Aesthetics

AESTHETICS. - Science of the beautiful and of art.

I. MEANING OF THE TERM

The use of the word aesthetics to denote philosophical reflection on art and on beauty goes back to a pupil of Leibniz, to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who in 1759 entitled Aesthetica, from αἴσθησις (= sensation), the science of those sensible facts that refer to the beauty and art. Aesthetics would in fact represent, for Baumgarten, the "perfectio cognitionis sensitivae, qua talis," precluding a higher knowledge and constituting almost a "lower gnoseology." Other names for the same discipline are not lacking, which some call "philosophy of art" and for which it would be desirable that the classical name "poetics" should come back into use. In the German schools of the pre-war period the distinction prevailed (to which, among others, C. Fiedler, H. Spitzer, M. Dessoir, W. Worringer, E. Utitz adhered) between aesthetics (Aesthetik) and science of art (Kunstwissenschaft): a distinction that was adopted in the two sections of the Congrès international d'esthétique et de science de l'art (v. Atti, Paris 1937); but it is hoped that a distinction has not followed which could deepen the gulf between the artistic and the aesthetic, to the detriment of the understanding of both. Bound to the expressive fact, art is bound to the word; with aesthetics, therefore, the science of language, that is, linguistics, maintains close relations. Indeed, for B. Croce the connection of the two disciplines is meant to be so close as to be transformed into identity, consecrated from the very title of the work: Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistics.

II. HISTORICAL SYNTHESIS

The question is raised whether a history of aesthetics can begin from classical antiquity or whether, with regard to the Greeks, one should not speak of a "prehistory of aesthetics," according to the expression used by Zimmermann in vol. I of the Geschichte der Aesthetik als philosophischer Wissenschaft. For Croce, aesthetics, together with politics or economics, would be a "new diabolical science" or one "of a new divinity" of the modern world, a science that could not arise until value had been given to the sensory and the imaginative, and until the new concept of spirituality as autonomy had been established. That would be tantamount to denying that there exists a philosophy of the Greeks, because an aesthetics exists, at least implicitly, wherever there is a philosophy. A concept of being cannot arise without its including a particular evaluation of a fact that plays so great a part in human experience, that is, of the aesthetic fact. Even aesthetic silences condition philosophical systematization, on account of the precariousness of conceptual syntheses that are constituted without taking into account an experience so fundamental. When a history of aesthetics is written, as a history of philosophy from the aesthetic point of view, it will come to light that the first speculation of the Greeks is conditioned by the necessity of justifying that "spurious" reality, mixed of being and non-being, which is the artistic image. Artistic "deception" rises in Gorgias to a cosmic value, on account of the irrationality of the being that it should reveal.

But, to keep here to elementary observations, it is recalled that the highest page of classical aesthetics is that of the Platonic Symposium, where the condition of Eros is described, who, fecundated by the yearning toward objective and absolute beauty, renders himself capable of generating and procreating in the beautiful (τῆς γεννήσεως καὶ τοῦ τόκου ἐν τῷ καλῷ: 206 e). In the being pregnant and turgid the amorous impulse toward the beautiful is generated (206 d); when someone already longs to generate and procreate, only then does he launch himself in search of the beautiful (209 b) and, having found it, generates and procreates that with which he had long been pregnant (209 c). Poetry is this spiritual procreation, for which no particular requirement is asked of "good poets," except that they be generators and inventors (γεννήσεως, εὐρετικοί: 209 a). This is the highest page of classical aesthetics, because it engages expression from within in artistic reproduction and brings the making of art close to the objective contemplation of the beautiful, to the point almost of making coincide the two dispositions that the Greeks for the most part love to distinguish, sometimes to oppose. The merit usually attributed to Plotinus of having made the beautiful intrinsic to artistic production must be traced back to the author of the Symposium. To the latter go back other aesthetic concepts that will remain to fecundate the whole philosophical tradition. The Platonic concept that beauty is an idea that is translated into corporeality (τίνα σώματος ἰδέαν; Phaedrus, 251 a) has reached as far as Romanticism, as far as Hegel, and is not yet settled in our days. Beauty is the only idea that had the privilege of being visible to mortals and of being ardently loved by them (230 d). That poetry constitutes an exceptional, alogical knowledge, similar to that of the priestesses of Delphi and of the seers; that the passionate raptus by which it is invested has the species of frenzy and madness: this is repeated by Plato, especially in the Ion and the Phaedrus, and this sometimes serves for the exaltation, sometimes for the devaluation of poetry on account of the dark and passionate element that it stirs up in man. Even the Platonic theory of artistic mimēsis has a twofold outcome, pessimistic and optimistic. Insofar as it is imitation of the sensible, in fact, art removes us by three degrees from the idea, from which the sensible is already removed, and for this reason art must be banished from the ideal republic. But, insofar as artistic mimēsis can be ascending, that is, can anticipate in sensible harmonies the ideal rhythms, as happens notably in music (Republic, III, 401 d-402 a), it is supremely educational, and precisely in music must the defenders of the city establish their stronghold.

