Crocean Aesthetics: Centrality of "Expression"

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) has been singled out as the most important influence on modern aesthetics after Kant and Hegel. The primary reason for this lies in the fact that Croce and his English disciple R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943) are responsible for situating expression, as distinct from representation, at the center of aesthetic discourse. According to Croce’s theory of art, aesthetic experience is essentially the “recognition of expression” making expression the sole criterion for aesthetic value.

Several crucial distinctions fundamental to Croce’s theory should be established in order to fully understand the Crocean view. First is the distinction between expression and representation. At the heart of representation is imitation, that lofty goal to which all artists were thought to strive in earlier times. A representational work of art, then, points to something outside of itself—the thing represented. However, Croce considered representational accuracy to be completely irrelevant to aesthetic value. A work’s “aesthetic” meaning, being synonymous with its expressive meaning, is of far greater importance than any representational meaning the work might have. Thus, bad art can succeed at representing accurately, while good art need not represent anything at all—it must only express.

But what is it exactly that is expressed through a work of art? Croce believed that it is not the emotions, as is so often maintained, but rather what he referred to as intuitions—what Roger Scruton has described as “a special mental category… of preconceptual mental particulars, the apprehension of reality in its uniqueness.”

This leads to the second crucial distinction in Crocean aesthetic thought—the distinction between intuition and concept. Scruton’s use of the word “preconceptual” in his description above is deliberate. Intuitions for Croce are entirely free from concept, and when an attempt is made to describe these intuitions in words, they are at once reduced to concepts. These preconceptual intuitions may, however, be communicated or expressed through art. Therefore, just as intuitions are untranslatable in conceptual terms, the expressive content of a work or art is likewise untranslatable. Representational content can be described in words, but the only way to reveal the expressive content of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, for example, is to make someone sit down and listen to Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony. There is no other way to grasp this aesthetic meaning—“certainly not by some biographical study of the artist, nor by decoding the word according to the imagined rules of its construction.” (Scruton) Aesthetic meaning is only encountered through the experience of the particular work of art. This connects Croce to Hegel’s notion of the inseparability of form and content. Aesthetic content inheres in the work’s particular form as it is discovered through experience.

These two distinctions (expression/representation and intuition/concept) then map onto each other. To simplify crudely, concepts can be represented in art, while only intuitions are expressed through art.

One final distinction in Croce’s theory of art is worth noting. It is the categorical distinction between art and craft. This is fully spelled out in The Principles of Art by Collingwood, Croce’s disciple. Art is to craft what expression is to representation and what intuition is to concept. At the heart of the distinction between art and craft is the divisibility of means and end. With craft, there is always an end that is sought through the use of chosen means. But true art, or “art proper” as Collingwood calls it, cannot be divided into means and end. Art is necessarily an end in itself. Furthermore, craft, or technical skill, can be acquired, while artistic intuition cannot be acquired or taught. The craftsman who has a preconceived “conceptual” end that he attempts to achieve through his acquired compositional skills is engaging not in art but craft.

Collingwood is therefore also quick to refute the arousal theory of expression. The artist who creates art in order to arouse emotion within his viewers or hearers or readers is not engaging in art. Art expresses intuitions; it does not arouse emotions. If the purpose of a work of art is to arouse an emotion, then its experience is dispensable since that emotion may be aroused through other means. The arousal theory runs counter to the fundamental Crocean tenet that each unique work of art has a unique expressive content that can only be accessed through an aesthetic experience of that particular work.