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Various significations of the word feeling.

Passing to the study of more complex concepts, where the æsthetic activity is to be considered in conjunction with other orders of facts, and showing the mode of their union or complication, we find ourselves first face to face with the concept of feeling and with those feelings that are called æsthetic.

The word "feeling" is one of the richest in meanings in philosophic terminology. We have already had occasion to meet with it once, among those used to designate the spirit in its passivity, the matter or content of art, and so as synonym of impressions. Once again (and then the meaning was altogether different), we have met with it as designating the non-logical and non-historical character of the æsthetic fact, that is to say, pure intuition, a form of truth which defines no concept and affirms no fact.

Feeling as activity.

But here it is not regarded in either of these two meanings, nor in the others which have also been conferred upon it to designate other cognitive forms of the spirit, but only in that where feeling is understood as a special activity, of non-cognitive nature, having its two poles, positive and negative, in pleasure and pain.

This activity has always greatly embarrassed philosophers, who have therefore attempted either to deny it as activity, or to attribute it to nature, excluding it from the spirit. But both these solutions bristle with difficulties of such a kind as to prove them finally unacceptable to any one who examines them with care. For what could a non-spiritual activity ever be, an activity of nature, when we have no other knowledge of activity save as spirituality, nor of spirituality save as activity? Nature is in this case, by definition, the merely passive, inert, mechanical, material. On the other hand, the negation of the character of activity to feeling is energetically disproved by those very poles of pleasure and of pain which appear in it and manifest activity in its concreteness, or, so to say, quivering.

Identification of feeling with economic activity.

This critical conclusion should place us especially in the greatest embarrassment, for in the sketch of the system of the spirit given above we have left no room for the new activity of which we are now obliged to recognize the existence. But the activity of feeling, if it is activity, is not new. It has already had its place assigned to it in the system that we have sketched, where, however, it has been given another name, economic activity. What is called the activity of feeling is nothing but that more elementary and fundamental practical activity which we have distinguished from the ethical activity and made to consist of the appetition and volition for some individual end, apart from any moral determination.

If feeling has been sometimes considered to be an organic or natural activity, this has happened just because it does not coincide either with logical, æsthetic or ethical activity. Looked at from the standpoint of those three (which were the only ones admitted), it has seemed to lie outside the true and real spirit, spirit in its aristocracy, and to be almost a determination of nature, or of the soul in so far as it is nature. From this too results the truth of another thesis, often maintained, that the æsthetic activity, like the ethical and intellectual activities, is not feeling. This thesis is inexpugnable, when feeling has already been understood implicitly and unconsciously as economic volition.

Criticism of hedonism.

The view refuted in this thesis is known as hedonism. This consists in reducing all the various forms of the spirit to one, which thus also loses its own distinctive character and becomes something obscure and mysterious, like "the night in which all cows are black." Having brought about this reduction and mutilation, the hedonists naturally do not succeed in seeing anything else in any activity but pleasure and pain. They find no substantial difference between the pleasure of art and that of easy digestion, between the pleasure of a good action and that of breathing the fresh air with wide-expanded lungs.

Feeling as a concomitant of every form of activity.

But if the activity of feeling in the sense here defined must not be substituted for all the other forms of spiritual activity, we have not said that it cannot accompany them. Indeed it accompanies them of necessity, because they are all in close relation both with one another and with the elementary volitional form. Therefore each of them has for concomitants individual volitions and volitional pleasures and pains, known as feeling. But we must not confound a concomitant with the principal fact, and substitute the one for the other. The discovery of a truth, or the fulfilment of a moral duty, produces in us a joy which makes vibrate our whole being, which, by attaining the aim of those forms of spiritual activity, attains at the same time that to which it was practically tending, as its end. Nevertheless, economic or hedonistic satisfaction, ethical satisfaction, æsthetic satisfaction, intellectual satisfaction, though thus united, remain always distinct.

