## 1. The Four Domains of Spirit (or Mind)



We are confining ourselves to Croce's aesthetics, but it will
help to have at least the most rudimentary sketch in view of his
rather complex general philosophy.



In Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, the prevailing
philosophy or 'world-view' was not, as in England,
post-Hegelian Idealism as already mentioned, but the early forms of
empiricist positivism associated with such figures as Comte and Mach.
Partly out of distaste for the mechanism and enshrinement of matter of
such views, and partly out of his reaction, both positive and
negative, to the philosophy of Hegel, Croce espoused what he called
'Absolute Idealism' or 'Absolute Historicism'.
A constant theme in Croce's philosophy is that he sought a path
between the Scylla of 'transcendentalism' and the
Charybdis of 'sensationalism', which for most purposes may
be thought of as co-extensive with rationalism and empiricism. For
Croce, they are bottom the same error, the error of abstracting from
ordinary experience to something not literally experienceable.
Transcendentalism regards the world of sense to be unreal, confused or
second-rate, and it is the philosopher, reflecting on the world in
*a priori* way from his armchair, who sees beyond it, to
reality. What Croce called 'Sensationalism', on the other
hand, regards only instantaneous impressions of colour and the like as
existing, the rest being in some sense a mere logical construction out
of it, of no independent reality. The right path is what Croce calls
*immanentism*: All but only lived human experience, taking
place concretely and without reduction, is real. Therefore all
Philosophy, properly so-called, is Philosophy of Spirit (or Mind), and
is inseparable from history. And thus Croce's favoured
designations, 'Absolute Idealism' or 'Absolute
Historicism'.



Philosophy admits of the following divisions, corresponding to the
different modes of mental or spiritual activity. Mental activity is
either theoretic (it understands or contemplates) or it is practical
(it wills actions). These in turn divide: The theoretic divides into
the aesthetic, which deals in particulars (individuals or intuitions),
and logic or the intellectual domain, which deals in concepts and
relations, or universals. The practical divides into the
economic--by which Croce means all manner of utilitarian
calculation--and the 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. Croce devoted
three lengthy books written between 1901 and 1909 to this overall
scheme of the 'Philosophy of Spirit': *Aesthetic*
(1901) and (1907) (revised), *Logic* (1909) and the
*Philosophy of the Practical* (1908), the latter containing
both the economic and ethics (in today's use of term you might
call the overall scheme Croce's *metaphysics*, but Croce
himself distanced himself from that appellation; there is also some
sense in calling it *philosophy of mind*).


## 2. The Primacy of the Aesthetic



Philosophers since Kant customarily distinguish intuitions or
representations from concepts or universals. In one sense Croce
follows this tradition, but another sense his view departs radically.
For 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 (and all
that is true *a priori* of them is that they have a particular
character or individual physiognomy--they are not necessarily
spatial or temporal, *contra* Kant). To account for this, Croce
supposes that the modes of mental activity are in turn arranged at
different levels. The intellect presupposes the intuitive
mode--which just is the aesthetic--but the intuitive mode
does not presuppose the intellect. The intellect--issuing in
particular judgements--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 this as one of his key insights: 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. This includes the concept of existence or
reality: the intuition plus the judgement of existence is what Croce
calls perception, but itself is innocent of it.



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; but any attempt to determine its exact size is
surely arbitrary. 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. Consider for example the
concept of a *space-time point*. Plainly it is not something
anyone has ever met with in experience; it is an abstraction,
postulated as a limit of certain operations for the convenience of a
'theory'. Croce would call it a pseudo-concept, and would
not call the so-called 'empirical laws' in which it
figures to be fit subjects for truth and knowledge. Its significance,
like that of other pseudo-concepts, is pragmatic.



