63

p Croce’s aesthetics is a component of his philosophy of the spirit: it is concerned with the intuitive form of the spirit, or with intuition. Intuition is identified with the activity of expression. By “expression” Croce understands language. This includes, alongside the words of everyday speech, the words of the poet, the notes of the musician, the forms of the artist, lines, colours, sounds, etc. (1, 8). Thus intuition-expression covers both language in the proper meaning of the word and art, which are regarded as identical in Croce’s philosophy of the spirit.

p Every expression has an aesthetic character. Croce distinguishes aesthetic expressions from naturalistic expressions, which are concerned with the relation between cause and action. Naturalistic expressions qua natural signs are excluded from language, since they lack the true character of “ activeness" and “spirituality”, inherent in “spiritual” expressions. Regarding semiotics as the study of precisely such natural signs, Croce maintains that aesthetics, or the study of spiritual expression, has nothing in common with semiotics.

p What is the relation between language and art, understood as expressions, and the concept of “symbol”? Croce does not object to this concept so long as it concurs with “expression”, which means that the symbol is inseparable from what is 64 expressed or symbolized-from intuition, if the symbol is identical with intuition. “If, however, the symbol is something separable from intuition, if on the one hand one can express the symbol and on the other the thing symbolized... this posited symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept" (1, 35). In this case Croce is again regarding symbol neither as expression nor as language in its proper sense. Thus Croce rejects the symbolic nature of language and art, relying on the principle of the identity of intuition and expression, a principle which, in his opinion, determines the essence of language and art. At the same time it is true to say that he recognizes the intuitive symbolic nature of language and art.  [64•1 

p The principle of the identity of intuition and expression is in essence the principle of the identity of content and form. The non-dialectic identification of form and content, intuition and expression was criticized by many western authors (16; 35). Many criticized the thesis of the identity of intuition and expression for its reduction of the material (expression) to the ideal (intuition). This is the direction taken by the criticism of R. Patankar and the Italian aestheticians-Calogero, Banfi, Paci.

p It should be borne in mind that Croce distinguishes “ expression"—the ideal, spiritual, inner—and its material manifestation in the outer, physical world, something which can be designated with the terms “objectivization” or “externalization”. The Italian philosopher’s mistake was not in his making this distinction, but in his incorrect interpretation of the role and place of externalization both in the process of intuitive cognition as a whole, and in the sphere of language and art in particular. Albert Hofstadter, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, criticizes the Crocean idea of the inalienable unity of presentation (intuition) and expression, which, in his view, was the central idea in Croce’s idealistic 65 aesthetic theory and had enormous influence in the first half of this century, for its radical subjectivization of the phenomenon of art. Croceanism, asserts Hofstadter, was a reaction against naturalism (literal reproduction), “essentialist” realism (reproducing the essence of the object) and metaphysical idealism (reproduction in the finite appearance of the infinite reality etc.). But this reaction, argues the American professor, led Croce to subordinate the expression of objective content to the actual subjective act of expression, in which he in fact saw the essence of art. Hofstadter correctly points out one of the main shortcomings of Croce’s aesthetics (in the process justly emphasizing the continuity between Croce’s ideas and Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms), although he does so in the interests of idealism, campaigning for “ objectivism" in the spirit of Schelling, Hegel, Husserl’s phenomenology etc.

p It follows from Croce’s identification of art and language that “the science of art and the science of language, aesthetics and linguistics, are by no means two different sciences .. . but one and the same science.... General linquistics, as far as it is reducible to a science or philosophy, is nothing other than aesthetics.... Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing. ... The problems which linguistics seeks to resolve, and the errors against which it has campaigned and continues to do so, are the very ones which occupy and stir up aesthetics. If it is not always easy it is however always possible to reduce the scientific questions of linguistics to their aesthetic formula" (1, 137-38).

p The intuition-expression theory not only determined the fact of the identification of art and language and of aesthetics and linguistic philosophy, it also conditioned their concrete characteristics. In this process the demands of the philosophical system frequently meant that language and art were dogmatically ascribed features which are contradictory to the facts.

p The terms “intuition” and “expression” are not used consistently by Croce, and this leads to great confusion. Intuition-expression is mainly understood as a process of activity, a universal form of activity. According to Croce, intuition is 66 theoretical cognitive activity, which uses fantasy to create individual images of things. Croce tried to interpret intuition dialectically both as cognition or reflection, and as action or creation. But the Italian philosopher’s thought, as Plekhanov pointed out, is precisely deficient in a dialectical element, which explains almost all his errors. Anxious to avoid the weaknesses inherent in the view of cognition as a passive “mirror” reflection, he was unable to find any other alternative than the principle of “idealistic activism”, according to which the subject creates the object of cognition. It was precisely this approach to the problem of object and subject that gave Plekhanov grounds for the assertion that the Kantian critique left a deep, ineradicable stamp on his entire world-view, that as a neo-Hegelian Croce corrects Hegel’s philosophy in the spirit of subjective idealism.

