Florence Coombe - "Jack of Both Sides"

Thomas Babington Macaulay - "The History of England from the Accession of James II, Vol. 2"

D. J. Medley - "The Church and the Empire"

Fred H. Colvin - "The Working of Steel"

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







IV

HISTORICISM AND INTELLECTUALISM IN AESTHETIC


These relations between intuitive or aesthetic knowledge and the other
fundamental or derivative forms of knowledge having been definitely
established, we are now in a position to reveal the errors of a series
of theories which have been, or are, presented, as theories of
Aesthetic.

[Sidenote] _Critique of verisimilitude and of naturalism._

From the confusion between the exigencies of art in general and the
particular exigencies of history has arisen the theory (which has lost
ground to-day, but used to dominate in the past) of _verisimilitude_ as
the object of art. As is generally the case with erroneous propositions,
the intention of those who employed and employ the concept of
verisimilitude has no doubt often been much more reasonable than the
definition given of the word. By verisimilitude used to be meant the
artistic _coherence_ of the representation, that is to say, its
completeness and effectiveness. If "verisimilar" be translated by
"coherent," a most exact meaning will often be found in the discussions,
examples, and judgments of the critics. An improbable personage, an
improbable ending to a comedy, are really badly-drawn personages,
badly-arranged endings, happenings without artistic motive. It has been
said with reason that even fairies and sprites must have verisimilitude,
that is to say, be really sprites and fairies, coherent artistic
intuitions. Sometimes the word "possible" has been used instead of
"verisimilar." As we have already remarked in passing, this word
possible is synonymous with that which is imaginable or may be known
intuitively. Everything which is really, that is to say, coherently,
imagined, is possible. But formerly, and especially by the
theoreticians, by verisimilar was understood historical credibility, or
that historical truth which is not demonstrable, but conjecturable, not
true, but verisimilar. It has been sought to impose a like character
upon art. Who does not recall the great part played in literary history
by the criticism of the verisimilar? For example, the fault found with
the _Jerusalem Delivered_, based upon the history of the Crusades, or of
the Homeric poems, upon that of the verisimilitude of the costume of the
emperors and kings?

At other times has been imposed upon art the duty of the aesthetic
reproduction of historical reality. This is another of the erroneous
significations assumed by the theory concerning _the imitation of
nature_. Verism and naturalism have since afforded the spectacle of a
confusion of the aesthetic fact with the processes of the natural
sciences, by aiming at some sort of _experimental_ drama or romance.

[Sidenote] _Critique of ideas in art, of theses in art, and of the
typical._

The confusions between the methods of art and those of the philosophical
sciences have been far more frequent. Thus it has often been held to be
within the competence of art to develop concepts, to unite the
intelligible with the sensible, to represent _ideas or universals_,
putting art in the place of science, that is, confusing the artistic
function in general with the particular case in which it becomes
aesthetico-logical.

The theory of art as supporting _theses_ can be reduced to the same
error, as can be the theory of art considered as individual
representation, exemplifying scientific laws. The example, in so far as
it is an example, stands for the thing exemplified, and is thus an
exposition of the universal, that is to say, a form of science, more or
less popular or vulgarized.

The same may be said of the aesthetic theory of the _typical_, when by
type is understood, as it frequently is, just the abstraction or the
concept, and it is affirmed that art should make _the species shine in
the individual_. If by typical be here understood the individual, here,
too, we have a merely verbal variation. To typify would signify, in this
case, to characterize; that is, to determine and to represent the
individual. Don Quixote is a type; but of whom is he a type, if not of
all Don Quixotes? A type, that is to say, of himself. Certainly he is
not a type of abstract concepts, such as the loss of the sense of
reality, or of the love of glory. An infinite number of personages can
be thought of under these concepts, who are not Don Quixote. In other
words, we find our own impressions fully determined and verified in the
expression of a poet (for example in a poetical personage). We call that
expression typical, which we might call simply aesthetic. Poetical or
artistic universals have been spoken of in like manner, in order to show
that the artistic product is altogether spiritual and ideal in itself.