In fact the vast majority of concepts--house, reptile,
tree--are mere adventitious collections of things that are
formulated in response to practical needs, and thus cannot, however
exact the results of the corresponding science, attain to truth or
knowledge. Nor do the concepts of mathematics escape the
'pseudo' tag. 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 accounts for *character* mentioned above). What
this means it that everything we can perceive or imagine--every
representation or intuition--will necessarily have all three:
there is no possible experience that is not of something concrete,
universal in the sense of being an instance of something absolutely
general, and expressive, that is, admitting of verbal enunciation.
Empirical concepts, then, like *heat*, are concrete but not
universal; mathematical concepts, like *number*, are universal
but not concrete. Examples of pure concepts are rare, but those
recognized by Croce are *finality, quality* and
*beauty*. Such is the domain of Logic, in Croce's
scheme.



A critical difference, for our purposes, between Croce's ideas
and those of his apparent follower Collingwood, emerges when we ask:
what are the constituents of the intuition? For
Collingwood--writing in the mid-1930s--intuitions are built
up out of sense-data, the only significant elaboration of
Russell's doctrine being that sense-data are never simple,
comprising what analysis reveals as sensory and affective
constituents. For Croce the intuition is an organic whole, such that
to analyze it into atoms is always a false abstraction: the intuition
could never be re-built with such elements. (Although a deadly
opponent of formal logic, Croce did share Frege's insight that
the truly meaningful bit of language is the sentence; 'only in
the context of sentence does a word have a meaning', wrote Frege
in 1884).


## 3. Art and Aesthetics



With such an account of 'the aesthetic' in view, one might
think that Croce intends to cover roughly the same ground as
Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic, and like Kant will think of art
as a comparatively narrow if profound region of experience. But Croce
takes the opposite line (and finds Kant's theory of beauty and
art to have failed at precisely this point): art is everywhere, and
the difference between ordinary intuition and that of 'works of
art' is only a *quantitative* difference
(*Aes.*13). This principle has for Croce a profound
significance:



> 
> We must hold firmly to our identification, because among the principal
> reasons which have prevented Aesthetic, the science of art, from
> revealing the true nature of art, its real roots in human nature, has
> been its separation from the general spiritual life, the having made
> of it a sort of special function or aristocratic club.... There
> is not ... a special chemical theory of stones as distinct from
> mountains. In the same way, there is not a science of lesser intuition
> as distinct from a science of greater intuition, nor one of ordinary
> intuition as distinct from artistic intuition. (*Aes.* 14)
> 



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'
(*Aes.* 11); 'intuitive knowledge is expressive
knowledge'. There are several points that have to be in place in
order to understand what Croce means by this, because it obviously
does not strike one as initially plausible.


### 4.1 The Double Ideality of the Work of Art



For our purposes, it is simplest to regard Croce as an idealist, for
whom there is nothing besides the mind. So in that sense, the work of
art is an ideal or mental object along with everything else; no
surprise there, but no interest either. But he still maintains the
ordinary commonplace distinction between mental things--thoughts,
hopes and dreams--and physical things--tables and trees. And
on *this* divide, the work of art, for Croce, is *still*
a mental thing. In other words, the work of art in *doubly*
ideal; to put it another way, *even if Croce were a
dualist*--or a physicalist with some means of reconstructing
the physical-mental distinction--the work of art would remain
mental. In what follows, then, except where otherwise noted, we shall
treat Croce is being agnostic as between idealism, physicalism, or
dualism (see *PPH* 227).



This claim about the ontological status of works of art means that a
spectator 'of' a work of art--a sonata, a poem, a
painting--is actually creating the work of art in his mind.
Croce's main argument for this is the same as, therefore no
better but no worse than, Russell's argument from the relativity
of perception to sense-data. The perceived aesthetic qualities of
anything vary with the states of the perceiver; therefore in speaking
of the former we are really speaking of the latter (*Aes.* 106;
Croce does not, it seems, consider the possibility that certain states
of the perceiver might be privileged, but it is evident that he would
discount this possibility). Now the Crocean formulation--to
intuit is to express--perhaps begins to make sense. For
'intuition' is in some sense a mental *act*, along
with its near-cognates 'representation',
'imagination',
'invention','vision', and
'contemplation.' Being a mental act, something we do, it
is not a mere external object.