Aristotle's Poetics contributes as original a direct consideration of that poetic genre which is tragedy, in regard to which he carries out an acute and minute analysis that nevertheless does not gain much ground compared with Platonic aesthetics. For Aristotle too art is imitation, although it is easier for him than for Plato to understand the ideality intrinsic to a sensible representation and therefore to evaluate artistic imitation positively. Plato in the Sophist had distinguished an ἱστορική μίμησις from a δοξομιμητική (267 d, e): and on this basis rises the Aristotelian distinction between history, which is description of things that have happened, and poetry, which represents things possible to happen. With this poetry is brought close to the universal and necessary of scientific knowledge, and one does not see how it can be distinguished except by that concept of verisimilitude (νὰ τανὰ τὸ εἰκός: Poet., IX, 1451 b) which is likewise borrowed from Plato. The latter had spoken in the Symposium of the liberating relief (ἀπόλυσις: 206 c) that follows the bleeding effort of spiritual gestation, preluding to the comprehension of the liberating virtue of art. The Aristotelian mention of tragic catharsis, that is, of the purification from the passions of terror and pity, obtained by means of their scenic representation (Poet., VI, 1449 b), develops its aesthetic meaning with a backward reading that allows the commentary of Aristotelian catharsis on the basis of the Platonic ἀπόλυσις.

In the aesthetics of late classical antiquity, besides Neoplatonism, which elaborates with a markedly mystical tone the concepts of the Platonic dialogues, one notes a tension between Epicureans and Stoics, the former intent on valorizing the hedonistic side, the latter the didactic side of poetry, the latter making large use of allegory to squeeze from the poetic fable allusions of doctrinal meaning. In Horace's epistle Ad Pisonem the two tendencies are reconciled by making poetic delight serve ends of moral and intellectual utility: omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.

The contribution of Christian philosophy to the history of aesthetics goes beyond the sporadic observations on art and beauty, mostly of Neoplatonic inspiration, that recur in the Fathers and the Doctors (v. ARTE), and far beyond the allegorism that informs, for example, Dante's aesthetics. The effective and essential contribution is indirect: it consists in the new theological conception destined to reform by reflection the concept of man. The Platonic Demiurge who looks to the ideas and shapes formless matter in the image of the intellectual type could not but condition an intellectualistic and mimetic aesthetics. But the Christian God, who intimately generates His consubstantial Word in whom He recognizes and loves Himself, and through whom He creates being outside Himself, could not but condition an aesthetics of expressiveness and creativity, such as would indeed come about in modern times. The beauty of things, for St. Augustine and St. Thomas, continues to reveal itself in the unity, harmony, proportion, and fitness of the parts, but it is always implied that these qualities of creation are due to the belonging of things to their spiritual matrix, that is, to the creative Principle. Nothing would be beautiful if it did not come from God: this is the motif that recurs from St. Augustine's Confessions to St. Bonaventure's Itinerarium. It is still a matter of divine art rather than human art: it is a matter of cosmology rather than psychology. But the motif of this aesthetic cosmology, to which Christian optimism is for so large a part indebted, is destined to bear fruit also in the conception of human art, which, rather than an imitation of nature, must prove to be an imitation of the act whereby God creates nature. When a history of aesthetics is written from this point of view, it will appear that St. Augustine's contribution to the aesthetics of modern times lies more in the De Trinitate than in the De musica, because, while in the latter work the Neoplatonic schema is reaffirmed, in the former advantage is taken of the resemblance between the human word and the divine Word in order to illustrate the generative act whereby the word detaches itself from the soul as an inner expression, warm with the love that binds it to the one who generates it. « Conceptam rerum veracem notitiam, tamquam verbum apud nos habemus, et dicendo intus gignimus » (De Trinit., IX, 7). In expressing itself to itself the mind loves itself and loves its own inner word: « Cum itaque se mens novit et amat, iungitur ei amore verbum eius. Et quoniam amat notitiam et novit amorem, et verbum in amore est, et amor in verbo, et utrumque in amante atque dicente » (IX, 10). Poems have their origin in this inner expression which is the reason for every word outwardly uttered: « Omnia... sonantium verba linguarum etiam in silentio cogitantur, et carmina praecurrunt animo, tacente ore corporis » (XV, 11). Here is the first page of modern linguistics and poetics; here is reckoned the innovative force of Christian thought within the framework of Western culture.

