  Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar. TimeSearch |
Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) | |
|
Italian critic, philosopher, politician, historian. Benedetto Croce deeply influenced aesthetic thought in the first half of the 20th century, including Robin C. Collingwood's Principles of Art (1934) and John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934), although in the latter the philosophical background is totally different. Croce's main thesis was that art is intuition. His best-known work in the English-speaking world is Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902).
Benedetto Croce was born in Pescasseroli, in the Abruzzi
region, into a moderately wealthy land-owning family. Croce's
grandfather was a judge of the Supreme Court of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies. His
parents,
Pasquale and Luisa Sipari Croce, were both pious Catholics,
and had him educated at a Catholic boarding school. Following a religious crisis, Croce lost faith in a
transcendent God at the age of thirteen. However, although he
criticized the policies of the
Catholic Church in later years, he never took an anti-religious
position. Often he expressed his ideas in Christian terms. In 1883 Croce
lost his parents and his younger sister in an earthquake in
Casamicciola, on the island of Ischia, where they were spending the
summer holiday – Croce himself was buried for
several hours
under the ruins of a hotel. When he was freed, the doctors found that
he had suffered a broken arm, a fractured leg, and bruises all over his
body, but from the most traumatic experience, hearing his father crying
and calling for help, he never quite recovered. The presence of
death became a theme to which he returned on several occasions. Orphaned at the age of 17, Croce went to live in Rome with his uncle, Silvio Spaventa, brother of the Hegelian philosopher Bertrando Spaventa. By this time, he had lost faith in God. After studying briefly at the University of Rome, Croce left without taking a degree and returned in 1885 to Naples, where he lived the life of a gentleman-scholar, writing about every issue of contemporary concern. He never held a university position. During the next years Croce travelled in Spain, Germany, France, and England. He became interested in history after reading the literary historian Francesco De Sanctis. Under the influence of Gianbattista Vico's (1668-1744) thoughts about art and history he turned to philosophy in 1893. Croce also purchased the 18th century house in which Vico had lived. His friend, the philosopher Giovanni Gentile encouraged him to read Hegel. Croce's famous commentary on Hegel, What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel, came out in 1907. Croce, Antonio Labriola (1843-1904), and Georges Sorel
(1847-1922) were known as the Holy Trinity of Latin Marxist studies,
but Croce rejected Marx's determinism. In art nothing can determine in
advance the direction our expression will take. In Materialismo storico ed economia marxista
(1900, Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx) Croce
argued that "Das Kapital is
without doubt an abstract investigation; the capitalist society studied
by Marx, is not this or that society, historically existing, in France
or in England, nor the modern society of the most civilized nations,
that of Western Europe and America. It is an ideal and formal society,
deduced from certain hypotheses, which could indeed never have occurred
as actual facts in the course of history. It is true that these
hypotheses correspond to a great extent to the historical conditions of
the modern civilized world; but this, although it may establish the
importance and interest of Marx's investigation because the latter
helps us to an understanding of the workings of the social organisms
which closely concern us, does not alter its nature. Nowhere in the
world will Marx's categories be met with as living and real existence,
simply because the are abstract categories . . ."
(Ibid.,
translated by C. M. Meredith, with an introduction by A. D. Lindsay,
The Macmillan Company, 1914, p. 50) Only Antonio Gramsci, an original Marxist philosopher, was able challenge Croce's position as the leading thinker of Italy. Though Gramsci's disciplines never achieved political power, in culture wars against Croce they got the upper hand. Croce's moral leadership was questioned in 1944 by Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Italian Communist Party, who claimed that under Mussolini's dictatorship Croce had enjoyed "a curious position of privilege." (Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism by Fabio Fernando Rizi, 2003, p. 5) In 1896 Croce entered the cultural scene with his book about the concept of history in its relationship to the concept of art. He noticed that the philosophical foundations of aesthetics did not yet exist. In the following works he attempted to demonstrate the superiority of arts over the natural sciences, which he considered as a system of "pseudo-concepts." From 1906 Croce worked as an adviser with his publisher, Laterza and Sons, Bari, to produce three highly influential literature series, 'Writers of Italy,' 'Classics of Philosophy,' and 'The Library of Modern Culture.' In 1914 Croce married Adele Rossi, a high school teacher from Turin. They had four daughters and one son who died. Adele was a practising Catholic. Croce also allowed his four daughters to have a Catholic education. For many years, Croce spent summers with her and his growing family in a resort town in the Piedmont mountains. In Turin, he was respectfully addressed as "Don Benedetto." In honor of his achievements, Croce was appointed senator
for life by Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti in 1910. Later, in
1920-21, he served as Minister of Public Instruction in
Giolitti's final government, planning school reform. La
Critica, which Croce founded in 1903 with Giovanni Gentile,
became a forum for his thoughts. The magazine appeared until 1943,
but Gentile left it much before, in the 1920s. Fascism destroyed
their deep personal friendship. When Gentile started to
support fascism and signed the 'Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals',
Croce published his 'Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals' (1925).
