophy of mind exhausts itself in the
study of the four fundamental forms of human activity, the concepts
of which we have seen slowly developing through the mazes of Croce's
early speculations: the æsthetic, the logic, the economic and the
ethic; of the distinction and the unity of æsthetic and logic in the
theoretical activity, or knowledge, and of economic and ethic in the
practical activity, or action; and finally of the relations between
the theoretical and the practical, or knowledge and action. This may
be said to be the positive aspect of Croce's philosophy: the negative
aspect consists in the criticism and exclusion of any other form of
activity from the system of the human spirit, and of that which is not
the spirit, or nature, from the system of reality.
To the four forms or grades of spiritual activity, correspond four
philosophical sciences: Æsthetics, Logic, Economics, and Ethics.
Each of them can be said to be the _organum_ of the particular form
of activity which it studies; the affirmation of that sphere of
consciousness which is proper to it, and of its relations to the other
forms. Each of them is therefore related to the others in the same
way as the various forms of activity are related to each other. They
might be defined as the projection on the plane of logic of the whole
system of human activity, that is, of the whole of reality. They derive
their intrinsic validity from this perfect coincidence of their several
objects with the only conceivable aspects of reality.
We shall in this and in the following chapters attempt to fill in with
the strictly necessary detail this very ample frame. But we can already
point to the idealistic character of such a philosophy resulting from
its method, which is that of the testimony of consciousness, as opposed
to the naturalistic or psychologic method of indirect observation; from
its object, which is the human spirit or mind in the fulness of its
determinations; and from the exclusion of any aspect of reality which
is not immanent in consciousness, that is, both of the naturally and
the supernaturally transcendent. As against another kind of idealism,
of which the typical example is Platonic transcendentalism, Croce's
idealism is realistic and immanentistic: the task of the philosophy of
mind is to discover the immanent logic of reality. But against current
realism, which considers mind as the mere spectator and observer of
external or natural reality, it asserts the identity of reality and
consciousness, which is the basic position of all idealism.
There are two forms of knowledge: intuitive (or æsthetic) and
conceptual (or logical). Intuition is the knowledge of the individual
or particular; the concept is the knowledge of the universal. This
distinction, as we have already seen, corresponds roughly to the old
classical distinction of _mythos_ and _logos_, to Vico's definitions
of poetry and metaphysics, and to the new meaning given by Baumgarten
to the old antithesis of _aisthēta_ and _noēta_. Let us quote Vico
again: "Men first feel without perceiving, then they perceive and are
perturbed and moved; finally they reflect with pure mind." Here we have
three successive grades, of which the first is mere sensation, the
lower limit of mental activity; the second is intuition; the third,
concept. For Vico, the second grade is identical with Poetry, and the
science of this form of knowledge, which we call Æsthetics, he called
Poetic Logic, the science of poetry as "the first operation of the
human mind." Vico's discovery consists in this definition of Poetry
(and Art), not as a casual, capricious, lateral form of spiritual
activity, but as the first and necessary grade of knowledge, as an
essential function of the mind. But Vico's thought was clothed in what
we might well call a mythological form: the various grades of spiritual
activity were presented by him as successive stages or epochs in the
history of mankind; and the inter-relation of the various grades, as
the actual law of the development of human society. Croce unravelled
Vico's philosophy, or ideal history, history of the mind, from Vico's
concrete, sociological history, and the result was this new Æsthetics
which is at the same time a science of the first grade of knowledge,
and of art and language.
Of the reality of intuitive, as distinct from reflected knowledge, we
have constant evidence in our immediate experience. If I examine my
own consciousness, at any particular moment, I find it crowded with
_things I know_, as, now, this room in which I am writing, the piano
that is open before me, the flowers in a little basket, blue fragments
of sky and green branches washed by the recent rain swaying in the
clear sunlight, the shrill voice of a child from the road, the light
steps of a girl moving about the house. I am not conscious of all
these intuitions at once: I write, and I distinctly _know_ this white
paper only, and the black signs I am tracing, the pen guided by my
hand, and the edges of a few books on my table: all the rest has faded
away into a blurred, fused intuition, the intuition of an atmosphere,
composed of mere shreds and shadows of the colours and sounds of which
I was so distinctly conscious but one minute ago. But now I put down
my pen again, and I look at the piano; and I let my mind wander away,
from what I see to what I remember or imagine: the fair-headed figure
playing this morning Franck's Prelude, Choral and Fugue, the rapid and
sure movements of the fingers on the white and black keys, a vague
image of the solemn and passionate music, memories of distant days,
a sudden rush of obscure fantasies, evoked by the actual playing,
and still lingering in the recesses of my mind, returning now with
a fragment of a melody, with a succession of triumphant chords. And
again, I look beyond the window, and the little square of green and
blue expands itself into the vast valley beyond, screened from my view
by these few trees clustering around the house, and yet mysteriously
present to my inner eye: I see a little company of riders cantering
along a shaded lane, coming out in an open meadow surrounded by low,
thick-wooded hills; the sun sets in a pale purple sky, and I hear the
tramping of the slow, heavy hoofs, as the horses find their way back
through the woods, through a darkness much more opaque and solid than
that of the remote twilight, still visible above the highest branches,
animated by the first faint glittering of a star. And the woods are
full of a myriad small breathing and stirring noises, of the sense of
the deep surging inhuman life of trees and shrubs, of the penetrating
scent of the rich damp earth, of decaying wood, of fallen leaves.
