Charles Kingsley - "Women and Politics"

John Morley - "Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3)"

Benedetto Croce - "Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic"

Sallust - "Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War"

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




After Aristotle, there comes a lull in the discussion, until Plotinus.
The _Poetics_ were generally little studied, and the admirable statement
of the problem generally neglected by later writers. Antique psychology
knew the fancy or imagination, as preserving or reproducing sensuous
impressions, or as an intermediary between the concepts and feeling: its
autonomous productive activity was not yet understood. In the _Life of
Apollonius of Tyana_, Philostratus is said to have been the first to
make clear the difference between mimetic and creative imagination. But
this does not in reality differ from the Aristotelian mimetic, which is
concerned, not only with the real, but also with the possible. Cicero
too, before Philostratus, speaks of a kind of exquisite beauty lying
hidden in the soul of the artist, which guides his hand and art.
Antiquity seems generally to have been entrammelled in the meshes of the
belief in mimetic, or the duplication of natural objects by the artist
Philostratus and the other protagonists of the imagination may have
meant to combat this error, but the shadows lie heavy until we reach
Plotinus.

We find already astir among the sophists the question as to the nature
of language. Admitting that language is a sign, are we to take that
as signifying a spiritual necessity (_phusis_) or as a psychological
convention (_nomos_)? Aristotle made a valuable contribution to this
difficult question, when he spoke of a kind of proposition other than
those which predicate truth or falsehood, that is, logic. With him
_euchae_ is the term proper to designate desires and aspirations,
which are the vehicle of poetry and of oratory. (It must be remembered
that for Aristotle words, like poetry, belonged to mimetic.) The
profound remark about the third mode of proposition would, one would
have thought, have led naturally to the separation of linguistic
from logic, and to its classification with poetry and art. But the
Aristotelian logic assumed a verbal and formal character, which set
back the attainment of this position by many hundred years. Yet the
genius of Epicurus had an intuition of the truth, when he remarked
that the diversity of names for the same things arose, not from
arbitrary caprice, but from the diverse impression derived from the
same object. The Stoics, too, seem to have had an inkling of the
non-logical nature of speech, but their use of the word _lekton_
leaves it doubtful whether they distinguished by it the linguistic
representation from the abstract concept, or rather, generically, the
meaning from the sound.

[5] In the Appendix will be found further striking quotations from
and references to Aristotle.--(D.A.)




II

AESTHETIC IDEAS IN THE MIDDLE AGE AND IN THE RENAISSANCE


Well-nigh all the theories of antique Aesthetic reappear in the Middle
Ages, as it were by spontaneous generation. Duns Scotus Erigena
translated the Neoplatonic mysticism of the pseudo-Dionysus. The
Christian God took the place of the chief Good or Idea: God, wisdom,
goodness, supreme beauty are the fountains of natural beauty, and these
are steps in the stair of contemplation of the Creator. In this manner
speculation began to be diverted from the art fact, which had been so
prominent with Plotinus. Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle in
distinguishing the beautiful from the good, and applied his doctrine of
imitation to the beauty of the second person of the Trinity (_in quantum
est imago expressa Patris_). With the troubadours, we may find traces of
the hedonistic view of art, and the rigoristic hypothesis finds in
Tertullian and in certain Fathers of the Church staunch upholders. The
retrograde Savonarola occupied the same position at a later period. But
the narcotic, moralistic, or pedagogic view mostly prevailed, for it
best suited an epoch of relative decadence in culture. It suited
admirably the Middle Age, offering at once an excuse for the new-born
Christian art, and for those works of classical or pagan art which yet
survived. Specimens of this view abound all through the Middle Age. We
find it, for instance, in the criticism of Virgil, to whose work were
attributed four distinct meanings: literal, allegorical, moral, and
anagogic. For Dante poetry was _nihil aliud quam fictio rhetorica in
musicaque posita_. "If the vulgar be incapable of appreciating my inner
meaning, then they shall at least incline their minds to the perfection
of my beauty. If from me ye cannot gather wisdom, at the least shall ye
enjoy me as a pleasant thing." Thus spoke the Muse of Dante, whose
_Convivio_ is an attempt to aid the understanding in its effort to grasp
the moral and pedagogic elements of verse. Poetry was the _gaia
scienza_, "a fiction containing many useful things covered or veiled."

