Benedetto Croce on Art

The following is a piece I wrote exactly one year ago to the day. It's a bit odd looking back at what one has written. It seems so distant already. There is a sense of unreality about it, as if it were not written by me. The reason I reproduce here is that I just read that those maintaining that blog space in which this article appeared a year ago said that they are now stopping to do so. So I must somehow figure out a way to preseve my blog articles if I do not wish them to disappear forever.  Transferring them here seems to me as good a way of doing that as another. So here is my first.

Hardly a day passes by in the course of  which we do not meet with some kind or other of a product of "art". We are bombarded by "art" at the service of sales, in the form of photos, bill boards and TV commercials, with or without music.Women in particular never cease to be moved by anything remotely connected with the "art" of making themselves "attractive": lipsticks, eye shadows, false eye lashes, face powder, masks, nail polish, surrogate nails, plastic surgery for the enhancement of face, arm, leg , breasts or stomach, decorative adhesives, body painting, ear rings, finger rings, nose rings, bracelets, brooches, necklaces, pendants, fashion, handbags, shoes etc. What is art? What does it do? What is the secret of its fascination for us? What is the relation between different works of art? How is art related to the beauty of nature? How is art related to intuition, expression and communication? How is classical art different from Romantic art? I turned to Benedetto Croce, the great Italian philosopher of art in a chapter on "Aesthetics" in "Philosophies of Art and Beauty" edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns 1964 and republished in 1976 by the University of Chicago Press. 

 

Taking a poem as an example Virgil's "Aeneid" (Aeneid iii 294 et sequel") in which he recounts how Aeneas met Andromache and his reception by the son of Priam, Croce thinks that what distinguishes a poem and other writings is "feeling" expressed through and "transcended" by "a complex of images" of persons, things, attitudes, gestures, sayings, joy and sorrow, of bitter memories, shuddering horror, melancholy, homelessness, tenderness and a childish pietas etc. feelings logically inexpressible except through poetry. To him, poetry is neither feeling nor images alone or together but "contemplation of feeling" (Keats' "emotions recollected in tranquility")  or what he calls "lyrical intuition" or just "pure intuition" or apprehending the "pure throb of life in its ideality". Other things like "reflections, polemics, allegories etc" are there too, of course, but only as "extraneous elements in compound" or as such "image-feelings" themselves in "non-poetic abstraction" before the relevant "poetic creation". And to him, similar principles would apply to painting, sculpture, architecture and music. Thus if a painting were mere imitation or reproduction of an object or if lines and lights and colours were merely combined with ingenuous novelty of effect or if music were just a combination of notes, then it would be a mere mechanical invention, not art. Whatever may be the skill, nobility of intellect, quickness of wit and pleasantness of effect, if the "feelings" embedded and expressed by the relevant images and techniques are missing, it would not be poetry.

 

Art is not philosophy (concerned with "logical reflection" of the universal categories of being but not unreflective "intuition of being" although there is "aesthetic logic" or "the logic of sense" in art, it is not "conceptual logic" but a "symbolic expression" of conceptual logic in terms of the "aesthetic logic" ), not history (in which there is distinction between reality and fiction, reality of fact and the reality of desire etc. whereas in art, such distinctions are not yet made and where it still lives upon "pure images"). Even the so-called "verisimulitude" of art is just a "clumsy metaphor for the mutual coherence of images", not correspondence to "factual reality", not natural science nor mathematical science( which relies on generalisation ,through the use abstract symbols to represent operations and function, any alleged similarity of mathematical or geometrical basis of art being just another metaphor or symbolic expression of the constructive, cohesive and unifying force of the poetic mind building itself a body of images), not play of fancy (concerned with flitting from image to image in search of mere variety and amusement for its own sake but are not truly artistic nor creative or poetic imagination, which seeks to capture true feelings in the drama of human life through giving them an emotional unity and concentration through the internal coherence between such images, something which involves the moral personality of the artist or poet in his actual life or through sympathy with others). To Croce the true artist must burn, therefore "the figure of the pure poet, the pure artist, the votary of pure Beauty, aloof from contact with humanity, is not real figure but a caricature". He has put the nail on the head. Is that not why we find so much of contempoary art so cold, distant, remote and therefore "dead". They seem mere intellectual play. There is no heart in them. Is it any wonder that so often they fail to touch us?

 

Croce says that the poetic imagination gives "contemplative form" to the workings of feelings, "intuitive expression" to "obscure impressions" and words, spoken or sung or painted or otherwise uttered.  Without them, logical thought cannot be fully expressed. To him, every logical thinker, critic, scientist cherishes at the bottom of his heart his own private store of imagination and poetry, otherwise, he would not have been a man and therefore not even a thinking or acting being but "in proportion as this private store is scanty, we find a certain superficiality and aridity in thought, and a certain coldness in action".To be moving and layered, the artist's own inner life must itself be rich. We cannot get blood from stone! We cannot get abundance from barrenness. A tropical rain forest does not rise from a desert! For there to be life in art, there must first be Life or better, an art of Life.