### 4.2 The Role of Feeling



Feeling, for Croce, is necessarily part of *any* (mental)
activity, including bare perception--indeed, feeling *is*
a form of mental activity (it is part of his philosophy that there is
never literally present to consciousness anything passive). 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 nothing but the will in mental activity, with all its
varieties of thought, desire and action, its varieties of frustration
and satisfaction (*Aes.* 74-6). The only criterion of
'art' is coherence of expression, of the movement of the
will (for a comparison with Collingwood's similar doctrine, see
Kemp 2003: 173-9).



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, to a posited *a priori*
synthesis (*EA* 39-40). At that level, the irruption of
an intuition just *is* the emergence of a form (we are right to
speak of the *formation* of intuition, that intuitions are
*formed*). At the aesthetic level--one might say at the
phenomenological 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, or good on content
but poor on form.


### 4.3 Feeling, Expression and the Commonplace



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? Even if we allow Croce his widened notion
of feeling, surely 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 or prejudice that we possess a more complete
intuition of reality than we really do' (*Aes.* 9). 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', he writes; 'It consists of small
expressions ... it is a medley of light and colour'
(*Aes.* 9). On the other side, if our man is seriously focussed
on the bowl of fruit, it is only a prejudice to deny that then he is
to that extent expressing himself--although, according to Croce,
ordinary direct perception of things, as glimpsed in photography, will
generally be lacking the 'lyrical' quality that genuine
artists give to their works (though this particular twist is a later
addition; see section 9 below).


## 5. Natural Expression, Beauty and Hedonic Theory



There is another respect in which Croce's notion of expression
as intuition departs from what we ordinarily think of in connection
with the word 'expression'. For example we think
unreflectively of wailing as a natural expression of pain or grief;
generally, we think of expressive behaviour or gestures as being
caused, at least paradigmatically, by the underlying emotion or
feelings. But Croce joins a long line of aestheticians in attempting 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--'for instance in Darwin's
enquiries into the expression of feeling in man and in the
animals' (*PPH* 265; cf. *Aes.* 21, 94-7).
In an article he wrote for the *Encyclopaedia Britannica*,
speaking of such 'psychophysical phenomena', he
writes:



> 
> ...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 is no doubt right to want to distinguish these things, but
whether his official position--that expression is identical to
intuition--will let him do so is another matter; he does not
actually analyze the phenomena in such a way as to deduce, with the
help of his account of expression, the result. He simply asserts it.
But we will wait for our final section to articulate criticisms.



Croce's wish to divorce artistic expression from natural
expression is partly driven by his horror at naturalistic theories of
art. The same goes for his refusal to rank *pleasure* as the
aim, or at least an aim, of art (*Aes.* 82-6). He does
not of course deny that aesthetic pleasures (and pains) exist, but
they are 'the practical echo of aesthetic value and
disvalue' (*Aes.* 94). Strictly speaking, they are dealt
with in the Philosophy of the Practical, that is, in the theory of the
will, and do not enter into the theory of art. That is, if the
defining value of the Aesthetic is *beauty*, the defining value
of the Practical is *usefulness*. 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. Croce does speak of
the 'truly aesthetic pleasure' had in beholding the
'aesthetic fact' (*Aes.* 80). But perhaps he is
being consistent. The pragmatic pleasure had in beholding beauty is
only contingently aroused, but in point of fact it always is aroused
by such beholding, because the having of an intuition is an act of
mind, and therefore the will is brought into play.


## 6. Externalization



The painting of pictures, the scrape of the bow upon strings, the
chanting or inscription of a poem are, for Croce, only contingently
related to the work of art, that is, to the expressed intuition. By
this Croce does not mean to say that for example the painter could get
by without paint in point of fact; the impossibility of say the
existence of Leonardo's *Last Supper* without his having
put paint on the wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie not an impossibility
in principle, but it is a factual impossibility, like that of a man
jumping to the Moon. What he is doing is always driven by the
intuition, and thereby making it possible for others to have the
intuition (or rather, *an* intuition). First, the
memory--though only contingently--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.