It would be inexact to identify art in the Middle Age with philosophy
and theology. Its pleasing falsity could be adapted to useful ends, much
in the same way as matrimony excuses love and sexual union. This,
however, implies that for the Middle Age the ideal state was celibacy;
that is, pure knowledge, divorced from art.

The only line of explanation that was altogether neglected in the Middle
Age was the right one.

The _Poetics_ of Aristotle were badly rendered into Latin, from the
faulty paraphrase of Averroes, by one Hermann (1256). The nominalist and
realist dispute brought again into the arena the relations between
thought and speech, and we find Duns Scotus occupied with the problem in
his _De modis significandi seu grammatica speculativa_. Abelard had
defined sensation as _confusa conceptio_, and with the importance given
to intuitive knowledge, to the perception of the individual, of the
_species specialissima_ in Duns Scotus, together with the denomination
of the forms of knowledge as _confusae, indistinctae_, and _distinctae_,
we enter upon a terminology, which we shall see appearing again, big
with results, at the commencement of modern Aesthetic.

The doctrine of the Middle Age, in respect to art and letters, may thus
be regarded as of interest rather to the history of culture than to that
of general knowledge. A like remark holds good of the Renaissance.
Theories of antiquity are studied, countless treatises in many forms are
written upon them, but no really new Ideas as regards aesthetic science
appear on the horizon.

We find among the spokesmen of mystical Aesthetic in the thirteenth
century such names as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Bembo
and many others wrote on the Beautiful and on Love in the century that
followed. The _Dialogi di Amore_, written in Italian by a Spanish Jew
named Leone and published in 1535, had a European success, being
translated into many languages. He talks of the universality of love and
of its origin, of beauty that is grace, which delights the soul and
impels it to love. Knowledge of lesser beauties leads to loftier
spiritual beauties. Leone called these remarks _Philographia_.

Petrarch's followers versified similar intuitions, while others wrote
parodies and burlesques of this style; Luca Paciolo, the friend of
Leonardo, made the (false) discovery of the golden section, basing his
speculating upon mathematics; Michael Angelo established an empirical
canon for painting, attempting to give rules for imparting grace and
movement to figures, by means of certain arithmetical proportions;
others found special meanings in colours; while the Platonicians placed
the seat of beauty in the soul, the Aristotelians in physical qualities.
Agostino Nifo, the Averroist, after some inconclusive remarks, is at
last fortunate enough to discover where natural beauty really dwells:
its abode is the body of Giovanna d'Aragona, Princess of Tagliacozzo, to
whom he dedicates his book. Tasso mingled the speculations of the
_Hippias major_ with those of Plotinus.

Tommaso Campanella, in his _Poetica_, looks upon the beautiful as
_signum boni_, the ugly as _signum mali_. By goodness, he means Power,
Wisdom, and Love. Campanella was still under the influence of the
erroneous Platonic conception of the beautiful, but the use of the word
_sign_ in this place represents progress. It enabled him to see that
things in themselves are neither beautiful nor ugly.

Nothing proves more clearly that the Renaissance did not overstep the
limits of aesthetic theory reached in antiquity, than the fact that the
pedagogic theory of art continued to prevail, in the face of
translations of the _Poetics_ of Aristotle and of the diffuse labours
expended upon that work. This theory was even grafted upon the
_Poetics_, where one is surprised to find it. There are a few hedonists
standing out from the general trend of opinion. The restatement of the
pedagogic position, reinforced with examples taken from antiquity, was
disseminated throughout Europe by the Italians of the Renaissance.
France, Spain, England, and Germany felt its influence, and we find the
writers of the period of Louis XIV. either frankly didactic, like Le
Bossu (1675), for whom the first object of the poet is to instruct, or
with La Menardiere (1640) speaking of poetry as "cette science agreable
qui mele la gravite des preceptes avec la douceur du langage." For the
former of these critics, Homer was the author of two didactic manuals
relating to military and political matters: the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_.

Didacticism has always been looked upon as the Poetic of the
Renaissance, although the didactic is not mentioned among the kinds of
poetry of that period. The reason of this lies in the fact that for the
Renaissance all poetry was didactic, in addition to any other qualities
which it might possess. The active discussion of poetic theory, the
criticism of Aristotle and of Plato's exclusion of poetry, of the
possible and of the verisimilar, if it did not contribute much original
material to the theory of art, yet at any rate sowed the seeds which
afterwards germinated and bore fruit. Why, they asked with Aristotle, at
the Renaissance, does poetry deal with the universal, history with the
particular? What is the reason for poetry being obliged to seek
verisimilitude? What does Raphael mean by the "certain idea," which he
follows in his painting?

