The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General: Part 1, Theory

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) spent most of his life as a private scholar in Naples. His Estetica, which first appeared in 1902, has remained a seminal work not only for aesthetics but also for general linguistics. As the full title indicates, this is not a narrow work dealing with the theory of art and criticism. For Croce intended this to be the first part of his ‘philosophy of the spirit’ and he thus presents a systematic general theory intended to solve all philosophical problems. The work presents an account of the structure of the human mind and shows how art arises naturally from that structure, as well as introducing the influential notion of the organic unity of a work of art. As a result, art is shown to be integral to any life and an essential aspect of what it is to be human.

Acknowledgments; Translator’s foreword; Preface; 1. Intuition and expression; 2. Intuition and art; 3. Art and philosophy; 4. Historicism and intellectualism in the aesthetic; 5. critique of analogous errors in history and logic; 6. Theoretical activity and practical activity; 7. The analogy between the theoretical and the practical; 8. The exclusion of other forms of the spirit; 9. That expression cannot be divided into modes or levels: the critique of rhetoric; 10. Aesthetic feelings and the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly; 11. Critique of aesthetic hedonism; 12. The aesthetic of ‘That which attracts liking’ and the pseudo-aesthetic concepts; 13. Physical beauty and the nature of art; 14. Errors arising from the confusion between the physical and the aesthetic; 15. The activity of externalisation: the technique and the theory of the arts; 16. Taste and the reproduction of art; 17. The history of art and literature; 18. Conclusion: identity of linguistics and the aesthetic; Index.