[Sidenote] _Critique of the symbol and of the allegory._

Continuing to correct these errors, or to make clear equivoques, we will
note that the _symbol_ has sometimes been given as essence of art. Now,
if the symbol be given as inseparable from the artistic intuition, it is
the synonym of the intuition itself, which always has an ideal
character. There is no double-bottom to art, but one only; in art all is
symbolical, because all is ideal. But if the symbol be looked upon as
separable--if on the one side can be expressed the symbol, and on the
other the thing symbolized, we fall back again into the intellectualist
error: that pretended symbol is the exposition of an abstract concept,
it is an _allegory_, it is science, or art that apes science. But we
must be just toward the allegorical also. In some cases, it is
altogether harmless. Given the _Gerusalemme liberata_, the allegory was
imagined afterwards; given the _Adone_ of Marino, the poet of the
lascivious insinuated afterwards that it was written to show how
"immoderate indulgence ends in pain"; given a statue of a beautiful
woman, the sculptor can write on a card that the statue represents
_Clemency_ or _Goodness_. This allegory linked to a finished work _post
festum_ does not change the work of art. What is it, then? It is an
expression externally _added_ to another expression. A little page of
prose is added to the _Gerusalemme_, expressing another thought of the
poet; a verse or a strophe is added to the _Adone_, expressing what the
poet would like to make a part of his public swallow; while to the
statue nothing more than the single word is added: _Clemency_ or
_Goodness_.

[Sidenote] _Critique of the theory of artistic and literary classes._

But the greatest triumph of the intellectualist error lies in the theory
of artistic and literary classes, which still has vogue in literary
treatises, and disturbs the critics and the historians of art. Let us
observe its genesis.

The human mind can pass from the aesthetic to the logical, just because
the former is a first step, in respect to the latter. It can destroy the
expressions, that is, the thought of the individual with the thought of
the universal. It can reduce expressive facts to logical relations. We
have already shown that this operation in its turn becomes concrete in
an expression, but this does not mean that the first expressions have
not been destroyed. They have yielded their place to the new
aesthetico-logical expressions. When we are on the second step, we have
left the first.

He who enters a picture-gallery, or who reads a series of poems, may,
after he has looked and read, go further: he may seek out the relations
of the things there expressed. Thus those pictures and compositions,
each of which is an individual inexpressible by logic, are resolved into
universals and abstractions, such as _costumes, landscapes, portraits,
domestic life, battles, animals, flowers, fruit, seascapes, lakes,
deserts, tragic, comic, piteous, cruel, lyrical, epic, dramatic,
knightly, idyllic facts_, and the like. They are often also resolved
into merely quantitative categories, such as _little picture, picture,
statuette, group, madrigal, song, sonnet, garland of sonnets, poetry,
poem, story, romance_, and the like.

When we think the concept _domestic life_, or _knighthood_, or _idyll_,
or _cruelty_, or any other quantitative concept, the individual
expressive fact from which we started is abandoned. From aesthetes that
we were, we have been changed into logicians; from contemplators of
expression, into reasoners. Certainly no objection can be made to such a
process. In what other way could science be born, which, if aesthetic
expressions be assumed in it, yet has for function to go beyond them?
The logical or scientific form, as such, excludes the aesthetic form. He
who begins to think scientifically has already ceased to contemplate
aesthetically; although his thought will assume of necessity in its turn
an aesthetic form, as has already been said, and as it would be
superfluous to repeat.

The error begins when we try to deduce the expression from the concept,
and to find in the thing substituting the laws of the thing substituted;
when the difference between the second and the first step has not been
observed, and when, in consequence, we declare that we are standing on
the first step, when we are really standing on the second. This error is
known as _the theory of artistic and literary classes_.

What is the aesthetic form of domestic life, of knighthood, of the
idyll, of cruelty, and so forth? How should these contents be
_represented_? Such is the absurd problem implied in the theory of
artistic and literary classes. It is in this that consists all search
after laws or rules of styles. Domestic life, knighthood, idyll,
cruelty, and the like, are not impressions, but concepts. They are not
contents, but logico-aesthetic forms. You cannot express the form, for
it is already itself expression. And what are the words cruelty, idyll,
knighthood, domestic life, and so on, but the expression of those
concepts?