However, in 1931 he advised university teachers to take the oath of
loyalty to fascism. At first, Croce himself had regarded Fascism as a politically promising movement, but in the theoretical realm, he criticized its ideology and rejected Gentile's and his pupils attempts to identify idealism with fascism: for him fascism was the contrary of liberalism. Mussolini's own paper, Il Popolo d'Italia, called Croce "a walking ghost" and "a corpse four days old." During
the reign of Mussolini and World War II, Croce
supported democratic principles, although he was skeptical about
democracy: "Sound political sense has never regarded the masses as the
directing force of society, but has always delegted this directive
function to a class which was not economic in its basic selection, but
political; one capable of governing." ('Future of
Democracy,' The Waikato Times,
June 12, 1937) Basically a man of words, not action Croce
never joined any underground
movement, but his historical essays, in which he defended the liberal
ideals of the Risorgimento, made him a high-profile opponent of the
regiment. Known as one of the major anti-fascist thinkers in Italy,
Croce was driven more and more into isolation from the society. After
he
refused to take the loyalty oath, he was no longer invited to the
meetings of the Reale Accademia of Naples. In a letter to the president
of Stockholm University in 1938 he expressed his horror at the
persecution of Jews. The letter was published in Sweden and after it
became known in Italy it brought threats against the author. Visitors
at his home were listed in police reports and his houses were under
surveillance. As a senator, Croce could not be arrested without the
consent of the Senate, but the Germans and fascist partisans planned to
kidnap
him in the Villa Tritone in Sorrento, where he lived after leaving
Naples to escape the bombings. The son of Axel
Munthe,
Major Malcolm Munthe, who was in charge of SOE's (Special Operations
Executive) missions in Sicily, rescued Croce and his family, and moved
them to Capri. For the allies, the operation was a great propaganda
coup. After the war Croce was appointed Minister without Portofilio
of the new democratic government and member of the Constituent
Assembly. When the Italian people were called upon to choose between
monarchy and republic in a referendum, Croce himself supported
the monarchy. Though he was open to social reforms, he viewed
Communism with suspicion and stated that "liberalism and democracy are
like two Siamese brothers, two persons joined by one circulatory blood
system." (Benedetto
Croce and Italian Fascism by Fabio Fernando Rizi, 2003, p. 256) Until his resingment from politics in 1947 Croce served as President of the reconstituted Liberal Party. On his retirement Croce established the Institute for Historical Studies in his Naples home, which held a magnificent collection of books. Croce continued his intellectual work until the last days of his life. When he was asked about his health, he said, "I am dying at my work." Croce died in Naples on November 20, 1952. He had been suffering from a kidney infection after an attack of influenca. The family refused a state funeral. No official speeches were made on the day of the funeral, which the government had proclaimed a day of mourning. "It is deeply ironic that Croce, defender of the autonomy of art, aesthetician, a man endowed with a great sensibility, good taste, and judgment, was finally unable to develop a theoretical and analytical scheme of criticism and had to be content (like many other critics) with defining his own taste, selecting his canon of classics, and persuading others that he was right. He was successful only for a time." (A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, Volume 8: French, Italian, and Spanish Criticism by René Wellek, Yale University Press, 1992, p. 223) Embracing Hegel, Croce
identified philosophy with the history of philosophy. History moves on
with no final stage: it is the only reality, and the only conceptual
and genuine form of knowledge. Croce maintained that there is no
physical reality, nothing
exists except the activity of spirit in history. The physical is solely
a construction of
mind. Croce distinguished two basic aspects of experience – the
theoretical, which included among others intuition, and the practical.