Croce thinks rightly that in art and the philosophic reflection upon art, there is no a priori concept, which to him, exists only in the individual products which it generates. "Just as the a priori reality called Art, Poetry or Beauty does not exist in a transcendent region where it can be perceived and admired in itself, but only in the innumberable works of poetry, of art and of beauty which it has formed and continues to form, the refutations which it has effected and continues to effect, the demonstrations it makes, the theories it constructs, the problems and groups of problems which it solves and has solved.". Therefore, aesthetics or the science of art, does not have to define art once and for all and to deduce from this conception its various doctrine so as to cover the whole field of aesthetics, which to him "is only the perpetual systematization, always renewed and always growing, of the problems arising from time to time out of reflection upon art and is identical with the solutions of the difficulties and the criticisms of the errors which art as stimulus and material to the unceasing progress of thought".

 

To Croce, it is impossible to dissociate aesthetics from the general philosophic temper of the relevant ages. He cites as example, "the downfall of psychological associationism ("the substitution of mechanism for a priori synthesis") implies not only logical associationism but of an aesthetics [of associationism] too, with its association of "content" and "form" or of two "representations" which... was a contactus extrinsecus whose terms were no sooner united than they discedebant. The collapse of biological and evolutionary explanations of logical and ethical values implies the same collapse in the case of aesthetic values. "

 

Then there is the problem of intuition and expression. Croce says that there is no solution, just like in the philosophical discussions on the problem of inner and outer, mind and matter, soul and body, moral intention and will, will and action etc. It is impossible to find a dialectical unity between terms which have been distinguished not philosophically or formally but only empirically and materially. He says: "An image that does not express, that is not speech, song, drawing, painting, sculpture or architecture--speech at least murmured to oneself, song at least echoing within one's own breast, line and colour seen in imagination and colouring with its own tint the whole soul and organism--is an image that does not exist". This doctrine of the identity of intuition and expression is a principle of common sense. "In the creation of a work of poetry, we are present, as it were, at the mystery of the creation of the world; hence the value of of the contribution made by aesthetics to philosophy as a whole, or the conception of the One that is All. Aesthetics, by denying in the life of art an abstract spiritualism and the resulting dualism, prepares the way and leads the mind towards idealism or absolute spiritualism". It is impossible to separate the intuition and its expression and its expression from the originating intuition!

 

Often people get confused between expression and communication and mistake matters of techniques with matter of art. To Croce, the work of art is completed by the artist once it is finished. How it is perceived is a matter for the reader/audience/spectator. The artist expresses his feeling and his intuition through his lively images which literally embody and which give form to the otherwise inchoate feelings existing in his heart and his mind. When he tries to "express" it or give form to it, we are concerned not with any physical objects but with his mental processes. The exact line between his mental processes and its expression is difficult to draw because during the creative process, the thought processes and the physical acticity of the actual creation, e.g the actual brush stroke or words quickly alternate, so that once the brush stroke or the word does not coincide with what the artist wishes to "express", it is canceled and replaced by another stroke or word. The two ideas are fused into one in practice. In this connection, "technique" strictly speaking, has more to do with "communication" than with art, which is more concerned with the integration of the artist's feelings through the relevant images. If the feelings are absent, the best practical "technique" will not turn the "artist's" work into a work of art!  To me, technique is something entirely mechanical. It requires constant practice, like riding a bicycle. But having the technique of riding a bicycle will not automatically turn the the rider into a bicycle "artist". The difference between an artist and a craftsman is here useful. The craftsman has all the technical know how but if he has not the "imagination" and the "feeling" to move by his technique, if he is not "inspired" to "create" something which is just right for expressing his "feeling", his work will lack that most important element: "life" and when the "feeling of life" is missing, it can't be good art !    

 

To Croce, the division of arts according to whether the artistic object consists of sounds, notes, coloured objects, carved or modeled objects, constructed objects having no apparent correspondence with natural bodies ( poetry, music, panting, sculpture, architecture etc) is merely technical. To ask what kind of images can be expressed in sound, in notes, in colours, lines etc is like asking in economics what relative values particular objects can have. Everything will have to depend upon the circumstances and needs. It really depends on the infinite varieties of artistic personalities and their states of mind . It is not something inherent in the medium itself. It depends on how they in fact will be used to produce "art". Similarly "natural beauty" does not exist except in the mind of the perceiver. The process of poetic communication can certainly take place through natural objects. The lover's imagination creates a woman beautiful to him, and the pilgrim's imagination creates the charming and sublime landscape and embroiders it in the scene of a lake or a mountain, according to Croce.

 

To Croce, the romantics emphasize the subjective, feeling, passion, immediacy, the ephemeral, excess, abandonment of control, fancy and nature above the objective, reason, balance, control, serenity. contemplation and the eternal and the soul." The romantic emphasis on feeling and sensation lives on in symbolism, impressionism, sensualism, imagism, expressionism, and even futurism although romanticism in itself is dead. Art is no longer concerned with the expression of feelings in harmonious forms of transcendence of life itself by the contemplation of the universal and the infinite, but has become multifaceted expressions of the cries and gesticulations and broken colours of life itself.

Whilst one may question whether "futurism" has anything to do with the romantic tradition except in its rebellion against classicism, it is undeniable that nowadays, the "part" has usurped the "whole", and different "aspects" of the whole now dominate the contemporary art world more than the "whole" itself! This is a time of fragmentation, of discrete, disconnected, disjointed, broken and partially coherent images. How long do we have to wait for the emergence of another new order, of balance, of equilibrium? Perhaps never!  In the meantime, we just have to open our eyes, our ears, our minds but above all, our hearts! Life may be stranger than art!