These themes and others cognate were dealt with by Italian and by
Spanish writers, who occasionally reveal wonderful acumen, as when
Francesco Patrizio, criticizing Aristotle's theory of imitation,
remarks: "All languages and all philosophic writings and all other
writings would be poetry, because they are made of words, and words are
imitations." But as yet no one dared follow such a clue to the
labyrinth, and the Renaissance closes with the sense of a mystery yet to
be revealed.




III

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES


The seventeenth century is remarkable for the ferment of thought upon
this difficult problem. Such words as genius, taste, imagination or
fancy, and feeling, appear in this literature, and deserve a passing
notice. As regards the word "genius," we find the Italian "ingegno"
opposed to the intellect, and Dialectic adorned with the attributes of
the latter, while Rhetoric has the advantage of "ingegno" in all its
forms, such as "concetti" and "acutezze." With these the English word
ingenious has an obvious connection, especially in its earlier use as
applied to men of letters. The French worked upon the word "ingegno" and
evolved from it in various associations the expressions "esprit," "beaux
Esprits." The manual of the Spanish Jesuit, Baltasar Gracian, became
celebrated throughout Europe, and here we find "ingegno" described as
the truly inventive faculty, and from it the English word "genius," the
Italian "genio," the French "genie," first enter into general use.

The word "gusto" or taste, "good taste," in its modern sense, also
sprang into use about this time. Taste was held to be a judicial
faculty, directed to the beautiful, and thus to some extent distinct
from the intellectual judgment. It was further bisected into active and
passive; but the former ran into the definition of "ingegno," the latter
described sterility. The word "gusto," or taste as judgment, was in use
in Italy at a very early period; and in Spain we find Lope di Vega and
his contemporaries declaring that their object is to "delight the taste"
of their public. These uses of the word are not of significance as
regards the problem of art, and we must return to Baltasar Gracian
(1642) for a definition of taste as a special faculty or attitude of the
soul. Italian writers of the period echo the praises of this laconic
moralist, who, when he spoke of "a man of taste," meant to describe what
we call to-day "a man of tact" in the conduct of life.

The first use of the word in a strictly aesthetic sense occurs in France
in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. La Bruyere writes in his
_Caracteres_ (1688): "Il y a dans l'art un point de perfection, comme de
bonte ou de maturite dans la nature: celui qui le sent et qui l'aime, a
le gout parfait; celui qui ne le sent pas, et qui aime au deca ou au
dela, a le gout defectueux. Il y a donc un bon et un mauvais gout, et
l'on dispute des gouts avec fondement." Delicacy and variability or
variety were appended as attributes of taste. This French definition of
the Italian word was speedily adopted in England, where it became "good
taste," and we find it used in this sense in Italian and German writers
of about this period.

The words "imagination" and "fancy" were also passed through the
crucible in this century. We find the Cardinal Sforza-Pallavicino (1644)
blaming those who look for truth or falsehood, for the verisimilar or
for historical truth, in poetry. Poetry, he holds, has to do with the
primary apprehensions, which give neither truth nor falsehood. Thus the
fancy takes the place of the verisimilar of certain students of
Aristotle. The Cardinal continues his eloquence with the clinching
remark that if the intention of poetry were to be believed true, then
its real end would be falsehood, which is absolutely condemned by the
law of nature and by God. The sole object of poetic fables is, he says,
to adorn our intellect with sumptuous, new, marvellous, and splendid
imaginings, and so great has been the benefits accruing from this to the
human race, that poets have been rewarded with a glory superior to any
other, and their names have been crowned with divine honours. This, he
says in his treatise, _Del Bene_, has been the just reward of poets,
albeit they have not been bearers of knowledge, nor have they manifested
truth.

This throwing of the bridle on the neck of Pegasus seemed to Muratori
sixty years later to be altogether too risky a proceeding--although
advocated by a Prince of the Church! He reinserts the bit of the
verisimilar, though he talks with admiration of the fancy, that
"inferior apprehensive" faculty, which is content to "represent" things,
without seeking to know if they be true or false, a task which it leaves
to the "superior apprehensive" faculty of the intellect. The severe
Gravina, too, finds his heart touched by the beauty of poetry, when he
calls it "a witch, but wholesome."