And now, I suddenly shut myself out of this world of perceptions and
imaginations, or rather I keep them all before me, but not because
of the immediate, individual interest I have in each of them. I try
to extract the common, the universal element of which I suspect the
existence not beyond but within them. I renounce all particular
intuitions for the concept of intuition. I am no longer an image-making
mind, no longer engaged in this elementary or "first" operation of
the human mind, but I have passed on to a different, and manifestly a
"secondary" plane of mental activity, since it would be impossible for
me to root my thinking anywhere but on the soil of my intuitions.
What, then, is intuition? Clearly it is not the mere sensation, the
formless matter which the mind cannot grasp in itself, as mere matter,
but possesses only by imposing its form on it. Without matter no human
knowledge or activity is possible, but matter is, within ourselves, the
animal element, that which is brutal and impulsive, not the spiritual
domain, which is humanity. Matter conquered by form gives place to
the concrete form. Matter, or content, is what differentiates one
intuition from another; the form is constant, and the form is the
spiritual activity. In this way we set the lower limit of intuitive
knowledge, and we recognize its characters of awareness and activity:
an intuition is not that which presents itself to me, but that which
I make my own, by giving form to it. It may be an actual perception,
but the distinction between that which is real and that which is
imaginary is not an intuitive, but a logical or intellectual one;
the knowledge of things which I do not perceive, but only remember,
or even only create with my imagination belongs to the same class,
partakes of the same formal character. Space and time, which have more
than once been considered as intuitions, are in reality categories
of an intellectual order: they may be found in intuitions, as other
intellectual elements are found, but as ingredients and not as
necessary elements, _materialiter_ and not _formaliter_. In relation to
the usual psychological concepts of association and representation, it
can be said that an intuition is an association, when by that word we
mean an active mental synthesis, and not a mechanical juxtaposition of
abstract sensations; and that it is a representation, not as a complex
sensation, but as a spiritual elaboration of the sensation.
The upper limit of intuitive knowledge is given by reflected, or
intellectual, or logical knowledge, or whatever we may call that
which is no longer knowledge of the individual, of things, but of the
universal, of relations among things, of concepts. Intuitive knowledge
is independent of intellectual knowledge, as it is possible to form
intuitions without forming concepts; in the examples which I have
given in the preceding paragraph, practically all the intuitions are
pure intuitions, in the sense that they do not contain any logical
ingredients. But even when such are found, they appear as mere
intuitions, and not as concepts: as, for instance, Hamlet's philosophy,
which I do not read as a help towards the understanding of metaphysical
problems, but as a characterization of an imaginery individual. On the
other hand, logical knowledge is founded on intuitions, presupposes
the world of intuitions as its matter or content. The relation between
æsthetic and logical knowledge is one of grade or development: the
former stands by itself, rests directly on that which is not yet spirit
or form, is the first grade of spiritual or human activity; the latter
gives a further spiritual elaboration to the intuitive material.
This relationship, to which we shall return later, is the typical
process of Croce's own logic, the logic of spiritual or mental grades,
which he substitutes throughout his system for the naturalistic or
transcendental logic of his early masters.
A further step in the deduction of the concept of intuitive or æsthetic
knowledge, is made by identifying intuition with expression. Given the
active and conscious character of intuition, we are already prepared to
admit that every true intuition is at the same time an expression; that
which cannot objectify itself into an expression is nothing but mere
sensation. The mind does not actually intuit except by doing, forming,
and expressing. We must not think only of verbal expressions: there
are intuitions which cannot be expressed by words, but only by sounds
or lines or colours. But in any case the two words are interchangeable:
what really exists in our spirit is only what we can express. It is
only when we can express ourselves, that we are conscious of actually
possessing, that is, of having actually formed, our intuitions. It is
impossible to distinguish the expression from the intuition because
they are not two but one.
