The Essence of Aesthetic by Benedetto Croce

BENEDETTO CROCE
• Benedetto Croce, (born February 25,
1866, Pescasseroli, Italy—died
November 20, 1952, Naples),
historian, humanist, and foremost
Italian philosopher of the first half of
the 20th century.
• The Neapolitan Benedetto Croce was
a dominant figure in the first half of
the twentieth century in aesthetics
and literary criticism, and to lesser
but not inconsiderable extent in
philosophy generally.

CONTENTS:
1. The Four Domains of Spirit (or Mind)
2. The Primacy of the Aesthetic
3. Art and Aesthetics
4. Intuition and Expression
4.1 The Double Ideality of the Work of Art
4.2 The Role of Feeling
4.3 Feeling, Expression and the Commonplace
5. Natural Expression, Beauty and Hedonic Theory
6. Externalization
7. Judgement, Criticism and Taste

• Philosophy, in Croce's view, is the study of Mind, or Spirit, which is reality.
• Mind is essentially an activity that takes two basic forms,
A. theoretic/knowing-(it understands or contemplates)
1. aesthetic- which deals in particulars (individuals or intuitions)
2. logic or the intellectual domain- which deals in concepts and
relations, or universals.
B. practical/doing- (it wills actions)
1. economic- means all manner of utilitarian calculation.
2. ethical or moral

Each of the four domains are subject to a characteristic norm or value:
• aesthetic is subject to beauty
• logic is subject to truth
• economic is subject to the useful (or vitality)
• and the moral is subject to the good.

Knowing (as Croce tells us at the start of the Aesthetic) aims at either
"intuitive knowledge" or "logical knowledge." The "science" of logical
knowledge, of concepts, is logic; the science of intuitive knowledge, or
images, is aesthetic.

• Customarily intuitions or representations are distinguished from concepts or
universals.
• But intuitions are not blind without concepts; an intuitive presentation (an
‘intuition’) is a complete conscious manifestation just as it is, in advance of
applying concepts they are not necessarily spatial or temporal.
• Croce supposes that the intellect presupposes the intuitive mode but the
intuitive mode does not presuppose the intellect. The intellect in turn is
presupposed by the practical, which issues among other things in empirical laws.
And morality tells the practical sciences what ends in particular they should
pursue.

Thus Croce regarded: All mental activity, which means the whole of
reality, is founded on the aesthetic, which has no end or purpose of its
own, and of course no concepts or judgements.

• To say the world is essentially history is to say that at the lowest level
it is aesthetic experiences woven into a single fabric, a world-
narrative, with the added judgement that it is real, that it exists.
• Croce takes this to be inevitable: the subjective present is real and has
duration, therefore the only rigorous view is that the past is no less
real than the present.
• History then represents, by definition, the only all-encompassing
account of reality.

• What we call the natural sciences then are impure, second-rate.
Eg. empirical concepts like heat, mathematical concepts like
number.
In fact majority of concepts—house, reptile, tree—are mere
adventitious collections of things formulated in response to practical
needs, and thus cannot attain to truth or knowledge.

• What Croce calls pure concepts, in contrast, are characterised by their
possession of expressiveness, universality and concreteness, and they
perform their office by a priori synthesis
- this means it that everything we can perceive or imaginewill
necessarily have all three: possession of expressiveness,
universality and concreteness.
• Examples of pure concepts are rare, but those recognized by Croce
are finality, quality and beauty.

3. Art and Aesthetics
Unlik Kant who think of art as a comparatively narrow if profound region of
experience, Croce argues that art is everywhere, and the difference between
ordinary intuition and that of ‘works of art’ is only a quantitative difference.
But the point is not that every object is to some degree a work of art. The point is
that every intuition has to some degree the qualities of the intuition of a work of
art; it’s just that the intuition of a work of art has them in much greater degree.