In this category he placed all economic, political and utilitarian
activities. The categories are dialectical, there is no action without
thought. In normal experience intuition and concept combine, but in
aesthetic experience we hold the two apart. In a work of art, form and
content are inseparable. Intuition is free from concepts, it "is blind: the intellect lends its eyes to it." Criticism cannot be founded on rules or theories. "It is said that there are certain truths of which definitions cannot be given; that cannot be demonstrated by syllogistic reasoning; that must be grasped intuitively... The critic holds himself honour bound to set aside, when confronted by a work of art, all theories and abstractions and to judge it by intuiting it directly." (The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General by Benedetto Croce, translated by Colin Lyas, 1992, p. 1) As a critic Croce started from the popular assumption that analysis of texts themselves must precede other analysis. Works of art must be viewed in the light of their own, entire context. The intentional world of the poet is one thing and, and poetry is another – what matters is not what the poet proposes or believes to make, but only what he has actually made, Croce argued in Aesthetica in nuce (1954). He distinguished expression from representation. Representational works of art tell a story, and if our interest is merely in the story, then the work has for us instrumental value. But when we are interested in expression, we are interested in the unique experience expressed by this special work of art. Like Henri Bergson, Croce put emphasis on intuitive knowledge, with the difference that Bergson cast the concept into to the realm of experience, it is a direct vision of reality, whereas Croce identified intuition with artistic creation: works of art are examples of intuitive knowledge. Basically artistic intuition do not differ in method from ordinary intuition, the difference is empirical (quantitative). Thus M. Jourdain in Molière's comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was right in his discovery that he had been speaking prose all his life, "and didn't even know it!" A poet realizes his intuition verbally, through the process of writing. According to Croce, poetry is emotion, an expression of the soul at the moment of intuition. The task of an art critic is to characterize the image of the work, an unified mental picture of a particular thing, define its emotional aspects and evaluate how faithful the image is to emotion. Image consists of smaller parts, plot, setting, language. Croce's conservative, classical taste led him to reject French symbolist poetry and experimental movements. He also dismissed translation as a logically imposible task, which somewhat hindered the development of translation studies in Italy. Croce disliked Pirandello, Rimbaud's 'Bal des pendus' showed him "stupid inhumanity," he ridiculed Valéry for his poetic theory, and criticized D'Annunzio for not having inner clarity. Thoroughly disappointed with contemporary literature, he eventually gave up writing. For further reading: Benedetto Croce by Rafaello Piccoli (1922); Benedetto Croce by C. Sprigge (1952); The Philosophy of Benedetto Croce by by A. De Gennaro (1961); Benedetto Croce by G.N.G. Orsini (1961); Le origini del pensiero di Benedetto Croce by Mario Corsi (1974); Benedetto Croce's Aesthetic by B. Bosanquet (1977); Croce and Literary Criticism by O.K. Struckmayer (1978); The Romantic Theory of Poetry by A.E.P. Dodds (1979); Benedetto Croce's Poetry and Literature by G. Gullace (1981); Introduzione a Croce by Paolo Bonetti (1984); Benedetto Croce Reconsidered by M.E. Moss (1987); Croce and Marxism by E.G. Caserta (1987); Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism by D.D. Roberts (1987); A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, vol. 8, by René Wellek (1992); Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943-46: Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the 'Actionists by David Ward (1996); The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, ed. by Jack D'Amico et al (1999); Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism by Fabio Fernando Rizi (2003); Benedetto Croce and the Birth of the Italian Republic, 1943-1952 by Fabio Fernando Rizi (2019); La cura Goethe: poesia e storia in Benedetto Croce by Rosaria Peluso (2022); Benedetto Croce: gli anni del fascismo by Eugenio Di Rienzo (2020); Croce on History: Aesthetic Defiguring by Massimo Verdicchio (2021); Benedetto Croce: la biografia by Paolo D'Angelo (2023) Selected works:
|
