Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Poetry and Art

SABCL - Volume 27

Part 2. On His Own and Others’ Poetry
Section 2. On Poets and Poetry
Comments on Some Passages of Prose

Croce’s Aesthetics

“Knowledge has two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of the relations between them; it is the production either of images or of concepts.” [B. Croce, Esthetic, 1902, p. 1.] The origin of art, therefore, lies in the power of forming images. “Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. Images are its only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them, does not define them; it feels and presents them — nothing more.” [In Carr, The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce, London, 1917, p. 35.] Because imagination precedes thought, and is necessary to it, the artistic, or image-forming, activity of the mind is prior to the logical, concept-forming, activity. Man is an artist as soon as he imagines, and long before he reasons.

The great artists understood the matter so. “One paints not with the hands but with the brain,” said Michelangelo; and Leonardo wrote: “The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work.” Everybody knows the story told of da Vinci, that when he was painting the “Last Supper”, he sorely displeased the Abbot who had ordered the work, by sitting motionless for days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate Abbot’s persistent query — When would he begin to work? — by using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas.

The essence of the esthetic activity lies in this motionless effort of the artist to conceive the perfect image that shall express the subject he has in mind; it lies in a form of intuition that involves no mystic insight, but perfect sight, complete perception, and adequate imagination. The miracle of art lies not in the externalization but in the conception of the idea; externalization is a matter of mechanical technique and manual skill.

“When we have mastered the internal word, when we have vividly and clearly conceived a figure or a statue, when we have found a musical theme, expression is born and is complete, nothing more is needed. If, then, we open our mouth, and speak or sing, ... what we do is to say aloud what we have already said within, to sing aloud what we have already sung within. If our hands strike the keyboard of the pianoforte, if we take up pencil or chisel, such actions are willed” (they belong to the practical, not to the aesthetic, activity), “and what we are then doing is executing in great movements what we have already executed briefly and rapidly within.” [Esthetic, p. 50.]

— Will Durant, presenting the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce in The Story of Philosophy

I have not read Croce but it seems to me that Durant must have taken something of their depth out of them in his presentation. At any rate, I cannot accept the proposition that there are only two forms of knowledge, imaginative and intellectual,— still less if these two are made to coincide with the division between knowledge of the individual and that of the universal and again with image-production and concepts. Art can be conceptual as well as imaginative — it may embody ideas and not merely produce images. I do not see the relevancy of the Da Vinci story — one can sit motionless to summon up concepts as well as images or a concept and image together. Moreover what is this intuition which is perfect sight and adequate imagination, i.e., production of an image: is it empty of all “idea”, of all conception? Evidently not,— for immediately it is said that the miracle of art lies in the conception of an idea. What then becomes of the division between the production of images and the production of concepts; and how can it be said that Art is ruled only by the image-producing power and images are its only wealth? All this seems to be very contradictory and confusing. You cannot cut up the human mind in that way — the attempt is that of the analysing intellect which is always putting things as trenchantly divided and opposite. If it had been said that in art the synthetic action of the idea is more prominent than the analytic idea which we find most prominent in logic and science and philosophical reasoning, then one could understand the statement. The integrating or direct integral conception and the image-making faculty are the two leading powers of art with intuition as the driving force behind it — that too would be a statement that is intelligible.

Still more strange is the statement that the externalisation is outside the miracle of art and is not needed; beauty, he says, is adequate expression, but how can there be expression, an expressive image without externalisation? The inner image may be the thing to be expressed, it may itself be expressive of some truth, but unless it is externalised how can the spectator contemplating beauty contemplate it at all or get into unity of vision with the artist who creates it? The difference between Shakespeare and ourselves lies only in the power of inwardly forming an image, not in the power of externalising it? But there are many people who have the power of a rich inner imaging of things, but are quite unable to put them down on paper or utter them in speech or transfer them to canvas or into clay or bronze or stone. They are then as great creative artists as Shakespeare or Michael Angelo? I should have thought that Shakespeare’s power of the word and Michael Angelo’s of translating his image into visible form is at least an indispensable part of the art of expression, creation or image-making. I cannot conceive of a Shakespeare or Michael Angelo without that power — the one would be a mute inglorious Shakespeare and the other a rather helpless and ineffective Angelo.

P.S. This is of course a comment on the statement as presented — I would have to read Croce myself in order to form a conception of what is behind his philosophy of Aesthetics.

19 December 1936