4. Intuition and Expression
• We now reach the most famous and notorious Crocean doctrine concerning art.
‘To intuit’, he writes, ‘is to express’.
• ‘intuitive knowledge is expressive knowledge’.
• intuition=expression

An intuition is a particular image (not necessarily visual, of course) held in
consciousness, an "objectified" impression.
(this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water)

All percepts are intuitions, but not all intuitions are percepts for some are
memories."The distinction between reality and non-reality is extraneous,
secondary, to the true nature of intuition" in the realm of intuitive knowledge, this
distinction has not yet arisen, for it is conceptual. Pure intuitions, without any
conceptualization, can occur. -Croce
Eg. "The impression of a moonlight scene by a painter.

• Intuitions are not bare "sensations," which are passive and formless,
and reveal no "spiritual activity".
• Pure sensation cannot really occur in consciousness, for whatever
occurs is intuition, and
• "every true intuition or representation is also expression"

N.B.
It is impossible to distinguish intuition from expression in this cognitive
process. The one appears with the other at the same instant, because
they are not two, but one [po 9].-file:///D:/BCKUP/Documents/2021-
22/2nd%20sem/Aesthetics/Docs/Aesthetics%20from%20classical%20Greece%20to%20the%20present%20%20a%20short%2
0history%20by%20Beardsley,%20Monroe%20C%20(z-lib.org)%20(1).pdf

Croce treats the proposition "intuition = expression" in a Curious way.
At first he argues for it empirically: how can you really claim to have an
accurate image (intuition) of a geometrical figure unless you can draw it
on the blackboard (expression)?
“what he really means by "expression" is precisely the clear
mental vision of the figure-which is also the intuition-and the
physical activity of drawing is quite another matter. “

To do justice to his meaning, we must think of the same image as both
an intuition and an expression, but considered in two aspects, so to
speak.

Croce's next step is simply to identify art with intuitive knowledge, that
art is expression.
He analyzes and rejects all attempts to distinguish artistic expressions
(or intuitions) as a special class. All men are artists in so far as they
possess images.

The simplest and most elementary level of mind has been taken for the
most complex.
Fine art is just the most highly developed form of intuition-expression,
as science is the most highly developed form of logical knowledge.

it is simplest to regard Croce as an idealist, so in that sense, the work of art is an
ideal or mental object along with everything else.
This claim about the ontological status of works of art means that a spectator ‘of’ a
work of art is actually creating the work of art in his mind.

Now the Crocean formulation—to intuit is to express—perhaps begins to make
sense. For ‘intuition’ is in some sense a mental act. Being a mental act, it is not a
mere external object.
Art is an intuition-expression of the mind.

4.2 The Role of Feeling
Feeling is necessarily part of any (mental) activity, including bare perception.
We are accustomed to thinking of ‘artistic expression’ as concerned with specific
emotions that are relatively rare in the mental life, but again, Croce points out that
strictly speaking, we are thinking of a quantitative distinction as qualitative.
In fact feeling is the will in mental activity

An artistic expression is always a complex, whose constituent
expressions correspond to individual intuitions; but it has a unity of its
own, that makes it a single expression.
Therefore, it must must correspond to a single intuition.
This intuition, Croce proposes, is always an emotion or feeling.
Thus all art is expression of emotion, the only criterion of ‘art’ is
coherence of expression, of the movement of the will.

Because of this, Croce discounts certain aesthetic applications of the
distinction between form and content as confused.
The distinction only applies at a theoretical level.
At the aesthetic level there is no identification of content
independently of the forms in which we meet it, and none of form
independently of content. It makes no sense to speak of a work of art’s
being good on form but poor on content.

FAQ:
When Croce says that intuition and expression are the same phenomenon, we are
likely to think: what does this mean for a person who cannot draw or paint, for
example?

Does this mean that the distinction between a man who looks at a
bowl of fruit but cannot draw or paint it, and the man who does draw
or paint it, is precisely that of a man with a Crocean intuition but who
cannot express it, and one who has both?
How then can expression be intuition?

Croce comes at this concern from both sides.
On one side, there is ‘the illusion that we possess a more complete
intuition of reality than we really do’
“We have, most of the time, only fleeting, transitory intuitions amidst
the bustle of our practical lives. ‘The world which as rule we intuit is a
small thing’; ‘It consists of small expressions -Croce

On the other side, if our man is seriously focussed on the bowl of fruit,
it is only an illusion to deny that then he is to that extent expressing
himself.