Even the most refined of these distinctions, those that have the most
philosophic appearance, do not resist criticism; as, for instance, when
works of art are divided into the subjective and the objective styles,
into lyric and epic, into works of feeling and works of design. It is
impossible to separate in aesthetic analysis, the subjective from the
objective side, the lyric from the epic, the image of feeling from that
of things.

[Sidenote] _Errors derived from this theory appearing in judgments
on art._

From the theory of the artistic and literary classes derive those
erroneous modes of judgment and of criticism, thanks to which, instead
of asking before a work of art if it be expressive, and what it
expresses, whether it speak or stammer, or be silent altogether, it is
asked if it be obedient to the _laws_ of the epic poem, or to those of
tragedy, to those of historical portraiture, or to those of landscape
painting. Artists, however, while making a verbal pretence of agreeing,
or yielding a feigned obedience to them, have really always disregarded
these _laws of styles_. Every true work of art has violated some
established class and upset the ideas of the critics, who have thus been
obliged to enlarge the number of classes, until finally even this
enlargement has proved too narrow, owing to the appearance of new works
of art, which are naturally followed by new scandals, new upsettings,
and-new enlargements.

From the same theory come the prejudices, owing to which at one time
(and is it really passed?) people used to lament that Italy had no
tragedy (until a poet arose who gave to Italy that wreath which was the
only thing wanting to her glorious hair), nor France the epic poem
(until the _Henriade_, which slaked the thirsty throats of the critics).
Eulogies accorded to the inventors of new styles are connected with
these prejudices, so much so, that in the seventeenth century the
invention of the _mock-heroic_ poem seemed an important event, and the
honour of it was disputed, as though it were the discovery of America.
But the works adorned with this name (the _Secchia rapita_ and the
_Scherno degli Dei_) were still-born, because their authors (a slight
draw-back) had nothing new or original to say. Mediocrities racked their
brains to invent, artificially, new styles. The _piscatorial_ eclogue
was added to the _pastoral_, and then, finally, the _military_ eclogue.
The _Aminta_ was bathed and became the _Alceo_. Finally, there have been
historians of art and literature, so much fascinated with these ideas of
classes, that they claimed to write the history, not of single and
effective literary and artistic works, but of their classes, those empty
phantoms. They have claimed to portray, not the evolution of the
_artistic spirit_, but the _evolution of classes_.

The philosophical condemnation of artistic and literary classes is found
in the formulation and demonstration of what artistic activity has ever
sought and good taste ever recognized. What is to be done if good taste
and the real fact, put into formulas, sometimes assume the air of
paradoxes?

[Sidenote] _Empirical sense of the divisions of classes._

Now if we talk of tragedies, comedies, dramas, romances, pictures of
everyday life, battle-pieces, landscapes, seascapes, poems, versicles,
lyrics, and the like, if it be only with a view to be understood, and to
draw attention in general and approximatively to certain groups of
works, to which, for one reason or another, it is desired to draw
attention, in that case, no scientific error has been committed. We
employ _vocables and phrases_; we do not establish _laws and
definitions_. The mistake arises when the weight of a scientific
definition is given to a word, when we ingenuously let ourselves be
caught in the meshes of that phraseology. Pray permit me a comparison.
It is necessary to arrange the books in a library in one way or another.
This used generally to be done by means of a rough classification by
subjects (among which the categories of miscellaneous and eccentric were
not wanting); they are now generally arranged by sizes or by publishers.
Who can deny the necessity and the utility of these groupings? But what
should we say if some one began seriously to seek out the literary laws
of miscellanies and of eccentricities from the Aldine or Bodonian
collection, from size A or size B, that is to say, from these altogether
arbitrary groupings whose sole object has been their practical use?
Well, whoever should undertake an enterprise such as this, would be
doing neither more nor less than those who seek out the aesthetic laws
of literary and artistic classes.




V

ANALOGOUS ERRORS IN HISTORIC AND LOGIC


The better to confirm these criticisms, it will be opportune to cast a
rapid glance over analogous and opposite errors, born of ignorance as to
the true nature of art, and of its relation to history and to science.
These errors have injured alike the theory of history and of science, of
Historic (or Historiology) and of Logic.