The subsequent progress of aesthetics is measured by the slow affirmation of the expressive powers of the spirit, in contrast with the reborn intellectualism and hedonism of classical aesthetics. The many treatises of the 15th and 16th centuries on beauty, on love, on furor (Ficino, Equicola, Bembo, Leone Ebreo, Bruno), linking the aesthetic to the emotive and the passional, bring some hint of the intimate, spiritual sources of beauty. They retard the progress of aesthetics less than the renewed cult of Aristotle's Poetics (Fracastoro, Castelvetro, Scaliger, Piccolomini, Patrizi), which brings reflection on poetry back into the furrow of classical intellectualism, opening the way to that rationalism of Descartes which will have its faithful aesthetic expression in the Art poétique (1674) of N. Boileau. In truth Aristotle's "verisimilar" did not coincide exactly with the "true," but left a margin to the poet's activity in that "similar" which denotes at once closeness and distance. By widening the margin, the poetics of the 17th century were able to make room for the concepts of "ingegno" (wit), "argutezza" (acumen), "gusto" (taste), "stile" (style), "immaginazione" (imagination), "fantasia" (fancy), by means of which poetic reality gradually disengaged itself from an objective and intellectual model in order to draw near in some way to the free productivity of the subject. The detachment was accentuated in those sophistic poetics which, no longer concerned with making artistic delight serve as a corrective to the asperities of the true, held sensible pleasure as an end in itself and the sole end of art.

The sensual and hedonistic aesthetics expelled poetry from the ranks of the serious activities of the spirit. In the first half of the 18th century a movement arose directed at recovering art as a form of knowledge, assigning to it, albeit in its sensible consistency, a function precursory of the clear and distinct ideas perceived by the intellect. Into this movement, which, as was said at the beginning, has its head in Germany in Leibniz and Baumgarten, there also enters the aesthetic contribution of G. B. Vico, who sees in "poetic wisdom" the morning phase of that "reflecting with a pure mind" which marks the phase of the intellectual maturity of individuals and peoples. But in Vico there is much more than the artistic auroralism that links him with the theories of his time. In Leibniz and the Leibnizians the aesthetic fact is still "perceived"; in Vico it is "productio." Nourished on Augustinian and Platonic studies, he brings to light what was implicit in Plato's « τόνος » and in St. Augustine's « verbum mentis » for explaining the true nature of beauty. Vico's "fantasia" is by now the expressive virtue of the human spirit which is fulfilled in the "corpulent" image, a synthesis of matter and form, issuing in a burst from the incandescent life of feeling. « I primi uomini delle nazioni gentili, come fanciulli del nascente genere umano..., dalla loro idea criavan essi le cose, ma con infinita differenza però dal criare che fa Iddio. Perocché Iddio, nel suo purissimo intendimento, conosce e conoscendole crea le cose; essi, per la loro robusta ignoranza, il facevano in forza d'una corpulenta fantasia. E perch'era corpulentissima, il facevano con una maravigliosa sublimità; tal e tanta che perturbava all'eccesso essi medesimi, che fingendo le si criavano, onde furono detti "poeti", che lo stesso in greco suona che "criatori" » (Seconda scienza nuova [1731], I, II). In the « ingente selva » of Vichian thought, where not everything is clear and distinct, the breath of the new aesthetics opens laboriously but validly.