5. Natural Expression, Beauty and Hedonic
Theory

5. Natural Expression, Beauty and Hedonic
Theory
There is another respect in which Croce’s notion of expression as intuition departs
from what we think in connection with the word ‘expression’.
Eg. we think unreflectively of wailing as a natural expression of pain or grief.
But Croce attempts a sharp distinction between this phenomenon and expression
in art. Whereas the latter is the subject of aesthetics, the former is a topic for the
natural sciences

…such ‘expression’, albeit conscious, can rank as expression only by
metaphorical licence, when compared with the spiritual or aesthetic
expression which alone expresses, that is to say gives to the feeling a
theoretical form and converts into language, song, shape. It is in the
difference between feeling as contemplated (poetry, in fact), and
feeling as enacted or undergone, that lies the catharsis, the liberation
from the affections, the calming property which has been attributed to
art; and to this corresponds the aesthetic condemnation of works of art
if, or in so far as, immediate feeling breaks into them or uses them as
an outlet. (PPH 219). -Croce

Croce wishes to divorce artistic expression from natural expression is
partly
The same goes for his refusal to rank pleasure as the aim of art.He does
not deny that aesthetic pleasures (and pains) exist, but they are ‘the
practical echo of aesthetic value.
In the Essence of Aesthetic (EA 11–13) Croce points out that the
pleasure is much wider than the domain of art, so a definition of art as
‘what causes pleasure’ will not do.

6. Externalization
The painting of picturesonly contingently related to the work of art, that is, to the
expressed intuition.
Croce does not mean to say that for example the painter could get by without
paint.
Eg. the impossibility of say the existence of Leonardo’s Last Supper without
painting on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie not an impossibility in
principle, but it is a factual impossibility.

What he is doing is always driven by the intuition, thereby making it possible
for others to have the intuition.
• First, the memory often requires the physical work to sustain or develop
the intuition.
• Second, the physical work is necessary for the practical business of the
communication of the intuition.
Eg. For example the process of painting is a closely interwoven
operation of positive feedback between the intuitive faculty and
the practical or technical capacity to manipulate the brush, mix
paint, etc.

6. Externalization
The first task of the the critic is for to reproduce the intuition, or perhaps better,
one is to realize the intuition, which is the work of art.
One may fail, due to one being mistaken; ‘haste, vanity, want of reflexion, theoretic
prejudices’ may bring it about that one finds beautiful what is not, or fail to find
beautiful what is.

How could that which is produced by a given activity be judged a
different activity? The critic may be a small genius, the artist a great
one … but the nature of both must remain the same. To judge Dante,
we must raise ourselves to his level: let it be well understood that
empirically we are not Dante, nor Dante we; but in that moment of
contemplation and judgement, our spirit is one with that of the poet,
and in that moment we and he are one thing. (Aes. 121)- Croce

In Croce’s overall philosophy, the aesthetic stands alone: in having an
intuition, one has succeeded entirely insofar as aesthetic value is
concerned. Therefore there cannot be a real question of a ‘standard’ of
beauty which an object might or might not satisfy.
Thus Croce says:
…the criterion of taste is absolute, but absolute in a different way
from that of the intellect, which expresses itself in ratiocination.
The criterion of taste is absolute, with the intuitive absoluteness
of the imagination. (Aes. 122)

REFERENCES
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/croce-aesthetics/#FouDomSpiMin
• AESTHETICS FROM CLASSICAL GREECE TO THE PRESENT
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benedetto-Croce

GEORGE SANTAYANA
Original name Jorge Augustín
Nicolás Ruiz De Santayana.
Born: December 16, 1863,
Madrid, Spain
Died: September 26, 1952, Rome,
Italy

GEORGE SANTAYANA
Spanish-American philosopher,
poet, and humanist who made
important contributions to
aesthetics, speculative
philosophy, and literary criticism.
From 1912 he resided in Europe,
chiefly in France and Italy.