p The Kantian idea that the world is constructed by a transcendental act of reason is transformed by Croce into the theory (in the spirit of the semantic trend) of the intuitive-expressive act which constructs human reality, in which expression is language, understood as a spiritual formation.

p The intuitive-expressive act is the subjective, individual, free creation of unique, individual images. It is from this point of view exclusively that Croce analyses language and art, which alone is sufficient to give a one-sided character to his linguistic and aesthetic theories. But it is not onesidedness which is the point. Croce does not merely limit himself to a consideration of certain aspects of language and art, he in principle reduces language and art to these aspects.

p Language and art are interpreted by him as mere speech, or, to be more precise, as the process of individual, subjective “speech” creation. Every event of language and art, Groce maintains, is a fully individual fact that exists only in given, concrete acts of expression, whether of a sentence or a poem, which are born and die instantaneously, and are indivisible and unique. Every work of art is a small revolution which every time contains its own language as a unique miracle. New form means a new novel, a new picture, etc. Language and art constitute a continuous process of creation, 67 realisable at any given moment; it is people who talk, paint, compose verse or perceive. It is only possible to reveal language and art in the work of the spirit of these people. The reality of language and art consists either in the acts of producing sentences and works of art or in the acts of their perception. Outside these acts they are dead. The search for an ideal language and art, which would have stability of concept, or rather abstraction, Croce declares to be absurd. “ Language does not have any reality outside utterances and sets of utterances and written statements... For what is the art of any given people, if not the totality of all their artistic works?" (1, 142).

p Insofar as intuition-expressions are individual, unique and incomparable one to the other, any classification in languages, such as of parts of speech, or in art, such as the categorization into types and genres, has at best for Croce the practical use of an auxiliary method or pattern, useful for the learning of languages and arts, but devoid of any objective, theoretical value and unable to pretend to any philosophical truth (5, 43-49). The unique character of expressions also makes translation either between languages or in any area of the arts impossible.

p Croce’s position, which we have discussed above, is, with regard both to language and to art, vulnerable to criticism on many points. Naturally, language and art only exist in objective reality in the individual speech and individual works of art of many billions of past, present and future people. Language “in general" and art “in general" are abstractions, ideal invariants, constructs. When Croce says that we do not know what language in general and art in general are, he is making exactly the same claim as Karl Wilhelm von Nageli, who asserted that we do not know what time in general, space in general, matter in general, etc. are. With regard to Nageli Engels wrote that with this he was merely saying that we first make abstractions from the real world in our heads and then we cannot cognize these self-made abstractions because they are things of thought and not of the senses. Croce was unable to approach in a dialectic way the problem of abstraction and abstract essences in linguistics and in the general theory of 68 art, or the closely connected problem of invariance. In his rejection of the existence of language and art as an objective system of socially significant categories, norms and structures independent of the individual (26), Croce is close to the positivist identification of language and art with an “immediate datum”. This aspect of the Italian thinker’s views characterizes him as a “nominalist” with reference both to language and to art.

p It is only worthwhile to reproach Croce for subjectivism and a negation of the objectivity of language and art for asserting that language and art actually exist only in individual “speech” insofar as this assertion is not supplemented by his statements about the social nature of this individual speech. Croce has indeed been reproached for ignoring the social nature of language. Thus the Soviet philosopher Valentin Asmus maintains that Croce’s position “leads to a negation of the social nature of language" (15, 146). Robert Hall writes that Croce’s idealism totally fails to take account of social conditions in its study of language (25, 35). In answer to criticisms of this sort Croce wrote in a letter to Karl Vossler (in 1923) that his individual is not abstract and not empirical: he is individual as a historical situation and therefore social, and that he has already discussed this misunderstanding of his position in his Philosophy oi Practice, Economics and Ethics (See 13).

p As Marx had pointed out, the individual may be manifested and realised as a social entity, even if his activity does not form direct part of collective activity parallel with other actions. But the social character of the individual and his language, which he is given in the capacity of a social product is derived from the forms and means of material activity, from communication within the collective. Marx described the notion of the development of language without cohabiting and intercommunicating individuals as outright nonsense.