As early as 1578, Huarte had maintained that eloquence is the work of
the imagination, not of the intellect; in England, Bacon (1605)
attributed knowledge to the intellect, history to memory, and poetry to
the imagination or fancy; Hobbes described the manifestations of the
latter; and Addison devoted several numbers of the _Spectator_ to the
analysis of "the pleasures of the imagination."

During the same period, the division between those who are accustomed "a
juger par le sentiment" and those who "raisonnent par les principes"
became marked in France, Du Bos (1719) is an interesting example of the
upholder of the feelings as regards the production of art. Indeed, there
is in his view no other criterion, and the feeling for art is a sixth
sense, against which intellectual argument is useless. This French
school of thought found a reflex in England with the position assigned
there to emotion in artistic work. But the confusion of such words as
imagination, taste, feeling, wit, shows that at this time there was a
suspicion that these words were all applicable to the same fact.
Alexander Pope thus distinguished wit and judgment:

For wit and judgment often are at strife,
Though meant each other's aid like man and wife.

But there was a divergence of opinion as to whether the latter should be
looked upon as part of the intellect or not.

There was the same divergence of opinion as to taste and intellectual
judgment. As regards the former, the opposition to the intellectual
principle was reinforced in the eighteenth century by Kant in his
_Kritik der Urtheilskraft_. But Voltaire and writers anterior to him
frequently fell back into intellectualist definitions of a word invented
precisely to avoid them. Dacier (1684) writes of taste as "Une harmonie,
un accord de l'esprit et de la raison." The difficulties surrounding a
true definition led to the creation of the expression _non so che_, or
_je ne sais quoi_, or _no se que_, which throws into clear relief the
confusion between taste and intellectual judgment.

As regards imagination and feeling, or sentiment, there was a strong
tendency to sensualism. The Cardinal Sforza-Pallavicino talks of poetry
as ignoring alike truth or falsehood and yet delighting the senses. He
approves of the remark that poetry should make us "raise our eyebrows,"
but in later life this keen-eyed prince seems to have fallen back from
the brilliant intuition of his earlier years into the pedagogic theory.
Muratori was convinced that fancy was entirely sensual, and therefore he
posted the intellect beside it, "to refrain its wild courses, like a
friend having authority." Gravina practically coincides in this view of
poetic fancy, as a subordinate faculty, incapable of knowledge, fit only
to be used by moral philosophy for the introduction into the mind of the
true, by means of novelty and the marvellous.

In England, also, Bacon held poetry to belong to the fancy, and assigned
to it a place between history and science. Epic poetry he awarded to the
former, "parabolic" poetry to the latter. Elsewhere he talks of poetry
as a dream, and affirms that it is to be held "rather as an amusement of
the intelligence than as a science." For him music, painting, sculpture,
and the other arts are merely pleasure-giving. Addison reduced the
pleasures of the imagination to those caused by visible objects, or by
ideas taken from them. These pleasures he held to be inferior to those
of the senses and less refined than those of the intellect. He looked
upon imaginative pleasure as consisting in resemblances discovered
between imitations and things imitated, between copies and originals, an
exercise adapted to sharpen the spirit of observation.

The sensualism of the writers headed by Du Bos, who looked upon art as a
mere pastime, like a tournament or a bull-fight, shows that the truth
about Aesthetic had not yet succeeded in emerging from the other
spiritual activities. Yet the new words and the new views of the
seventeenth century have great importance for the origins of Aesthetic;
they were the direct result of the restatement of the problem by the
writers of the Renaissance, who themselves took it up where Antiquity
had left it. These new words, and the discussions which arose from them,
were the demands of Aesthetic for its theoretical justification. But
they were not able to provide this justification, and it could not come
from elsewhere.