GEORGE SANTAYANA
Author of 132 books...
including his most famous “The
Sense of Beauty” and “The Life
of Reason”

GEORGE SANTAYANA
Taught metaphysics, which he
called “naturalism” /
“materialism”
Distinguished the “four realms of
being”
Primarily a moralist

GEORGE SANTAYANA
... “rational pursuit of happiness”
is the “life of reason”...
The main drive of Santayana’s
philosophy of art, is to settle the
role of aesthetics in this whole
design.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
A psychological study - partly
introspective, partly speculative -
of the experience of beauty and
its conditions.
The books main novelty lay in
the attempted psychological
explanations of two aesthetic
phenomena; beauty and
expression.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
The experience of art, is a pleasure, a positive and intrinsic value.
This pleasure, like other sensations, can be transformed by the mind
into the “quality of a thing”.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
If we say that other men should see the beauties we see, it is because
we think those beauties are in the object, like its color, proportion, or
size. Our judgement appears to us merely the perception and
discovery of an external existence, of the real excellence that is
without. (pp. 44-45)

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
A beauty not perceived, is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction.
Hence... “beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing,” or
“pleasure objectified”.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
Santayana simply appeals to what he considers a general tendency, or
capacity, of the mind - “a tendency originally universal to make
every effect of a thing upon us a constituent of its conceived
nature”.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
In his later footnote, on his paper “The Mutability of Aesthetic
Categories” he denounces the use of “pleasure objectified” - because
a term does not become subjective merely because an intuition of
it occurs; pleasures, like colors, are neither subjective nor
objective, but neutral.

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY
Santayana devotes the remainder of his book to an extended
discussion of the kinds or conditions of beauty, which he divides
into three classes.

THREE CLASSES ON THE KINDS OR CONDITIONS OF
BEAUTY
1. Beauty of Material - e.g. pleasure of the colors and sounds
2. Beauty of Form - e.g. pleasure in symmetry and proportion
3. Beauty of Expression - occurs when the ‘hushed reverberations’ of
some feelings associated with a certain percept linger on in memory,
but dimly, and ‘by modifying our present reaction, color the image
upon which our attention is fixed’

In all expression we may thus distinguish two terms: (1) the first is the
object actually presented, the word, the image, the expressice thing;
(2) the second is the object suggested, the further thought, emotion, or
image evoked, the thing expressed. (p. 195)

REASON AND ART
Begins by a general account of
the rise of art: any operation
which thus humanizes and
rationalizes objects is called art.
What we call practical skills and
activities are then set aside.

REASON AND ART
Productions in which an aesthetic
value is or is supposed to be
prominent take the name of fine
art.
But Santayan is unwilling to
withhold the terms ‘practical’ and
‘useful’ from fine arts, and is
uneasy about divorcing “the
aesthetic function of things” from
the ‘practical’ and ‘moral’.

REASON AND ART
One of his dominant feelings throughout this work is a mistrust of all
the “aestheticism” and conviction of the estrangement of the ‘aesthetic
good’ from other goods that ‘hatched in the same nest’ , will lead to
devitalization and trivialization of fine art, and the article “What is
Aesthetics?”

REASON AND ART
This double view that there are distinguishable aesthetic goods and yet
that they depend for their existence on a close relationship with other
goods, is one that Santayana has some difficulty keeping in balance.

REASON AND ART
In his discussion of music, for example, he gives a beautiful
description of musical process just as it is in itself, and of its inherent
delight; but then he adds that music is rescued from this ‘pathological
plight’ of meaning nothing because its emotional expressiveness lends
itself to infinite uses to the ends of prayer, mourning, and dancing. Its
rational justification, in his view, seems to be incomplete until it is
related to something more substantial.

REASON AND ART
“Art in general is a rehearsal of rational living”, a model, as well as a
constituent of Life and Reason.

JOHN DEWEY
Born: October 20, 1859,
Burlington, Vermont, U.S.
Died: June 1, 1952, New York,
New York

JOHN DEWEY
American philosopher and
educator who was a cofounder of
the philosophical movement
known as pragmatism, a pioneer
in functional psychology, an
innovative theorist of democracy,
and a leader of the progressive
movement in education in the
United States.

