'The Forms of Things Unknown'

Towards the end of 'The Winter's Tale', by William Shakespeare, (1564 – 1616), a rumour circulates concerning a lifelike statue of Hermione, wife of Leontes, king of Sicilia, (a statue that will turn out to be Hermione herself, which explains why it is so lifelike). Concerning the statue, one court gentleman remarks that it is: '...a piece many years in the doing and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer'. (Act 5, Scene 2).

(Guilio Romano, (1499 – 1546), celebrated Italian painter, not a sculptor. Shakespeare was as knowledgeable about art as he was about geography. See, as Shakespeare probably never did, Romano's fresco 'The Fall of the Giants', in the Palazzo del Te, Mantua).

Behind the gentleman's remark is an expression of a Renaissance ideal about art; the more faithfully the artist imitates nature, (is 'nature's ape'), the more the artist robs nature of her trade, ('beguiles Nature of her custom'), the greater his or her work of art. Mimesis, imitation, art is the imitation of nature. 'If somebody does not esteem the arts because they imitate nature', said Plotinus, (204 – 270), 'it should be said first that nature herself imitates. Then it should be borne in mind that the arts do not simply copy the visible things but draw from the principles that constitute the source of nature'.

Plato, (428/7 – 424/3), however, was critical of mimesis, for imitation is twice removed from reality. Plato recounts Socrates making this point with an example of a bed. To illustrate with a very fine work from many centuries after Socrates' death,Vincent van Gogh's, (1853 – 1890), painting of his bed, ('Bedroom in Arles', 1888). Socrates would not have been impressed. He would have complained that there are really three beds in the mix, so to speak; the ideal and therefore perfect Bed that exists in a Platonic heaven (wherever that might be), or in a Platonic realm of Ideas, (and I would like to know what a perfect Bed is like); then there is the bed itself, made by the bedmaker, by which I mean the manufacturer of the bed, not the arranger of bedsheets; and thirdly there is the painting of the bed by the artist van Gogh, in imitation of the manufacturer. Van Gogh's bed is thereby twice removed from the truth of the Bed.

The manufacturer's bed will appear differently to the observers of the bed depending on their points of view. But with van Gogh's bed there is forever only one perspective we can take upon it. And van Gogh himself will perhaps have known very little or nothing at all of the manufacturer's art of making beds; and though the better the artist the more faithfully their works of art will resemble the reality of the manufacturer's bed, (a judgement about art that van Gogh himself contradicts), nonetheless a mere imitator will never attain the truth of the ideal Bed, (though given that a philosopher, by contrast, is able to attain the truth in a way that imitators who merely copy over and over again never can, a philosopher should then be able to give an account of the truth of the ideal Bed; perhaps, one day, I will set my mind to it).

Shakespeare himself was often admired for his mimetic realism with regard to created nature, natura naturata, whereas Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (1772 – 1834), by contrast, admired Shakespeare for his grasp of the animate principle at the heart of nature, natura naturans. Baruch Spinoza, (1632 – 1677), distinguished nature as an active and creative principle, intelligible in and through itself, natura naturans, nature naturing, if I may so put it. And nature as a product of creation, as the working out of a creative enterprise, natura naturata, passive nature, nature natured. Coleridge wrote:

'If the artist copies the mere nature, the natura naturata what idle rivalry! If he proceeds only from a given form, which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty, what an emptiness, what an unreality there always is in his productions, as in Cipriani’s pictures! Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura naturans which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man'.

(Giovanni Battista Cipriani, (1727 – 1785), Italian painter; see, for instance, 'The Rape of Oreithyia', 1745. But Coleridge does have a point with regard to some of Cipriani's output, particularly his representations of putti; which is never a good image, certainly empty and unreal, however fine the artist may be. Although, as Cipriani's sketch, 'Sleeping Nymph and Putti', date unknown, demonstrates, representations of nymphs in art can be a very fine thing, but without the putti).