However, within the framework of his philosophical system Croce explains the social character of the individual and of his language in an idealistic way: as a universality of spirit, which is embodied in every speech act. The idealistic 69 “philosophy of the spirit" ignores the factor of actual interaction of individual languages in the process of the activity and actual interaction of the individuals themselves-an interaction which determines everything in the individual language.

p The ideal, spiritual nature of intuition-expression in Croce’s philosophy required him, insofar as language and art are identified with intuition-expression, to recognize the exclusively spiritual, ideal, inner character of language and art.  [69•1  In the foreword to the fifth edition of Aesthetics (1921) Croce wrote that the book was conceived and written in the atmosphere of the universal dominance of positivism, and had as its aim the defence of the spirituality of art. The idea of “spirituality”, of the inner, ideal character of language and art had already been given clear formulation in the Tesi (1900) to his Aesthetics. In these Croce wrote that when we acquired the gift of inner speech, when a figure or statue appears clearly and vividly in our minds, or we alight on a tune, expression is born and has taken full form. Developing this idea in Aesthetics the author writes that language is a spiritual creation and will remain such forever, that the work of art is always inner, and that what is described as outer can no longer be a work of art (1, 50, 139); that the view of linguistics and aesthetics as a natural science has to do with the confusion of expression in language and art with expression in the physical sense.

p Thus by identifying language to speech the Italian philosopher is rejecting the latter’s material nature. He rejects the fact which forms the basis for the materialistic conception of language, namely that “the ‘mind’ is from the outset afflicted 70 with the curse of being ’burdened’ with matter in the form of ... language”, that language, the primary component of thought that reflects the process of formation of ideas, is also sensory by nature.  [70•1 

p What role does Croce accord the process of exteriorization (objectivization) of intuition-expression in the material physical sphere? He believes that it is necessary to accomplish exteriorization because it can be “preserved” and “conveyed to others" in the form of “physical stimuli of reproduction" (1, 93, 106). Exteriorization was referred to the sphere of practical spirit, meaning that Croce had to make in reference to language and art all those conclusions which logically proceeded from the metaphysical dichotomy of the theoretical and practical in his philosophy. He did make these conclusions, even though he had to move in direct defiance of the facts.

p For the Italian philosopher theory logically precedes practice and is totally independent of it. In accordance with this dogmatic and metaphysical requirement of the system, the intuitive-expressive activity of language and art is seen to precede the practical activity of the materialization of images, whether by sounds, or colours, etc., and is totally independent of it. The artist, Croce declares categorically, never creates a form he has not already envisaged in his imagination. In all cases of exteriorization, he continues, we are confronted by a new fact which is joined to the first and subject to laws quite different from those of the first fact, and which we do not have to pay attention to, for the time being, although we recognize now that it is the production of things and may be a practical fact or one of the will (1, 50).

p Practical activity in language and art is subject not to 71 aesthetic but to physical laws, whether these are the phonetic laws of language or the laws of statics in architecture. The search for a transition or link between spirituality and the physical complex of colours, sounds and voices is, in Croce’s opinion, a hopeless undertaking.

p Acts of material exteriorization are goal-oriented and have at their disposal knowledge about the means of achieving this goal, and therefore Croce calls them technical acts (or technique). The latter are important for the process of exteriorisation for reproduction, but have no influence whatever on the intuitive-expressive processes in language and art. A good artist can be a poor technician. In this period Croce fully rejects the significance of any technique, i.e. of those acts which presuppose knowledge about their goal and the means of attaining it, for practising intuition-expression. “Expression has no means, it just sees, it wants no goal.. .” (1, 108). Nor can there be any such thing as, for example, dramatic technique in the aesthetic sense: there can only be theatrical technique.

p K. Gilbert and H. Kuhn point out in their A History of Esthetics that of all the aspects of Croce’s “simplification” his denial of the physical, objective reality of art-work roused more objection than any other. Marxist critics pointed to the blatantly idealistic nature of this.theory, to its subjectivism. “The desire to isolate aesthetic expression from exteriorization resulted in particular from the idealistic postulate of art as a totally free, undetermined sphere of man’s activity" (19, 103). Croce contradicts the facts when he rejects materially palpable activity as a constitutive element both of linguistic and artistic creation. If they are not expressed in sounds or other matter language and art do not exist for others and cannot be analysed. When they are materialized, according to Croce, they lose their theoretical and scientific significance. The agnosticism which results from this is inevitable in the Crocean conception. His disregard of the materially palpable side of art relieves Croce’s aesthetics of the need to study the laws of the existence of different forms of art. Croce underestimated the role of “technique” in the properly aesthetic intuitive-expressive processes of creation. In 72 consequence of this he did not study the technical procedures of the different forms of art.

