Jean Pierre Camus - "The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales"

Richard F. Burton - "The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6"

G. A. Henty - "Under Wellington's Command"

Lorin Low Dame - "Handbook of the Trees of New England"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

B >> Benedetto Croce >> Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic




What have we done in both cases? Neither more nor less than to submit to
logical elaboration what was first elaborated only aesthetically; that
is to say, we have destroyed the aesthetical by the logical. But, as in
general Aesthetic, error begins when It is wished to return from the
logical to the aesthetical, and it is asked what is the expression of
movement, action, matter, being, of the general, of the individual,
etc.; thus in like manner with language, error begins when motion or
action are called verb, being, or matter, noun or substantive, and when
linguistic categories, or _parts of speech_, are made of all these, noun
and verb and so on. The theory of parts of speech is at bottom
altogether the same as that of artistic and literary classes, already
criticized in the Aesthetic.

It is false to say that the verb or the noun is expressed in definite
words, truly distinguishable from others. Expression is an indivisible
whole. Noun and verb do not exist in themselves, but are abstractions
made by our destroying the sole linguistic reality, which is _the
proposition_. This last is to be understood, not in the usual mode of
grammarians, but as an organism expressive of a complete meaning, from
an exclamation to a poem. This sounds paradoxical, but is nevertheless a
most simple truth.

And as in Aesthetic, the artistic productions of certain peoples have
been looked upon as imperfect, owing to the error above mentioned,
because the supposed kinds have seemed still to be indiscriminate or
absent with them; so, in Linguistic, the theory of the parts of speech
has caused the analogous error of dividing languages into formed and
unformed, according to whether there appear in them or not some of those
supposed parts of speech; for example, the verb.

[Sidenote] _The individuality of speech and the classification of
languages._

Linguistic also discovered the irreducible individuality of the
aesthetic fact, when it affirmed that the word is what is really spoken,
and that two truly identical words do not exist. Thus were synonyms and
homonyms destroyed, and thus was shown the impossibility of really
translating one word into another, from so-called dialect into so-called
language, and from a so-called mother-tongue into a so-called foreign
tongue.

But the attempt to classify languages agrees ill with this correct view.
Languages have no reality beyond the propositions and complexes of
propositions really written and pronounced by given peoples for definite
periods. That is to say, they have no existence outside the works of
art, in which they exist concretely. What is the art of a given people
but the complex of all its artistic products? What is the character of
an art (say, Hellenic art or Provencal literature), but the complex
physiognomy of those products? And how can such a question be answered,
save by giving the history of their art (of their literature, that is to
say, of their language in action)?

It will seem that this argument, although possessing value as against
many of the wonted classifications of languages, yet is without any as
regards that queen of classifications, the historico-genealogical, that
glory of comparative philology. And this is certainly true. But why?
Precisely because the historico-genealogical method is not a
classification. He who writes history does not classify, and the
philologists themselves have hastened to say that the languages which
can be arranged in a historical series (those whose series have been
traced) are, not distinct and definite species, but a complex of facts
in the various phases of its development.

[Sidenote] _Impossibility of a normative grammar._

Language has sometimes been looked upon as an act of volition or of
choice. But others have discovered the impossibility of creating
language artificially, by an act of will. _Tu, Caesar, civitatem dare
potes homini, verbo non poles!_ was once said to the Roman Emperor.

The aesthetic (and therefore theoretic) nature of expression supplies
the method of correcting the scientific error which lies in the
conception of a (normative) _Grammar_, containing the rules of speaking
well. Good sense has always rebelled against this error. An example of
such rebellion is the "So much the worse for grammar" of Voltaire. But
the impossibility of a normative grammar is also recognized by those who
teach it, when they confess that to write well cannot be learned by
rules, that there are no rules without exceptions, and that the study of
Grammar should be conducted practically, by reading and by examples,
which form the literary taste. The scientific reason of this
impossibility lies in what we have already proved: that a technique of
the theoretical amounts to a contradiction in terms. And what could a
(normative) grammar be, but just a technique of linguistic expression,
that is to say, of a theoretic fact?

[Sidenote] _Didactic purposes._

The case in which Grammar is understood merely as an empirical
discipline, that is to say, as a collection of groups useful for
learning languages, without any claim whatever to philosophic truth, is
quite different. Even the abstractions of the parts of speech are in
this case both admissible and of assistance.