A question often asked is thus answered at the same time, one which has correctly seemed to be a matter of life or death for æsthetic science, namely, whether feeling and pleasure precede or follow, are cause or effect of the æsthetic fact. We must widen this question to include the relation between the various spiritual forms, and answer it by maintaining that one cannot talk of cause and effect and of a chronological before and after in the unity of the spirit.

And once the relation above expounded is established, all necessity for inquiry as to the nature of æsthetic, moral, intellectual and even what was sometimes called economic feelings, must disappear. In this last case, it is clear that it is a question, not of two terms, but of one, and inquiry as to economic feeling must be the same as that relating to economic activity. But in the other cases also, we must attend, not to the substantive, but to the adjective: the æsthetic, moral and logical character will explain the colouring of the feelings as æsthetic, moral and intellectual, whereas feeling, studied alone, will never explain those refractions and colorations.

Meaning of certain ordinary distinctions of feelings.

A further consequence is, that we no longer need retain the well-known distinctions between values or feelings of value, and feelings that are merely hedonistic and without value; disinterested and interested feelings, objective feelings and feelings not objective but simply subjective feelings of approbation and of mere pleasure (cf. the distinction of Gefallen and Vergnügen in German). Those distinctions were used to save the three spiritual forms, which were recognized as the triad of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, from confusion with the fourth form, still unknown, and therefore insidious in its indeterminateness and mother of scandals. For us this triad has completed its task, because we are capable of reaching the distinction far more directly, by receiving also the selfish, subjective, merely pleasurable feelings among the respectable forms of the spirit; and where formerly antitheses were conceived (by ourselves and others), between value and feelings, as between spirituality and naturality, henceforth we see nothing but differences between value and value.

Value and disvalue: the contraries and their union.

As has already been said, feeling or the economic activity presents itself as divided into two poles, positive and negative, pleasure and pain, which we can now translate into useful and disuseful (or hurtful). This bipartition has already been noted above, as a mark of the activistic character of feeling, and one which is to be found in all forms of activity. If each of these is value, each has opposed to it antivalue or disvalue. Absence of value is not sufficient to cause dis value, but activity and passivity must be struggling between themselves, without the one getting the better of the other; hence the contradiction and disvalue of the activity that is embarrassed, impeded, or interrupted. Value is activity that unfolds itself freely: disvalue is its contrary.

We will content ourselves with this definition of the two terms, without entering into the problem of the relation between value and disvalue, that is, the problem of contraries (that is to say, whether they are to be thought of dualistically, as two beings or two orders of beings, like Ormuzd and Ahriman, angels and devils, enemies to one another; or as a unity, which is also contrariety). This definition of the two terms will be sufficient for our purpose, which is to make clear the nature of æsthetic activity, and at this particular point one of the most obscure and disputed concepts of Æsthetic: the concept of the Beautiful.

The Beautiful as the value of expression, or expression without qualification.

Æsthetic, intellectual, economic and ethical values and disvalues are variously denominated in current speech: beautiful, true, good, useful, expedient, just, right and so on—thus designating the free development of spiritual activity, action, scientific research, artistic production, when they are successful; ugly, false, bad, useless, inexpedient, unjust, wrong designating embarrassed activity, the product that is a failure. In linguistic usage, these denominations are being continually shifted from one order of facts to another. Beautiful, for instance, is said not only of a successful expression, but also of a scientific truth, of an action successfully achieved, and of a moral action: thus we talk of an intellectual beauty, of a beautiful action, of a moral beauty. The attempt to keep up with these infinitely varying usages leads into a trackless labyrinth of verbalism in which many philosophers and students of art have lost their way. For this reason we have thought it best studiously to avoid the use of the word "beautiful" to indicate successful expression in its positive value. But after all the explanations that we have given, all danger of misunderstanding being now dissipated, and since on the other hand we cannot fail to recognize that the prevailing tendency, both in current speech and in philosophy, is to limit the meaning of the word "beautiful" precisely to the æsthetic value, it seems now both permissible and advisable to define beauty as successful expression, or rather, as expression and nothing more, because expression when it is not successful is not expression.