[Sidenote] _Critique of the philosophy of history._

Historical intellectualism has been the cause of the many researches
which have been made, especially during the last two centuries,
researches which continue to-day, for _a philosophy of history_, for an
_ideal history_, for a _sociology_, for a _historical psychology_, or
however may be otherwise entitled or described a science whose object is
to extract from history, universal laws and concepts. Of what kind must
be these laws, these universals? Historical laws and historical
concepts? In that case, an elementary criticism of knowledge suffices to
make clear the absurdity of the attempt. When such expressions as a
_historical law_, a _historical concept_ are not simply metaphors
colloquially employed, they are true contradictions in terms: the
adjective is as unsuitable to the substantive as in the expressions
_qualitative quantity_ or _pluralistic monism_. History means concretion
and individuality, law and concept mean abstraction and universality.
If, on the other hand, the attempt to draw from history historical laws
and concepts be abandoned, and it be merely desired to draw from it laws
and concepts, the attempt is certainly not frivolous; but the science
thus obtained will be, not a philosophy of history, but rather,
according to the case, either philosophy in its various specifications
of Ethic, Logic, etc., or empirical science in its infinite divisions
and subdivisions. Thus are sought out either those philosophical
concepts which are, as has already been observed, at the bottom of every
historical construction and separate perception from intuition,
historical intuition from pure intuition, history from art; or already
formed historical intuitions are collected and reduced to types and
classes, which is exactly the method of the natural sciences. Great
thinkers have sometimes donned the unsuitable cloak of the philosophy of
history, and notwithstanding the covering, they have conquered
philosophical truths of the greatest magnitude. The cloak has been
dropped, the truth has remained. Modern sociologists are rather to be
blamed, not so much for the illusion in which they are involved when
they talk of an impossible science of sociology, as for the infecundity
which almost always accompanies their illusion. It is but a small evil
that Aesthetic should be termed sociological Aesthetic, or Logic, social
Logic. The grave evil is that their Aesthetic is an old-fashioned
expression of sensualism, their Logic verbal and incoherent. The
philosophical movement, to which we have referred, has borne two good
fruits in relation to history. First of all has been felt the desire to
construct a theory of historiography, that is, to understand the nature
and the limits of history, a theory which, in conformity with the
analyses made above, cannot obtain satisfaction, save in a general
science of intuition, in an Aesthetic, from which Historic would be
separated under a special head by means of the intervention of the
universals. Furthermore, concrete truths relating to historical events
have often been expressed beneath the false and presumptuous cloak of a
philosophy of history; canons and empirical advice have been formulated
by no means superfluous to students and critics. It does not seem
possible to deny this utility to the most recent of philosophies of
history, to so-called historical materialism, which has thrown a very
vivid light upon many sides of social life, formerly neglected or ill
understood.

[Sidenote] _Aesthetic invasions into Logic._

The principle of authority, of the _ipse dixit_, is an invasion of
historicity into the domains of science and philosophy which has raged
in the schools. This substitutes for introspection and philosophical
analyses, this or that evidence, document, or authoritative statement,
with which history certainly cannot dispense. But Logic, the science of
thought and of intellectual knowledge, has suffered the most grave and
destructive disturbances and errors of all, through the imperfect
understanding of the aesthetic fact. How, indeed, could it be otherwise,
if logical activity come after and contain in itself aesthetic activity?
An inexact Aesthetic must of necessity drag after it an inexact Logic.

Whoever opens logical treatises, from the _Organum_ of Aristotle to the
moderns, must admit that they all contain a haphazard mixture of verbal
facts and facts of thought, of grammatical forms and of conceptual
forms, of Aesthetic and of Logic. Not that attempts have been wanting to
escape from verbal expression and to seize thought in its effective
nature. Aristotelian logic itself did not become mere syllogistic and
verbalism, without some stumbling and oscillation. The especially
logical problem was often touched upon in the Middle Ages, by the
nominalists, realists, and conceptualists, in their disputes. With
Galileo and with Bacon, the natural sciences gave an honourable place to
induction. Vico combated formalist and mathematical logic in favour of
inventive methods. Kant called attention to _a priori_ syntheses. The
absolute idealists despised the Aristotelian logic. The followers of
Herbart, bound to Aristotle, on the other hand, set in relief those
judgments which they called narrative, which are of a character
altogether different from other logical judgments. Finally, the
linguists insisted upon the irrationality of the word, in relation to
the concept. But a conscious, sure, and radical movement of reform can
find no base or starting-point, save in the science of Aesthetic.