Many books entitled treatises of Linguistic have a merely didactic
purpose; they are simply scholastic manuals. We find in them, in truth,
a little of everything, from the description of the vocal apparatus and
of the artificial machines (phonographs) which can imitate it, to
summaries of the most important results obtained by Indo-European,
Semitic, Coptic, Chinese, or other philologies; from philosophic
generalizations on the origin or nature of language, to advice on
calligraphy, and the arrangement of schedules for philological spoils.
But this mass of notions, which is here taught in a fragmentary and
incomplete manner as regards the language in its essence, the language
as expression, resolves itself into notions of Aesthetic. Nothing exists
outside _Aesthetic_, which gives knowledge of the nature of language,
and _empirical Grammar_, which is a pedagogic expedient, save the
_History of languages_ in their living reality, that is, the history of
concrete literary productions, which is substantially identical with the
_History of literature_.

[Sidenote] _Elementary linguistic facts or roots._

The same mistake of confusing the physical with the aesthetic, from
which the elementary forms of the beautiful originate, is made by those
who seek for elementary aesthetic facts, decorating with that name the
divisions of the longer series of physical sounds into shorter series.
Syllables, vowels, and consonants, and the series of syllables called
words which give no definite sense when taken alone, are not facts of
language, but simple physical concepts of sounds.

Another mistake of the same sort is that of roots, to which the most
able philologists now accord but a very limited value. Having confused
physical with linguistic or expressive facts, and observing that, in the
order of ideas, the simple precedes the complex, they necessarily ended
by thinking that _the smaller_ physical facts were _the more simple_.
Hence the imaginary necessity that the most antique, primitive
languages, had been monosyllabic, and that the progress of historical
research must lead to the discovery of monosyllabic roots. But (to
follow up the imaginary hypothesis) the first expression that the first
man conceived may also have had a mimetic, not a phonic reflex: it may
have been exteriorised, not in a sound but in a gesture. And assuming
that it was exteriorised in a sound, there is no reason to suppose that
sound to have been monosyllabic rather than plurisyllabic. Philologists
frequently blame their own ignorance and impotence, if they do not
always succeed in reducing plurisyllabism to monosyllabism, and they
trust in the future. But their faith is without foundation, as their
blame of themselves is an act of humility arising from an erroneous
presumption.

Furthermore, the limits of syllables, as those of words, are altogether
arbitrary, and distinguished, as well as may be, by empirical use.
Primitive speech, or the speech of the uncultured man, is _continuous_,
unaccompanied by any reflex consciousness of the divisions of the word
and of the syllables, which are taught at school. No true law of
Linguistic can be founded on such divisions. Proof of this is to be
found in the confession of linguists, that there are no truly phonetic
laws of the hiatus, of cacophony, of diaeresis, of synaeresis, but
merely laws of taste and convenience; that is to say, _aesthetic_ laws.
And what are the laws of _words_ which are not at the same time laws of
_style_?

[Sidenote] _Aesthetic judgment and the model language._

The search for a _model language_, or for a method of reducing
linguistic usage to _unity_, arises from the misconception of a
rationalistic measurement of the beautiful, from the concept which we
have termed that of false aesthetic absoluteness. In Italy, we call this
question that of the _unity of the language_.

Language is perpetual creation. What has been linguistically expressed
cannot be repeated, save by the reproduction of what has already been
produced. The ever-new impressions give rise to continuous changes of
sounds and of meanings, that is, to ever-new expressions. To seek the
model language, then, is to seek the immobility of motion. Every one
speaks, and should speak, according to the echoes which things arouse in
his soul, that is, according to his impressions. It is not without
reason that the most convinced supporter of any one of the solutions of
the problem of the unity of language (be it by the use of Latin, of
fourteenth-century Italian, or of Florentine) feels a repugnance in
applying his theory, when he is speaking in order to communicate his
thoughts and to make himself understood. The reason for this is that he
feels that were he to substitute Latin, fourteenth-century Italian, or
Florentine speech for that of a different origin, but which answers to
his impressions, he would be falsifying the latter. He would become a
vain listener to himself, instead of a speaker, a pedant in place of a
serious man, a histrion instead of a sincere person. To write according
to a theory is not really to write: at the most, it is _making
literature_.

The question of the unity of language is always reappearing, because,
put as it is, there can be no solution to it, owing to its being based
upon a false conception of what language is. Language is not an arsenal
of ready-made arms, and it is not _vocabulary_, which, in so far as it
is thought of as progressive and in living use, is always a cemetery,
containing corpses more or less well embalmed, that is to say, a
collection of abstractions.

