From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation by Umberto Eco
3. Varzi (2005) returns to themes previously discussed in Smith and Varzi (2000: 401–420). [Translator’s note: The Phantom Blot is a Walt Disney character (Macchia Nera in Italian). He is an archenemy of Mickey Mouse and first appeared in the comic strip Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot by Floyd Gottfredson in 1939.]
4. [Translator’s note: The quotation from Varzi’s article appears in the original Italian in Eco’s text.]
5. Nevertheless, with reference to the Phaedrus, in which Plato recommends that we divide being into species “according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might” (Benjamin Jowett trans.), Varzi reminded us that, if all boundaries were the product of a conventional decision, then our knowledge of the world would be reduced to a knowledge of the maps we have drawn of it (an example of the total substitution of facts by interpretations). But, without postulating a totally realistic solution (according to which the world presents itself to our experience already prepackaged into objects, events, and natural properties), he cited my proposal (from K & P) as a compromise solution: though in different cultures veal may be carved in different ways (so that the names of certain dishes are not always translatable from one language to another), it would be very hard to think of a cut that offered at the same time the end of the snout and the end of the tail. Even if there were no one-way streets in the world, there would still be no-entries, in other words objective limits to our ability to organize the content of experience.
6. Originally published as “Questions concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy (1868) 2, 103–114].
7. At this point we might be tempted to open up another can of worms: Why does one thing attract my attention at the expense of another? But reconstructing a theory of attention in Peirce lies beyond my capabilities, and beyond the scope of this chapter.
8. English translation: Wittgenstein (1961: 63e–65e).
16
The Definitions in Croce’s Aesthetic
It may seem odd to include a critique of Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic in a collection of essays devoted to the history of semiotics and the philosophy of language. But, apart from the fact that the full title of Croce’s work (The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General)1 entitles us to speculate on what “linguistics in general” might mean for Croce, the present chapter will deal for the most part with the lack of precision of the definitions on which the Aesthetic is founded. In a volume that opened with a critique of the most venerable model of definition (the Porphyrian tree)—whose inability to define we attempted to demonstrate, but to which we must at least grant an almost heroic effort of logical rigor—we feel duty bound to examine a theoretical work which undermines its own project through the dramatically approximate nature of the definitions it pretends to provide.
Rereading the Aesthetic today, we encounter a number of ideas that have become part of received wisdom, as well as the record of a series of battles lost from the outset. Among the latter, this is not the place to tackle the indefensible equation between aesthetics and “linguistics in general,” a paradox of such proportions as to call for a separate treatment of its own.2 What seems to me more urgent is an examination of Croce’s theory of intuition, not just because this is the first topic the work addresses, but because with it Croce intends to lay the cornerstone of his entire system.
1. The book’s incipit asserts that knowledge takes two forms: it is either intuitive or logical, and, consequently, knowing means producing either representations or concepts. But, after passing in review several traditional woolly notions regarding the nature of intuition, Croce confronts the problem himself, not by definition but by example: “the net result in the case of a work of art is an intuition” (p. 2). The procedure would be incorrect if it was Croce’s intention to demonstrate what art is, taking the notion of intuition as his starting point; but in fact his intention is to demonstrate what intuition is, taking as his starting point the experience we have of art. Even in this latter case, we would simply have gone from example to antonomasia, if it were not for the fact that the antonomasia in fact conceals an absolute identity.
For Croce, intuition is not pure sensation (which in any case is not pure, but matter without form, passivity), even when the latter is seen, in Kantian fashion, as formed and organized in space and time (we have intuitions outside of space and time, such as when we react with a spontaneous cry to a sensation of pain or a sentimental impulse). It would appear at first blush, however, that the result of perception is intuition. True, Croce’s intuition has wider implications, since we have intuitions of what today we would call “counterfactual” states of affairs, while successful perception requires representation and reality to be congruent. Our author suggests, however, that what we call a representation or an image could be intuition, especially when we reflect that the phenomenon of intuition also applies to the nonverbal or to what cannot necessarily be put into words, as is the case, for instance, when we intuit the form of a triangle.
Nevertheless, the intuitive nature of perception becomes problematic once Croce introduces (p. 8) the twin category that dominates his aesthetics, affirming that every true intuition and representation is also, inseparably, expression, because “the spirit only intuits by making, forming, expressing” (pp. 8–9). Intuiting a geometrical figure, then, means having its image so clear in one’s mind as to be able to trace it immediately on paper or on a blackboard.