The creative powers of the human spirit that Vico had which he had grown accustomed to in the orbit of poetic fantasy, the human productivity which Vico had kept under control in history, with German Romanticism exceed these limits and, having invented the whole of the real, touch the boundaries of the absolute. The history of the human becomes the history of being. "Genius" is the new Romantic god that bends the rebellious forces, leads back to the unity of form nature and spirit, thought and extension, the infinite and the finite, and reveals the ultimate meaning of the whole. Already in the Critique of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant had allowed this outcome to present itself, attributing to beauty the virtue of establishing the point of reconciliation between sensibility and the intellect, between the necessity of nature and the freedom of the spirit — precisely the terms between which the other two Critiques had discerned "an immense fracture." Kant had also fleetingly suggested that the foundation of this unity must be concretized in the idea of an Intellect that was not the intellect of man and by whose power the conjunction would be brought about of what man's discursive pure reason separates and opposes (Kritik der Urteilskraft, Berlin 1912, pp. 244, 249). In Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), on the other hand, this supersensible intellect is resolved entirely in the genius of the artist who, as the organ of the absolute, discloses its intimate essence, as the indisposition of ideal and sensible, of thought and extension, of unreflective spontaneity and of consciousness.

Aesthetic interest seems foreign to Fichte's Doctrine of Science (1794); but the absolute power of the transcendental I, which creates the non-I in order to express therein its moral freedom, is translated into the magic of Novalis's poetic inspiration, into the free creativity of the artist who in F. Schlegel and in Tieck hurls worlds out of himself, only to annihilate them despotically, to surmount ironically the finitude of his every work with a proud affirmation of infinity. Kant's "thing in itself" is the veiled donna whose mystery is revealed in the embrace of beauty. Romanticism, philosophy and literature, proceeds under the sign of the primacy of the aesthetic. Indeed, in Hegel art is not last in the dialectic of the absolute spirit, but, as "sensible ideality" or "formed spirituality," it preludes imperfectly to the definitive moment in which the absolute possesses itself in the purity of the philosophical concept. Yet the Hegelian logos, in which art is destined to be resolved and to die, itself realizes the Romantic-aestheticist design, because it concludes within the limits of the human and of historical dialectic the sense of the absolute which, on the contrary, exceeds and overflows from every side. The Hegelian system, according to V. Gioberti's observation, possesses as much from the beauty of the work of art as it lacks of the truth which the philosopher seeks. Romanticism is a crucial point of modern aesthetics because it recognizes and exalts the creative powers of the human spirit, giving an account of poetic magic; but it leaves unresolved the problem of an excess of reality and of truth — of the logical, the moral, the metaphysical — beyond the boundaries of the aesthetic. Many Romantic souls lived this problem tormentedly and dramatically.

Subsequent aesthetics marks a decomposition of art into its formal values, on the one hand, and, on the other, into its psychological-historical values. In extreme synthesis, one may include in the first category (Gestaltästhetik, or aesthetics of the "tie," as opposed to Gehaltästhetik, or aesthetics of the "tone") the current that descends from Herbart, and which, having its historian in Zimmermann, includes up to a certain point the lofty critical contribution of F. De Sanctis, and descends to our own day through the elaboration of Hanslick, Fiedler, Semper, Wölfflin and the early Berenson. On the side of historical-psychological values stand movements of various inspiration, among them the aesthetics of positivism which with Taine reduces art to a problem of psychological mechanics, bound to the three concurrent factors of race, environment and moment; philological-biographical criticism, which lingers in erudite researches in order to reconstruct texts and interpret them, to ascertain dates and attributions, to reveal the environmental and psychological conditions of authors; the historicism of Dilthey's epigones, who make use especially of art in order to individuate and characterize epochs and historical spheres or cycles of civilization, or who with Max Dvořák identify the history of art with the history of culture (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte), and so on.