Croce contradicts himself when he ascribes to exteriorization the function of physical stimulus of reproduction. If the physical side of art is for him an aesthetically heterogeneous fact it cannot serve as an objective basis for the process of reproduction, which must be regarded as wholly dependent on the subjective perception of the intuiting agent. It also follows from this that communication of aesthetic experience is impossible, and Croce is inconsistent when he says that intuition-expressions, being exteriorized, can be conveyed to others. This inconsistent admission is most likely caused by the actual conditions of the existence of art, rather than by the demands of his philosophy. Croce either had to reject the identification of expression and intuition, or renounce his view of the communicability of aesthetic experience. Croce failed to understand that communication is an essential factor of aesthetic expression and in no way an appendage, having no relation to the essence of the matter.

p Human cognition, according to Croce, “is either intuitive cognition or logical cognition; cognition with the help of imagination or with the help of the intellect; cognition of the individual or cognition of the universal; of the things themselves or of their relationships-in other words, either a creator of images or a creator of concepts" (1, 1). “From this contraposition of two types of cognition,” writes V. F. Asmus, “it is clear that Croce’s theory excludes intuition from the intellectual forms of knowledge. . . It exists alongside intellectual knowledge as a form of non-intellectual cognition. Moreover, intuition is not only placed on a par with intellect, as an equal and parallel form, it is proclaimed a basic, primal form with respect to concept, independent of the intellect and autonomous" (15, 134).

p In accordance with this interpretation of intuition-expression language and art in their primal, aesthetic function acquire an alogical, extra-intellectual character. In Croce’s 73 opinion, there is no such thing as logical expression. Expression is always aesthetic. In many places of his Aesthetics the author writes that language can exist without concepts, and grammar is separable from logic. In this point Croce parts company with Humboldt, who interpreted language above all as the logical activity of spirit, which creates concepts, and is closer to Hugo Steinthal, who freed language from any dependence whatever on logic. Like language, argues Croce, the facts of art, whether these are “a painter’s impression of moonlight; a cartographer’s map; a musical motif, tender or energetic; the words of a sighing lyric poem, can all perfectly easily be intuitive facts, without the shadow of any relation to the intellect" (1, 2).

p Croce’s theory of the “alogical” extra-intellectual character of language was also subjected to serious criticism. Many authors pointed out that Croce, while he correctly identified the alogical aspects (or functions) of language-the aesthetic, emphatic, etc., exaggerated their significance and in essence ignored the logical intellectual essence of language. A persuasive critical analysis of Croce’s theory of the “alogicality” of language can be found in V. F. Asmus’ work Problema intuitsii v filosofii i matematike (Intuition in Philosophy and Mathematics).

p For Croce art has an alogical character, as language does. Poetry, he writes, lies outside logic (3, 148). The Crocean principle of the alogicality of art is discussed in detail in a monograph by the Soviet philosopher Yelena Topuridze, Estetika Benedetto Croce (1967). The author is careful to avoid superficial criticism, and points to a number of profound and valuable ideas in Croce’s thought. At the same time she remarks that as a result of metaphysical “dialectics” “the correct notion of the sui generis existence of the intellectual factor (as well as of other spiritual factors) in the imagination becomes declarative and intuition is turned from logical into pre-logical and extra-intellectual intuition" (42, 80).

p Croce was undoubtedly right to emphasize the role of the intuition in art. “Where Croce errs is not, of course, in his idea that artistic intuition performs the function of cognition, or that it performs this function by specific means, which 74 distinguish it from science. It is when he asserts that artistic (intuitive) cognition is non-intellectual and extra-intellectual cognition" (15, 136). Following Kant, although not in such a categorical form, Croce understands by intuition only sensual intuition and ridicules those scholars who recognize the activity of “mental imagination”, “intuitive intellect" or “ intellectual intuition”. There is no such thing, wrote Croce, as aesthetic intellectual intuition in art (1, 65). By rejecting intellectual intuition Croce could not fail to come to the conclusion that concepts cannot be expressed either in language or in art. The word and the work of art are individual, while concepts are universal. Speech and art as intuitiveexpressive activity only constitute form, while concepts are intellectual content, but the quality of its expression (as form) is not derivable from the essence of a concept (as content). For this reason the transition from the concept to its expression is impossible in Croce’s aesthetics. This transition is in essence something completely irrational. Concepts in language and art can only be designated, and in relation to them expression is no longer expression, but merely a sign or index (1, 43). In art such signs or symbols are the statements of abstract concepts, allegories-low art, which copy science (See 7). The concept is faced by an unhappy choice: either not to be expressed in art, or to be designated, thereby lowering art to an approximation of a science. In Aesthetics Croce suggests a solution to the problem on another level, namely by studying the special properties of concepts and the intellectual factor in art as an element of intuition, but this suggestion remained only a suggestion until Croce’s later period when he developed it.

We have reviewed the Crocean thesis of the identity of art and language, and as we have shown, this interpretation had an openly idealistic character, recognized both by Croce and his followers.  [74•1