Our mode of settling the question of the model language, or of the unity
of the language, may seem somewhat abrupt, and yet we would not wish to
appear otherwise than respectful towards the long line of literary men
who have debated this question in Italy for centuries. But those ardent
debates were, at bottom, debates upon aestheticity, not upon aesthetic
science, upon literature rather than upon literary theory, upon
effective speaking and writing, not upon linguistic science. Their error
consisted in transforming the manifestation of a want into a scientific
thesis, the need of understanding one another more easily among a people
dialectically divided, in the philosophic search for a language, which
should be one or ideal. Such a search was as absurd as that other search
for a _universal language_, with the immobility of the concept and of
the abstraction. The social need for a better understanding of one
another cannot be satisfied save by universal culture, by the increase
of communications, and by the interchange of thought among men.

[Sidenote] _Conclusion._

These observations must suffice to show that all the scientific problems
of Linguistic are the same as those of Aesthetic, and that the truths
and errors of the one are the truths and errors of the other. If
Linguistic and Aesthetic appear to be two different sciences, this
arises from the fact that people think of the former as grammar, or as a
mixture between philosophy and grammar, that is, an arbitrary mnemonic
scheme. They do not think of it as a rational science and as a pure
philosophy of speech. Grammar, or something grammatical, also causes the
prejudice in people's minds, that the reality of language lies in
isolated and combinable words, not in living discourse among expressive
organisms, rationally indivisible.

Those linguists, or glottologists with philosophical endowments, who
have best fathomed questions of language, resemble (to employ a worn but
efficacious figure) workmen piercing a tunnel: at a certain point they
must hear the voices of their companions, the philosophers of Aesthetic,
who have been piercing it from the other side. At a certain stage of
scientific elaboration, Linguistic, in so far as it is philosophy, must
be merged in Aesthetic; and indeed it is merged in it, without leaving a
residue.




HISTORICAL SUMMARY

I

AESTHETIC IDEAS IN GRAECO-ROMAN ANTIQUITY


The question, as to whether Aesthetic should be looked upon as ancient
or modern, has often been discussed. The answer will depend upon the
view taken of the nature of Aesthetic.

Benedetto Croce has proved that Aesthetic is _the science of expressive
activity_. But this knowledge cannot be reached, until has been defined
the nature of imagination, of representation, of expression, or whatever
we may term that faculty which is theoretic, but not intellectual, which
gives knowledge of the individual, but not of the universal.

Now the deviations from this, the correct theory, may arise in two ways:
by _defect_ or by _excess_. Negation of the special aesthetic activity,
or of its autonomy, is an instance of the former. This amounts to a
mutilation of the reality of the spirit. Of the latter, the substitution
or superposition of another mysterious and non-existent activity is an
example.

These errors each take several forms. That which errs by defect may be:
(_a_) pure hedonism, which looks upon art as merely sensual pleasure;
(_b_) rigoristic hedonism, agreeing with (_a_), but adding that art is
irreconcilable with the loftiest activities of man; (_c_) moralistic or
pedagogic hedonism, which admits, with the two former, that art is mere
sensuality, but believes that it may not only be harmless, but of some
service to morals, if kept in proper subjection and obedience.

The error by excess also assumes several forms, but these are
indeterminable _a priori_. This view is fully dealt with under the name
of _mystic_, in the Theory and in the Appendix.

Graeco-Roman antiquity was occupied with the problem in all these forms.
In Greece, the problem of art and of the artistic faculty arose for the
first time after the sophistic movement, as a result of the Socratic
polemic.

With the appearance of the word _mimesis_ or _mimetic_, we have a first
attempt at grouping the arts, and the expression, allegoric, or its
equivalent, used in defence of Homer's poetry, reminds us of what Plato
called "the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry."

But when internal facts were all looked upon as mere phenomena of
opinion or feeling, of pleasure or of pain, of illusion or of arbitrary
caprice, there could be no question of beautiful or ugly, of difference
between the true and the beautiful, or between the beautiful and the
good.

The problem of the nature of art assumes as solved those problems
concerning the difference between rational and irrational, material and
spiritual, bare fact and value, etc. This was first done in the Socratic
period, and therefore the aesthetic problem could only arise after
Socrates.