Inspiration and execution, feeling and form, psychological factors and stylistic factors, are complementary elements that are of value for the understanding of art only insofar as they mutually integrate one another. To save formal aesthetics and psychological aesthetics from the one-sidedness of their attitude, the aesthetic synthesis of B. Croce serves, which, from the first decades of our century, has been imposing itself in contemporary thought. Vico's creativity, through the idealist-Romantic experience, bears fruit in Croce's concept of art as expression, externalization of the inner, immediate apprehension of the sensible image in which matter and form fuse into an indissociable reality. Fantastic expression-intuition, the first degree of the activity of the absolute spirit, is bound to the individual concreteness of the image, being distinguished from the logical conception which, at a further degree of the activity of the spirit, grasps the universal, and being distinguished from the collateral forms, economic and moral, of practical activity. In the writings after the Aesthetics (Bari 1903), with the concept of the "circularity" of the forms of the spirit, the exigency of unity is satisfied, correcting whatever was too rigid and mechanical in the doctrine of the degrees and of the autonomy of the initial degree with respect to the subsequent one; with the concept of "lyricism" the color and warmth of the spiritual act is introduced into artistic expression, integrating its theoretical and cognitive aspect with feeling; with the concept of "cosmicity," the particular concrete individuality of the aesthetic intuition is diffused into universal and cosmic value. At the same time, in the development of the system in relation to the other forms of spiritual activity, Croce was defining the character of philosophy as methodology of historiography, specifying the individual character of the concrete concept and of the historical judgment, now identified, without residue, with the philosophical judgment. While the particular of intuition opened itself to a value of universality, the universal of the philosophical judgment was concretized in the individuality of historical intuition, with the difficulty of marking a difference between artistic theoreis and historico-philosophical theoreis. In the first Aesthetics the autonomy of art and the distinction of the degrees were established at the expense of the idealist presupposition of the unity and absoluteness of the spirit in its every moment and act; in the later writings the unity of the absolute spirit is re-established at the expense of the autonomy of the forms of cognitive activity, which seems unable to realize itself otherwise than in the cosmic concreteness of artistic intuition, so that, as Croce had done in one of his youthful essays, history or philosophy is led back to the general concept of art (History Reduced to the General Concept of Art, 1893). The legacy of Romantic idealism remains in Croce too an unresolved problem.

Not very different is the epilogue of G. Gentile's aesthetics (Filosofia dell'arte, Florence 1931), although he intends from the outset not to create watertight compartments among the spiritual activities and in art sees nothing other than the aspect or moment of subjectivity that draws to itself the object, born from its creative power, in order to burn it in the flame of the generating feeling. Just as the pure act of the subject resolves every reality into itself, so the other moments in which the dialectic of the spirit is accomplished, the religious and the philosophical, remain invested by the form of art, in which, in turn, the other practical, theoretical, and religious elements circulate, which constitute our entire humanity and which ceaselessly feed the flame of art. But if the subject in its actuality constitutes the totality of being, for what reason must the spirit surpass the moment of subjectivity, which is the moment of art, and win for itself, through religious objectification, in philosophical self-consciousness? Gentile replies that here is the true actuality of consciousness and that the aesthetic and religious moments are inactual, because consciousness mediates the opposition of subject and object and resolves it in the clear awareness of the object's belonging to the creative power of subjectivity. To this it seems obvious that one must reply that either philosophical self-consciousness, in order to distinguish itself in any case from aesthetic activity, is deprived of that emotional warmth which distinguishes art, and in that case one obtains the theoretical and the philosophical by devitalizing the aesthetic; or self-consciousness, as would seem necessary, preserves in the purity and fullness of the act the living actuality of pure feeling, and in this case philosophy is entirely consumed in art. Within the frameworks of idealism or of actualism, that is, of a doctrine that contains the absolute in the creative powers of the human spirit, life cannot be conceived except as art, and the other activities of the human spirit are not justified in any way.