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 and so
on:



> 
> Likewise with the painter, who paints upon canvas or upon wood, but
> could not paint at all, did not the intuited image, the line and
> colour as they have taken shape in the fancy, *precede*, at
> every stage of the work, from the first stroke of the brush or sketch
> of the outline to the finishing touches, the manual actions. And when
> it happens that some stroke of the brush runs ahead of the image, the
> artist, in his final revision, erases and corrects it.
> 



> 
> It is, no doubt, very difficult to perceive the frontier between
> expression and communication in actual fact, for the two processes
> usually *alternate rapidly* and are *almost*
> *intermingled*. But the distinction is ideally clear and must
> be strongly maintained... The technical does not enter into art,
> but pertains to the concept of communication. (*PPH*
> 227-8, emphasis added; cf. *Aes*. 50-1, 96-7,
> 103, 111-17; *EA* 41-7)
> 



He also defines technique as 'knowledge at the service of the
practical activity directed to producing stimuli to aesthetic
reproduction' (*Aes.* 111). Again, we defer criticism to
the conclusion.


## 7. Judgement, Criticism and Taste



The first task of the spectator of the work of art--the
critic--is for Croce simple: one is to reproduce the intuition,
or perhaps better, one is to *realize* the intuition, which is
the work of art. One may fail, and Croce is well aware that one may be
*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 (*Aes.* 120). But given
the foregoing strict distinction between practical technique and
artistic activity properly so-called, his task *is the same as that
of the artist*:



> 
> 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)
> 



Leave aside the remark that we become identical with the poet. If by
taste we mean the capacity for aesthetic judgement--that is, the
capacity to find beauty--and by genius we mean the capacity to
produce beauty, then they are the same: the capacity to realize
intuitions.



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)
> 



Of course there is as a matter of fact a great deal of variability in
critical verdicts. But Croce believes this is largely due to variances
in the 'psychological conditions' and the physical
circumstance of spectators (*Aes.* 124). Much of this can be
offset by 'historical interpretation' (*Aes.* 126);
the rest, one presumes, are due to disturbances already mentioned:
'haste, vanity, want of reflexion, theoretic prejudices'
(*Aes.* 120). Also one must realize that for Croce, all that
Sibley famously characterized as aesthetic concepts--not just
gracefulness, delicacy and so on but only aesthetically negative
concepts like ugliness--are really variations on the over-arching
master-concept *beauty*.


## 8. The Identity of Art and Language



The title of the first great book of Croce's career was
'Aesthetic as a Science of expression and *general
linguistic*' (emphasis added). There are several
interconnected aspects to this.



Croce claims that drawing, sculpting, writing of music and so on are
just as much 'language' as poetry, and *all*
language is poetic; therefore '*Philosophy of language and
philosophy of art are the same thing*' (*Aes.* 142;
author's emphasis). The reason for this is that language is to
be understood as expressive; 'an emission of sounds which
expresses nothing is not language' (*Aes.* 143). From our
perspective, we might regard Croce as arguing thus: (1) Referential
semantics--scarcely mentioned by Croce--necessarily involves
*parts* of speech. (2) However:



> 
> It is false to say that a verb or noun is expressed in definite words,
> truly distinguishable from others. Expression is an indivisible whole.
> Noun and verb do not exist in it, but are abstractions made by us,
> destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is the
> *sentence*. (*Aes.* 146)
> 



If we take this as asserting the primacy of sentence
meaning--glossing over the anti-abstraction remark which is
tantamount to a denial of syntactic compositionality--then
together with (3) a denial of what in modern terms would be
distinction between semantic and expressive meaning, or perhaps in
Fregean terms sense and tone, then it is not obvious that the
resulting picture of language would not apply equally to, for example,
drawing. In that case, just as drawings cannot be translated, so
linguistic translation is impossible (though for certain purposes,
naturally, we can translate 'relatively'; *Aes.*
68).



Interestingly, Croce does *not* think of all signs as natural
signs, as lightning is a sign of thunder; on the contrary, he thinks
of 'pictures, poetry and all works of art' as equally
conventional--as '*historically conditioned*'
(*Aes.* 125; authors emphasis).



