Croce

Croce

Intuition, Expression and Communication

BA 3D Design.

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) perhaps the most important philosopher of

the twentieth century lived most of his life in Naples born in the

Abruzzi hills a elder son of an ancient and wealthy Neapolitan family

was for decades Italy’s exemplar of the indispensable link between

intellect and conscience, a philosopher, historian, and critic his

approach is one usually termed neo-idealist his aesthetic derives

principally from earlier idealist G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) and

Giambatista Vico (1668-1774).

Croce’s possibly best-known work was published in 1902 Philosophy of

the spirit which was divided into four parts “Aesthetic as the Science

of Expression and general Linguistics, Logic as the Science of Pure

Concept, Philosophy of the Practical, and History: Its Theory and

Practice” But my main concern is with Estetica come scienza dell’

espressione e linguistica generale or “Aesthetic as the Science of

Expression and General Linguistics” within his analysis he states

that ““intuition” is only intuition in as far as it is, in that very

act, expression”. In other words he argues that intuition is one and

the same as expression what he means by this is all genuine examples

of intuition are in fact examples of expression, and all genuine

examples of expression are examples of intuition one is a complex of

feeling and thought, while the other is the image that derives from it

but for Croce they are the interior and exterior views of the same

thing. Plausibly, we cannot have an intuition without an equivalent

expression; in other terms that is like talking about a piece of art

work or sculpture inside us that we are incapable of expressing in

form. Although people do talk that way from time to time, of course,

but others are entitled to doubt whether the art piece is really there

inside the person or not. The reason we may think we have intuitions

that we cannot express is that most of our intuitions like our

memories are cloudy and vague, when we come to actualize them; we

realize this and put the fault down to poor technique or skill. What

distinguishes artists from the inartistic and the rest of us that

artists’ intuitions have become much clearer than ours and have also

become much clearer still in the process of expression within their

art work itself.

But he does make a distinction between expression and communication

the third factor in the artistic process which in itself is quite

unimportant. Croce argues that expression does not basically involve

communication. A person can have an intuition in their head and it

will count as a genuine expression even if they never try to