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p “We can define beauty," writes Croce in Aesthetics, “as successful expression, or better still, as expression plain and simple, for expression, when it does not succeed, is in no way expression" (1, 77). Croce’s definition of beauty means that beauty is not an inner property of an object, but a meaning of a language which has to be known. This is a subjectivist theory, continuation of Hume and Kant. By restricting the existence of the beautiful to the sphere of expressions in language and art Croce denies the existence of the beautiful in nature or natural, physical beauty. There are two factors behind this negation. One, the positive factor, has to do with critical theories of beauty as an essence independent of man’s activity. Croce considers among them the transcendental theories and the naturalistic conceptions of beauty as a property of physical natural things. The beautiful, in Croce’s view, is not a physical fact and does not relate to the sphere of things, but to the activity of man. There is no transition from a physical fact to an aesthetic fact. To define beauty as a physical property is tantamount to establishing the economic value of things according to their natural features. But there are no natural or naturally useful things, there is labour and there are demands, from which things acquire the epithet useful. In his work The Young Croce and Marxism the Italian scholar Emilio Agazzi points out that Croce’s positive desire to link beauty and human activity is a product of the influence of 80 Marxism, of his study of the economic phenomenon and the social activity of man connected with it.

p The negative side of Croce’s criticism consists in the fact that, not recognizing objective reality, he absolutizes the factor of man’s activity and denies the objectivity of beauty, a denial that goes together with his criticism of the theory of reflection in art. There is no such thing, according to Croce, as objective models of beauty. Art has only itself as a model.

p Beauty in the Crocean philosophical system is one of the four main values alongside truth, usefulness and good. Insofar as expression in Croce’s philosophy is identical with an aesthetic act, the expression of value is for him synonymous with poetry or art (2, 76). In his explanation of the nature of value itself Croce criticized the Rickertian metaphysical dualism of facts and values, but this was criticism from the right. All reality was reduced to the reality of value. This meant that there was no longer any necessity for a special study of values, which, according to Croce, was philosophy itself. Under the influence of Marxism he identifies the reality of value with human activity, but interprets it in a spiritualistic way. He claims that the only reality is dynamism, activity, purposefulness, spirit (2, 31). Thus the elimination of dualism was in effect the “monism” of absolute idealism, and this led Croce to a conception of aesthetic value close to the Platonic theory of beauty as an eternal immutable category. But Platonism cannot explain the transition from the domain of ideal, eternal beauty to the world of chance manifestations. Neither could Croce explain this. As a result Croce developed precisely that dualism he was so vigorously opposing. The subjective-idealistic aspect of Croce’s philosophy also gives grounds for viewing his axiological position within the framework of subjectivism.

A consideration of Croce’s aesthetics in its philosophical aspect gives grounds for the assertion that it does not make an essential contribution to scientific knowledge. This does not of course mean to say that the Italian aesthetician’s observations and conclusions do not contain anything rational with regard to facts of art and the process of artistic creation. Croce was no ordinary thinker, and a great connoisseur of 81 art. The principles of Marxist-Leninist criticism require the retention of everything positive contained in Croce’s observations and generalizations, even though this positive is not all that easy to separate from his metaphysical idealism. In actual fact, taken precisely as “Crocean”, they constitute a part of his philosophical system and lose their objective value in its context.  [81•1 

p Croce’s philosophy of art had an enormous influence on the development of aesthetic thought in the 20th century (See 21; 22; 27). In the opinion of the authors of A History of Aesthetics, K. Gilbert and H. Kuhn, it was dominant in aesthetics at the end of the last century and throughout at least the first quarter of the present century.

p When Gillo Dorfles, characterizing modern tendencies in Italian aesthetics, pointed to a gradual withdrawal from Crocean philosophy, and also stated that only his “idealistic language" was retained, Gian Orsini took exception to this evaluation. In his opinion, Croce’s aesthetics “is the operational directive" in most departments of Italian literary criticism and historiography (32, 306). Crocean methods of analysing art are influential on the representatives of semantic aesthetics, applying the methods of linguistic analysis (17; 28; 31). It is characteristic that Croce’s influence is felt to a certain extent even by those aestheticians of the semantic orientation who criticized his aesthetics (G. Calogero, M. G. Tagliabue et al.).

p Outside Italy Croce’s ideas influenced the English aesthetics (E. F. Carritt, L. A. Reid, J. A. Smith, S. A. McDowall, L. Abercrombie, A. B. Walkey et al.). Croceanism was represented in American literary criticism by J. E. Spingarn. Croce’s influence can be traced in the philosophy of art of H. Read, C. G. Jung. Particular attention should be paid to the representatives of the semantic philosophy of art. First mention here should go to the English philosopher and 82 aesthetician Collingwood. Richards, another prominent representative of the semantic school, who in fact criticized many of Croce’s aesthetic views, also took up many of his ideas about art. The American semanticist Susanne Langer points to the kinship of her aesthetics with Croce’s philosophy of art.

p We should mention in particular the connection between Croce’s aesthetics and the decadent tendencies in art, to which he expressed a sharply negative attitude when stating his subjective opinion of them. He wrote in 1948, in support of John Dewey’s argument that we must reject the formalists’ theories of art, which make beauty consist in lines, colours, lights and shadows, and such, separating it from its psychological content and meaning (11, 204; 38). He protested against “decadence” in poetry, considering it the extreme of “pure poetry" (14, 19), against “abstract art”, correctly characterizing it as an illness rather than healthy art.

p Despite these statements by Croce most of his commentators, Marxist (V. F. Asmus, A. G. Yegorov et al.) and nonMarxist (J. Lamere, J. Collins et al.) point to the formalist essence of his aesthetics (18; 27). Croce’s ideas were employed by European formalism and received theoretical substantiation in the writings of G. Lanson, H. Wolfflin and O. Walzel. The “new criticism”, and “interpretation theory”, the most formalist tendencies in modern bourgeois literary criticism are largely based on Croce’s theories. Thus formalism is the bridge linking Croce with both the practice and the aesthetics of modernism.

In addition to its formalism, another feature of Croce’s philosophy of art by virtue of which he is the spiritual father of modernist aesthetics is his intuitivism. His theory of the “spirituality” of art, which is intimately connected with intuitivism, is extremely close to the theories of abstractionism. Like Croce they see the greatness of the art they propagate in the fact that it contains a “pure spirit”. Like Croce they emphasize that there exists only spirit, intuitive energy. Thus, Croce’s aesthetic ideas are in essence those very ideas which lie at the basis of all the main schools of modernist art-not only of abstractionism, but also of the theories of futurism, surrealism and expressionism.