p Croce’s views on art, stated in his “first” aesthetics, were later subjected to substantial alterations (See 24; 39). One of the least tenable theses of the Aesthetics, as we have pointed out above, was the absolute identification of art and linguistic expressions. Anxious to free himself from the fetters of this identification Croce differentiates the concept of intuition. In the essay Pure Intuition and the Lyrical Character of Art (1908) he introduces the concept of “lyrical intuition" in art, distinguishing it from other intuitions. The question of what this distinction consists in is only answered by Croce-both in this article and in his subsequent writings-in the most general way. Artistic intuition or intuition in art is “pure”, lyrical intuition, and these are not abstract concepts but a “state of mind”, affected content, which possesses the quality of feeling (5, 25). Intuition in art is a synthesis of feeling and image, it is “contemplated” feeling (See 38). Carlo de Simone writes that when Croce reached his understanding that artistic expression is the clarification of feeling he realized that this property of artistic expression could not be a common feature of all linguistic acts. This was the first blow to the absolute identity of art and language (40, 7).
p Croce introduces a classification of expressions. These classifications were already present in embryonic form in Aesthetics, where true expressions are distinguished from the naturalistic expression of feelings and signs of concepts. This classification is most fully presented in La Poesia (1937).
p Art is now identified not with all types of expressions and language as a whole, but only with poetic expression. In contrast to poetic expressions, which are the only true expressions, i.e. connected with intuition as a theoretical factor of the spirit, language contains three more types of non-poetic expressions-sensual, prosaic and oratorical. Sensual expression is the naturalistic expression of feeling in articulated sounds, for example in interjections. By contrast, poetic expression is not naturalistic and gives theoretical form to feeling. Thus a poetical interjection is already a theoretical fact.
76p Prosaic expression is the language of the sciences and logical thought. Its main point of difference from that of art is in its sign character. Here thought is expressed in symbols or signs. By contrast poetry can never be a symbol, i.e. the sign of something else (9, 17, 211). Prose is language which has been purified from its primitive expressiveness. The expressiveness of poetic language is not a complementary feature of prose language, it constitutes the primal essence of this true form of expression. By contrast to the theoretical character of poetic expression, prose expression is made use of for practical purposes and is created by means of practical activity. Whereas poetry has no standards prose does have such standards, or patterns, according to which its effectiveness can be measured. In this the main criterion is truth, along with the criteria of clarity, precision and economy.
p In general Croce gives accurate indications of the properties of the language of the sciences, and its differences from poetic expression. It is true that in doing so, as Topuridze points out, he contradicts his own theory of the nature of logical synthesis. According to this theory logical synthesis must contain a true word-intuition and a concept must have a verbal expression. Croce attempts to retain the factor of the true word in its conceptual expression, but here he lacks “clarity and consistency" and as a result the word and concept are divorced and isolated from one another (42, 141). At the same time, by emphasizing the specific features of poetic expression by comparison with the expression of discursive thought in signs and on this basis rejecting the symbolic, or sign, nature of art Croce inevitably sidesteps the question of the specific nature of poetic expression precisely as a special type of symbolism, or semiotic phenomenon. His isolated statements to the effect that a work of art may be viewed as a symbol, if it is to be approximated to intuition, and that feeling and not idea gives art the ethereal lightness of a symbol (5, 25), remain completely undeveloped.
p Art, or poetic expression, must also be distinguished, in Croce’s view, from rhetorical expression. In contrast to art the latter constitutes practical activity, the goal of which 77 consists in the evocation of a certain state of mind in people with the aid of articulated sounds. [77•1 The primary motive for the isolation of this type of expression and its opposition to art is an idealistic and metaphysical anxiety to isolate art as a theoretical, autonomous, free activity from everything practical and socially conditioned. For precisely this reason poetry is contrasted to rhetorical expression as to a practical language, a social activity, which creates signs with the aim of communication and necessarily presupposing an addressee. But for art, argues Croce, an addressee is not obligatory. Earlier, in his lectures under the heading The Defence of Poetry, Croce had written that pure poetry, in the pure sense of the term, does not communicate a conception, a judgement (14, 22). Rhetorical expression as practical activity is subject to all the restrictions and control of society, while art is “free”.
p The Italian aesthetician’s “good” intention to “pinpoint” the specific features of art in comparison to other forms of activity turned into the “grotesque” and “paradoxical”, in the Italian Marxist Antonio Banfi’s expression, opposition “poetry—not poetry”. Moreover, he sees a logical connection between this opposition and the interpretation of art as an autonomous factor of the spirit in the metaphysical sense which this concept acquired in the eyes of the epigones of idealism.
p In addition to poetic, sensual, prose and rhetorical expressions Croce also isolates a fifth form of expression: literature, which is constituted by the combination and harmony of different forms of expression, and the combination of poetic form and non-poetic content. Depending on which type of expression is meant in a consideration of literature Croce distinguishes the following classes of literature: the literary processing of feeling (so-called religious literature, etc.), didactic literature (history, science, philosophy, etc.), and rhetorical 78 literature. The latter is subdivided according to whether it has as its goal (a) to appeal (e.g. patriotic books) or (b) to entertain (detective stories, romances). Croce’s classification of literature unquestionably contains many accurate observations. But, as a number of commentators have pointed out (Theodor Osterwalder et al.) it is contradictory to a number of the requirements of his philosophical system-the principle of distinguishing concepts, which requires a definition of the pure essence of each spiritual fact (and for Croce literature does not have such an essence), the theory of categories (good, beautiful, useful, true etc.) (See 34; 36).
p The main tendency in Croce’s distinction between poetry and literature is to “divorce” various types of “literary” works (e.g. political poetry) from real art, from “poetry” (8, 265), and to regard them as quasi-art. Croce pointed out that, despite its poetic covering, the essence of such literature is not poetic (10, 136). This tendency is undoubtedly metaphysical in its basis and extremely questionable in its results. [78•1 Croce’s idea of quasi-arts received its most developed form in the writings of his successor Collingwood, in which its metaphysical essence is more clearly revealed.
p Insofar as external expressions are fixed in articulated speech, and unpoetical content can be clothed in poetical form, their difference can only be established on the basis of their signification. The classification of expressions given by Croce is in essence his “theory of meaning”. The nature of the meaning of an expression is determined, in Croce’s view, not so much by its objective content and objective structure as by the establishment of an “inner position”. Poetic meaning is determined by the position of a pure expressive act, and prosaic by the position of a conceptual, logical act. The poetical position is characterized by rapture and 79 ecstasy, the literary by control and reflection. The establishment of positions depends on the context. [79•1
Croce’s approach to the analysis of meaning, and in particular to the analysis of the meaning of works of art, distracts the scholar from the study of those objective properties, of that objective structure inherent to the language of art, which is the “primal” and essential prerequisite for the emergence of a poetic “position” in relation to works of art.
Notes
[77•1] Orsini, an American scholar of Croce’s aesthetics, has pointed out that Croce realized, long before the modern semanticists, that words are not only a vehicle for thought but also purveyors of stimuli (33, 255-56).
[78•1] Wolfgang Kayser, one of the leading modern western critics, takes an extremely critical stance with regard to Croce’s criterion for the distinction between literature and poetry. There are no grounds. Writes Kayser, to exclude as objects of the study of poetry (as Croce does) Horace, Moliere, Byron and others (W. Kayser. Das spzachliche Kunstwerk. Bern und Munchen, 1960).
[79•1] In this connection we might point out that Croce develops a point of view extremely close to the contextual theory developed in the west today by a number of linguists and psychologists.