EXPERIENCE AND NATURE
1.) Either art is a continuation, by
means of intelligent selection and
arrangement, of natural
tendencies of natural events;
2.) Or art is a peculiar addition to
nature springing from something
dwelling exclusively within the
breast of man, whatever the name
be given the latter.

ART AS EXPERIENCE & EXPERIENCE IN
NATURE
Experience - the interaction between organism and environment - not the
subjective pole only, but the whole transaction - man’s “doing and
undergoing”.

NATURE
Experience divides up, not sharply or ultimately, into strands -
beginnings and endings, dependencies and independencies of causal line
- which he calls ‘histories.
These are the prototypes of an experience in the later book. No more
than any other sort, is aesthetic experience “something private and
physical”

NATURE
Any experience, to some degree, involves “objects which are final” that
is, afford ‘consummations’ - and this is always and aesthetic aspect, or
phase, of the experience.

NATURE
Emperically, things are poignant, tragic, beautiful, humurous, settled,
disturbed, comfortable, annoying, barren, harsh, consoling, splendid,
fearful; are such immeduiately and in their own right and behalf. if we
take advantage of the word aesthetic in a wider sense than that of
application to the beautiful and ugly, aesthetic quality, immediate, final,
or self enclosed, indubitably characterizes natural situations as they
emperically occur. These traits stand in themselves on precisely the same
level as colors, sounds, qulaities of contact, taste and smell. (pp. 96 &
108)

NATURE
The stress was on means, on methods, on process - and had to be, to
make good his long struggle against intrinsic values, final ends, the
“spectator - theory” of knowledge, supernaturalism, and all dualisms: the
separation of mind from body, of theory from practice, of knowing from
doing, etc.

NATURE
Dewey spoke more fully of what he called “consummatory” aspect of
experience and nature...
When this perception dawns, it will be a commonplace that art - the
mode of activity that is charged with meanings capable of immediately
enjoyed possession - is the complete culmination of nature, and that
‘science’ is properly handmaiden that conducts natural events to this
happy issue (pp. 358; ch.9)

ART AS EXPERIENCE
The task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms
of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and
sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience (p. 3)

ART AS EXPERIENCE
The clue to a sounder view of art is provided by what we know of
primitive civilizations, and earlier stages of Western civilizations, where
we find the arts existing in close association with other cultural activities,
as celebrations and commemorations of the qualities of experience
encountered in worship, in hunting, in sowing, and reaping.

ART AS EXPERIENCE
To understand the aesthetic, ‘one must begin with it raw’.

ART AS EXPERIENCE
Direct experience comes from nature and man interacting with each
other. In this interaction, human energy gathers, is released, dammed up,
frustrated and victorious. There are rhythmic beats of want and
fulfillment, pulses of doing and being withheld from doing. (pp. 16, 14,
22, 24)

ART AS EXPERIENCE
Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring
consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need,
impulse and action characterisitc of the live creature.

FEATURES OF EXPERIENCE THAT MAKES AN
EXPERIENCE
1. There is completeness.
2. There is internal impetus.
3. There is continuity.
4. There is articulation
5. There is cumulativeness.

EXPERIENCE
6. There is dominant quality.

EXPERIENCE
This quality, Dewey sometimes call ‘emotions’, as when he says
“emotion is the moving and cementing force”
Experience is emotional but there are no separate things called emotions
in it.

THE “ACT OF EXPRESSION” AND THE “EXPRESSIVE
OBJECT”

THE ACT OF EXPRESSION
To express is not merely to vent emotions; it differs from plain discharge
in two ways. (1) It is undertaken with a sense of the consequences, a
conscious grasp of meaning; (2) it has a medium, so that the emoition is
released indirectly

THE EXPRESSIVE OBJECT
In a sense in which the work expresses, rather than that the artist
expresses; by asking what “representation” , means - since it must be
representative in some sense if it is expressive”.

THE VALUE OF ART
The value of art is in its refreshment, its quickening of the sense of ideal
possibilities in natural experience, - quoting Santayana. Not by being
moralistic, but by its power “to remove prjudice, do away with the scales
that keeps the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and
custom, perfect the power to perceive”, it has the highest moral value.

The Essence of Aesthetic by Benedetto Croce

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