There is no doubt that on this point Croce was inspired by his great
precursor, the Neapolitan Giambattista Vico (1668-1744).
According to Croce (*Aes.* 220-34) Vico was the first to
recognise the aesthetic as a self-sufficient and non-conceptual mode
of knowledge, and famously he held that all language is substantially
poetry. The only serious mistake in this that Croce found was
Vico's belief in an actual historical period when all language
was poetry; it was the mistake of substituting a concrete history for
'ideal history' (*Aes.* 232).


## 9. Later Developments



As he became older, there was one aspect of his aesthetics that he was
uneasy with. In the *Aesthetic* of 1901 (*Aes.*
82-7, 114), and again in *Essence of Aesthetic* of 1913
(*EA* 13-16) , he had been happy to deduce from his
theory that art cannot have an ethical purpose. The only value in art
is beauty. But by 1917, in the essay *The Totality of Artistic
Expression* (*PPH* 261-73), his attitude towards the
moral content of art is more nuanced. This may have been only a shift
of emphasis, or, charitably perhaps, drawing out a previously
unnoticed implication: 'If the ethical principle is a cosmic
[universal] force (as it certainly is) and queen of the world, the
world of liberty, she reigns in her own right, while art, in
proportion to the purity with which she re-enacts and expresses the
motions of reality, is herself perfect' (*PPH* 267). In
other words, he still holds that to speak of a moral work of art would
not impinge upon it aesthetically; likewise to speak of an
*immoral* work, for the values of the aesthetic and moral
domains are absolutely incommensurable. It is not merely an
*assertion* that within the domain of pure intuition, the
concepts simply don't apply; that would merely beg the question.
He means that a pure work of art *cannot* be subject to moral
praise or blame because the Aesthetic domain exists independently of
and prior, in the Philosophy of Spirit, to the Ethical.



In the Encyclopaedia article of 1928, Croce asserts positively that
the moral sensibility is a necessary condition of the artist:



> 
> The foundation of all poetry is therefore the human personality, and
> since the human personality fulfills itself morally, the foundation of
> all poetry is the moral conscience. (*PPH* 221)
> 



Still it's possible to read him as not having changed his view.
For instance, Shakespeare could not have been Shakespeare without
seeing into the moral heart of man, for morality is the highest domain
of spirit. But we have to distinguish between the moral
sensibility--the capacity to perceive and feel moral
emotions--and the capacity to act morally. Croce's position
is that only the first is relevant to art.



The early emphasis on beauty is downplayed in subsequent writing in
favour of the successful work art as expression, as constituting a
'lyrical intuition'. In *Essence of Aesthetic* he
writes:



> 
> ...what gives coherence and unity to the intuition is feeling:
> the intuition is really such because it represents a feeling, and can
> only appear from and upon that. Not the idea, but the feeling, is what
> confers upon art the airy lightness of a symbol: an aspiration
> enclosed in the circle of a representation--that is art; and in
> it the aspiration alone stands for the representation, and the
> representation alone for the aspiration. (*EA* 30)
> 



Croce still holds that art is intuitive, a-logical or nonconceptual,
and therefore by 'it represents a feeling' he does not
mean that our aesthetic mode of engagement involves that concept, and
he does not mean that art is to be understood as symbolic, implying a
relation which would require an intellectual act of mind to apprehend.
Both would imply that our mode of aesthetic engagement would be
something more, or something other than, the aesthetic, which is as
always the intuitive capacity. The point is simply that our awareness
of the form of the intuition in nothing but our awareness of the
unifying currents of feeling running through it. It is a claim about
what it is that unifies an intuition, distinguishes it from the
surrounding, relatively discontinuous or confused intuition. This is,
in effect, a claim about the nature of beauty:



> 
> An appropriate expression, if appropriate, is also beautiful, beauty
> being nothing but the precision of the image, and therefore of the
> expression. ...(*EA* 48).
> 



> 
> Expression and beauty are not two concepts, but a single concept,
> which it is permissible to designate with either synonymous word
> ... (*EA* 49).
> 



