Listening to Will Durant writing about Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) while walking island path up toward spinnaker on lovely snow-deep Ragged Mountain this afternoon with Enso the good dog.
3. What is Beauty?
Croce came to philosophy from historical and literary studies; and it was natural that his philosophic interest should be deeply colored by the problems of criticism and esthetics. His greatest book is his Esthetic (1902). He prefers art to metaphysics and to science: the sciences give us utility but the arts give us beauty; the sciences take us away from the individual and the actual, into a world of increasingly mathematical abstractions, until (as in Einstein) they issue in momentous conclusions of no practical importance; but art takes us directly to the particular person and the unique fact, to the philosophical universal intuited in the form of the concrete individual. “Knowledge has two forms: it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of the relations between them; it is the production either of images or of concepts.” The origin of art, therefore, lies in the power of forming images. “Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination, Images are its only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them, does not define them; it feels and presents them—nothing more.” Because imagination precedes thought, and is necessary to it, the artistic, or image-forming activity of the mind is prior to the logical, concept-forming, activity. Man is an artist as soon as he imagines, and long before he reasons.
Croce prefers art to metaphysics and to science: the sciences give us utility but the arts give us beauty. The origin of art lies in the power of forming images and not concepts. The image-forming activity of the mind is prior to the logical, concept-forming, activity.
The great artists understood the matter so. “One paints not with the hands but with the brain,” said Michelangelo; and Leonardo wrote: “The minds of men of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work.” Everybody knows the story told of da Vinci, that when he was painting the “Last Supper,” he sorely displeased the Abbot who had ordered the work, by sitting motionless for days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate Abbot’s persistent query—When would he begin to work?—by using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas.
(-- from Chapter X Section 2.3 from the book THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY by WILL DURANT. The contents are from the 1933 reprint)
Seems right -- to feel and present.
No rational argument. No calculated or conditioned elaboration of a point of view intended to overwhelm someone’s conclusions to correspond with your slant of persuasion.
Rather, to feel and present.
To intuit the whole of one’s life and past while navigating the moments and molecules of a quietly passing geography of now.
We are artists until we think we should be something else, do something else to justify our existence in the eyes of mechanical pragmatic witnesses. And then we grow old. A nostalgia for the person we always were overwhelms us. Maybe resentment. Perhaps blame. A spate of what could have been.
Forget about it!
Feel now.
Present now.
You are the blank page, the empty canvas, the mute flute, the silent spacious vista, the deep inner space, the cavernous dance floor.
Go ahead...there’s nothing more to think about.