III. THE PROBLEMS OF AESTHETICS

The conclusion of the preceding historical synthesis brings to light the first and most urgent problem: that of the relations of art to the other activities of the spirit. Modern philosophy, developing the intimacy of the Augustinian "verbum mentis" and Vico's creativity, has been able to exalt the expressive activity of the human spirit at the cost of a one-sided understanding of existence. In the ancient world, with intellectualism, didacticism and allegorism, the sense of the autonomy of art had been lost; in the modern and contemporary world an absorbing autonomy is redeemed for art which contends for the autonomy of the other spiritual activities. Estheticism (v.) is a note to which a great part of philosophy, culture and custom in our days can be reduced. But the limits of the human are also the limits of the aesthetic. However much expression may be the essential act of the spirit and man may recognize nothing beyond what he expresses from himself, it must also be recognized that he is bound to express from himself his integral being, with its cosmic and metaphysical roots: rooted in the absolute that makes him exist, man cannot constitute the absolute in his act, cannot create himself nor create, but only signify in his expressive act the absolute to whose infinite transcendence his existence is suspended. Reason, mediating the immediate of intuition, binds the existent to itself and, reducing it to coherence and unity, manifests to it its limits, opens to it beyond the enchanting ossis of beauty the arduous path of truth. Art isolates with prestige the intuitive moment of expression, closes the image in itself as the term of contemplative ecstasy, in a state which, with one accord, aestheticians call one of spell, enchantment, dream, intoxication. This condition, highly revelatory, cannot be consolidated into a permanent and realistic state: it cannot be extended to the whole of existence without falsifying it with a presumption of infinity and of divine self-sufficiency. Conceptual thought unveils the incompleteness of existence, restores transparency to the human act, so that man may recognize in himself what is not from himself, and beyond that recognition disposes him to adoration.

The solution of the problem of the relations between art and language follows the lyrical-expressive nature of art. But in order that between art and language, between aesthetics and linguistics, the coincidence might be perfect, reaching even to identity, man would have to express himself only when he creates the imaginal and not also when he thinks, conceives, calculates. Instead, both art and science belong to human expression: the human act, while always remaining expression, is at one and the same time constitutive and significative, image and sign, term and means, and therefore man's word combines the two qualities that make it fit to sustain feeling and idea, music and thought (Schleiermacher), poetry and prose (W. v. Humboldt). Hence the range of language extends beyond that of art: aesthetics and linguistics remain concentric, but not coextensive.

A question is raised about the relations between the aesthetic and the artistic and, as was said at the beginning, there is a tendency to distinguish the one from the other, because the beautiful would be the object of pure ascertainment or contemplation, whereas art engages human productivity. The naive distinction is overcome with the deepened concept of beauty, which is not a property of things except through their belonging to the generative act of the spirit that recognizes and loves itself in them; so that in every vision of beauty the expressive act is engaged, just as, reciprocally, there is no expression of art until the beautiful image is seen or contemplated in its realized objectivity.

As for the classical concept of mimēsis, it is observed that art is always execution of the inner, not imitation of the outer. Art does not copy nature, but creates a nature of its own. Even when artistic representation seems to adhere to a perceptual model, what counts in it as art is not the figured content as such, but the tone, the style, the "how" of the figuration. Therefore even the most realistic art, if it has succeeded as art, is always transfiguration, is always "pure" art, however much one may wish to denote by that adjective an art that repudiates every realistic trace of emotivity or representation. Yet, however "pure," art cannot be "empty": it must be executed in a coherent cosmos, organized in its own internal rhythms, and in this sense a certain artistic realism is always essential to any successful execution, however abstractive and transfigurative. Classicism and romanticism, objectivism and subjectivism, realistic execution and intimism, mark a note that is accentuated, not an indivisible substance broken and halved. The art which knows only how to offend sensibility by its extravagance and irrationality is failed art because it has not succeeded in creating its cosmos.

Implicit in the preceding problem is the other one of the relations between form and content. If the analogy with divine creation holds, artistic expression is not superficial, epidermal: it too is a "producere rem subsistentem totam, non solum rem inherentem, scilicet formam in materia" (C. Gent., II, 16). So-called content is invested and resolved in the full form, in such a way that in this no element persists that weighs by its extraneousness. However, the resolution of content in form does not entail exclusion of what we might call the "containing." The form lives not for what it signifies, but for the spirituality that is signified in it, and therefore it is not possible to relive the beautiful work without re-expressing in it the "spiritual motive," the "fontal principle," the "generative nucleus," which is constituted by the personality of the artist and by the feeling that inspires him in the act of generation. The spiritual motive is, in place of so-called content, the ideality that sustains the physicality of the form, transfiguring it into beauty.