At this point Croce has not yet excluded perceptions from the category of intuitions, but he leads us to suspect that, if indeed they are intuitions, they are extremely imperfect ones. The uneducated fisherman, who may not even know how to use a sextant, can find his way back to port even at the height of a storm, because he “recognizes” every feature of the coast, every indentation. This is because he is working with a stored system of perceptions, present and past. But if he were asked to make a drawing of the coastline, he would be incapable of doing so. The anthropologists have given us many examples of natives who know every bend of the river they sail on every day, but when confronted with a map are completely at a loss. Or again, it is a common experience for lovers who are apart not to be able to picture the features of the beloved, however fully and adoringly they “perceive” those features when the beloved is present. They are frustrated by this form of expressive impotence, though the sentiment that accompanies this imperfect reevocation remains extremely vivid (and recognition of the beloved when he or she appears is of course immediate, even at a great distance, as if we knew their most imperceptible movements by heart).
If perceiving and representing to oneself were the same thing as intuition, which coincides with the most complete kind of expression, what happens when, having known someone at the age of twenty, young, clean-shaven with a shock of curly hair, I run into him again at forty, bald or white-haired, with a grey beard? The completeness of today’s intuition not being commensurate with the completeness of yesterday’s intuition, I ought not to recognize anything at all. Instead I say: “How you’ve changed, it doesn’t look like you!” This implies that knowing a person means selecting as pertinent certain features, in a kind of mnemonic schema (not necessarily exclusively morphological, because I may have selected a twinkle in the eye or a crease at the corner of the mouth), and preserving in our memories a “type” with which we compare every “token” of the person, each time I see him or her. The type of the beloved breaks down precisely because I try to pack in an infinite number of pertinent traits, the voracity of my passion makes me want to memorize too much. Croce is the first to recognize that “even of our closest friend, the person to whom we are close every hour of every day, we possess intuitively only a very few physiognomic traits” (p. 10).
In the face of these problems, Croce decides (pp. 13–14) that
the world that we normally intuit is a petty thing and translates itself into petty expressions that are gradually enlarged
Guazzabuglio or “hotchpotch” seems to me an extremely effective term to describe what we are faced with in everyday life, and I shall use it. What is it that rises above this quotidian hotchpotch? The intuition-expression of Raphael, who sees, knows, and reproduces on canvas La Fornarina. Intuition-expression belongs only to art, and “good” art at that, given that Croce is prepared to assign to the hotchpotch the imperfect expressions of Manzoni, Proust, Mallarmé, and many others.
Hence, the first form of the spirit, the form onto which the lucidity of the concept and ethical action and economic action must be grafted, is that of great art. The rest—our perceptions of the world, our encounters with other people and nature—belongs to the territory of the guazzabuglio.
2. At this point we might expect Croce to define art, or the moment when intuition-expression occurs in the pure state. And in fact, in his “Conclusion,” he writes: “having defined the nature of intuitive or expressive knowledge, the aesthetic or artistic act (I and II), and noted the other forms of knowledge, and the further combinations of this form” (p. 154). Unfortunately, this affirmation is false: nowhere in the Aesthetic do we find a definition of art that is not a definition of intuition, and nowhere do we find a definition of intuition that does not refer to the definition of art. The reason would seem to be that “the boundaries between the expression-intuitions that are called ‘art’ and those that are commonly called ‘non-art’ are purely empirical: they cannot be defined” (p. 14). Thus, Croce takes, so to speak, the experience of art (the confident immediate recognition of what art is) as a primitive that acts as a starting point for conferring on intuition all the (undefined) characteristics of art. Nor do things change when we proceed to formulas such as “lyrical intuition” (Breviario d’estetica, 1), since we discover that “lyrical” is not a specific difference, but a synonym of “intuition.” For a devotee of the Circle, the demonstrative circularity is perfect: the only intuition is artistic intuition, and art is intuition. This definitional circularity may have relieved Croce’s earliest readers of critical responsibility, reassuring them that art was nothing more or less than what they felt art was, and all the rest was professorial hair-splitting, to which the second part of the book, devoted to the history of aesthetics, does summary justice.