Genuinely new in the 1917 essay was Croce's appealing but
enigmatic claim that art is in a sense 'universal', is
concerned with the 'totality':



> 
> To give artistic form to a content of feeling means, then, impressing
> upon it the character of totality, breathing into it the breath of the
> cosmos. Thus understood, universality and artistic form are not two
> things but one. (*PPH* 263).
> 



And:



> 
> In intuition, the single pulsates with the life of the whole, and the
> whole is in the life of the single. Every genuine artistic
> representation is itself and is the universe, the universe in
> *that* individual form, and *that* individual form as
> the universe. In every utterance, every fanciful [imaginative]
> creation, of the poet, there lies the whole of human destiny, all
> human hope, illusions, griefs, joys, human grandeurs and miseries, the
> whole drama of reality perpetually evolving and growing out of itself
> in suffering and joy. (*PPH* 262)
> 



Croce--and undoubtedly the political situation in Italy in 1917
played a role in this--was anxious to assert the importance of
art for humanity, and his assertion of it is full of feeling. And the
claim marks a decisive break from earlier doctrine: form is now linked
with universality rather that with particular feelings. But it is
difficult to see beyond such metaphors as 'impressing upon it
the character of totality' (not even with the help of
Croce's *Logic*). One is reminded of the Kantian dictum
that in aesthetics we 'demand universality' in our
judgements, but there are no explicit indications of such. There is
one piece of Crocean philosophy behind it: Since art takes place prior
to the intellect, so the logical distinction between subject and
predicate collapses; therefore perhaps at least one barrier is removed
from speaking of the 'universality of art'. But that does
not indicate what, positively, it means. It obvious that there is
something right about speaking of the 'universal
character' of a Beethoven or a Michelangelo as opposed to the
pitiful, narrow little spectacle of this month's pop band, but
Croce doesn't tell us what justifies or explains such talk
(various others have reached a similar conclusion; see Orsini p. 214).
Still, that doesn't mean that he had no right to proclaim it,
and perhaps not to count his readers as agreeing to it.


## 10. Problems



There is a lot of Croce's aesthetics that we have not discussed,
including his criticisms of the discipline of Rhetoric (Aes.
67-73; *PPH* 233-35), his disparagement of
'genre criticism'--that is, his doctrine that there
are ultimately no aesthetic differences amongst different kinds of art
(Aes. 111-17, *EA* 53-60, *PPH*
229-33)--and his condemnation of psychological and other
naturalistic views of art (*Aes.*87-93; *EA*
41-7). There is also his magnificent if contentious
*precis* of the history of aesthetics (*Aes.*
155-474). But these are points of relative detail; the theory is
whole is sufficiently well before us now to conclude by mentioning
some general lines of criticism.


### 10.1 Acting versus Contemplation



The equation of intuition with expression as at section 4.3 simply is
not, in end, plausible. C. J. Ducasse (1929) put his finger on it.
When we look at a vase full of flowers, it simply does not matter how
closely or in what manner we attend to it; we do not create a
'work of art' unless we draw or paint it. Croce has lost
sight of the ordinary sense of passively contemplating and
*doing* something; between reading and writing, looking and
drawing, listening and playing, dancing and watching. Of course all
the first members of these pairs involve a mental *action* of a
kind, and there are important connections between the first members
and the corresponding seconds--perhaps in terms of what Berenson
calls *ideated sensations*--but that is not to say that
there are not philosophically crucial distinctions between them.