One may suggest a solution of the problem of feeling in art, by distinguishing the feeling specific to art from the other feelings that dwell in everyday life. The feeling specific to art is the coloring of the generative act, the joy of creating, the "amor in verbo" of St. Augustine. All the other feelings of our daily life are commingled with passivity, with suffering: only that one is "pure," "innocent," as Plato saw it, because it controls the perfection of activity. Through it art is catharsis, that is, liberation from inner heaviness and from the weight of impression in expression. As for the other domestic feelings, they do not enter into art directly, because they are of a sign contrary to it, but indirectly, through the personality of the artist who in them and through them, that is, through a life realistically experienced and suffered, always draws the vigor that will make him capable of the sovereign gesture of art. Thus art is not outburst, wrath, invective, confession: but everything that seethes in our mediocre humanity, through the metamorphosis of the generative feeling, becomes tone or touch of the beautiful work. Art can never dehumanize itself, although it wraps everything that is human in its light that quickens and purifies.

The problem of the historicity of art can find an analogous solution. Art is exception, miracle, and yet it lives in history, of which it bears the most faithful testimony. It lives in history not as an event in a conditioning succession of causes and effects, but as the singular and unrepeatable expression of a man who sinks the roots of his experience and his passion into the soil of history. Through this process of osmosis, the ethos of a people and its political, moral and religious ideals filter into the autonomous substance of art and are transfigured into beauty. To educate art toward the good, one must not cut the branches or pluck the flowers, but sow the fertilizing substances in the humor of history, so as then to find them again in renewed flowering. Even the meditations of philosophers and the torments of thought are susceptible to artistic palingenesis. Art is the infancy of the spirit not insofar as it makes one childish in intellect and wild in the primitive, but insofar as it can youthfully renew every fruit, even the most experienced and consummate, of existence.

The problem of technique arises from the collusion of the absolute spontaneity of creation with the complex of conditions to which artistic execution seems to be subject: aptitudes to be acquired, resistance of materials, laws of the mixing of colors, of the equilibrium of masses, of musical counterpoint. But everything that is outside art conditions the artist, not the artist; it concerns the workshop, not Olympus. Through the calvary of technique, creation is not conditioned, but an activity is progressively freed from frictions and hindrances, an activity that in the end must posit itself as the exclusive law of its own operation. When the gesture of art is accomplished, every external difficulty disappears, swept away by the divine facility of creation. If the initial effort persists, if the acquired skill is displayed, then cleverness, virtuosity, mannerism emerge: the industry of art emerges in place of art.

Art criticism (v.) is a problem because of the difficulty of understanding how that which is intimate, singular, and cannot be said with words other than the unique ones that constitute its whole worth and rarity can be interpreted, judged, translated into another language. One cannot escape the difficulty except by recognizing in criticism a circumscribed function that brings one close to the nucleus of the work, without presuming to coincide with this nucleus and to render an equivalent of the aesthetic emotion. The space in which criticism moves is between inspiration and execution, between feeling and form, between the artist and the work, through the penetration of the spiritual motive that innervates the sensible and the identification of the stylistic elements that obey the innermost necessity, avoiding the one-sided halt either at pure biographism or at pure sensibility or at pure visibility. The relationship between judgment and taste in art criticism is also a problem: insofar as, on the one hand, mere judgment which, with the application of the aesthetic category to a determinate subject, imports only election or condemnation (poetry or non-poetry), appears too rigid, mechanical and unsuited to the delicate nature of art; but, on the other hand, mere taste, that is, the sole emotional reliving of the work, is too subjective and open to every arbitrary appreciation, when it is not disciplined by an aesthetic category, that is, by the precise concept of what art is. The difficulty is resolved on the basis of an aesthetic category that recognizes art as singular and absolute expression, so that the critic, precisely in order to obey the discipline of the aesthetic concept and to pronounce a judicious judgment, cannot but bring to bear as his unit of measure his own sensibility, which places itself in confrontation with the work and relives it congenially, re-expressing singularly that which, precisely, is valid only through the singularity of the expression. The aesthetic universal is at the apex of individuality: and therefore the aesthetic category that sustains judicious criticism is the taste of the critic.

Luigi Stefanini