Shakespeare's output was therefore seen by Coleridge to be the product of a centralized, integrating creative function in the person of Shakespeare himself; a creative principle that Coleridge termed 'imagination'. And Art is the unconscious inspiration directed by such an intellectual consciousness. But this is not very clear. Coleridge's philosophy is suffused with idealism, in the philosophical sense, (that is, reality is fundamentally mental, or mentally constructed). He was influenced by German metaphysicians; Johann Gottlieb Fichte, (1762 – 1814), for instance, one of the founders of a German idealism that culminated in the great philosophical system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 – 1831). It may therefore be enlightening to compare Coleridge's views on art with that of a more recent, if rather eccentric, proponent of the idealist trend in philosophy, the philosopher and aesthetician Benedetto Croce, (1866 – 1952). For Croce a work of art is not a physical entity, it is a mental entity. Art is in the mind; in particular, art is intuition, and intuition is the expression of impressions.

Concerning alternative theories of art, Croce contends, whether it is art as an imitation of nature, art as conceptual representation, art as the presentation of allegories, art as symbolic, art as the portrayal of various forms of life, all such theories commit the same fallacy, that of confusing the intellectual with the artistic, (as Croce would presumably accuse Coleridge of doing, thinking of art as inspiration directed by an intellectual consciousness). These aesthetic theorists are thinking conceptually, rather than intuitively, mistaking the concept for the intuition. What is needed, if we are to engage in the philosophy of art, is a proper aesthetic attitude. By focusing on the kind of subject matter in art, or the way it is treated, or the style it exhibits, the aesthetic attitude is in all cases lost, replaced by a scientific, or intellectual, activity, a logical thinking that concerns itself with concepts, or universals. 'The science of thought (logic) is that of the concept', Croce insists, 'as that of fancy (aesthetic) is the science of expression'.

But what does Croce mean exactly by 'intuition', or by 'fancy', or by 'expression'?

Henri Bergson, (1859 – 1941), distinguished between intuitive and conceptual or logical knowledge; there are some things that just cannot be understood analytically, nor can they be categorized, they can only be felt, with all their peculiar internality; intuition is to know by feeling. But with Croce there is a difference. The crucial distinction is not that between the object as known externally and the object as it is realized in itself; although this plays its part in what for Croce is the important distinction. That is, intuition is the possession of images, but of images made clear by the attention of mind; an act of apprehension that liberates the image from all vagueness. For example, I could not draw the island of Sicily, not very well anyway, so how could I be said ever to intuit the island of Sicily?

Croce denies that the particular skill of the artist resides in his or her ability to transfer an image from the mind to a physical surface, that the peculiar gift of the artist is in his or her handling of a brush or pencil. The artist merely deceives himself or herself with vagueness if they cannot own in contemplation a sensation, or an impression, which sensation or impression they can then realize as an individual image.

As always with aesthetic theory, problems arise once we try to apply it to existing works of art. What of the paintings of Mark Rothko, (1903 – 1970), and 'mythomorphic abstractionism', (never mind 'orphic cubism', or any other of the many modern art movements)? 'It is the poet and philosopher', said Rothko, 'who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them'. But then, what would Rothko think about a philosopher who provides an aesthetic theory, that is, aesthetic objectives for the artist to participate in? Is an artist ever likely to be influenced by such, whatever his or her other influences, as he or she creates her art? And see, for instance, the Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas, with Rothko's black paintings, (though they do incorporate other dark tones); black looking into eternity, or just black? Much depends on the viewer, and whether they are open to having a dialogue with Rothko on his terms.

What does Croce have in mind when he uses the term 'expression'? He acknowledges this is generally limited to verbal expression, but for Croce it also covers nonverbal expressions of line, colour and sound. Rothko's black paintings do express something, anyway; they do express a feeling. Expression is not merely the clear apprehension of an image; the image is an expression of the feeling which it evokes, and it is as expressive of feeling that it becomes full expression or intuition. Croce writes that 'what gives coherence and unity to the intuition is feeling: the intuition is really such because it represents a feeling, and can only appear from and upon that'. And he affirms: 'Not the idea, but the feeling, is what confers upon art the airy lightness of the symbol: an aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representation - that is art...'

Strange consequences follow from Croce's aesthetic theory. Art is intuition, the artist produces an image which is expressive of feeling, the image is realized in its full individuality. Therefore, art is not a physical fact, physical facts 'do not possess reality', (which makes more sense if we bear in mind the distinction that Hegel makes between reality and existence; of course physical facts exist, though they are unreal, but I won't go into that particular distinction here). It also follows from Croce's aesthetic theory that art is not concerned with the useful, with pleasure or pain; nor is art a moral act, for art, unlike morality, 'is opposed to the practical of any sort'. And art is not conceptual knowledge, for intuition is not concerned with the distinction between the real and the unreal.