This identification runs counter to a number of very common and very
dear delusions: we constantly imagine that the difference between
ourselves and a great painter or a great poet does not consist in the
power of seeing and feeling, but in a supposed gift of merely external
expression; and again, we credit ourselves with a number of thoughts
and images, which we might express if we only wished to. The easiest
way to free ourselves of such delusions is to try to express whatever
it seems to us that we possess: it becomes then apparent that our
pictorial or poetical intuitions are really mere fragments, or echoes,
of intuitions; are, in fact, not more than that which we succeed in
expressing. It must however be borne in mind that we give here to the
word expression a purely mental or spiritual significance: we mean by
it the image that we form in our mind, and of which the painting or the
poem, as objects, are the material extrinsications. It requires but
little reflection to realize that there is no painting or poem--there
is no word that we utter--unless it be a mere _flatus vocis_, which
has not been preceded in our mind by an internal image, which is the
true expression.
The reader will have remarked that, in order to give examples of
intuitive knowledge, we have now had recourse to poetry and to
painting. The fact is that there is no difference between intuitive
knowledge, or expression, and art, except a purely extensive and
empirical one: that is, we call a poet or an artist a man who possesses
this expressive power in a higher degree than the rest of mankind;
we call a poem or a work of art an expression which is fuller, more
complex, more elaborate, than those which are the product of our
common intuitive activity, mere waves of the continuous stream of
spiritual life, in which they are constantly interrupted by and mixed
with reflections and volitions, with logical and practical facts. The
difference between the genius and the common man, in the æsthetic as
well as in the other spheres of human activity, is a quantitative,
not a qualitative one. Art is not a peculiar spiritual function, and
therefore a closed circle to which none but the elect are admitted: the
artist appeals to the intuitive man in each of us, in a language of
which every human mind finds the key within itself.
The definition of art as expression emphasizes the creative and formal
character of art; and its immediate consequence is the identification
of form and content, that is, the solution of one of the oldest and
most confused of æsthetic problems. Art is form, not in the technical
or formalistic sense, but in the meaning which we have given to the
word when discussing the relation between sensation and intuition; and
the content of a particular work of art cannot be abstracted from the
work itself as something that existed before it, and to which a form
has been added from outside. There is no content, in art, which is not
the content of a particular form, that is, that which has ceased to
exist as a possible content, and has transformed itself into a definite
form. This conception of the relations of form and content implies
also either a new interpretation, or the repudiation, of the theory
of art as the imitation of nature, meaningless in a mechanical sense,
true, and synonymous with the theory of intuition, in a creative and
formative sense. Through the same critical process, all discussions of
the relations between art and the senses appear as being founded on a
confusion between that which is still beyond the limit of spiritual
activity, the sensation or impression, and the actual æsthetic
elaboration, which begins only when the mind becomes aware of the
impression that has reached it through the channel of the senses.
We have mentioned, in connection with the identification of intuition
and expression, the fact that every word that we utter is constantly
preceded by an internal image; which is as much as saying that
language is a perpetual spiritual creation, on the same plane as all
our other expressions, and as art. We are accustomed to seeing dead
words and syllables in grammars and dictionaries, and we consider
them as something external, as a kind of instrument that we use and
accommodate to this and that purpose. But words that grammarians
study, through a naturalistic process, as independent elements of
the linguistic organism, are really alive and full of their meaning
only in the active context of speech. The reality of words is only in
the individual spirit that speaks, and every word is new every time
that it is employed because it expresses that particular, individual
moment of spiritual activity, which cannot be the same as any other
one. Philologists have been divided on the question of the origin of
language for centuries, some finding it in the logical activity, others
in a system of mechanical symbols and conventions, a few admitting the
conception of language as a pure æsthetic creation only for a mythic,
primitive period, which is succeeded in the history of every language
by a period of development by convention and association. But, as in
all other branches of spiritual activity, it is here impossible to draw
a distinction between the problem of the origins and the problem of
the nature of language: linguistic expressions have fixed themselves
in the course of centuries and stand before us as a body of language,
as a reality independent of the individual activity that produces the
particular expressions; this is what prevents us from recognizing in
the actual linguistic facts the same creative energy that formed the
first words uttered by man.
In this reduction of the philosophy of language to æsthetics, Croce
again follows Vico, who professed to have found the true origins
of languages in the principles of poetry, who first asserted the
functional identity of language and poetry. This theory, however,
seems to clash with the existence of what we might call the implicit
conceptuality of language, of which we are constantly made aware by our
grammatical categories. The fact is that the relation between language
and concept is the same as between intuition and concept: that is, on
one side, language is the material of our reflected thought, and it
would be impossible for the reflection to begin without or before the
language; but, on the other hand, the concepts appear in language not
as forms but as matter. In other words, to speak it is not necessary
to think logically, but it is impossible to think logically without
speaking. The grammatical categories are not real elements of language,
but products of abstraction, of a purely practical character, of the
kind that we shall soon have to examine in the rhetoric of the arts.