With Descartes, we are not likely to find much sympathy for such studies
as relate to wit, taste, fancy, or feelings. He ignored the famous _non
so che_; he abhorred the imagination, which he believed to result from
the agitation of the animal spirits. He did not altogether condemn
poetry, but certainly looked upon it as the _folle du logis_, which must
be strictly supervised by the reason. Boileau is the aesthetic
equivalent of Cartesian intellectualism, Boileau _que la raison a ses
regles engage_, Boileau the enthusiast for allegory. France was infected
with the mathematical spirit of Cartesianism and all possibility of a
serious consideration of poetry and of art was thus removed. Witness the
diatribes of Malebranche against the imagination, and listen to the
Italian, Antonio Conti, writing from France in 1756 on the theme of the
literary disputes that were raging at the time: "They have introduced
the method of M. Descartes into belles-lettres; they judge poetry and
eloquence independently of their sensible qualities. Thus they also
confound the progress of philosophy with that of the arts. The Abbe
Terrasson says that the moderns are greater geometricians than the
ancients; therefore they are greater orators and greater poets." La
Motte, Fontenelle, Boileau, and Malebranche carried on this battle,
which was taken up by the Encyclopaedists, and when Du Bos published his
daring book, Jean Jacques le Bel published a reply to it (1726), in
which he denied to sentiment its claim to judge of art. Thus
Cartesianism could not possess an Aesthetic of the imagination. The
Cartesian J.P. de Crousaz (1715) found the beautiful to consist in what
is approved of, and thereby reduced it to ideas, ignoring the pleasing
and sentiment.

Locke was as intellectualist in the England of this period as was
Descartes in France. He speaks of wit as combining ideas in an agreeable
variety, which strikes the imagination, while the intellect or judgment
seeks for differences according to truth. The wit, then, consists of
something which is not at all in accordance with truth and reason. For
Shaftesbury, taste is a sense or instinct of the beautiful, of order and
proportion, identical with the moral sense and with its "preconceptions"
anticipating the recognition of reason. Body, spirit, and God are the
three degrees of beauty. Francis Hutcheson proceeded from Shaftesbury
and made popular "the internal sense of beauty, which lies somewhere
between sensuality and rationality and is occupied with discussing unity
in variety, concord in multiplicity, and the true, the good, and the
beautiful in their substantial identity." Hutcheson allied the pleasure
of art with this sense, that is, with the pleasure of imitation and of
the likeness of the copy to the original. This he looked upon as
relative beauty, to be distinguished from absolute beauty. The same view
dominates the English writers of the eighteenth century, among whom may
be mentioned Reid, the head of the Scottish school, and Adam Smith.

With far greater philosophical vigour, Leibnitz in Germany opened the
door to that crowd of psychic facts which Cartesian intellectualism had
rejected with horror. His conception of reality as _continuous_ (_natura
non facit saltus_) left room for imagination, taste, and their
congeners. Leibnitz believed that the scale of being ascended from the
lowliest to God. What we now term aesthetic facts were then identified
with what Descartes and Leibnitz had called "confused" knowledge, which
might become "clear," but not distinct. It might seem that when he
applied this terminology to aesthetic facts, Leibnitz had recognized
their peculiar essence, as being neither sensual nor intellectual. They
are not sensual for him, because they have their own "clarity,"
differing from pleasure and sensual emotion, and from intellectual
"distinctio." But the Leibnitzian law of continuity and intellectualism
did not permit of such an interpretation. Obscurity and clarity are here
to be understood as quantitative grades of a _single_ form of knowledge,
the distinct or intellectual, toward which they both tend and reach at a
superior grade. Though artists judge with confused perceptions, which
are clear but not distinct, these may yet be corrected and proved true
by intellective knowledge. The intellect clearly and distinctly knows
the thing which the imagination knows confusedly but clearly. This view
of Leibnitz amounts to saying that the realization of a work of art can
be perfected by intellectually determining its concept. Thus Leibnitz
held that there was only one true form of knowledge, and that all other
forms could only reach perfection in that. His "clarity" is not a
specific difference; it is merely a partial anticipation of his
intellective "distinction." To have posited this grade is an important
achievement, but the view of Leibnitz is not fundamentally different
from that of the creators of the words and intuitions already studied.
All contributed to attract attention to the peculiarity of aesthetic
facts.

Speculation on language at this period revealed an equally determined
intellectualist attitude. Grammar was held to be an exact science, and
grammatical variations to be explainable by the ellipse, by
abbreviation, and by failure to grasp the typical logical form. In
France, with Arnauld (1660), we have the rigorous Cartesian
intellectualism; Leibnitz and Locke both, speculated upon this subject,
and the former all his life nourished the thought of a universal
language. The absurdity of this is proved in this volume.

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