But what does Croce mean by 'fancy', this 'peculiar artistic faculty', as he calls it, and what does he mean by 'imagination'? By 'imagination' he certainly means something different from Coleridge. 'Imagination' is the fanciful combination of images, while 'fancy' is the production of an image that displays a unity in variety. The mere fanciful manipulation of images is not art, and the compound image thereby produced is not a work of art; but if the imagination retains a sense impression, and realizes its presence, attending to the image because the image itself attends upon the embodiment of feeling, then the image is a work of art.

And here arises another problem with any aesthetic theory; how well does it apply to works of art I happen to like? Surrealism, which I do like, is the fanciful manipulation of images. The Comte de Lautréamont, (1846 – 1870), that prophet of surrealism, once described a young boy as 'beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella'. Max Ernst, (1891 – 1976), took this as inspiration in his definition of how surrealist paintings are structured: 'A linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them'. See, for instance, Salvador Dali's, (1904 – 1989), powerful 'The Face of War', 1940, the wizened face expressing misery, the duplicated faces in the mouth and eye sockets, the desiccated landscape, the gnawing snakes thronging around the face, Dali's own hand print in the ground, etc....

For Croce, then, art is expression (intuition), and aesthetics is the systematic attempt to acquire knowledge about expression. His work on aesthetics is called 'Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic'. That is, aesthetics and linguistics are one science; aesthetics is philosophical linguistics, general linguistics is aesthetics. 'Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing', said Croce; for language is expression, and aesthetics is the science of expression. Linguistics is a rational science, a pure philosophy of speech, and speech is any mode of expression.

Which is all well and good, the emphasis on art as expression. But expression of what? Denis Diderot, (1713 – 1784), exhorted painters to 'move me, astonish me, unnerve me, make me tremble, weep, shudder, rage, then delight my eyes afterwards if you care to'. And 'The Face of War' does it for me. But for Croce art is a pure image. And what does that express?

Croce, who, for an Italian seemed to have something of a puritanical streak, would certainly not accept Sigmund Freud's, (1856 – 1939), view of art as 'sublimated sexual satisfaction', that 'beauty derives from the field of sexual feeling'. Croce specifically criticizes any form of aesthetic hedonism, art as pleasurable, for that would fail to distinguish the pleasurable as expression from other sources of pleasure. Croce rejects with derision any theory that locates the source of artistic activity in sexuality, or in the desire for sexual conquest. He does concede that 'one often meets in ordinary life poets who adorn themselves with their poetry, like cocks that raise their crests'. Perhaps he has in mind the likes of John Donne, (1572 – 1631), whose poem 'The Flea' is addressed to his beloved, and makes the point that since they have both been bitten by the same flea and their blood is now mixed, they may as well exchange other body fluids too:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,   

How little that which thou deniest me is;   

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, 

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;   

Thou know’st that this cannot be said 

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, 

Yet this enjoys before it woo, 

And pampered swells with one blood made of two, 

And this, alas, is more than we would do. 

And so on. The strategy fails, in this instance, his beloved kills the flea. But, this would seem to me to be putting one's poetic skills to good use, to seduce, or at least to attract, women; that is what I would do, were I a poet. But Croce would be scornful; I am not a poet, he would say, just 'a poor devil of a cock or turkey'.

And yet, perhaps support for Croce is to be found in Shakespeare:

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy.

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

('A Midsummer Night's Dream', Act 5, Scene1).

The embodiment of feeling ('imagination bodies forth'); the liberation of the image from vagueness (giving to 'airy nothingness' a 'local habitation and a name'); the expression of things that don't exist, ('forms of things unknown'); a strong imagination with all that entails; art as intuition, or apprehension, the emphasis on feeling, (an emotional state such as joy being felt by the artist to have an other-worldly source). But perhaps I am being merely fanciful.

However, despite his esotericism, Croce is undoubtedly correct to emphasize the artist's ability to see more clearly that which the non-artist may sense only vaguely. 'The painter is a painter', he wrote, 'because he sees what others can only feel or catch a glimpse of, but do not see'.