[Sidenote] _Logic in its essence._

In a Logic suitably reformed on this basis, it will be fitting to
proclaim before all things this truth, and to draw from it all its
consequences: the logical fact, _the only logical fact_, is _the
concept_, the universal, the spirit that forms, and in so far as it
forms, the universal. And if be understood by induction, as has
sometimes been understood, the formation of universals, and by deduction
the verbal development of these, then it is clear that true Logic can be
nothing but inductive Logic. But since by the word "deduction" has been
more frequently understood the special processes of mathematics, and by
the word "induction" those of the natural sciences, it will be advisable
to avoid the one and the other denomination, and to say that true Logic
is the Logic of the concept. The Logic of the concept, adopting a method
which is at once induction and deduction, will adopt neither the one nor
the other exclusively, that is, will adopt the (speculative) method,
which is intrinsic to it.

The concept, the universal, is in itself, abstractly considered,
_inexpressible_. No word is proper to it. So true is this, that the
logical concept remains always the same, notwithstanding the variation
of verbal forms. In respect to the concept, expression is a simple
_sign_ or _indication_. There must be an expression, it cannot fail; but
what it is to be, this or that, is determined by the historical and
psychological conditions of the individual who is speaking. The quality
of the expression is not deducible from the nature of the concept. There
does not exist a true (logical) sense of words. He who forms a concept
bestows on each occasion their true meaning on the words.

[Sidenote] _Distinction between logical and non-logical judgements._

This being established, the only truly logical (that is,
aesthetico-logical) propositions, the only rigorously logical judgments,
can be nothing but those whose proper and exclusive content is the
determination of a concept. These propositions or judgments are the
_definitions_. Science itself is nothing but a complex of definitions,
unified in a supreme definition; a system of concepts, or chief concept.

It is therefore necessary to exclude from Logic all those propositions
which do not affirm universals. Narrative judgments, not less than those
termed non-enunciative by Aristotle, such as the expression of desires,
are not properly logical judgments. They are either purely aesthetic
propositions or historical propositions. "Peter is passing; it is
raining to-day; I am sleepy; I want to read": these and an infinity of
propositions of the same kind, are nothing but either a mere enclosing,
in words the impression of the fact that Peter is passing, of the
falling rain, of my organism inclining to sleep, and of my will directed
to reading, or they are existential affirmation concerning those facts.
They are expressions of the real or of the unreal, of historical or of
pure imagination; they are certainly not definitions of universals.

[Sidenote] _Syllogistic._

This exclusion cannot meet with great difficulties. It is already almost
an accomplished fact, and the only thing required is to render it
explicit, decisive, and coherent. But what is to be done with all that
part of human experience which is called _syllogistic_, consisting of
judgments and reasonings which are based on concepts. What is
syllogistic? Is it to be looked down upon from above with contempt, as
something useless, as has so often been done in the reaction of the
humanists against scholasticism, in absolute idealism, in the
enthusiastic admiration of our times for the methods of observation and
experiment of the natural sciences? Syllogistic, reasoning _in forma_,
is not a discovery of truth; it is the art of exposing, debating,
disputing with oneself and others. Proceeding from concepts already
formed, from facts already observed and making appeal to the persistence
of the true or of thought (such is the meaning of the principle of
identity and contradiction), it infers consequences from these data,
that is, it represents what has already been discovered. Therefore, if
it be an _idem per idem_ from the point of view of invention, it is most
efficacious as a teaching and an exposition. To reduce affirmations to
the syllogistic scheme is a way of controlling one's own thought and of
criticizing that of others. It is easy to laugh at syllogisers, but, if
syllogistic has been born and retains its place, it must have good roots
of its own. Satire applied to it can concern only its abuses, such as
the attempt to prove syllogistically questions of fact, observation, and
intuition, or the neglect of profound meditation and unprejudiced
investigation of problems, for syllogistic formality. And if so-called
_mathematical Logic_ can sometimes aid us in our attempt to remember
with ease, to manipulate the results of our own thought, let us welcome
this form of the syllogism also, long prophesied by Leibnitz and essayed
by many, even in our days.

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