If this seems like a harsh judgment, we have only to consider such glaring tautologies as “it seems appropriate for us to define the beautiful as successful expression, or better, as expression simpliciter, since expression, when it is not successful, is not expression” (p. 87); or examples of woolliness that would not be countenanced even in a beginner, such as when, on page 78, the author, distinguishing “successful expressions” from those that are “flawed,” compares two pairs of paintings, of which we are told nothing except that one is “devoid of inspiration” and the other “inspired,” one “strongly felt,” the other “coldly allegorical,” though no explanation is offered of exactly what a “strongly felt” painting might look like. You can’t help thinking that many of Croce’s readers must have been delighted to see the feeble interjections they used in the cultural circles of the provincial Italy of the late nineteenth century raised to the level of critical categories.
The elusive nature of aesthetic form deprives Croce of a flexible theory of judgment and interpretation. A promising idea is presented in the fourth chapter: namely, that forming an aesthetic opinion means putting oneself in the artist’s place and following the process of creation “with the assistance of the physical sign he has produced.” Genius and taste are, then, substantially identical. But the fact that they share the same nature does not necessarily mean that any judgment of taste must fit the work of art in the same way and from the same point of view. Croce is not unaware of the empirical phenomenon of the variety of judgments, due to the evolution of cultural conditions as well as to the physical nature of the work. But he considers it is always possible, with a proper philological effort, to recreate the original conditions and retrace the process in the only correct way possible. Either everything the artist intuited is fully reproduced, or the process is stymied. Tertium non datur. There is no third way. Since he did not develop a theory of the conditions that make a form what it is, the suspicion could not cross Croce’s mind that a form might lend itself to several different interpretations, each of which captures it fully from a separate point of view (as will be the case in Pareyson’s aesthetics). Even his 1917 reflections on the cosmic character of art presuppose that the successful work is like Borges’s Aleph from which one may view the entire cosmos: it’s all or nothing. Croce’s theory of form ignores Nicholas of Cusa’s complicatio, which is likewise ignored in his history of aesthetics.
3. We feel a similar sense of unease when Croce announces his explanation of what he means by conceptual knowledge, as opposed to the intuitive form. His model of pure knowledge is the lucid and complete logical concept. When it comes to knowledge directed toward practical ends, all we have are his notorious pseudo-concepts. But if we take a closer look at what pseudo-concepts mean for Croce, we realize that they are far more important for him than they would later become for so many of his followers. In the opinion of the latter, they were mere mechanical lucubrations that the philosopher would be well advised not to meddle with. Croce on the other hand meddles as a matter of principle, because the pseudo-concepts of the sciences are fundamental to the orientation of our practical actions. We realize, with some satisfaction, that the pseudo-concepts too belong to the world of the inchoate hotchpotch in which our perceptions are formed, and like them proceed by standardizations, incomplete profiles of reality, and can always be jettisoned, as we all do with our own perceptions of the day before (“I must admit that that wardrobe seemed bigger than it really is”). The world of the hotchpotch is the everyday territory we live in, in which we proceed by trial and error, assays, conjecture, and, seeing a shadow pass by in the dark, we hazard a guess that it must have been a dog, and discovering that Mars passes through two points that cannot belong to a circle, we hazard a guess, as Kepler did, that the orbits of the planets may be elliptical.
Croce grasps this world very concretely, with a keen sense of life’s flux, and he describes it vividly: but after having recognized it, he loses interest, as if philosophy were not supposed to get involved with the human condition as it really is, but only with the way things ought to be, with forms so pure that they defy any attempt at definition. And yet Croce expects philosophy to prompt his readers to exclaim “I felt that too!,” and he remarks: “There is no greater satisfaction for a philosopher than to discover his philosophical ideas in the opinions of common sense” (Croce 1995: 211). It is as if Croce were tempted to flatter false common sense when he is explaining what pure intuition is by talking about a “strongly felt” painting, and that he turns away out of boredom when common sense is recognized in the everyday hotchpotch.
The quest after pure conceptual knowledge gives rise to a fair number of embarrassments. In chapter 3 of the Aesthetic an attempt is made to define it as “knowledge of the relationships between things, and the things are intuitions” (p. 24). “Intuitions are: this river, this lake, this brook, this rain, this glass of water; concept is: “water.” But we have been told that “this lake” is a true intuition only when painted by a great painter, whereas the lake I intuit is a schema, a sketch, or a label. If conceptual knowledge consists in establishing relationships among d