The ugly, and the elements of beauty which compose it.

Consequently, the ugly is unsuccessful expression. The paradox is true, for works of art that are failures, that the beautiful presents itself as unity, the ugly as multiplicity. Hence we hear of merits in relation to works of art that are more or less failures, that is to say, of those parts of them that are beautiful, which is not the case with perfect works. It is in fact impossible to enumerate the merits or to point out what parts of the latter are beautiful, because being a complete fusion they have but one value. Life circulates in the whole organism: it is not withdrawn into the several parts.

Illusion that there exist expressions neither beautiful nor ugly.

Unsuccessful works may have merit in various degrees, even the greatest. The beautiful does not possess degrees, for there is no conceiving a more beautiful, that is, an expressive that is more expressive, an adequate that is more than adequate. Ugliness, on the other hand, does possess degrees, from the rather ugly (or almost beautiful) to the extremely ugly. But if the ugly were complete, that is to say, without any element of beauty, it would for that very reason cease to be ugly, because it would be without the contradiction in which is the reason of its existence. The disvalue would become non-value; activity would give place to passivity, with which it is not at war, save when activity is really present to oppose it.

And because the distinctive consciousness of the beautiful and of the ugly is based on the conflicts and contradictions in which æsthetic activity is developed, it is evident that this consciousness becomes attenuated to the point of disappearing altogether, as we descend from the more complicated to the more simple and to the simplest instances of expression. Hence the illusion that there are expressions neither beautiful nor ugly, those which are obtained without sensible effort and appear easy and natural being considered such.

True æsthetic feelings and concomitant or accidental feelings.

The whole mystery of the beautiful and the ugly is reduced to these henceforth most easy definitions. Should any one object that there exist perfect æsthetic expressions before which no pleasure is felt, and others, perhaps even failures, which give him the greatest pleasure, we must recommend him to concentrate his attention in the æsthetic fact, upon that which is truly æsthetic pleasure. Æsthetic pleasure is sometimes reinforced or rather complicated by pleasures arising from extraneous facts, which are only accidentally found united with it. The poet or any other artist affords an instance of purely æsthetic pleasure at the moment when he sees (or intuites) his work for the first time; that is to say, when his impressions take form and his countenance is irradiated with the divine joy of the creator. On the other hand, a mixed pleasure is experienced by one who goes to the theatre, after a day's work, to witness a comedy: when the pleasure of rest and amusement, or that of laughingly snatching a nail from his coffin, accompanies the moment of true æsthetic pleasure in the art of the dramatist and actors. The same may be said of the artist who looks upon his labour with pleasure when it is finished, experiencing, in addition to the æsthetic pleasure, that very different one which arises from the thought of self-complacency satisfied, or even of the economic gain which will come to him from his work. Instances could be multiplied.

Criticism of apparent feelings.

A category of apparent æsthetic feelings has been formed in modern Æsthetic, not arising from the form, that is to say, from the works of art as such, but from their content. It has been remarked that artistic representations arouse pleasure and pain in their infinite shades of variety. We tremble with anxiety, we rejoice, we fear, we laugh, we weep, we desire, with the personages of a drama or of a romance, with the figures in a picture and with the melody of music. But these feelings are not such as would be aroused by the real fact outside art; or rather, they are the same in quality, but are quantitatively an attenuation of real things. Æsthetic and apparent pleasure and pain show themselves to be light, shallow, mobile. We have no need to treat here of these apparent feelings, for the good reason that we have already amply discussed them; indeed, we have hitherto treated of nothing but them. What are these apparent or manifested feelings, but feelings objectified, intuited, expressed? And it is natural that they do not trouble and afflict us as passionately as those of real life, because those were matter, these are form and activity; those true and proper feelings, these intuitions and expressions. The formula of apparent feelings is therefore for us nothing but a tautology, through which we can run the pen without scruple.