And in fact it does arise, with Plato, _the author of the only great
negation of art which appears in the history of ideas_.

Is art rational or irrational? Does it belong to the noble region of the
soul, where dwell philosophy and virtue, or does it cohabit with
sensuality and with crude passion in the lower regions? This was the
question that Plato asked, and thus was the aesthetic problem stated for
the first time.

His Gorgias remarks with sceptical acumen, that tragedy is a deception,
which brings honour alike to deceived and to deceiver, and therefore it
is blameworthy not to know how to deceive and not to allow oneself to be
deceived. This suffices for Gorgias, but Plato, the philosopher, must
resolve the doubt. If it be in fact deception, down with tragedy and the
other arts! If it be not deception, then what is the place of tragedy in
philosophy and in the righteous life? His answer was that art or mimetic
does not realize the ideas, or the truth of things, but merely
reproduces natural or artificial things, which are themselves mere
shadows of the ideas. Art, then, is but a shadow of a shadow, a thing of
third-rate degree. The artificer fashions the object which the painter
paints. The artificer copies the divine idea and the painter copies him.
Art therefore does not belong to the rational, but to the irrational,
sensual sphere of the soul. It can serve but for sensual pleasure, which
disturbs and obscures. Therefore must mimetic, poetry, and poets be
excluded from the perfect Republic.

Plato observed with truth, that imitation does not rise to the logical
or conceptual sphere, of which poets and painters, as such, are, in
fact, ignorant. But he _failed to realize_ that there could be any form
of knowledge other than the intellectual.

We now know that Intuition lies on this side or outside the Intellect,
from which it differs as much as it does from passion and sensuality.

Plato, with his fine aesthetic sense, would have been grateful to anyone
who could have shown him how to place art, which he loved and practised
so supremely himself, among the lofty activities of the spirit. But in
his day, no one could give him such assistance. His conscience and his
reason saw that art makes the false seem the true, and therefore he
resolutely banished it to the lower regions of the spirit.

The tendency among those who followed Plato in time was to find some
means of retaining art and of depriving it of the baleful influence
which it was believed to exercise. Life without art was to the
beauty-loving Greek an impossibility, although he was equally conscious
of the demands of reason and of morality. Thus it happened that art,
which, on the purely hedonistic hypothesis, had been treated as a
beautiful courtezan, became in the hands of the moralist, a pedagogue.
Aristophanes and Strabo, and above all Aristotle, dwell upon the
didactic and moralistic possibility of poetry. For Plutarch, poetry
seems to have been a sort of preparation for philosophy, a twilight to
which the eyes should grow accustomed, before emerging into the full
light of day.

Among the Romans, we find Lucretius comparing the beauties of his great
poem to the sweet yellow honey, with which doctors are wont to anoint
the rim of the cup containing their bitter drugs. Horace, as so
frequently, takes his inspiration from the Greek, when he offers the
double view of art: as courtezan and as pedagogue. In his _Ad Pisones_
occur the passages, in which we find mingled with the poetic function,
that of the orator--the practical and the aesthetic. "Was Virgil a poet
or an orator?" The triple duty of pleasing, moving, and teaching, was
imposed upon the poet. Then, with a thought for the supposed
meretricious nature of their art, the ingenious Horace remarks that both
must employ the seductions of form.

The _mystic_ view of art appeared only in late antiquity, with Plotinus.
The curious error of looking upon Plato as the head of this school and
as the Father of Aesthetic assumes that he who felt obliged to banish
art altogether from the domain of the higher functions of the spirit,
was yet ready to yield to it the highest place there. The mystical view
of Aesthetic accords a lofty place indeed to Aesthetic, placing it even
above philosophy. The enthusiastic praise of the beautiful, to be found
in the _Gorgias_, _Philebus_, _Phaedrus_, and _Symposium_ is responsible
for this misunderstanding, but it is well to make perfectly clear that
the beautiful, of which Plato discourses in those dialogues, has nothing
to do with the _artistically_ beautiful, nor with the mysticism of the
neo-Platonicians.

