Читать книгу Æsthetic as science of expression and general linguistic - Benedetto Croce - Страница 25

Pseudo-æsthetic concepts belong to Psychology.

Nevertheless, the important place which, as we have said, those concepts have hitherto occupied in æsthetic treatises makes it advisable to supply a rather more complete explanation as to their nature. What shall be their lot? Excluded from Æsthetic, in what other part of Philosophy will they be received?

In truth, nowhere; for all those concepts are without philosophical value. They are nothing but a series of classes, which can be fashioned in the most various ways and multiplied at pleasure, to which it is sought to reduce the infinite complications and shadings of the values and disvalues of life. Of these classes, some have an especially positive significance, like the beautiful, the sublime, the majestic, the solemn, the serious, the weighty, the noble, the elevated; others a significance chiefly negative, like the ugly, the painful, the horrible, the dreadful, the tremendous, the monstrous, the insipid, the extravagant; finally in others a mixed significance prevails, such as the comic, the tender, the melancholy, the humorous, the tragi-comic. The complications are infinite, because the individuations are infinite; hence it is not possible to construct the concepts, save in the arbitrary and approximate manner proper to the natural sciences, satisfied with making the best classification they can of that reality which they can neither exhaust by enumeration, nor understand and conquer speculatively. And since Psychology is the naturalistic science which undertakes to construct types and schemes of the spiritual life of man (a science whose merely empirical and descriptive character becomes more evident day by day), these concepts do not belong to Æsthetic, nor to Philosophy in general, but must simply be handed over to Psychology.

Impossibility of rigorous definitions of them.

The case of those concepts is that of all other psychological constructions: no rigorous definitions of them are possible; and consequently they cannot be deduced from one another nor be connected in a system, though this has often been attempted, with great waste of time and without obtaining thereby any useful results. Nor can it be claimed as possible to obtain empirical definitions, universally acceptable as precise and true in the place of those philosophical definitions recognized as impossible. For no single definition of a single fact can be given, but there are innumerable definitions of it, according to the cases and the purposes for which they are made; and it is clear that if there were only one which had the value of truth it would no longer be an empirical, but a rigorous and philosophical definition. And as a matter of fact whenever one of the terms to which we have referred has been employed (or indeed any other belonging to the same class), a new definition of it has been given at the same time, expressed or understood. Each one of those definitions differed somehow from the others, in some particular, however minute, and in its implied reference to some individual fact or other, which thus became a special object of attention and was raised to the position of a general type. Thus it is that not one of such definitions satisfies either the hearer or the constructor of it. For a moment later he finds himself before a new instance to which he recognizes that his definition is more or less insufficient, ill-adapted, and in need of retouching. So we must leave writers and speakers free to define the sublime or the comic, the tragic or the humorous, on every occasion as they please and as may suit the end they have in view. And if an empirical definition of universal validity be demanded, we can but submit this one:—The sublime (or comic, tragic, humorous, etc.) is everything that is or shall be so called by those who have employed or shall employ these words.

Examples: definitions of the sublime, the comic, the humorous.

What is the sublime? The unexpected affirmation of an overwhelming moral force: that is one definition. But the other definition is equally good, which recognizes the sublime also where the force which affirms itself is certainly overwhelming, but immoral and destructive. Both remain vague and lack precision, until applied to a concrete case, to an example which makes clear what is meant by "overwhelming," and what by unexpected. They are quantitative concepts, but falsely quantitative, since there is no way of measuring them; they are at bottom metaphors, emphatic phrases, or logical tautologies. The humorous will be laughter amid tears, bitter laughter, the sudden spring from the comic to the tragic and from the tragic to the comic, the romantic comic, the opposite of the sublime, war declared against every attempt at insincerity, compassion ashamed to weep, a laugh, not at the fact, but at the ideal itself; and what you will beside, according as it is wished to get a view of the physiognomy of this or that poet, of this or that poem, which, in its uniqueness, is its own definition, and though momentary and circumscribed, is alone adequate. The comic has been defined as the displeasure arising from the perception of a deformity immediately followed by a greater pleasure arising from the relaxation of our psychical forces, strained in expectation of a perception looked upon as important. While listening to a narrative, which might, for example, be a description of the magnificently heroic purpose of some individual, we anticipate in imagination the occurrence of a magnificent and heroic action, and we prepare for its reception by concentrating our psychic forces. All of a sudden, however, instead of the magnificent and heroic action, which the preliminaries and the tone of the narrative had led us to expect, there is an unexpected change to a small, mean, foolish action, which does not satisfy to our expectation. We have been deceived, and the recognition of the deceit brings with it an instant of displeasure. But this instant is as it were conquered by that which immediately follows: we are able to relax our strained attention, to free ourselves from the provision of accumulated psychic energy henceforth superfluous, to feel ourselves light and well. This is the pleasure of the comic, with its physiological equivalent of laughter. If the unpleasant fact that has appeared should painfully affect our interests, there would not be pleasure, laughter would be at once suffocated, the psychic energy would be strained and overstrained by other more weighty perceptions. If on the other hand such more weighty perceptions do not appear, if the whole loss be limited to a slight deception of our foresight, then the feeling of our psychic wealth that ensues affords ample compensation for this very slight disappointment. Such, expressed in a few words, is one of the most accurate modern definitions of the comic. It boasts of containing in itself, justified or corrected and verified, the manifold attempts to define the comic, from Hellenic antiquity to our own day, from Plato's definition in the Philebus, and from Aristotle's, which is more explicit, and looks upon the comic as an ugliness without pain, to that of Hobbes, who replaced it in the feeling of individual superiority; of Kant, who saw in it the relaxation of a tension; or from the other proposals of those for whom it was the conflict between great and small, between the finite and the infinite and so on. But on close observation, the analysis and definition above given, although in appearance most elaborate and precise, yet enunciates characteristics which are applicable, not only to the comic, but to every spiritual process; such as the succession of painful and pleasing moments and the satisfaction arising from the consciousness of strength and of its free expansion. The differentiation is here given by quantitative determinations whose limits cannot be laid down. They therefore remain vague words, possessing some degree of meaning from their reference to this or that particular comic fact, and from the psychic disposition of qualities of the speaker. If such definitions be taken too seriously, there happens to them what Jean Paul Richter said of all the definitions of the comic: namely, that their sole merit is to be themselves comic and to produce in reality the fact which they vainly try to fix logically. And who will ever logically determine the dividing line between the comic and the non-comic, between laughter and smiles, between smiling and gravity, or cut the ever varying continuum into which life melts into clearly divided parts?

Relation between these concepts and æsthetic concepts.

The facts, classified as far as possible in these psychological concepts, bear no relation to the artistic fact, beyond the general one, that all of them, in so far as they constitute the material of life, can become the object of artistic representation; and the other, an accidental relation, that æsthetic facts also may sometimes enter the processes described, such as the impression of the sublime aroused by the work of a Titanic artist, such as Dante or Shakespeare, and of the comic produced by the attempts of a dauber or scribbler.

But here too the process is external to the æsthetic fact, to which is linked only the feeling of æsthetic value and disvalue, of the beautiful and of the ugly. Dante's Farinata is æsthetically beautiful and nothing but beautiful: if the force of will of that personage seem also sublime, or the expression that Dante gives him seem, by reason of his great genius, sublime in comparison with that of a less energetic poet, these are things altogether outside æsthetic consideration. We repeat again that this last pays attention always and only to the adequateness of the expression, that is to say, to beauty.