### 10.2 Privacy



The equation also defeats the purpose of art criticism or
interpretation, and indeed of the very notion of an aesthetic
community, of an audience. To say that the work of art is identical
with the intuition is to say that it is necessarily private. It is to
say, for example, that since one man's intuition of
Botticelli's *Venus* is necessarily different from any
one else's, there is no such thing as Botticelli's
*Venus*, understood not as a material painting but as a work of
art; there is only Botticelli's-*Venus*-for-A,
Botticelli's-*Venus*-for-B, and so on. But these
intuitions cannot be compared, and there is no higher standard; thus
they cannot be said to agree or disagree, since any such comparison
would be logically impossible (see Tilghman 1971, Ch. 1, for further
discussion; for at attempt at saving Croce, see Schusterman 1983). The
position is perhaps not contradictory, but it is exceedingly
unattractive; it renders art a diversion away from reality, when as
Freud emphasized--to invoke a figure who is Croce's
opposite in almost every respect--the artist's struggle
with the medium is the attempt to conquer reality. Although Croce
disowned this consequence, it's hard not to conclude that on
this view art is a domain of fancy (in the bad sense), without any
check upon vanity (see *Aes.* 122 for a point at which Croce
almost sees the point). If we bring back the material painted object
into the picture, of course, then there is no such difficulty: ones
'intuition' will be accurate, or one's
interpretation will be correct, just in case it corresponds to the
picture (of course the notion of 'corresponds to the
picture' is only a placeholder for a great deal to be supplied
by theories of representation, perspective, expression and other parts
of aesthetics; but the one thing that plausible theories will share is
a commitment to the object, the material painting).



It's worth emphasizing again that Croce's claim that
intuition is expression, and consequently that works art are mental
objects, is not just an application of his general idealism. It is
independent of it. In the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* article,
for example, he allows himself to speak for convenience of the
'spiritual' and 'physical', in order to make
the point that the physical object is only of practical, and not of
aesthetic significance (*PPH* 227-8).


### 10.3 The View of Language



Undoubtedly Croce was influenced by his lifelong immersion in
literature in his proclamation that all language is poetry. And
perhaps it is true that all language has some poetic qualities, and
perhaps it is true that language 'in its actuality'
consists of sentential utterances. But as Bosanquet pointed out in
1919, this does not mean that language is *only* poetry, or
that the referential dimension of language does not exist. It must
have something that distinguishes a scientific treatise from a
tune--in fact it must be the same thing, which we are calling the
referential dimension, that serves to distinguish *poetry* from
a tune (it has to have sound *and sense*, as we say). So to say
that drawings and tunes are equally good examples of language seems,
at best, strained. Perhaps Croce would have said that the referential
dimension does not exist, or is a false abstraction; but his general
philosophical views may be forcing him down an unprepossessing path.
More promising would be a formalist endeavor to try to isolate the
pure sonic aspect of poetry--comprising metre, alliteration and
so on--and then to search for instantiations or at least
analogies in the other arts.


## 11. Conclusion



Suppose Croce were to give up the idea that art *is* intuition,
and agree that the work of art is identical with the material
work--remember this would not prevent him being an idealist in
his general philosophy--and suppose he allowed that he was wrong
about language. What would remain of his theory would arguably be its
essence: that art is expression, and we engage with it via the
intuitive capacity. It remains individual, and perhaps
pre-conceptual.



In closing, the reader may find it useful if we summarize the major
differences--narrowly on matters of aesthetics--between
Croce and Collingwood, who is often thought of as Croce's
follower. (Indeed the question of whether, how, and to what extent
Croce 'influenced' Collingwood, not only in aesthetics but
in wider matters of metaphysics and history, are vexed questions.
According to a careful study Rik Peters, the influence was perhaps
pervasive insofar as Croce influenced the *questions* that
Collingwood posed for himself, but Peters concludes that the answers
given were of Collingwood's own making; see Peters 2011 for
more; for the matter specifically about art and aesthetics, see also
Hospers 1956, Donagan 1962, and Jones 1972.) First, Collingwood seems
to agree with Croce that art, so to speak, is everywhere--there
no self-conscious perception that lacks expressive and aesthetic
qualities--whereas Croce's theory does not tend to regard
the expressive content of work of art as something 'in the
artist', emphasizing instead its form and later its
'universality', Collingwood tries to explain expressive
content in terms of a detailed theory of the emotions. Second,
although Croce does devote some energy to discrediting the
'technical' theory of art, Collingwood offers a more
organized and detailed analysis of why art is not 'craft',
though arguably the main points are Croce's. Finally,
Collingwood devotes his final sections to a topic left unaddressed by
Croce: the problem of whether or in what way the responses of the
audience can constrain the object presented by the artist.