Yet the thinkers of antiquity were aware that a problem lay in the
direction of Aesthetic, and Xenophon records the sayings of Socrates
that the beautiful is "that which is fitting and answers to the end
required." Elsewhere he says "it is that which is loved." Plato likewise
vibrates between various views and offers several solutions. Sometimes
he appears almost to confound the beautiful with the true, the good and
the divine; at others he leans toward the utilitarian view of Socrates;
at others he distinguishes between what is beautiful In itself and what
possesses but a relative beauty. At other times again, he is a hedonist,
and makes it to consist of pure pleasure, that is, of pleasure with no
shadow of pain; or he finds it in measure and proportion, or in the very
sound, the very colour itself. The reason for all this vacillation of
definition lay in Plato's exclusion of the artistic or mimetic fact from
the domain of the higher spiritual activities. The _Hippias major_
expresses this uncertainty more completely than any of the other
dialogues. What is the beautiful? That is the question asked at the
beginning, and left unanswered at the end. The Platonic Socrates and
Hippias propose the most various solutions, one after another, but
always come out by the gate by which they entered in. Is the beautiful
to be found in ornament? No, for gold embellishes only where it is in
keeping. Is the beautiful that which seems ugly to no man? But it is a
question of being, not of seeming. Is it their fitness which makes
things seem beautiful? But in that case, the fitness which makes them
appear beautiful is one thing, the beautiful another. If the beautiful
be the useful or that which leads to an end, then evil would also be
beautiful, because the useful may also end evilly. Is the beautiful the
helpful, that which leads to the good? No, for in that case the good
would not be beautiful, nor the beautiful good, because cause and effect
are different.

Thus they argued in the Platonic dialogues, and when we turn to the
pages of Aristotle, we find him also uncertain and inclined to vary his
definitions.[5] Sometimes for him the good and pleasurable are the
beautiful, sometimes it lies in actions, at others in things motionless,
or in bulk and order, or is altogether undefinable. Antiquity also
established canons of the beautiful, and the famous canon of
Polycleitus, on the proportions of the human body, fitly compares with
that of later times on the golden line, and with the Ciceronian phrase
from the Tusculan Disputations. But these are all of them mere empirical
observations, mere happy remarks and verbal substitutions, which lead to
unsurmountable difficulties when put to philosophical test.

One important identification is absent in all those early attempts at
truth. The beautiful is never identified with art, and the artistic fact
is always clearly distinguished from beauty, mimetic from its content.
Plotinus first identified the two, and with him the beautiful and art
are dissolved together in a passion and mystic elevation of the spirit.
The beauty of natural objects is the archetype existing in the soul,
which is the fountain of all natural beauty. Thus was Plato (he said) in
error, when he despised the arts for imitating nature, for nature
herself imitates the idea, and art also seeks her inspiration directly
from those ideas whence nature proceeds. We have here, with Plotinus and
with Neoplatonism, the first appearance in the world of mystical
Aesthetic, destined to play so important a part in later aesthetic
theory.

Aristotle was far more happy in his attempts at defining Aesthetic as
the science of representation and of expression than in his definitions
of the beautiful. He felt that some element of the problem had been
overlooked, and in attempting in his turn a solution, he had the
advantage over Plato of looking upon the ideas as simple concepts, not
as hypostases of concepts or of abstractions. Thus reality was more
vivid for Aristotle: it was the synthesis of matter and form. He saw
that art, or mimetic, was a theoretic fact, or a mode of contemplation.
"But if Poetry be a theoretic fact, in what way is it to be distinguished
from science and from historical knowledge?" Thus magnificently does the
great philosopher pose the problem at the commencement of his _Poetics_,
and thus alone can it be posed successfully. We ask the same question in
the same words to-day. But the problem is difficult, and the masterly
statement of it was not equalled by the method of solution then
available. He made an excellent start on his voyage of discovery, but
stopped half way, irresolute and perplexed. Poetry, he says, differs from
history, by portraying the possible, while history deals with what has
really happened. Poetry, like philosophy, aims at the universal, but in a
different way, which the philosopher indicates as something more (_mallon
tha katholon_) which differentiates poetry from history, occupied with the
particular (_malon tha kath ekaston_). What, then, is the possible, the
something more, and the particular of poetry? Aristotle immediately falls
into error and confusion, when he attempts to define these words. Since
art has to deal with the absurd and with the impossible, it cannot be
anything rational, but a mere imitation of reality, in accordance with
the Platonic theory--a fact of sensual pleasure. Aristotle does not,
however, attain to so precise a definition as Plato, whose erroneous
definition he does not succeed in supplanting. The truth is that he
failed of his self-imposed task; he failed to discern the true nature of
Aesthetic, although he restated and re-examined the problem with such
marvellous acumen.

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