What may help us, in thus conceiving of the active and intuitive
character of language, is a comparison with other classes of expressive
facts. When we speak of musical or pictorial language, we are aware
that we are using mere metaphors for the purpose of collecting certain
general characteristics which are common to some of these facts. The
various musical grammars, the rules of harmony or of orchestration, are
nothing but summaries of abstractions: in the presence of a certain
music, or of a certain picture, we cannot forget the principle that no
expression can give birth to a new expression without first undergoing
a new creative process. And this is as true of the highest forms of
artistic expression as of the words which we use in our daily life.
A number of objections to Croce's æsthetics have been prompted by his
use of the word intuition. To the reader who has followed our argument,
it is not necessary to explain that Croce's intuition has nothing in
common either with the mystic intuition of the Neoplatonists or of
the ultra-romantics, or with the intuition which Bergson substitutes
for the intellect as the proper organ of absolute knowledge. It is
not a mysterious instrument of the mind, by which man can either come
in contact with supernatural realities, or, renouncing that which is
distinctively human in him, enter into the actual movement and life
of nature. The fact that Croce has spent so much time and thought
in trying to understand this first, naïve, elementary grade of the
theoretical activity, does not justify his critics in putting him in
the same class either with romantic metaphysicians or with romantic
naturalists. That such a confusion has ever been possible is only a
further proof of the immaturity and superficiality of a large part of
our most solemn contemporary thought. It shows how it has been given to
grown-up and apparently educated men, to read a book without knowing
what its subject was, and without even being able to shield themselves
behind the saving grace of silence.
An objection of a quite different order was raised by Croce himself,
who found its solution in the elaboration of his philosophy of
the practical, or of will. It can be said of the theory of art as
intuition, that it reduces art to a form of knowledge, to a theoretical
function, while what we look for in works of art is life and movement,
and the feeling and personality of the artist, that is, something
that is not theoretical but practical. The answer might be that the
feeling is content and the intuition form; but such a dualistic point
of view would in reality destroy not only Croce's æsthetics, but the
foundations of his whole philosophy of mind. And we would be back at a
position which we thought we had already criticised and surpassed. The
truth is that intuition, and the personality, or lyrical character,
of a work of art, are only different aspects of the same spiritual
process, that where one is, the other too will have to be found. What
we can abstract as the psychic content of intuition, since we have
already excluded abstractions and concepts, is only what we call
appetition, tendency, feeling, will--the various facts which constitute
the practical form of the human spirit. Pure intuition cannot
represent anything but the will in its manifestations, that is, nothing
but states of mind. And the states of mind are that passion, feeling,
and personality which we find in art, and which determine its lyrical
character.
In order properly to understand this new point of view, it must be
borne in mind that the lyrical character of the poetry does not
however coincide with the practical passion of the poet: the relation
between the emotion and the intuition is not a deterministic one, as
of cause and effect, but a creative one, as of matter and form. The
poetical vibration is different in kind from the practical one. If I
grasp Croce's meaning correctly, the feeling and movement which we
find in art is something that belongs intrinsically to the intuitive
activity--it is the dynamic of the creative process itself. And
in fact, what we look for in the works of art is not the empirical
personality of the artist, but the tonality of his individual æsthetic
activity, which is always new and always unmistakably his own,--not
the rhythm of his passion but that of his vision or contemplation,
of his intuition of the passion. Any other way of considering this
relation would inevitably lead us back to the conventional distinction
of form and content, to the attribution of æsthetic characters to
the emotions themselves, and to a definition of intuition not as a
simple and primitive fact, but as a combination of the practical and
the theoretical, of will and knowledge. I consider this deduction of
the lyrical character of intuition as one of the points of Croce's
æsthetics which opens the way to new problems and stand in need of
further elaboration; but what is important in it, and already firmly
established, is the recognition of this character, through which the
whole doctrine of intuition gains a deeper and richer meaning, and
becomes more apt to deal with the concrete facts of our æsthetic
experience.
[Footnote 1: This chapter and the following two are founded especially
on the _Estetica_, pp. 1-171; the essay on _L'intuizione pura e
il carattere lirico dell' arte_, in _Problemi_, pp. 1-30; and the
_Breviario_, in _Nuovi Saggi_, pp. 1-91.]